Many people now work from home (WFH) 100% of the time. Hopefully, if this is the case for you, you can stay productive and stay positive during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While many of us are used to living business life from a home office, it’s still a big adjustment to have to isolate yourself and stop all face-to-face interactions with co-workers and clients.
I encourage you to use this time to take a closer look at your overall business goals, focus on your health (both physical and mental) and self-care, and enjoy some family time at home.
I think a lot of small business owners are having to change their marketing strategy, and what they do when coronavirus passes could look very different than what they did before.
I wanted to share some useful tech tools that can make your everyday work-from-home life so much easier.
Team communication tools
This is probably the biggest decision you will ever make about a WFH product. Your team needs a reliable and easy-to-use tool that allows them to instant message their co-workers. The one that’s right for you depends on your business needs and challenges, team size, and budget.
1. You may have heard of Slack. This tool gives you the ability to create channels on multiple topics and invite users. From marketing content ideas to social media tactics to photos of dogs in the office, your team can create relevant channels to make chatting and collaborating easy.
It also integrates with many helpful tools, like Outlook Calendar, Twitter, HubSpot, and Salesforce, so you can see what’s happening at all times right in the Slack app (no need to click in and out of your daily calendar or Twitter, etc.). for example). example). There are also LOTS of fun and creative emojis you can use, which makes remote messaging in a challenging time like this a little more lighthearted.
2. Another popular platform is Discord. Popular with gamers, this voice, video, and text tool isn’t just for talking with co-workers, but also for finding like-minded communities and new friends. You can create “servers” and “channels” for specific topics, similar to how you do with Slack channels. While Slack has more business integrations, Discord has voice channels, so you can easily chat with team members. Discord also allows you to set user roles and permissions.
3. Flock is a cloud-based team communication tool with video and audio calls, screen sharing, text chat, integration with other business apps, and more. You can tag colleagues in comments and to-do lists, upload documents, images, and videos, and set reminders and due dates. Polls, code snippet sharing, and group discussions are available, and it integrates with other apps like Trello, Github, Google Drive, and Asana.
Team collaboration tools
Your employees need to be able to share their work, whether they’re creating a marketing strategy or editing a press release. Here are a few that might fit your small business needs.
1. G Suite is a Google product comprised of cloud computing, productivity, and collaboration tools, software, and products. In one set of tools, it offers email, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, shared calendars, cloud storage, and more.
You can comment and make suggestions on specific documents through Google Sheets and Docs, simultaneously edit documents online, and collaborate on projects and documents. It’s easy to give users permission to specific files.
2. Evernote: This is more than just a note-taking app. Evernote helps you capture, prioritize and share ideas, track projects and to-do lists. I find it very useful for taking notes, obviously, but also as a kind of “digital filing cabinet” that simplifies organization. There is a free, basic and enterprise package available.
CRM tools
CRM stands for “customer relationship management,” and CRM tools help you with things like managing inbound leads, tracking sales, social following, and delivering email newsletters. Here are three to consider:
1. MailChimp is an all-in-one marketing platform with tools to create everything from emails to postcards. They have a huge selection of templates to choose from that can then be modified to fit your brand. Its intuitive interface and comprehensive reporting are great, but things can get expensive as your subscriber list or number of emails grow. You can compare their different plans on their website.
2. Constant Contact has always been a great rival to MailChimp for being the brand name in email marketing. It’s a great company and a great option if Facebook is an important part of your online marketing strategy. Constant Contact has an email option designed to make it easy for users to share your newsletter on Facebook.
This option can be considered the most friendly with social networks and has all the main features of the others mentioned. If your online marketing involves Hootsuite (you can integrate it into Hootsuite) and you focus your efforts on gaining social media traction, then this is a great newsletter tool for you.
3. AWeber is an extremely popular choice and recommended by many professional marketing companies. It gives you five plans to choose from and a long list of features like unlimited email marketing campaigns, follow-ups, lists, and autoresponders.
Many people believe that their autoresponder platform is superior to other companies, allowing businesses to automate the process of delivering personalized emails to customers on a schedule.
Project management tools
A collaborative task management tool allows everyone to track and manage all of their projects. Think of it as an online scheduler, foreman, and collaboration tool to manage your team’s workflows.
1. Asana is one of the leading tools and gets a lot of positive feedback. Let everyone on your team follow the entire workflow of a project in one easy visual tool. You will always know where your team is and who is responsible for what and when.
From daily reminders about a task that’s due, to the ability to easily add collaborators or assign teammates to a project subtask, Asana makes it easy to see what everyone’s day, week, and month looks like (but you can easily move things around). if plans change).
2. Monday.com is a fairly simple and intuitive visual team management tool (it’s actually a project management platform). Run processes, workflows, and projects in a digital workspace. Visually, it looks like a collection of highly personalized spreadsheets, where each team member can record their tasks and update them with status reports and other relevant information.
That means each person can see all active tasks and count on their progress. Team members can work on multiple projects without getting lost using the weekly summary on Mondays. The workflow can be customized in any way you want to communicate priority, what was done, what was not done, etc. Colorful designs and big buttons don’t hurt either!
Social media management tools
Many small businesses will already have a social media management tool set up. A social media management tool lets you manage all your accounts from one dashboard, saving you time and frustration. These tools share your content at the best possible times throughout the day, so your followers and fans see your updates more often. It’s a smarter and more efficient way to schedule and share your posts on social media.
The best part of these tools is the built-in analytics system, which will give you insight into what’s working well and when your social media posts are having the most impact.
Here are two social media management tools that I use personally:
1. Buffer shows your scheduled posts and analytics (the depth of those analytics depends on the plan you choose). Many small business owners choose Buffer because of its sleek and clean interface that is easy for beginners to understand.
2. I find that while Buffer is great for less demanding social media needs, Hootsuite is where it’s at if you want to see your timelines, replies, and more across all your social networks.
Both Buffer and Hootsuite offer free and paid plans, so you can always try them out and see which one suits your small business best.
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And while it’s not a tool your entire workforce can use, I like MoneyMinderOnline during these uncertain times. Not only does it give you a place to track your spending, but you also get insight into your spending habits and can look ahead to improve your cash flow, pay off your debt, and start saving for your big goals.
I hope I’ve given you an overview of some tools that will help increase your team’s productivity and morale while working from home. You can also benefit from our article on how to boost business efficiency on our website.