Through the past few years of the pandemic, workplaces have seen many changes in how they function. Many companies have adopted a hybrid work model. While this combination of remote and office-based work gives employees a great deal of flexibility, it still has its own challenges. We traditionally believe that we are at our most productive stage when working from a shared office space — but this is not true anymore. With evolving technology and a massive influx of innovative tools and apps that make remote work convenient, efficient, and better. But, what should you use from the many available options?
Apps and solutions to adopt into your workflow to boost efficiency
Choosing the correct tools that align with your needs and workspace culture is an important decision to make. They should help you boost productivity, save time, and engage employees without burning a hole in your pocket or overlapping with each other.
• Communication and Collaboration
Working remotely comes with the challenge of maintaining effective communication across the team. With team collaboration becoming essential with more and more of the workforce being distributed through remote work and flexible work hours, internal communication apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams ensure that information does not get lost while you try to communicate and collaborate across cities or even continents.
You can organize your work and team within channels, leverage their message search capability, share files, integrate with a variety of third-party apps to improve productivity, and even have video and voice calls. This ensures that your business runs smoothly and without any communication gaps.
• Internal issue resolution
There is no dearth of questions asked by employees to your IT, HR, and Operation support teams on a daily basis. But having to refer to a wiki or knowledge base and search through it, even for repetitive and simple questions, is time-consuming and does not guarantee a correct answer.
Tools such as Happyfox’s Assist AI leverage technology such as AI, ML, and NLP to bring conversational ticketing to the comfort of Slack and Microsoft Teams — platforms your team is already comfortable with. Your employees can self-serve, reduce the workload of your support staff by deflecting repetitive tickets, and increase agent productivity and employee engagement. It also offers ML-powered analytics capabilities to help you learn from the data collected on frequent questions and requests, helping you improve your knowledge sources.
• Project Management
Any company, irrespective of what they deal in, requires work to be carried out on time, by the correct people, and in an efficient manner. This puts us in need of project management software that is easy to use even for a team that is spread across different locations.
Notion is one such tool with a simple, easy-to-comprehend interface that can help you define deliverables, assign tasks, and track outcomes. It is a versatile solution equipped with templates for roadmaps, calendars, Kanban boards, and task tracking that can be used across multiple teams, increasing productivity. Its customizable case and project management tools can be used by any department across your company.
• Conferencing
A major shift in every workspace has been the steep increase in the adoption of video conferencing tools to communicate. Tools like Zoom or Meet from the Google Workspace Suite help us achieve a satisfactory level of human interaction even if we are physically in different places. You can schedule meetings, record calls, carry out whiteboard activities, collaborate more seamlessly, and facilitate virtual events on these platforms.
• HR management
Ensuring a good employee experience is of utmost importance. This can be carried out with HR software like Bamboo HR, which organizes and collects all information that surfaces throughout the employee life cycle. It eases everyday tasks by providing insights on important activities like onboarding, hiring, compensation reviews, and even building culture. With such intuitive software, your HR team would no longer need to manually input data into spreadsheets, giving them the opportunity to focus on other vital tasks.
• Payroll
Managing staff compensation and insurance is an important and repetitive task that every business goes through. By leveraging software like Gusto, a cloud payroll provider, which utilizes smart technology, you can provide an all-in-one solution to conduct payroll runs, state tax registrations, health and financial benefits, tax calculations, and direct deposits. Save time, effort, and money while you ensure seamless payment operations. You can also make use of their automated time tools to ease the management of your employee hours, PTO, and holidays.
• Knowledge management
Knowledge is power. Having a clearly crafted, regularly updated, and well-managed knowledge base is of utmost importance. Guru is a wiki that claims to cut through the noise of communication tools to create a culture of knowledge sharing within your organization by organizing data and letting yo surface it whenever you need it. They make accurate, up-to-date information available for your team at any time and place. It is also equipped with a browser extension and knowledge alerts to keep everyone on the same page.
Prepare your workspace for maximum productivity
Today, you can’t just give your employees access to email, word processing, and spreadsheets and expect them to be effective at their work. They need to be given the right tools to help them plan, communicate, collaborate, manage, and execute work. However, achieving maximum productivity does not mean choosing multiple tools. The company leadership should invest in a small, but powerful range of tools that can work well together. Explore how you can make your organization future-ready with Assist AI by scheduling a one-on-one session with our product specialists. Assist AI offers free plans and also premium plans for enterprise customers.
