Amongst the Covid-19 epidemic, many workers may be faced with working from home, raising many questions for managers on how to maintain productivity. 

To enable workers to effectively engage without face to face contact can be difficult without utilising the latest teamwork tools. Using teamwork tools is best practice to increase productivity and reduce time wasted.

Why most businesses lose out on productivity already

Email is known as one of the biggest time wasters. Most employee waste 2.5 hours a day on emails alone.

Working from home is only going to exacerbate the problem.

One study found that organisation by simply introducing instant messaging software they reduced their email usage by 81% and phone usage by 61%.

Mckinsey in 2012 did a ground-breaking study which found that $900 billion to $1.2 trillion dollars in the global economy could be unlocked by using social media within organisations.

Two-thirds of this lies in internal communications. By adopting more social technologies they found that knowledge workers could increase their productivity by 20-25%.

If you still think email is an effective tool in 2020 to be doing internal communications, think again. Email has quickly become old fashioned and should only really be used for external communications.

When we work with organisations in internal communications we look at two main tools. Firstly messaging, and team-based threads. Then secondly task allocation and management. Thirdly if possible, we integrate file sharing that encourages collaboration.

Tools For Messaging

There are many tools for team messaging. When choosing one it depends on which other programs you’re using and adaptability to your processes.

SLACK

One of the biggest messaging and collaboration apps in the field. It has plenty of integrations with other apps. It’s mostly simple to use. It uses a channel interface for team-based work. Under multiple tabs you might have different projects like #exampleproject. You can attach files, tag team mates, and private message. You can also do calls, and video calls if need be.

In terms of pricing, you’ll pay $8US per user for a small to medium business.

Find out more here.

Microsoft Teams

If you’re using the Microsoft Suite, I would highly recommend this for you. Teams works slightly different to SLACK. Instead of just having threads you have teams. Once an admin has placed employees in teams, they can create threads if they permission to do so.

Microsoft Teams integrates with the Microsoft Suite. If you’re using Excel, Word, Sharepoint and especially Planner this program is effective at integrating it all. You can also do video calls and calls from this app. Ilove that you can record these calls as well and watch them later to see if there is anything you missed.

Find out more here.

But how do they help?

Email threads tend to get lost, and people tend to get confused. By also taking out your internal emails you can focus on more important emails like your clients. There have also been studies that have shown that organisations that have “Leaky Communications” (internally), people tend feel more included, know more about the project they’re working on and feel better connected.

It also tends to foster innovation by allowing cross-departments to see what the others are doing and collaborate. They’ve also found when training new employees on to projects by giving them a trail of information they can come onto projects better and have a better sense of what needs to be done.

Tools For Task Allocation

I still can’t believe that many organisations are still not utilising task management software. As a project manager it is one of the best tools to start using. You can monitor tasks in progress, completed, and complications to be dealt with.

Asana

I love Asana, I tend to think of it as a sexier version of Trello, one of the original task management platforms. Once you add a project, boards are set up for you with: To Do, In Progress, and Done. You can also create additional boards to add more steps. It tends to follow the old fashioned way of using a whiteboard, then putting sticky notes on the progress mapped out.

You add teams members to tasks, set deadlines, add files, instant message and more. It has plenty of integrations into other apps and can be used for multiple purposes.

What’s nice about ASANA is you can use it for free for up to 15 team members. Up from that and to use advance features you’ll pay $11.99AU a user per month.

Find out more here.

Planner (Microsoft)

Planner is less sexy then Asana but is quite similar. It has all the tools to get the job done works with the Microsoft Suite and doesn’t easily integrate with many other tools. All your team will need to have a business user account granted by Microsoft for your organisation.

What’s nice about this is all you have to do is simply type in your teammate’s name and Planner will find them automatically. You also share files from SharePoint to collaborate.  

Find out more here.

Conclusion

Microsoft pricing differs depending on what you prefer. Business premium comes to $20.60AU per user a month (discount on annual). This allows you to download all the apps and allow the greatest productivity gains. If you can’t afford that they have a much cheaper option at $8.20AU per user for their Business Essential plan, which doesn’t allow you to download the apps.

Just to note these a just a few. There are hundreds of apps out there which do very similar things. Another eco-system like Microsoft I would mention is Gsuite from Google that integrates Gmail and all their other apps. This is priced at $8.4AU a month.