Chanakya Kyatham December 1, 2021 Optimizing your company’s workflow is a key part of increasing overall productivity and efficiency in the workplace. If your team works remotely, or if you have a mix of people working from home and in an office, it’s even more important to find ways to improve your company’s workflow.
Fortunately, there are many tools and techniques you can use to do just that! In this article, we’ll give you a few of our favorite tips for improving productivity through workflow optimization.
Try These Four Ways To Streamline Your Team’s Workflow
1. Chatify Your Email Threads
If you had to pick a reason why reading and responding to emails in your inbox is one of your least favorite tasks, what would it be? For us, it’s definitely that email threads with more than one or two replies become incredibly repetitive and cluttered, making it hard to find and easy to miss important information.
Wouldn’t it be great if all your email messages were as easy to read and respond to as chat messages? Imagine a scenario in which we were to let you know that they can be.
You can “chatify” your inbox threads by using Spike, an email client for mac that turns your emails into chat-like conversations. In other words, instead of opening up your inbox every time you receive a new message and sifting through all the back and forth, you receive email replies as chat bubbles in a messaging window. It’s just like using a workplace chat application but synced with your email!
This makes it possible to respond to emails in a much faster, more natural way. Instead of sitting down for a chunk of time and going through your emails one by one, you can simply respond to messages on the fly.
Conversational email messaging apps also offer other useful features, such as priority inboxes that only show you the most important messages now and put things like promotional and marketing emails away for later. By eliminating all that unnecessary noise and clutter from your inbox, you can really boost your workflow and increase productivity!
2. Use Collaboration Software
Collaboration software is essential if you want an optimized workflow. Something like project management software or a collaborative workspace tool lets you centralize all your project info in one place, where everyone on your team can access it.
Instead of having different bits and pieces of information in a bunch of different locations, you can have all tasks, files, notes, deadlines, and other relevant project info in one central hub. This improves your workflow by making it easier to stay on top of project data and deadlines.
Plus, collaboration software holds everyone on your team accountable for their individual tasks, ensuring timely delivery. If there are delays or updates that change timelines, the person responsible for a task can note them in the app and make sure everyone else on the team is aware of what’s going on.
3. Use a Team Communication Platform
Improving communication is essential to optimizing your team’s workflow. The best way to do this is to get everyone using the same team communication app. That way, everyone knows exactly where to best contact everyone else to get answers to questions or updates on progress.
The best team communication platforms also allow for audio and video meetings right within the app, for when it’s more efficient to do so. This is especially useful for remote or hybrid teams.
Additionally, good team chat apps have advanced search features that let you filter chats and search for messages by keyword, thus making it really easy to track down key information that you need without having to ask someone for it again.
4. Don’t Forget to Take Breaks
You can use all the productivity tools and apps you want, but if you don’t remember to take breaks, it’s hard to maintain focus and keep your work flowing.
Try different break schedules to see what works best for you. For example, get up and move around, stretch, or grab a snack and a cup of coffee after each individual task you finish. Or go for a 20-minute walk outside every few hours to reset your body and mind.
Remind others on your team to take breaks, too. If you’re co-located in an office with other team members, you could even schedule team breaks, such as active pauses or coffee runs. If you work with a remote team, maybe try setting up automatic reminders via your team chat app or email messaging app for everyone to get up and move a bit!
The type of breaks you take doesn’t matter, but studies have shown that regular breaks improve your workflow and help you concentrate better on long, complex tasks.
Conclusion
An efficient, productive workflow means you can move things from “to-do” to “done” faster, ultimately leading to higher productivity. From email messaging apps to taking breaks, there are all kinds of ways to improve your company’s workflow. Try out the tips on this list to get started, and you’re sure to notice your team’s workflow improving in no time!
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