Maintaining a high level of productivity is very essential for your business as this has a great impact on your business growth and revenue. This means that you need all the help you can get in achieving this.

As it is very likely that you would be collaborating with team members whether physically or remotely, you will need to employ tools that allow for effectiveness.

So, here are 5 tools we think are a great help in boosting your productivity.

1.    Slack 

Subscription: Free and Paid

Slack in the simplest of terms is “WhatsApp for work”. It’s an easy-to-use business communication tool where you can communicate with your team members, create groups, share files, and any other important information. It features real-time team chats, cross-functional communication, and timely notifications.

Another major advantage is that it integrates with dozens of other business apps and can pull in data from all your business applications and help employees stay informed, collaborate and get things done faster.

It also allows for video calls but your plan determines how many people can be on a call.

Alternatives: Microsoft Teams and Facebook Workplace

2.    G-Suite 

Subscription: Paid

What would we all do without Google? Well, before you answer that, let’s talk about how Google can help your business.

G-Suite is the collective family name for most of Google’s amazing apps. G Suite comprises Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, and Currents for communication; Drive for storage; Docs, Sheets, Slides, Keep, Forms, and Sites for productivity and collaboration; and, depending on the plan, an Admin panel and Vault for managing users and the services. It also includes the digital interactive whiteboard Jamboard and the app development platform App Maker.

With these, you can handle your meetings, share documents, presentation, and spreadsheets from anywhere with no clutter of various document versions floating around in your inbox.

An amazing feature they all have is the ability to let multiple people collaborate on a document all at the same time.

Alternative: Microsoft 365

3.  Asana 

Subscription: Free and Paid

Asana (fun fact – the name is gotten from a yoga pose) is a tool that enables team members to simplify complicated projects into separate tasks, assign and schedule each one, and track their progress. It basically assists teams to organize, track, and manage their work.

It is exceptionally great for small teams and very easy to use. The app allows you to mark items as top priority, especially if the rest is at a normal priority level. This will alert your team that this item needs attention right away.

Asana’s superpower is that it is a combination of task & resource management, along with budget management & time tracking features.

Alternatives: Trello and Monday.com

4.   Zoom

Subscription: Free and Paid

Zoom is a video conferencing tool that allows users to create and join virtual meetings at the click of a button.

The app allows you to schedule future meetings while also offering password protection to control access to your meeting.

Your team can have its weekly stand-up meetings via Zoom, as well as host customer events on the platform, making use of the chat box and Q&A panels for comments or inquiries on the various talking points.

Its unique feature is that you can stream from Zoom to other social platforms in the case of a webinar, and also set up polls for attendees to weigh in on.

Its free plan allows you to add over 100 attendees to your meeting and has a limit of 40 mins at a stretch. The paid plan offers a webinar mode feature, 24-hours meeting duration, virtual break-out rooms and up to 1000 attendees.

Alternatives: Google Meet and Microsoft Teams

5. HubSpot CRM

Subscription: Free 

HubSpot CRM is an ‘I can do all things’ customer relationship management tool/platform. It is built to allow members of your sales team, marketing team, customer service, operations team and even you, the business owner, collaborate and manage all customer relations in one place.

A special feature is that it has automated logging and updating of customer deals and sales activities. Its ability to make and record sales calls, send emails, schedule tasks, and assign tasks to members of your sales team makes it a favourite.  Simply put, its high-level automation will make your work seamless and effective.

Alternative: Zoho

We said 5 but there’s one more tool we can’t help but mention:

6. Canva

Subscription: Free and Paid

Canva is essentially technology’s gift to small businesses and teams in handling their graphic designs needs.

Alternatives: PicMonkey and Adobe Spark

Most of these tools require that you grant permissions or allow your team members to have access to sensitive company information, ideas and details.

You should ensure that your team members are bound by confidentiality obligations and use such information appropriately. This should be included in their employment contract. You can get an employment contract with confidentiality obligations here.