These are the top tools for improving team project productivity

It seems like this year (and the last five) has been the year of productivity. With small startup teams overtaking large, traditional corporations and doing much much more with less, productivity rules the workplace. Instead of relying just on brute workforce, companies are having to think about working smarter, instead of hiring more and more employees.

Luckily, business tech has kept up. There are new tools flooding the marketing every year to help employees work faster and better. It can be a daunting task to determine which tools are best and stay on top of the latest improvements. Luckily, we’ve done the research for you and tested out a few tools you may have not even heard of yet.

Here are the top tools that will help you and your team members manage office projects better

TimeDoctor

The name pretty much tells you most of the story. TimeDoctor helps you fix your team’s time management problems and lets you understand how to best manage for optimal productivity. TimeDoctor tracks where team members spend the most time. It’s not just helpful for eliminating distractions, but for knowing where working processes need to improve. If your team is having to spend 60% of their day answering email to move forward with a project, maybe another form of communication is better. Additionally, you can identify which tasks take the most time and distribute work evenly.

Scannable

Scannable from Evernote is a quick, easy tool everyone on your team can use individually or together. Scannable lets you scan documents, contracts, ads, print material, etc. with a smartphone and upload it into a shareable file instantly. It’s a great way to ensure all your files and documents are “digitized” and accessible by everyone. If your sales or marketing team members are out and about, they can capture and share new ideas for print material or a lead’s business card with a click!

IFTTT

IFTTT is a tool that allows you to easily automate the repetitive online tasks so you and your team can save a little time here and there and still make sure they get done. It works like a formula: if “you do this” then “this does that”. For instance, if your team posts a new blog and a post on Facebook, you can automatically send an email reminder for everyone to like and share it. Another example: during a project, you can set it up so all of your team are notified when an important client or executive responds to an email. It’s simple, but these things add up! Letting little things fall through the cracks can be more costly than you think.

Expensify

Project management can be a mess when you have team members left and right signing up for new tools and spending here and there on things you need to keep the project moving. Expensify helps you keep on top of team spending. Employees can take photos and screenshots of receipts and upload them to your flow to automatically be approved, or wait for approval, and be reimbursed without the extra accounting work. This is a great way to automate another one of those tasks that often takes way too much time away from real work.

Rapportive

This fun little Google Chrome extension can save you a lot of questions and explanations. Have your whole team install this ASAP. This extension will show you a bio for anyone who’s emailed you when you open an email. This way, your team doesn’t have to look up a name or email or ask who a person is when they are contacted or CC’d on an email! It’s a great tool for bringing a new team together on a project, dealing with outside contractors, or interacting with leads as a team.

Hibox

Surprise, surprise. But honestly, this is genuinely what we use as a team to organize big projects. Hibox was born helping big international banks like BBVA plan their projects and now it helps many teams of all sizes do the same. With Hibox, your team can set up group chat streams for individual projects (unlimited) and create tasks and share files directly in the stream. You can also video call directly from Hibox — no other tools needed — so your team stay personally connected at any time throughout your project no matter where they are. Your whole team can brainstorm, stay accountable, and on task in one place. Try Hibox for free for your team today!

Sometimes the key to productivity isn’t an expensive project management system, but taking care of the little things that cost your team time and energy throughout a project. Try out a few of these and see how much time you can save together.

Originally published at www.hibox.co on October 31, 2017.