Best Productivity Software for Small Businesses

Regardless of its size, your business can only go as far as your employees take it. And although the first step to help your company reach its full potential is hiring top talent, it’s also essential to nurture your employees and give them the necessary tools for maximum efficiency. For instance, unmotivated employees are unlikely to go the extra mile for your company, but even the most driven teams won’t be able to work at their best without the appropriate software.

In short, productivity can make or break your company. If you don’t take action to improve communication, team management, efficiency, and morale, it will be hard for your business to thrive. Fortunately, productivity software allows companies to tackle many of these issues.

Managing a Small Team Effectively

The average employee spends 60% of their time attending meetings with no clear goals, chasing approvals, searching for documents, and managing their workload. This is a lot of time spent on menial tasks that don’t add any value to your company. So, the first challenge to face is to find a way of reducing the time spent organizing work. Effectively delegating tasks and showing employees how to manage their time is a great starting point. Strategies like the Pomodoro technique or the ‘getting things done’ method are just a few proven tactics that help people declutter their minds and focus on the important tasks at hand.

However, to have your team performing at their best, there are a lot of human capital management best practices that need to be followed. This can be the most challenging part, as people are complex and what works for some might not work for others. That’s why it’s essential to have transparent communication with your employees and know what motivates them individually. Not taking this into consideration can decrease overall productivity and even result in losing top talent to other organizations or mental illnesses like burnout.

Recommended Productivity Tools for Small Businesses

Even though software isn’t able to tackle an employee’s motivational issues, it does solve some logistical productivity challenges. Here’s what we recommend using to boost your team’s productivity:

Password Manager: 1Password

How many times have you tried to log into a platform just to realize you’ve forgotten the credentials? After trying your usual passwords you end up having to click the ‘forgot password’ link and, without realizing it, you’ve wasted around five minutes trying to get into an account. Moreover, by having to deal with credential problems, you’ve lost focus on what you were originally going to do. Imagine this happening to your team on a daily basis. When you add all that time up, you’ll notice that it costs your company quite a lot – something a password manager can easily fix. This type of platform stores all of your credentials in one safe place and can automatically fill website login pages with just a few clicks. Better yet, password managers developed for companies, like 1Password, allow for shared vaults – letting employees use the same accounts without having to ask their coworkers for the password. Read our 1Password review.

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Project Management: Asana

If you don't use a project management platform, we can imagine what your calendar looks like – meetings across the board and a lot of notes to catch up on after each one. Some meetings are undeniably essential, especially when you're starting a new project or need to reevaluate your business strategies, but too many meetings cut the time your employees have to focus on their work. Let's not forget that most meetings drag on for longer than necessary and that sometimes the final output could have been obtained with a simple message. Project management platforms are the perfect tool to eliminate unnecessary meetings while keeping everyone on the same page as users can create projects, add subtasks, and leave comments for everyone to see. Thorough project management tools, like Asana, even let you set up task dependencies and automatically notify users when it's time to start their part of a project.

Productivity Monitoring: ActivTrak

Your business can only be as productive as your employees. Unfortunately, not everyone has the same work ethic, which means you need to be on top of your team members to make sure they’re completing their tasks. But this is challenging when employees work from home. That’s why employee monitoring software exists. ActivTrak is one of the best options around, as it offers comprehensive productivity reporting without being too invasive. The software allows you to set up your own rules, block specific domains, and even send a warning message when someone opens Facebook. All of this is backed up with thorough reports where you can find your team’s most-used apps, visited websites, time worked, and more. To protect employees’ privacy, ActivTrak only takes screenshots when they break one of your rules. You can also enable real-time screenshots – think of it as the online version of glancing over an employee’s shoulder. Read our ActivTrak review.

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Email Management: SaneBox

An email organizer such as SaneBox is a blessing for anyone with a cluttered inbox. It’s incredibly intuitive, as the software’s powerful AI effortlessly moves unimportant emails, newsletters, and spam to specific folders, so you can focus on urgent messages. The AI is trainable, meaning it can identify your email organization patterns and improve the more you use the platform . For example, if a message is mistakenly categorized as spam and you move it back to the inbox, the AI will learn that such emails aren’t actually spam. This means that it becomes enough after a while to simply check SaneBox’s Digest reports to learn what’s been happening in your inbox and correct small mistakes if necessary. Another great tool is the software’s deep scan, which reveals emails that use up a lot of space. Beyond that, the software also offers additional DIY folders and efficiency tools for reminders, attachments, and more. Read our SaneBox review.

