Top 7 Business Productivity Tools

Everyone who manages or owns a small business wants things to run more smoothly and for productivity to increase. Unfortunately, not everyone always knows how best to achieve this goal, and instead flounders about trying one strategy after another, and finding that more time and expense was wasted rather than saved. While there are of course specific strategies that do work quite well, depending upon what type of business you own or manage, many strategies don't show results for quite some time, and require strong enforcement and training in order to get the entire workforce in sync with new company procedures.

Thankfully, in lieu of attempting new strategies, there are also several tools that can be acquired and utilized immediately, and with very little learning curve involved. Today's advancing technology makes available new productivity tools every day that are designed to save you time, money, and headaches, as well as to facilitate communicate, foster productivity, and enable your workforce to operate more efficiently.

Most businesses can easily benefit from some or all of the top business productivity tools discussed below:

1. Asana

A recent introduction and a quick favorite in many businesses, this handy collaboration app is ideal for any businesses that often utilizes teams to complete projects. The innovative app enables more efficient communication thanks to integrated tools that handle email messaging, document sharing, conferencing, and task management. With all of these daily business functions conveniently located within one innovative app, your teams will save time and be able to communicate more efficiently with one another, rather than having to constantly switch between many different applications in order to engage other members or find out what tasks they have been assigned.

2. Mention

Mention is a great way to find out how much recognition your company gets on the Web. The app will send you alerts whenever your company is mentioned, and with a far range and integration with social media platforms, you'll be able to discover and be notified of mentions across the Web as well as on popular social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. The app is also ideal for monitoring your company in the news, and discovering trends so that you can learn how to better market your business. Additionally, you can also sync Mention with Google Alerts, effectively doubling your alert power and ensuring nothing is missed.

3. Track Duck

Track Duck is a no nonsense productivity tool that is simple and to the point, eliminating much of the unnecessary clutter that comes with many other apps. Designed for easy visual feedback so that you can quickly get back to work, one simply uploads an image, such as a website in production, an ad layout, or signage, and those who are allowed to see the shared image can quickly post feedback and discuss the file in real-time.

4. Switch

Switch is an advanced phone system integrated with the suite of Google apps, and is ideal for businesses of all sizes. To start, you'll get a free company number for each of your employees using the app, enabling you to always easily reach them transfer calls, and hold conferences at any time, regardless of where they may, so long as they have access to their mobile device. And with the integration with Google apps, you can easily share documents, view calendar updates, send texts and recordings, and improve efficiency and productivity overall throughout the whole office. Additionally, both local and international calling is much less expensive than when using traditional phone systems, saving your company plenty of money as well. You'll get a free company number once you download and set up the app.

5. BoostSuite

A strong, visible website is essential in today's competitive marketplace. BoostSuite helps you maintain an edge over your competitors by helping you to improve everything about your website. This intuitive app provides you with a great deal of information about your website and its traffic so that you can easily make adjustments to improve search engine rankings, relevancy, and boost traffic on a daily basis.

6. 15Five

It's no secret that open communication between employees and managers improves productivity and employee morale. 15Five is an app designed to facilitate communication by giving employees 15 minutes each week to write a simple report and voice any concerns they might have regarding anything to do with the business, which can then be read within 5 minutes by a manager. This is a great way to continually foster communication as well as identify trouble spots on projects or other areas in the business.

7. Shoeboxed

Organization is also essential to ensuring productivity in the workplace, but files, documents, receipts and lots of other office clutter can quickly get out of hand and cause you to waste ample time sifting through everything. Shoeboxed solves that problem with easy and efficient organization of files, and scanned images of receipts and other paperwork.