Employee
The workplace is no longer confined to the four walls of your office. The digital workplace is breaking the geographical boundaries where employees have the freedom to work from anywhere, using any device, at any time. The need for implementing business tools to improve employee communication and productivity is felt more now than ever before.
Employees are also showing great interest in using these tools. A recent survey revealed that 95% of the working population prefer to use a good business communication tool instead of in-person meetings. This is all the more true since the pandemic started.
Tools can make or break business communication. Though it is generally believed that access to a wider range of business communication tools would significantly improve employee communication and productivity, there are some challenges that must be addressed. Organizations must make sure that they have plans to deal with meeting fatigue, slow wi-fi connections, poor work-life balance etc.
Besides, using multiple business tools create communication silos and a significant amount of team members time is spent searching for information rather than doing productive work. Given the level of information being generated on a daily basis, this is highly inefficient. A survey points out that almost 20% of the business time – the equivalent of one day per working week – is wasted by employees searching for information to do their job.
We have identified the 10 best business tools that will help companies improve employee communication and productivity.
1. Clariti
Clariti is one of the best free employee communication and productivity apps that bring all emails, chats, calls, to-dos, and documents…in one app and automatically links related items in a TopicFolder. Clariti uses the concept of “TopicFolders” to store all the related information in one place based on some context. This information can be easily retrieved and acted upon when needed. With TopicFolders, organizing and finding data becomes much easier and less complicated. By simplifying the ability to store and retrieve any information when needed, TopicFolders speed up the decision-making process and team productivity.
Clariti is ideal for small and medium businesses to boost employee communication and drive productivity. It is securely hosted on Amazon Web Services, providing total reliability, 100% uptime and trusted security of all your workday data.
2. Highfive
Highfive is a cloud-based video conferencing and collaboration solution that provides employees in businesses across various industry verticals a platform to communicate and share information with their colleagues and managers. Highfive allows organizers and presenters to start and manage meetings from their laptops, phones or tablets and share screens with the audience in the room or remotely via Mac, Windows, Chrome OS, Linux and Android devices. Attendees can join the meeting via custom Highfive URLs, which are shared by the organizers. Highfive supports integration with Google Calendar, Outlook and Slack.
3. Time Doctor
Time Doctor is a powerful employee productivity management software used by corporations as well as by SMBs to improve employee productivity and time management. It will allow you to see how your team is spending their workday as it generates detailed reports to the manager and employee. It also allows you to give each website or application a rating based on if they’re for productive use or not. Managers or admins can customize these ratings for any application or website and apply it across your entire organization, team, or even specific employees. You can also connect your Time Doctor to your favorite apps as it integrates with more than 60 applications.
4. Avaza
Avaza is a business management tool that includes features for project management, resource scheduling, online timesheets, expense management, online invoicing, recurring invoicing, quotes and invoices and more. Avaza also integrates with third-party platforms to manage workflows. Avaza is an integrated cloud solution for professional services companies and is supported on tablets and mobile devices. The platform offers online project collaboration with clients and allows users to drag and drop tasks and files as needed. Tasks can be viewed in list view, Kanban boards or on Gantt charts.
5. Aritic Swarm
An Instant Messaging Tool for internal company collaborations. Aritic Swarm takes team collaboration to the next level with an encrypted secure messaging option.
The rich UI, along with group messaging features, among others, make Aritic Swarm a go-to-platform for teams that rely on the ‘work together’ motto.
It brings all your teams together on Aritic Swarm to coordinate and drive business growth.
You can Create message rooms or groups as well as engage in one-on-one messaging. Upload videos, images, documents, and any other type of files, use emojis in messages, write HTML-coded messages. Format messages with bold, italics, or strikethrough to emphasize important aspects of your message.
6. Zinc
Zinc is a cloud-based solution that helps field employees establish two-way communication through text messages, audio clips and voice or video calling. It allows business leaders to send targeted broadcast messages to specific employee groups based on departments, locations, and skills. Zinc facilitates integration with internal and third-party solutions, including Google Drive, SharePoint and Dropbox. Team members can use the native Android and iOS applications to establish communication remotely.
7. Circuit
Circuit is an online business tool designed to bring teams together and enhance team collaboration with virtual meeting spaces and integrated communication tools. Circuit helps teams build online communities to promote idea and opinion sharing, cooperation, and interactions amongst the team. Circuit includes voice and HD video calling, chat messaging, screen sharing, file-sharing, contextual search capabilities, content storage and history, and virtual meeting rooms. Circuit is compatible with Chrome, Firefox, and IE and is available as a mobile app via Android and iOS devices.
8. Rock
Rock is a remote work and team communication solution that helps businesses schedule meetings, handle projects and collaborate with internal or external stakeholders. The application enables managers to run marketing campaigns, allocate budgets, assign projects to team members and track progress in real-time. Additionally, remote teams can utilize mobile applications to view and track assigned tasks, interact with team members and share business documents using Android and iOS devices. Rock facilitates integration with Zoom and Google Drive applications, which allows employees to conduct online meetings and store documents in a centralized repository.
9. Swit
Swit is a collaboration management platform designed to help businesses create, assign and manage tasks and communicate with teams in real-time. The platform enables managers to set goals, track progress and organize the project data by team, category, status and calendar. Swit comes with an interactive timeline functionality, which allows administrators to view project duration, subtasks and completion status through Gantt charts. Swit’s chat functionality allows teams to communicate with members via text messages and share word documents, PDFs, images and JPG files.
10. Hibox
Hibox is primarily a business collaboration platform that supports the workflows of business teams with private, online communications. Wrapped within a single lightweight app, Hibox begins with cloud-based signup before a registered user invites other contacts to join the account via email. Contacts can enjoy secure, internal instant chat capabilities where streams can be created for specific teams and projects, or company-wide announcements shared within the public room. The encrypted app also fits neatly within an existing IT setup with integration options for popular cloud-based storage such as Box, Dropbox and Google Drive. General chat features are enhanced with face-to-face video calling and conferencing, giving one-tap access to instant team meetings wherever and whenever required.
11. Vonage Business Solutions
Vonage Business Solutions is a cloud-based communications solution suitable for small and midsize companies. The solution offers a business phone system that enables businesses to connect their VoIP phone system to internet-enabled devices and communicate via text, over the phone or via video conferencing. Core features include call announcement and screening, multiple devices on a single extension, do not disturb settings and more. The Vonage Business Solutions mobile app gives users another method for accessing the service. Vonage Business Solutions also offers desktop plug-ins to customize the system. Users can also integrate their contacts from Google, Outlook and customer relationship management systems such as Salesforce.
In today’s workplace, effective communication can be challenging, but with the right employee communication tools, you can easily overcome all those challenges. Sign up for any of the above next-generation employee communication and productivity tools, it will help you to create more collaborative teams that can work smarter and faster.
