Four Ways Work Management Apps Will Transform Your Work

In today’s digital workplace, employees must work together more efficiently to get more done.  Customer-obsessed firms take an outside-in approach, relying on collaboration to win, serve, and retain customers. Yet with all of the enterprise collaboration tools at hand, the majority of teams still rely heavily on email, and email usage in many companies has actually increased.

Due to the interrupt-driven nature of email activities, information workers are in need of new alternatives to organize their work, and companies are turning to enterprise collaboration apps to help employees better manage work.

Of the enterprise collaboration apps available, work management apps help employees move work forward by enabling visibility, action, status, and automation for processes, programs, or projects. Here are four ways that work management apps can help you accomplish more:

1. Capture Conversations in Context

Email and chat apps may be great for communication, but referring back to them for important information is time consuming. And using chat apps – though efficient – can also result in important team members or stakeholders being left out of the loop.   

Rather than spending time searching for relevant information in inboxes or chat streams, users with work management apps can share information about their projects in comments or instant messages – all within the context of their work. They can add people to the conversation and keep those conversations stored within their shared workspace, so that anyone can quickly reference important decisions and updates.

2. Plan and Manage Projects With Flexibility

These days, nearly everyone is a project manager in one way or another. Yet few information workers are project managers by trade or have had any formal project-management training. For most, the use of conventional project management tools actually adds to their workload, rather than helping to manage it. So workers default to email and email attachments to manage their projects.

Work management tools provide an alternative to that ineffective combination and offer a flexible approach to managing projects and processes. Some work management tools provide a variety of ways to organize projects and manage work, including task lists, calendars, schedules, and card views akin to Kanban. This freedom to manage work in ways that best fit the tasks at hand frees workers from having to learn a formal project management tool, and instead lets them focus on getting their work done.

3. Consolidate Apps Into One Workspace

A recent report found that 46% of organizations use six or more collaboration apps. Switching between so many applications (including email) slows down workers and can drop productivity by as much as 40%.

The more apps can be connected to a single workspace, the less time workers spend switching between apps. A work management platform that connects to other apps can help teams move work forward more quickly.

4. Delegate and Automate

Work management apps can also accelerate work by making it easy to centrally track and manage tasks for an entire team, not just an individual’s to-do list. Plus, pieces of project plans, like due-date reminders and approval request workflows, can be automated to ensure that work moves along in a timely fashion.

In Smartsheet, for example, people can assign others to tasks and set up notifications so that assignees are automatically informed of their assignments, key milestones, and deadlines. This helps projects move forward without taking a lot of time from the team lead or project manager to track down the pieces of a project, freeing up time for them to be more productive themselves.

Accelerate Achievement for Your Organization

Given the volume and velocity of work coming in from all directions, the ability to effectively manage work at scale is rapidly becoming a key to success. Finding a work management app that you can customize to fit your particular business needs is an important part of a best-in-class collaborative app strategy and will help accelerate achievement for your organization.

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