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The workplace is evolving. While we already touched on office space trends that are becoming the norm, technology in the workplace is also changing the game. With the rise of the millennial workers and the prevalence of technology in today’s office environment, the workplace is not what it used to be.
Meetings are becoming few and far between — only for essential brainstorming sessions, client pitches, or status calls — not to mention they’re becoming far more informal. Workplace technology is supporting fewer meetings by keeping employees in regular communication between departments and within the entire company. Internal processes can be improved by embracing top technologies, not to mention workplaces adopting these in order to meet the demands of millennials and improve efficiencies throughout the company.
More and more companies are beginning to adopt the convenience and efficiencies of a high-tech environment like startups in Silicon Valley, but for some, it’s going against the traditional processes established many years ago. Here are a few tools worth integrating into the modern workplace.
Google Drive
If you haven’t caved in to Google Drive yet, you’re missing out on a wonderful tool of technology. With Google Drive, businesses can enjoy a collaborative system of shared documents, spreadsheets, slideshows, templates, and calendars. Google creates a network to exclusively share important company items within teams, departments, the entire company or between only two people. Similar to Dropbox, Google Drive also acts as a file storage application, hosting PDFs, Adobe files, images and more, all while replacing costly softwares you’re normally required to purchase.
Sounds a lot like Microsoft Office, right? In many ways, Drive is an Office replacement tool, but the true benefit here is the ability to make real-time updates, collaboratively. This means a whole team can be working on the same document, spreadsheet or slideshow at the same time, making updates that are automatically saved to the Drive. Say goodbye to saving and sending Word documents back and forth.
Another major perk of Google Drive is that it runs off of cloud technology which reduces space requirements and increases file storage because of cloud hosting. Since everything lives in the cloud, it enables employees to work remotely and access their server from any location.
More benefits of Google Drive for businesses can be found here.
Slack
As mentioned above, one of the biggest ways millennial professionals are changing the workplace dynamics is with they way they prefer to communicate. Hint: it’s no longer through email. Being digital natives, these employees see the benefit of quickly communicating more often in a digital chat environment rather than holding physical meetings. Couple this with their hopes to achieve inbox zero by avoiding unnecessary emails, and tools like Slack become an obvious choice.
Defined as “team communication for the 21st century,” Slack is a tool that improves inter-department and team communication through direct messages and project-specific or multi-team member message threads. It’s customizable to fit the needs of your company, and is perfect for quick informal communication for internal purposes.
Unroll.Me
We mentioned inbox zero as a motivator for many business professionals. The goal is to file, open, and respond to emails immediately in order to avoid the bolded number of unread emails sitting next to Inbox. Unroll.Me is the best suggestion for achieving this dream inbox.
Unroll.Me specifically works to manage the subscription spam that bogs down your inbox. The service will send a daily email that rolls up all your subscription emails into one, allowing you to easily unsubscribe from whatever you don’t want to read going forward. It also empowers you to organize the subscriptions you do want. Your Rollup email can be a snapshot of all your wanted subscription emails, as if it’s a daily newsletter customized just for you.
Asana
Productivity is essential to any business. Embracing a technology that seamlessly integrates an improved project management tracking method will help the workplace move from chaos to clarity. Asana enables teams to move work from start to finish, tracking the status of tasks and projects through a user-friendly dashboard.
With the ability to customize for unique business needs, the tool assigns team members and due dates to tasks, projects, and subtasks and includes a step-by-step checklist for maintaining specific processes. Explore the lengths that Asana can go in order to ensure your business is running efficiently and your projects are well documented and managed.
Calendly
In business environments filled with conference calls and meetings, scheduling conflicts can quickly arise. Finding a time and location that works for everyone to meet shouldn’t be a meeting in itself. Calendly schedules meetings without the back-and-forth emails that take too much time.
Simply start by letting Calendly know your availability preferences and it’ll do the work for you. A shareable link can be sent to each team member to choose a time that works with them, and the best available time will automatically be scheduled. Its ability to integrate with Google, Outlook, Office 365, or iCloud calendars ensures no double booking occurs.
By incorporating just a few tech tools into the workplace, your business can benefit from better convenience, improved efficiencies, and happier employees. While every team member may not consider themselves tech savvy, many of these tools are extremely user friendly and easy to get the hang of. Know some other tools that improve your workplace dynamics? Let us know!
