6 Tools to Improve Productivity and Employee Engagement

As a business owner or manager, you must constantly seek ways to improve your team’s engagement and performance, which in turn boosts their productivity. Also, it is common knowledge that low productivity will negatively affect revenue, work quality, and the organization. However, only about 15% of the world's employees are engaged at work.

Employee engagement is a vital factor in the success of any company. When your employees are engaged and feel emotionally invested in your business, they will make every effort to boost productivity, increase efficiency, and ultimately generate more revenue.

Luckily, technology can help facilitate productivity and engagement; there are now productivity tools that can help improve employee engagement and boost productivity. This article will discuss the best productivity apps available to your organization.

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How can productivity apps help you?

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The answer is simple. Productivity applications are designed to make you and your team more productive in terms of achieving goals. They enable your team to work smarter and not harder, achieving more work in less time. 

So, the best productivity tools help organize business operations, automate repetitive tasks, reduce distractions, improve team collaboration, facilitate remote work, and save significant time and money. Other ways that productivity apps can be beneficial to your firm include:

Improve employee engagement

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Employee engagement is the level of emotional and mental connection employees feel toward their jobs, co-workers, and organization. Engaged employees are passionate about their work and the company's performance. They put in extra effort to make a difference and are not just in the job for the paycheck. The right tools make it easy to measure and boost employee engagement, improving overall productivity. 

For example, there are tools to help have meaningful one-on-one meetings, give and receive continuous feedback, track important client information in a CRM software, set and track important goals, etc. All these tools can help increase your employee engagement by creating efficient workflows. 

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Increase workplace productivity

Productivity at work is vital for any successful business because your business will be negatively impacted if you can’t quickly complete tasks done. For example, a profitable sales team will use several productivity tools to ensure their workflows, such as outreach programs or sales pipeline CRM are hyperefficient 

In addition, you need to motivate your employees to stay on task when working remotely or traveling for work. With the right tools, you can significantly improve workplace productivity. For example, productivity tools that include gamification designed features can motivate employees to achieve new milestones. 

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What are the different categories of productivity apps?

There are several productivity tools. However, most of them fall under specific categories. So, you can use multiple tools in one category to perform one task. Below is a list of some classifications of productivity tools.

1. Meeting note apps

Meetings always occur in workplaces. They are essential in every organization as businesses use them to update employees, track work progress, and make important announcements. However, the average human's attention span is short, so it's easy to forget important details from meetings.

Thus, meeting notes apps provide meeting agenda examples that allow you to organize your meetings properly and ensure all relevant parties have access to the information they need. The app also stores previous meeting minutes for future reference. In addition, some apps have features that allow you to record the meeting and transcribe it later.

2. Communication tools

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Communication is the core of any organization. Without an effective communication tool, you will make business errors, lose essential data, and miss deadlines.

But with the perfect communication tool, you can avoid all these issues. Communication tools provide users with instant messaging platforms that allow for direct and group messaging within an organization. They also have task management features to monitor progress toward one-time tasks, create a repetitive to-do list, and track the progress of long-term goals. Some communication tools also have the ability to share and store files (in cloud) related to a project, making it easily accessible.‍

3. Scheduling apps

Scheduling applications are tools that streamline the appointment booking process for organizations and service providers. They generate automatic notifications and reminders, allowing you to focus on the important aspects of your business.

Furthermore, scheduling apps are great for setting one-on-one meetings with your employees to check on their well-being and monitor their work progress, or they can be used to hold weekly/monthly team meetings.

‍4. Feedback tools

Feedback tools help organizations track employee feedback, customer feedback, recognize staff achievements, and promote positive company culture. In addition, you can use feedback tools to draw actionable insights from employee feedback. 

Feedback tools are generally implemented in HR departments as a substitute for the traditional performance review process. Alternatively, they can be used after a meeting or upon complement a project to hold an anonymous poll and gather real time feedback. Companies also use them to promote employee recognition through internal communication channels.

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Six best apps for productivity

Now that we have established the importance and functions of productivity tools, let’s look at some specifics. We have scoured the internet and come up with six of the best tools to help increase workplace productivity and some of their features.

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1. Fellow

Fellow is an excellent meeting management software where teams gather to have productive team meetings and meaningful one-on-ones. Fellow  cultivates efficient meeting habits through collaborative agendas, real-time notetaking, and pre-build time-saving templates. . Fellow also fosters accountability, encourages continuous improvements, and enables important conversations across the entire company.