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Onboarding and Training: Trainual

One of the best ways to make sure your company is productive is for each team member to have a clear understanding of their role and responsibilities. Trainual can help with this by providing a platform where you can build your one-stop-shop company manual. The software requires each team member to document their expertise and responsibilities, which can be easily done through the numerous templates available. Trainual’s template portfolio covers everything – from your work-at-home policy and company story to software used. To help you even further, Trainual also offers various resources explaining how to best write a manual. More than becoming essential for onboarding, Trainual is also perfect for training existing employees, as you can assign yearly readthroughs and tests to check everyone has assimilated what they’ve learned. There’s a significant upfront time investment as you build the manual, but once that’s complete, finding out ‘How to Use Asana’ will be a piece of cake. Read our Trainual review.

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Home Service Work Scheduler: Jobber

Managing a home service is hard work. In addition to the usual financial tasks small businesses need to keep track of, home service companies also need to make sure they don’t overbook or under book themselves. All these administrative tasks may feel unproductive, as the time spent doing them could be better put to use doing what you love most – your craft. Fortunately, Jobber is here to help. It offers an all-in-one platform to manage new jobs, invoices, quotes, customers, home visits, and much more. Plus, it also oversees your business by sending automatic follow-ups to customers about quotes and late invoices. It also supports several users, making it perfect for a small business or one-person show. All this while being affordable and intuitive. Anyone interested in Jobber can also try out the platform by taking advantage of the free trial available. Read our Jobber review.

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CRM: HoneyBook

Without their clients, businesses wouldn’t exist. So, it goes without saying that building a strong relationship with customers, from the first contact to the final payment, must be every company’s top priority. With this in mind, using CRM software is essential to run your business well, and HoneyBook is the go-to platform to do just that. With tools for capturing leads, scheduling meetings, streamlining the sales pipeline, and much more, HoneyBook gathers all necessary resources to manage clients and projects. As everything is neatly displayed and easily accessible in a single platform, users don’t need to rely on multiple spreadsheets and apps, saving time and enhancing productivity. Additionally, HoneyBook is affordable, and all pricing plans support unlimited users, so the whole team can use the platform without having to pay extra. Finally, with the 7-day free trial and 60-day money-back guarantee, there’s every reason to give the service a try. Read our HoneyBook review.

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Office Suite: Microsoft 365

When it comes to boosting productivity within a digital workplace, the well-known office suite Microsoft 365 stands out from the crowd. The all-in-one platform is home to various apps that enhance collaboration, communication, and efficiency in teams. Team members can work using Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents simultaneously, with all changes being updated in real time. Better yet, the software is entirely cloud-based, so all documents are stored in OneDrive, instantly updated, and synced seamlessly across all types of devices. Additionally, creating templates with the standard layout settings saves precious time that would be spent formatting word documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Teams is another of the software’s selling points, as its chat and meeting functions reduce communication breakdowns. Microsoft 365 also has tools for automating repetitive tasks, making it easier to focus on what’s important. The service is subscription-based, but a generous 30-day free trial is available, so customers can thoroughly test the service before committing. Read our Microsoft 365 review.

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Best Ways To Boost Productivity

Although using the right software improves efficiency, the way your small team works is what most impacts their productivity. Thankfully, many companies have already researched how to boost their productivity, and there are several best practices you can follow to deliver a higher output with less effort.

Simplifying your surroundings is a great place to start. While project management apps help clear up your information flow, you should also declutter your working space. Only having the essentials on your desk and always keeping things in the same place is a good way to prevent losing time looking for a document or a stapler.

With everything we need to do during a day, it's easy to think that multitasking can help you finish more tasks in a shorter period of time. But that’s not entirely true. In fact, you should avoid multitasking altogether, as our brains aren't wired to process several tasks simultaneously. It will not only take you longer to finish both tasks, but the quality of your work will also suffer. It's better to just do one task at a time and capitalize on your peak productivity hours. For instance, if you have several meetings you need to attend in a day, try to schedule them all in a row, giving yourself the rest of the day to focus on your to-do list.

Additional Advice for Small Businesses

Productivity is indeed crucial, but there are many other aspects that business owners need to worry about. From marketing to payroll and online security, small business owners need to be a jack of all trades. Fortunately, we live in an era where technology can help with less important tasks, allowing you to focus on the most essential elements of a small business, such as strategy and human capital management.