10 of Our Favorite Tools for Team Productivity & Communication
We love systems and tools (surprise, surprise). We’re always upgrading a process, trying out new tools that we think will benefit our team, and generally seeing what’s helpful and ends up sticking long-term. In doing so, we’ve accumulated a small staple collection of tools that massively benefit our team productivity and communication, which are two of the most important aspects of managing a team.
Stepping into our roles as not only managers but leaders, learning how members of our team work best, how they prefer to communicate, and ensuring that we have the necessary tools to aid in that has served us and our team members so well.
There are 10 tools that are our absolute couldn’t-live-without-them favorites, and we’re so excited to share them with you today! If you don’t adopt some of these exact tools for your team, hopefully the goal behind them inspires you to create something similar.
1. Slack
Everyone and their mom knows about Slack at this point, but on the off chance you’ve never heard of it, it’s like Discord but for work. You can create multiple channels for different topics, choose what team members are in each channel, share collaborative channels with people outside of your Slack organization, integrate countless apps, and more.
We have channels for each department (marketing, programs, etc.), specific channels for things like email, blog, podcast and social media, team channels like announcements, calendar updates, check-ins, water cooler for non-work related banter, and so much more.
We also have apps integrated with Slack like Zapier, which sends us a channel message when someone new has applied for the Incubator (apply here so we can get a message with your name!), Fellow, and Range, which we’ll be diving into next.
2. Fellow
Fellow has changed our meeting structure for the better. It acts as a collaborative meeting agenda where every member can simultaneously add notes, links, images, and assign tasks while in the meeting together. It can sync with Google Calendar or Microsoft Office calendar to automatically pull in all of your upcoming meetings.
In the past, we had a trusty Google Doc system for our meetings. While it was still collaborative, Fellow just streamlines the process, plus it avoids us having hundreds of Google Docs that take up precious storage space. You can also use the same template for recurring meetings and easily scroll through notes from past meetings of the same kind.
We have Asana integrated, so tasks that are added in Fellow will be automatically added to Asana and assigned to the correct person. Fellow can also integrate to individuals’ Slack accounts to send meeting reminders and other notifications.
3. Range
Even though we have weekly meetings with our team to get on the same page and set the tone/priorities for the week, we still love having them check in daily with what’s on their plate. Range helps us easily check-in and view our team members’ check-ins as well. They can set the mood for the day (green, yellow, or red, plus an emoji), add tasks that are on their plate to tackle, and what was already accomplished from the day prior.
One of our favorite parts of Range is that there are also fun daily questions we can answer about ourselves and work to help us connect and get to know even more about each other. You can even upload images with the check-in and comment or react on other team members’ check-ins.
Range easily integrates with Slack, so we have a channel dedicated to Range check-ins. It gives a summary of who’s checked in, what their mood is, and also who hasn’t checked in yet and when their last check-in was. Inside the thread is where everyone’s check-ins are sent for easy viewing, though you can still view all check-ins inside Range.
4. Asana
We’re a sort of Lewis and Clarke but if they explored project management systems. We’ve tried nearly all of them, but the one that’s trumped them all by far has been Asana. We eventually outgrew both Trello and ClickUp, but Asana has similar capabilities on a grander scale. You can create projects in the view of a board (our fav), list, calendar, timeline, overview, etc., have tasks within that board (which we call cards), and further subtasks within those tasks. We have a project for basically every department of our business where we can easily see and streamline our tasks.
We also regularly use task templates for recurring tasks. For example, we have cards for every Monday Memo for the month, which is a weekly newsletter we send to our Incubator clients about what happened in the last week and what’s coming up. Instead of having to recreate the card from scratch, we can easily create it from a task template that will automatically add all the subtasks and assignees we need. All we really have to do is adjust due dates and add any relevant notes to the description.
Asana also has simple automation tools as well as custom fields, so the possibilities for how you can revolutionize your project management process are endless. We cover more about these features and how we use them in this blog post.
Additionally, each team member has their own project that is their “Dashboard.” This includes things like information about them (learning style, workplace love language, enneagram, etc.), a link to our Notion site (we’ll talk about this next), our calendar system, how to request time off, and 30, 60, and 90-day objectives.
5. Notion
Notion is one of the most versatile tools out there as there are so many different ways you can use it both in your business and just personally. We use it as a sort of hub of information about the company for our team members. They’re able to view things like:
Team directory
Our mission, vision and values
Team culture and accountability
Brand assets
HR information (time off policy, employee handbook, etc.)
Marketing analytics and reports
And much more! As we mentioned earlier, this is linked in all team members’ dashboards, as well as pinned to one of our Slack channels for easy access.
6. HeyTaco
HeyTaco allows us to offer kudos in a much more fun way than just saying thanks– sending virtual tacos! It integrates to our Slack workspace in channels that you can specify. Whenever you send someone the taco emoji, you’re sending them a virtual taco that HeyTaco will keep track of. You’re allotted 5 tacos to send per day, and we really encourage our team members to use them everyday.
During our weekly all-team meetings, we congratulate whoever received the most tacos from the week prior. You can even set up rewards that team members can use their tacos to renew!
7. Zoom
Of course, we had to add Zoom to this list. It’s the holy grail of virtual meetings, and we host every meeting and training with Zoom. We’ve spent too many hours to count on a Zoom call having important discussions about our business and brainstorming ideas. We host all of our meetings with team members on Zoom, and they hold their private meetings with one another on Zoom as well.
8. Google Drive
We’re G-Suite people, and we live and breathe out of Google Docs and Sheets. Google Drive is where we house all of the, probably thousands by now, documents and spreadsheets for various aspects of our business. We have an awesome system of organization, so we’re able to keep track of marketing documents (blog posts, social media copy, etc.), programs and client materials, marketing and sales materials, and much more. Our team can access these things at any time in case there’s something they need.
Pro Tip: Create only one shared folder then make folders inside it for organization. This way, you don’t have to create a share link for every single thing you work on — just add it to the main folder and anyone who is added to the shared folder can see it!
9. Dropbox
There are some things that just Google Drive can’t handle alone, which is where Dropbox comes in. This is where we keep all files that aren’t documents and spreadsheets, so photos, videos, SVG files, PDFs, our font files, etc. are all housed in Dropbox.
We’ve got Dropbox downloaded on our computers so we can save directly, and also installed on our phones so we can access documents or images on the go. We can keep track of all our blog post graphics, stock photos, slides for our private training, and all the course content we produce.
10. Gmail
It may seem silly to have to mention Gmail, but when we see anyone with any other email provider, we can’t help wondering why they haven’t made the switch yet. All of our team members have their own email address and inbox, and it just makes communication so much easier. If a support email comes to the wrong person, they can easily forward it to the correct team member. We also use Google Calendar, so Gmail is pretty imperative to our meeting invitation system.
There you have it, folks. All of these systems and tools have greatly impacted our team’s overall performance (in the best way). They’re all used for various purposes, but they make leading a team a heck of a lot easier and more ethical. If you haven’t started integrating different tools into your business for your team (or your future team), we suggest going ahead and getting started.
We dive deeper into team building and leadership skills inside The Incubator. We teach our clients how to hire and onboard new team members, how to prepare your business to grow a team, how to delegate properly, and all things financial changes when you have a team. Go ahead and apply now, then let us know you applied over in our DMs on Instagram, so we can get chatting ASAP about your needs!
