Employee productivity a little sluggish lately? A report from The Engagement Institute estimates that U.S. companies are losing as much as over half a trillion dollars in lost productivity every year. Even more—a third of employees report that they aren’t truly engaged in their job. Whether you are a boss or a worker bee, here are four excellent employee productivity apps that can help.
The Best Employee Productivity Apps
1. Deputy
If you’re in the services or food industry, you know how important it is to keep all shifts sufficiently staffed. However, planning shifts can become quite a chore. Lapses in scheduling could leave shifts understaffed or even critical roles unfilled. Poor shift planning can also affect customer service and staff burnout.
To help you manage staffing, you can use Deputy, an online scheduling software solution that allows you to schedule workers conveniently and effectively. Deputy lets you create staff schedules according to your needs and budget. It can even accurately and automatically create shifts based on forecasts and labor demand using historical data. Through optimized shifts, you can ensure that your business is amply resourced.
Employees receive notifications regarding shift assignments or changes. Deputy also includes time and attendance features to help record staff hours accurately. You can even instantly generate exportable timesheets for your payroll.
2. Jotform
Poor communication in the workforce is a productivity killer. Imagine people doing the wrong things just because instructions were poorly relayed or no instructions were given at all. This is why ticketing systems and job order forms are used to facilitate work requests, but dealing with that sort of manual paperwork can be tedious and wasteful.
To help you manage forms, you can use online and mobile form builder Jotform. It allows you to create custom forms including date, times, and job descriptions. It can even collect data on the go. So, no matter where your employees are, they can instantly get push notifications on their mobile device as soon as a form gets accomplished.
You can also use it for all your other form needs including transactions from external customers such as accepting orders and payments, subscriptions, registrations, and messaging.
3. ToDoist
Employees are faced with various tasks and competing priorities. Without proper task and time management, it’s easy for things to go out of control. Multitasking has been proven to make people less productive. Rather than forcing your staff members to multitask, you can encourage them to use to-do lists instead so that they can queue their assigned tasks accordingly.
ToDoist has been a go-to task management app for many users for quite some time. It allows you to create tasks using natural language. Users can set schedules for each task and toggle whether it is a one-time task or recurring. ToDoist also lets you organize tasks into projects and set priority levels which are helpful especially if employees have to work on various initiatives.
ToDoist also offers a business version that provides collaboration and file management features, allowing users to delegate tasks, manage projects, organize attachments, and integrate with other apps.
4. FocusMe
While technology can help workers be more productive, it can also be the cause of distractions as well. Modern workstations are designed to enable multitasking where users can access multiple windows and applications at the same time. An employee can have their email client, messenger app, and office productivity app running.
While this makes it easy for them to switch over from one window to the next, it’s also easy for an incoming email or a message to distract them from whatever they’re working on. If your network doesn’t have policies and restrictions, your workers may even be watching videos or playing games during work hours.
To help employees avoid distractions, you can adopt an app and website blocker like FocusMe. FocusMe runs on each workstation and encourages employees to focus mainly on work tasks by blocking all distracting applications and websites. Users can white list the essential applications they need during work—blocking all other potentially distracting applications.
Empowering Employees
Many businesses often fall into the trap of putting up restrictive policies in order to force employees to be productive. However, it’s common for such schemes to backfire since workers today value independence. They also appreciate if they are given some latitude on how they work. The idea behind adopting productivity-boosting apps is to allow you or your employees to better manage their own time, empower them and put them in situations where they can succeed. Their improved productivity will ultimately reflect on your business’ bottom line.
Black Enterprise Contributors Network