Are you ready to maximize your team’s productivity for the New Year? Here are 5 tools to make sure your team hits the ground running in 2018.
1. Zapier
Zapier is a SaaS company that connects and automates all your various tools and apps that your team uses. It’s nothing short of genius.
It works like this: You get an account, then, you connect all the apps and other SaaS tools you already use to Zapier.
Trello, Asana, Gmail, MailChimp, PayPal, Evernote, social media platforms, Slack, Dropbox, and Salesforce are just a few examples of the apps that Zapier can integrate with.
Then, you create ‘zaps’ – basically ‘if this then that’ sort of rules. For example, you might connect your Gmail account to your Trello board so that when a new customer request comes in, it's automatically added to your workstack.
By improving the integration between apps, you can give your team more time to focus on what's important you can help improve your team’s productivity.
2. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a way for you to schedule and manage your digital marketing. From publishing a blog post to promoting something on social media, CoSchedule makes the process far easier and slicker (not to mention a lot more automatic).
It works by sitting within your WordPress CMS and acting as a re-skin of your normal back-end. For companies with many writers or different (non-writer) contributing team members, it’s a brilliant tool.
CoSchedule:
- Helps you manage and direct what goes live when
- Helps with automatic headline creation tools
- Makes it easy to optimize for SEO
- Makes it easy to plan a whole content calendar
And it integrates with the Google suite including analytics, so you can track and optimise your content over time.
3. Time Doctor
We thought about excluding Time Doctor, but decided the potential gains outweigh the heebie-jeebies it gives us.
Time Doctor allows you to track what your team does. For example, how much time is spent on email, how much on other apps (e.g. Slack, QuickBooks etc.), how much time is spent in meetings for each individual team member.
Naturally, this can be pretty weird pretty quick – after all, if Joe is delivering, who cares if he works for 1 hour and plays Farmville for the remaining 7?
But if we step back and look at the whole picture, Time Doctor is superb for helping teams figure out as a team where there are inefficiencies – are you meeting too often? Is your administration eating up too much of your team’s time?
These sorts of insights can help you with hiring new staff, keeping your team focused, and distributing workload efficiently.
4. iDoneThis
iDoneThis is like a daily status update of what each member of a team has done. You list all the things you’ve done, then at the end of the day, that list gets sent to your manager (or whoever you want).
For balancing workload and keeping your team focused and motivated, iDoneThis is a brilliant tool. Plus, if you are the sort of team that would appreciate a bit of healthy competition, it’s an easy way to encourage it.
Proceed with caution though – this sort of micro tracking and progress updating doesn’t work in every environment, so think carefully before you roll it out. Maybe try it first with your own boss before you roll it out to your entire digital team.
Conclusion
It’s always difficult to set the right balance of productivity and creative process for digital teams. How much “waste” is required to produce something amazing? Some, certainly – but hopefully, these tools will help you get on top of your workstack and drive a more productive team without compromising happiness or quality.
