Gone are the days when you had to rely on pieces of paper, spreadsheets and email to manage your employees’ productivity. Nowadays, there are so many tools that can save you time and boost productivity even further.
But there are hundreds of these management tools. Some of them are great, while most aren’t up to the mark. If you want to get the most out of your employees, you need to find the right tools in your first attempt. To help you out, I have made this list of top tools to manage your employees’ productivity.
The most important piece of software you require is a scheduling software. One of the best ones is Deputy’s.
Deputy’s scheduling software can be used to create an employee schedule whether you are running a small, medium or large business. It can also be used to manage remote employees.
You can use it to create new shift structures quickly, build rota templates and then drag and drop them easily when required. There is also an auto scheduling feature that can simplify things even further through automation.
You can do all this through a desktop/pc or mobile device. There’s also an app for your employees. It notifies them about the schedule and lets them view it on their mobiles. It also lets you inform employees via email and SMS. Employees can even swap shifts with their apps.
It has many more wonderful features like time limits which can help reduce employee stress and fatigue. It also integrates with third-party software such as your payroll provider, which can help reduce wages.
The above software will help you create a better schedule for your employees. But to create it in the first place and to better it in the future, you need data about your employees’ everyday activities at work. For this you can use RescueTime.
It is a software that can be added to your PC/laptop, mobile device and even your browser. Once you add it to your employees’ devices, it will begin tracking all the activity you do at work.
And it will display data in easy-to-view graphs. This will help determine if your employees are being productive or not. You will also learn extra information like the times at which your employees are most active. All this data will help you improve the schedule you created for them.
Some other extra features that RescueTime offers are setting goals and blocking distracting websites and notifications for when you aren’t being productive.
This can be a great tool for tracking your employees’ activities, but before you begin installing it on your employees’ devices, make sure you get their permission. Many of them might not enjoy this invasion of privacy.
Trello is an easy-to-maneuver productivity tool that makes it easy for you and your team to work on projects. It can be accessed both via the mobile or the desktop.
Their main features are boards, lists and cards. You create lists that are labelled with the status of the tasks in each board. You then create cards for each task and place it under the list. As the status of the tasks change, you can move the cards from one list to another until they are complete. You can add team members to each board, and they can tag and communicate with each other in the cards.
You can share files like documents and images in these cards. This is a great project management tool to use whether you are managing a team on site or remotely. It integrates with several other apps like Drive, MailChimp and Xero.
If you want to take communication with and between your employees to the next level, you can use Slack. It can be used to conduct voice or video calls. You can also share your screens with it.
But the most common method people use here is chats, as you can type in messages via your desktop or mobile app and quickly communicate. Employees in your company can either directly contact each other or they can use channels where entire teams can communicate through group chat.
It integrates well with the abovementioned Trello. You can combine these two to create a powerful project management system for your employees.
Conclusion:
These are the 4 top tools you should be using to manage your employee productivity. You should use them together. Deputy will help you create a schedule, RescueTime will help you collect data to optimize the schedule, and Trello and Slack will help you execute the schedule.
