5 Management Tools to Help Keep Your Team On Track
Managing a team whether large or small is no easy task. With ongoing projects, remote-working team members, and keeping track of tasks, it can get overwhelming fast especially during periods of growth. Staying productive and efficient is a major factor in the smooth running of your business, and having a few tools to help manage your team effectively can be a lifesaver. There are plenty of management tools on the market, so to help you get started we’ve rounded up five that may help your team’s productivity.
#1 - ClockedIn - Time Management
A great team starts with efficient time management, and that’s where our own app ClockedIn comes in. ClockedIn is a stress-free way to keep track of your employees’ time. Your employees see a sort of “punch card” that allows them to clock in and out of work, so you can see clearly who has worked when and how for long, as well as who is currently clocked in. When you’re ready to process payroll, ClockedIn will also export hours worked in a convenient CSV format ready for your chosen payroll platform. No need for multiple spreadsheets and guesswork on how many hours someone worked if they forgot to log them.
#2 - Slack - Communication
Now that you know who’s working and when, let’s move onto communication. Whether you’re a fully remote team or a blend of remote and in-office, having a tool like Slack can simplify and improve how your team communicates on projects.
Put simply, Slack is a chat based app that allows your team to communicate in real-time. That real-time aspect is precisely why it’s so conducive to keeping your team focussed and on-track, as it’s much easier than sending emails back and forth, forgetting to copy relevant people into every email, etc. You can create separate channels for projects, different teams, and areas of the business, allowing everyone to collaborate quickly and easily.
One of Slack’s major benefits is its huge integration directory - you can very easily integrate it with Gmail, Dropbox, Google Drive, Zapier, Zoom, Trello...you name it!
#3 - Soapbox - Communication
An essential part of every project in your business - meetings. All too often, meetings can easily go off on a tangent, questions are missed, and actions are forgotten. Soapbox helps your team to run efficient, productive meetings with a variety of different tools such as:
- Shared online agendas that can be adjusted to suit 1-on-1, team specific meetings, and recurring meetings.
- Take meeting notes within the meeting agenda that can be easily emailed to participants afterwards.
- Suggested questions based on your meeting agenda
- Next steps tracker to ensure actions aren’t missed
- Real-time employee feedback
And to make things even easier, Soapbox integrates with a variety of other apps such as Google Calendar, Outlook, and Slack.
#4 - Todoist - Productivity
Think of every time you’ve written down a to-do list in a notebook, only to discover it at the end of the week buried under other notes with tasks you’d completely overlooked. It happens to all of us! That’s where apps like Todoist swoop in to save the day.
Todoist is a task management tool that helps you to organize your tasks in a way that’s clear and easy to refer back to and track. You can create lists depending on the different projects or business areas you need to track, set priority levels, delegate tasks to different team members, track progress on ongoing projects, create recurring tasks, and more. It’s also easily integrated with a variety of other apps such as Google Calendar, Zapier, and Slack.
#5 - Basecamp - Project Management
An all-in-one project management tool, Basecamp is a great way to keep track of relevant documents, tasks, and more for any and every project your team has on their plate. You can create a board, for example, if you’re developing new products giving each product its own board with all the relevant team members, documents, and tasks added. Or perhaps you work with external clients; clients can be added to their project, allowing your team to have a space to communicate with them, upload assets and documents, and assign tasks.
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The best way to get started with any new tool, is to do so gradually. Take the time to identify areas in which your team could benefit from one of these tools, then pick one to start with. Try it out with your team over a period of time to determine whether or not it is actually useful to your business. Adding too many tools at once and expecting everyone to pick them up instantly without consideration as to how they’ll actually help can in fact slow down productivity. However when a new tool does improve the communication and productivity of your team, it can make a huge positive impact on your day-to-day operations.