4 Tools to Help Boost Team Productivity

As your team and business expand, managing productivity quickly becomes a monumental challenge. You wake up one morning and realize that what you could once manage with just a pen and a legal pad suddenly has a host of moving parts, all with different owners focused on competing objectives.

In its 2014 Time Management & Productivity Study, the FPA highlights that enhanced productivity is not about working less on the business, but rather it’s about working smarter – spending more time on the right tasks. They conclude that advisory teams who are efficient time managers achieve significantly more production (on average an additional 50 client meetings, 10 prospect meetings and 5 COI meetings each year).

The following are four tools we’ve found to be incredibly useful in helping advisory teams more efficiently manage their time. The first two applications are terrific broad-based team engagement applications, while the other two are strong niche-focused apps:

StatusPath (www.statuspath.com): It’s one thing to set goals and objectives for your team, but it’s another thing entirely to implement those objectives as a driving force across your business. StatusPath helps you build the six foundational pillars required for a goal-driven culture (Transparency, Accountability, Alignment, Collaboration, Execution and Recognition). This intuitive goal-engagement application is specifically designed to align the work of each employee with their team and the overall objectives of your business.

Teamphoria (www.teamphoria.com): A suite of apps all built around five key areas of team engagement (Recognition, Communication, Camaraderie, Performance, and Culture). It provides your team easy-to-use tools to increase communication, provide instant peer-to-peer recognition, and build the kind of camaraderie that’s the hallmark of high-performing teams. Data from Teamphoria gives you valuable insights into how team members are feeling about work, with real-time analytics on various aspects of engagement.

Evernote (www.evernote.com): This powerful organization tool unites writing, collection, discussion, and presentation in a single workspace. Instead of jumping between apps, Evernote Premium allows you to keep your focus in one place with a wide array of features. Move ideas from inspiration to completion; clip web articles, capture handwritten notes, and snap photos and image business cards to keep the physical and digital details of your projects with you at all times. Communicate, collaborate, and share in real-time with anyone in the world without ever leaving the app.

11 Best Wunderlist Alternatives (www.chamberofcommerce.org): As of May 6, 2020 the era of Wunderlist  has come to an end. Since the creation of this ultimate team "to-do" list app in 2011 it has helped millions. Fortunately, in the past few years, dozens of similar apps came to fruition and the New York Chamber of Commerce has compiled a list of some of the best Wunderlist alternatives. We hope that this article will help those who have used the app find a replacement that is of equal or greater value. Although it is always sad when things come to and end, we must look forward to our bright future. 

Coaching Questions from this article:

1. Imagine attempting to plan your personal daily schedule around processes that are clear, repeatable, and scalable. How much time do you think that would afford you to do other things?
2. Consider your team’s current degree of collaboration. How many tasks either fall through the cracks or are duplicative of the work that someone else is doing?
3. How much do you embrace technology in your practice?