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Only 18% of employees reported being productive for 90% or more of their time at work.
Sounds concerning, right?
After all, every business wants its workforce to be their productive best at any given time. But while employees are filling in 100% of their time at work, they’re thriving for hardly a fraction of their entire workday. Everyday!
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So, what can be the solution here?
Enter productivity apps. A far better solution than those never-ending meetings and old-school survey tactics!
Productivity software features are designed in such a way that keeps your employees engaged while helping them bring about desired results.
In this blog, we’ll take you through the top 10 key features of a winning productivity app. But before we do that, let’s first explore the productivity app definition.
» What is a Productivity Application?
A productivity application is nothing but a tool developed to enhance the efficiency of professionals, both in a team set-up and at an individual level. You can use these apps on a mobile device as well as on web browsers as an extension.
Some examples of leading productivity software used across industries worldwide include Trello, Evernote, Slack, Notion, and Todoist.
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At an individual level, a productivity app can help enhance your focus, become more organized, and optimize your tasks.
When it comes to teams, productivity tools provide a host of features like multiple views & boards for project management, tools for seamless collaboration and communication among teams, and triggered notifications and reminders. As a result, teams are able to perform better and maximize their time with improved efficiency and engagement.
Wondering in what ways a productivity software tool helps teams do it all, and why should you opt for one, too? It’s time to discover some critical use cases of the software:
» The Importance of Productivity Software
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› Project Planning
With a productivity app, creating schedules for different projects, adding new tasks, and assigning them to your teams becomes a breeze. You can also check the progress of these disparate tasks from a single place. What’s more? All the data is stored at a central location. That further simplifies project management while making way for desired outcomes with unmatched accuracy across organizational levels.
› Time Tracking
Productivity tools typically come with timers. That means you get a correct picture of how much time you spend on a particular task. Doing so also allows you to optimize your time in the future for similar tasks and enhance your efficiency. For managers, such a time-tracking mechanism streamlines the planning and management of their team’s deliverables.
› Seamless Communication
Projects often get derailed due to miscommunication, unclear briefs, and delayed responses to queries. Add to that those endless trails of emails, and your teams end up more confused. You can eliminate all of that with a productivity app. These tools provide built-in communication mechanisms for instant conversations - one-on-one and in groups. There are discussion boards as well. All of that, as a whole, ensures everyone stays on the same page without any delays in the timeline.
› Reminders
If you struggle to remember crucial project dates for important deliverables, productivity apps are your perfect rescue system. You can set triggers for reminders and notifications about tasks and duties. Besides, these notifications are customizable. You can also mute them when working on a vital, focus-requiring task. Sticking to project deadlines has never been this easy
» Top 10 Features of a Winning Productivity App
Keen on getting the best-fit productivity solution for your organization but confused about how to choose one?
Here’s a checklist of the key features of productivity applications you must tick off to build synchronized, organized, motivated, and engaged teams.
› 1) Intuitive interface
If you think an efficient productivity app has to be complex in its functionality, let us enlighten you. The simpler the software is, the more accepted it becomes. No one likes those endless text-heavy instructions and a steep learning curve, after all.
That’s the primary reason the leading productivity applications in the market offer an easy, intuitive interface. With an eye-pleasing design and powerful functions.
One can find the information, task details, or project updates, for instance, easily without having to pick their brains or wander around the systems for hours. Creating project boards, adding data, and scheduling tasks also becomes smoother, streamlining operations further.
The goal is to choose a system that’s simple to use. A tool that does not require a novice to transform into a tech geek overnight!
› 2) Automation
One of the essential features of a robust productivity app is its ability to automate your manual, recurring tasks. Handling every little sub-task of a larger process manually is time-consuming and prone to errors. It often delays the whole project.
You can bypass all of that with productivity software. The system lets you define automation rules and triggers. From auto-assigning tasks to sending reminders and notifying everyone on the team on the completion of a specific dependency, you can do so much.
