Rev Up Your Team With These Apps
Teams are vital in the 21st century workplace; massive projects requiring a blend of complex skills cannot be completed by the person toiling alone and trying to be a jack-of-all trades. Effective teams help workers to share responsibilities, lower the stress, and speed the project towards completion. A well-structured team is also a fertile field for good ideas to grow, as one creative mind feeds off another. Team members are often more confident to express their disagreement with a concept and offer a better solution than if they are one worker standing alone before management. Teams provide learning opportunities for members at all different levels of their careers and learning to develop through each other. They provide formal and informal learning opportunities and support. So, how can you rev up your team?
If you are charged with building and developing effective teams in your workplace, consider getting a little help from innovation apps like these 3 below:
1. BoostHQ
BoostHQ is a Toronto startup on a mission to connect teams with the knowledge that they need to excel and achieve their goals. They believe people learn best from each so they created a platform to captures teams informal learning and to enhance their productivity.
BoostHQ essentially makes knowledge sharing in teams super easy and powerful. It allows you to curate any type of content, share it, and ignite real-time discussion on content that works. It helps with productivity because critical knowledge is no longer lost in an endless stream of emails, chats, or scattered across platforms - like Slack. It's also efficient and easy to implement into your workflow, since it integrates with all the tools you already use, capturing your team's informal learning. BoostHQ allows you to harness the power of teams to boost their productivity. It's web based, so you work with it in a browser. There is also a mobile app where every team member has access on the go. Finally, it has a Chrome web extension that makes it easy to use while your working on the web.
The free version supports a team of up to 10 members. After that you move into the premium where it is $5/ per month for additional users.
2. Asana
Asana launched after Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein created an integrated tool that changed how Facebook coordinated its work; the technology has been adapted so it fits right into any kind of work environment where teams exist.
Designed to take stress and chaos out of the workplace, the approach is to create a space where everything from immediate task details to the company's big picture is organized and clear to the workers. Using the system, each member of the team is clear about what they are supposed to be doing and why they are doing it. By reducing the friction that accompanies lack of clarity and transparency, it encourages greater and more creative production.
Moskovitz and Rosenstein worked from the theory that coordination among team members should be as natural and effortless as communication between our own brains and our bodies.
Behind the warm and fuzzy goals of injecting more joy and authenticity into the workplace are the practical aspects of the app. Basically, it is designed to help all team members to be clear on who is doing what by when, how and why. It allows team members to take and give full responsibility and in the process to focus on the mission at hand and create together. Putting Asana in context, it would be reasonable to say that it is more of a workflow management assistant as opposed to a tool for productivity. For example, it has no billing information. It is totally adaptable to any corporate, and the main challenge is setting it up to be most beneficial to you.
3. Trello
Another app focused on workflow and task management is Trello. Trello allows you to create and delegate tasks to individual team members as well as make team boards where group tasks are posted.
Whatever your team goals are, there's a great app that can help you.
What apps does your team currently use? Let me know in the comments.
