So your startup has a mission, and you’ve hired a talented team to help you get there. As a new team, how do you establish systems and processes to boost productivity and get more done in less time?
Here’s a roundup of seven of our top favourite tools that help us strike things off our to-do lists quickly and manage our projects closely for top client satisfaction. We wish we had started using some of these sooner!
1. Asana for Project Management
New project management tools pop up every so often, but Asana is by far our favourite. It’s a powerful project management and a tracking tool with many useful features for teams to plan what else needs to be done to reach the next project milestone. It helps that it comes with a beautiful and intuitive user interface which gives us a pleasant user experience.
We love using Asana to organise and assign tasks to our team. It gives project leaders a quick overview of the team’s progress and makes our collaboration smoother.
Popular alternatives to Asana include Trello and Monday.com.
2. Notion for Knowledge Management
As your team grows and matures, so will your knowledge database. We love Notion for organising our resources – files, videos, PDFs, meeting notes etc. – and useful information. It’s fairly easy to search through our resources for what we need.
Our institutional and project knowledge is now centralised and made accessible to everyone in the team. This helps us ensure continuity when a team member goes on holiday or moves on to focus on other projects. We’ve also been able to cut down on email requests asking each other to send such-and-such material because many times, we can access it ourselves on Notion.
3. Slack for Team Communication
Communicating via email can feel slow and sluggish, and using Whatsapp for everyday team communication can feel intrusive into our personal mobile space.
Slack, in our opinion, hits a good middle ground between both extremes. Our chats move faster than email and are a clearly demarcated space for work chatter. We like Slack because we can organise our communications into projects and themes even though we’re chatting with the same people. It’s a lot easier to manage multiple chat groups on Slack than on Whatsapp.
Best of all, our e-mail inboxes don’t overflow with relatively minor and internal project updates, which means we can see and respond to important and time-sensitive emails more quickly.
4. Loom for Video Feedback or Walkthroughs
When you’re testing a new website or you want to give feedback to a team member verbally so that you can explain better and ensure that the tone of your message doesn’t come across the wrong way, Loom comes in handy.
It lets you record your screen with your voiceover – similar to doing a video call with a screen share, but without needing everyone to find a common time slot for the discussion or the internet lagging. Loom has been quite a game-changer in the way we exchange feedback.
There are many other creative ways that your team can use Loom. You can use it to onboard a new client, send a video response to answer a prospective client’s questions about your product or send a more personal team update to everyone.
5. Freshbooks for Invoicing
An intuitive and powerful invoicing tool is key to businesses so that we don’t spend too much time manually issuing invoices. We like Freshbooks for its simple-to-use interface. Invoicing is an important yet tedious administrative process, so the less time we have to spend on it, the happier our team is.
Freshbooks also allows you to automate invoicing for retainer clients and services, which is incredibly time-saving because that will be one less thing for you to track.
Popular alternatives include Xero and Quickbooks. It doesn’t matter which one you pick, as long as you pick one!
6. G-EMx for International Payments
If your team engages suppliers and clients across the globe, managing currencies and payments can become more complicated. G-EMx helps your team open a current account that can hold money securely in more than 10 major currencies and make secure international payments to over 180 countries seamlessly.
Conversely, you can also collect payments easily using G-EMx in most of the major currencies available. Our app is easy to use and will save your team time in navigating complicated bank websites.
7. Automation
Lastly, for a lean team like us, we need all hands on deck. Automation frees up our resources to work on more strategic and relationship-focused tasks. That’s why we like Zapier to make our favourite apps even more powerful and to automate repetitive tasks.
For instance, after every sales call, we use Zapier to automatically create a debrief meeting so that we can analyse what went well and what could have been better. Such automation helps put some structure around our work processes and frees up our mental space from having to remember this additional item on our never-ending to-do list.
Increase Your Team’s Productivity with G-EMx
Leading a startup or a new company can be daunting with so many uncertainties and possibilities. Being in charge of team members also means having to coordinate and collaborate well with each other to avoid unnecessary delays and hurdles.
Having productivity tools helps us to work faster and if necessary, fail faster so we can move on to try other strategies and approaches.
Also, since you’re here: G-EMx is on a mission to help businesses operate without borders or restrictions by simplifying international payments. If this is valuable to your team, learn more about our services and open a free account today!