Such functionality helps you save your time, ensure alignment across departments, and enable you to concentrate on more critical duties.
› 3) Task organization & management
Productivity is hard to achieve with poor task and process management. Hence, it is imperative to go for a tool that offers swift task creation, management, and monitoring capabilities across teams.
We know all projects require multiple team members for successful completion. Thus, your productivity app should allow you to break down tasks into chunks, creating a channeled, step-by-step process with personalized views on the progress.
Such a mechanism also makes way for better resource management. You get to ensure the work is allocated to the right person and the workload is evenly distributed among teams to avoid burnout and maximize productivity.
› 4) Collaboration tools
One of the ways to tell apart a good productivity app is by checking the collaborative functions it offers. Collaboration is the key that fuels an organization's success, after all.
The system you choose must make it easier for your teams to work together. Whether it is sharing a document, dropping a comment on a task thread, providing feedback, or updating the progress of a project to cross-functional teams, things should be simpler.
The goal is to have everyone on the team on the same page, at any given time, with streamlined communication channels, real-time updates, and an instant overview of tasks.
The best part? The leading productivity apps offer collaborative tools even among employees working remotely as well as teams in another time zone.
› 5) Flexibility & customizations
Every organization has its own set of functions and processes. Hence, it is only wise that you choose a productivity system that blends in with your current process. The motto here is to simplify and streamline operations, not complicate them further.
Opt for a tool that facilitates personalization of the interface as well as settings. Leading apps come in with plenty of templates that you can reconfigure as per your preferences and distinct workflow.
At the same time, the system has to be flexible enough to accommodate changes with changing requirements and processes. From adjusting schedules to replicating a project board, management turns hassle-free. What’s more? You can do it all with a few clicks right from a single place.
› 6) Integrations
As a business, you might already be using other software tools to manage your workflow - be it a CRM, communication platform, or payroll system. Therefore, while selecting a productivity tool for your organization, it’s critical to ensure that it integrates with the tools you already use. Otherwise, your business operations may turn into complete chaos!
A good productivity app provides seamless integrations with other platforms, including third-party apps, to help you achieve a streamlined, transparent process. Leading tools work well with other popular systems, such as Slack, GSuite, Dropbox, Asana, and GitHub.
› 7) Analytics
One of the most significant features of top productivity software is the insights it offers. You can get analytics in real-time about tasks, processes, projects, budgets, and employee performance. That, in turn, helps you determine where you stand and the changes you need to make to achieve your goals. Moreover, you can also do real-time monitoring to know whether the change you implemented is giving you the desired productivity results.
› 8) Accessibility
In today’s tech-first world, teams work together beyond the geographical limits. Hence, it is crucial for you to choose an app that allows multi-device, anytime access to all your teams, regardless of where they are based.
At the same time, the app should come with an access control feature. This means you should be able to set permissions for users to restrict access to sensitive, confidential data while providing them with an uninterrupted workflow setup.
› 9) Single sign-ons
No one likes the long process of signing up and setting up a new profile on yet another platform. Thus, it’s a smart move to go with a tool that allows you to use your existing accounts on platforms such as Microsoft and Google. It saves precious time by giving a headstart. Besides, such a single sign-on option, combined with instant access to projects, creates a positive experience among users.
› 10) Security
Last but not the least, make sure you go through the security features the productivity apps you’ve shortlisted have to offer. Since the tool is going to store your critical business data about your processes, finances, projects, and internal and external stakeholders, security should be top-notch. You don't want the data to be stolen or be a victim of cyber attacks.
» Ending Note
With the ever-increasing workload and disparate, hybrid teams, a productivity app acts as a glue to keep it all together and be the best at it. We explored it all in this article - from the definition and importance to the key features of productivity applications. These apps not only boost the productivity of your employees but also streamline your entire workflow. They foster better communication, simplify collaboration, and keep everyone across the organization aligned toward a shared goal. The best part? There are many paid, as well as free productivity apps, available in the market. Go with the one that suits your business needs, expectations, and processes.
