3 Productivity Apps for Boosting Teamwork and Employee Collaboration Every team is an opportunity for powerful synergy but making it happen is a constant leadership challenge. Some shrewd technology helps.
By Pratik Dholakiya Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
Very often, teamwork is the difference between successful companies and those finding it difficult to make a mark. Seamless and effective collaboration between employees delivers clear value to an organization and plays a mission-critical role in charting strategic growth. Camaraderie amongst the workforce nurtures ideation, facilitates results-driven decision making and promotes innovation.
But some employers have a cavalier attitude towards teamwork. They expect team members to work together effectively, but make no attempts to create an environment that eases collaboration. In a worst case scenario, that can hurt the team's productivity and a project veers completely off track, leading to unintended outcomes.
Related: How to Foster Effective Teamwork
Don't risk it. Instead, make proactive attempts to improve teamwork and collaboration at the workplace. Fostering effective cooperation between team members is not really that difficult, any more, with the help of disruptive technology solutions like mobile apps for this purpose. They are powerful, easy to use and nurture seamless collaboration. Companies are already deploying mobile apps to improve employee efficiency.
Here are three great apps you can use to boost team work and shore up employee collaboration.
1. PingPong
Think of a scenario where you are presenting the salient points of a project brief to your team but you are not entirely convinced they understand the points you are making.
If you've been facing this problem in team meetings and discussions, you have a solution in PingPong.
Use this app to induce relevant questions from team members and also assess their understanding of the subject matter. With PingPong, you can create questions, share them with team members and ask them to respond, all during the course of your information sharing session. Responses can be checked in real time, giving you a very clear idea of whether you are on the right track or there are still some grey areas that need to be addressed. What's more, you can even share the necessary research/reference material with your team, so that they get a better understanding of what you are talking about.
Teamwork is all about effective communication that keeps all members of the team on the same page. This app helps you approach team communication with a lot of confidence; at the end of a meeting, you have no doubts about your team's understanding of the topic that was under discussion.
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Workboard
There are various pain points that act as barriers to effective collaboration. Take, for example, those pesky Excel lists that need to be updated at the end of every work day. These need to be sent to all team members so that everybody is aware of the project status and deliverables. If that's not painful enough, you'll also need to keep track of all the discussions you've been having within the team.
This is just an overview of the difficulties you might face in your efforts to effectively manage a team. It is at this point that Workboard comes in to simplify coordination and communication. The app enables users to collaborate on action items, track delegated work and get status reports in real time. You can even ensure all discussions and document sharing is aligned with project deliverables.
This is a comprehensive app that improves various facets of team collaboration and also enhances meaningful results-driven team engagement.
Huddle
Huddle allows users to take better control of their tasks. It is an extensive task management app that helps identify what you need to work on, who you need to delegate a task to and control your workflow for the best results.
One of the biggest advantages of this app is that you can read, review and approve file tasks without going online. Huddle brings all your work to one place. Basically, you don't need to get out of the app to share project objectives, have and share discussions, keep track of work, get feedback or send reports. It's your one-stop work dashboard that expedites and simplifies collaboration.