Fellow’s features encourage productivity by improving meeting habits before, during, and after every meeting. Notable features of Fellow.app include:

• Task delegation
• Action items
• Pre-built templates
• Meeting minutes
• 360 feedback
• Third-party integrations
• Streams
• Meeting analytics

Pricing: Fellow has a free and pro pricing plan that starts at $6.00 per month.

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‍2. Agendrix

Agendrix is an employee management application designed to make it easier to create schedules, track work hours, and communicate in the workplace. The software assists organizations in adopting management principles that improve employee retention and job satisfaction. Moreover, managers can easily organize retail employee scheduling with Agendrix. 

This productivity tool is designed for small businesses across industries, including retail, pharmacy, assisted living,  healthcare, construction, hotels, and security services. 

Key features include

• Scheduling
• Time tracking
• Timesheets
• Ways to clock
• Communication
• Human resources
• Mobile access

Pricing: Agendrix has two pricing packages. The first is the ‘Essential package’, which begins from $2.75 per user/ per month. Then, the Pro pricing plan starts at $4.

‍3. TestGorilla

At some point, every organization will need to hire new employees. So, there are productivity apps to make this process easier and more efficient. TestGorilla is a pre-employment testing software that helps organizations streamline the entire hiring lifecycle, from building assessments and inviting candidates to performing an in-depth analysis of results. 

In addition, administrators can view automated screen snapshots during ongoing tests and receive alerts when applicants try to exit the full-screen mode to prevent examination malpractices.

With TestGorilla.com, you can predict real-world job performance using a library of 262 scientifically validated tests. Furthermore, hiring managers can also test candidates for job-specific skills like coding or digital marketing and more general skills like critical thinking.

Key features include:

• Aptitude testing
• Customizable questions
• Email Reminders
• Reporting/Analytics
• Collaboration Tools

Pricing: TestGorilla has four pricing plans. The free plan, pay-as-you-go ($26/month), scale plan ($325/month), and business plan ($2,200/month)

‍4. ClickUp 

ClickUp is a task and project management tool that helps teams increase their productivity with organized and collaborative project management. It offers all the important features to enhance productivity such as task management, project/time tracking, Gantt charts, collaboration, recurring tasks, and more.

Furthermore, ClickUp seamlessly integrates with Google Drive, Zoom, GitHub, Slack, Outlook, Google Docs, Google Meet, Dropbox, etc. The main features include:

• Team management software
• Project management tool 
• Goal and milestone tracking
• Screen recording
• Whiteboards
• Mind Maps 

Pricing: ClickUp has a free starter plan with limited features, but they also have a paid unlimited plan for $5 per member per month. 

‍5. Polly

Polly is a survey software built for Slack, Microsoft Teams & Zoom. Administrators can use the features available on the software to queue survey questions in advance, streamline data collection and feedback control operations.

Polly enables teams to gather the information required to enhance business operations and take commercially sensible decisions that maximize work productivity. Managers can use the software's real-time feedback tools to encourage better engagement and enhance decision-making across the company. Other features include:

• Polly vs. surveys
• Suggestion box
• Instant engagement
• Real-time visualization
• Powerful automation
• Enterprise-grade security

Pricing: Polly has a free plan, a standard plan ($49/month), and a pro plan ($19/month).

 6. Hubspot

Hubspot provides marketers salespeople with time-saving workflows to help tackle their workday head on. These collaborative tools help them manage contacts, deals, and tasks through email templates and scheduling tools all while increasing efficiency. By centralizing all your prospect information into one place, sending prospect emails is simpler, quicker and more effective. Communication is automatically tracked through Hubspot, so the sales person can see when emails are received and opened, which helps with other outreach.  

• Favicon generator
• CRM 
• Deal tracking and projection 
• Email marketing
• Online form builder 
• Email tracking 
• Task reminders 
• Meeting scheduling 

Pricing: Hubspot has a free plan and a variety of paid plans based on the size of your organization and what tools you’d like to access. 

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Parting advice

The level of employee engagement within your organization determines whether or not your employees would be productive. Although there are several ways to improve employee engagement, having the right tools that make work seamless and faster is one way to make your employees happier and thus boost their productivity. This article discussed some of the best productivity tools for your business in 2024.

‍Author Bio

‍Lydia Iseh is a writer with years of experience in writing SEO content that provides value to the reader. As someone who believes in the power of SEO to transform businesses, she enjoys being part of the process that helps websites rank high on search engines.