In a startup or small business, people sometimes have to wear many hats. That means an increase in responsibilities and bigger workloads and, a lot of times, more stress. The work day can seem to go by at break-neck pace week in and week out. Emails fly around like mosquitoes, vendors and employees are spread out throughout the country and the world, and you need an answer on something now. How do you keep everything together? Easy! A collaboration tool, like Slack, Hive, Google Hangouts, and a whole bunch more.
These tools, a mixture of free and paid software, can give your company a huge advantage in organization, communication, and productivity. Here are five reasons why you should drop everything you’re doing and find the perfect collaboration software that fits your business.
Everything is in one place
Email and text can get massively overwhelming when you’re a small team (or even when you’re big). You can lose track of dates, meetings, and important notes about clients, etc. With a collaborative tool, everyone and everything is logged into one place. On Slack, you can create a vast number of different channels for whatever you need. Be it to segment your teams, organize the company outing, or simply where everyone puts in their Friday lunch order.
Everything is shareable & searchable from one place
Centralized file sharing makes the workday that much easier. Whether it’s links, images, Illustrator files, or cute puppy pictures, you’ll never want to send anything over email again.
And not to belabor the idea of oneness, but it’s pretty great when you’re missing something and only remember a word or two and type it in a search bar and voila! Your searches can be as finite or big as you need. Filters make it easy to find whatever you’re looking for.
Open accessibility
Your office eventually closes up for the day, but that might not suit your employees on the west coast or the one guy who just loves waiting till the last minute on projects and needs to work late. Thankfully, collaboration tools never (knock-on-wood) shut down! The fact that employees can send messages and access files from anywhere at anytime makes this a no-brainer for workplace productivity and organization.
Integration Station
Think of a collaboration software as a Swiss army knife with just the knife and all the open space. You can fill it with as many other gadgets as you need in order to be as stocked as possible to streamline your everyday business. Integration is a great idea to maximize everything in one space. Add your calendar, the Google suite, time-keeping tools, reminders, team building integrations and so much more.
Increased access to talent
With the uptick in remote working, it’s even easier to source talent from around the globe. Thanks to your shiny new collaboration tools software, you can have all your freelance employees or vendors plugged into whatever your team is working on. And if they shouldn’t be privy to certain conversations or information, simply set their access to however much or little you decide.
