Small inefficiencies in a business can swiftly turn into big problems. When these add up, your employees cannot do their job properly. Slowly, they become less productive and more stressed. This is why it is your job to streamline your staff’s work and provide them with the tools they need.
If an employee struggles to do their work because they haven’t been provided with the right set of tools, their lack of results is not really their fault, is it?
In this article, you’ll learn why it’s important to streamline your staff’s work and which tools you can offer them to make it happen.
Should you invest in tools to streamline your staff’s work?
Why is this, you wonder? Why should you be investing money and time in making your staff’s work easier? You hired them to do their job, so why is it your responsibility to make it simpler?
The numbers say it all.
In 2021, 47.8 million employees quit their jobs, looking for better opportunities and conditions to work. This says a lot about the modern workplace. Massive resignations indicate that companies must improve a lot to offer their staff the best working conditions.
Nowadays, it’s not easy to attract the most qualified people to work for you. However, if you make it happen, it would be a pity if they leave just because you didn’t take appropriate actions to streamline their work. This will take away a big part of your company’s budget, much more than you’d invest in tools in the first place. Employee turnover costs around two times the person’s salary.
Here are just a few of the ways in which streamlining can improve your business:
- Improved employee productivity. Facilitating your team’s work can increase workplace productivity.
- Less turnover. If your employees are happy and can do their job without problems, this will reduce employee turnover, one of the biggest expenses businesses are facing nowadays.
- Fewer mistakes. When tasks are organized, and your team has access to what they need to streamline their work, it’s less likely that they’ll make a costly and time-consuming mistake.
- Improved communication and company culture. Find a way to streamline communication in the workplace, with and between your employees, and your team will be more cohesive.
Tools to use to streamline your team’s work
Since the majority of companies these days don’t offer their staff the right conditions to work, you have an advantage. This is your opportunity to make the workplace a place where your staff can do their jobs without problems and inefficiencies. The right set of tools can help you with managing the workplace in today’s digital era, and they’ll also help your team do their job better.
Below we’ve narrowed down your choices to the best tools.
1. Best for form templates: SmallPDF
Employees handle tons of paperwork regularly. If you provide them with free-form templates that they can customize, this will save them a lot of time and effort. From invoice templates to contracts to business plans, SmallPDF has everything for your team’s business, as well as personal form needs.
Documentation can take up a lot of time in your employees’ schedules. They won’t know how to craft a specific document. Creating business plans or contracts from scratch will take hours of their day that they can spend working on a project. This can be extremely stressful and, obviously, a big waste of time.
Provide your team with free form templates they can customize to eliminate the unnecessary workload and help them get rid of the stress that comes with juggling documentation.
2. Best for project management: Asana
Most teams work on projects and when they do, their work depends on communication with others and task organization. Offering your team a project management tool like Asana can help streamline the projects significantly. Asana can help them manage everything from the smallest day-to-day tasks to large strategic projects.
Some of the things that your staff can do with Asana include:
- Manage their tasks in different formats such as calendar, timeline, or kanban
- Track each project from start to finish
- Engage with others, share feedback and files
By offering your staff project management tools, you can help them organize their work, track their progress, and communicate with others more efficiently.
3. Best for team communication: Slack
Effective communication is vital for your business operations, regardless of what industry you work in. If your team cannot communicate well, they can’t work in cohesion, and this will lead to endless delays and mistakes in their work.
Now that remote work is also in the picture for many organizations, and communication is an even bigger challenge. However, if you invest in tools like Slack, you can facilitate communication in your workplace, even if you have a remote or hybrid team working on the projects.
Here are a few things that Slack offers its users:
- Create different channels and use them to share important documentation and information with your team
- Integrate Slack with other software solutions like Google Drive and Asana
- In-app calling feature
Facilitate your team’s communication by offering them a tool they can use to share information, discuss the project, or simply chat.
4. Best for employee surveys and feedback: OfficeVibe
If you want to improve your employees’ work conditions, you need to learn what needs to be improved. Who better to ask than the employees themselves?
OfficeVibe is a nice tool that will help you boost the employee experience by implementing surveys to get a feel of the work conditions your staff is experiencing. Here is what the tool offers:
- Pulse surveys that are engaging and easily customizable that you can use on your team
- Analytics to automatically measure the engagement score
- One-on-one meeting templates and other features to improve your relationship with your team
By continuously surveying and tracking your employees’ satisfaction levels, you can learn which areas in your company need improvement and how you can streamline their workload more efficiently.
5. Best for email management: Clean Email
On average, office workers receive around 121 emails every day. They send around 40 daily, which, as you can agree, adds up to quite a lot – and makes a lot of mess. This is the reason why many messages get lost; your team forgets about an email they sent or received, not to mention the endless spam messages they have to go through on a daily basis.
To help them declutter this and optimize email communication, you need tools like Clean Email.
Just as the name tells you, this is an email cleaner and organizer. It will allow your staff to unsubscribe from messages they don’t want to receive and declutter their inboxes. It automatically segments messages into bundles, making this a very easy task.
Your staff receives and sends dozens of emails every day, making it hard to juggle through it all and focus on the important messages. Offer them an email organizer tool to help them settle this mess.
6. Best for design: Photoshop
Is your company dealing with designing? Almost every creative project requires some imaging and designing. If your team has such projects, offer them a tool to help them with the creative work. Photoshop is a great example of such a tool.
Some of the top features of Photoshop include:
- Smart sharpening and quality 3D tools
- Advanced color selector
- Simplified object selection
- Smart, intuitive photo editing
If your team handles designs, give them access to smart, intuitive design tools to make their work easier and more effective.
7. Best for document organization: Google Docs
Documents can get lost. They can get deleted unintentionally, devices can crash and delete them, or your staff can misplace them. Cloud-based tools like Google Docs eliminate all these problems. With Google Docs, your team can work on documents in the cloud, which ensures that their data will remain safe even if their device crashes. On top of that, they can access documentation from any place with an internet connection and share it with others with ease.
Make it easy for your staff to organize and store their documents in a cloud-based tool.
Which of these tools have you been using?
If your answer is one or two – or none, you’ve done poorly for your staff. Tools these days can do wonders for your company’s work, and their cost is minimal compared to what you’ll pay for lack of productivity, high employee turnover, and mistakes in the workplace.
It is your responsibility to find the right people for the job but also to equip them with the tools they need to streamline their work and be more productive.
Author bio
Nadica Metuleva is a freelance writer who’s passionate about creating quality, original content. She holds a Master’s degree in English teaching and a Bachelor’s degree in translation. With eight years of experience in the freelance writing industry, Nadica has become proficient in creating content that captivates the audience, drives growth, and educates. You can find her on LinkedIn.
