This is a guest post from Harrison Kratz. Harrison is a bright, up-and-coming PR pro who’s doing amazing work with Tweetdrive, which aims to use social media to form “real-world” communities that can help underprivileged children around the globe. Because he has his hands in so many pots, Harrison is a prime source to recommend tools to improve productivity and collaboration. One that note, happy reading!
I think many of us see (or like to believe) the top agencies and teams in PR and Social Media as well oiled machines that have everything figured out, from strategies to office functionality.
However, even some of the top companies we follow are susceptible to a disturbing trend. I continuously hear stories from friends that they’re in meetings all day and can’t find time to actually get work done or deliver on the projects they are assigned because of these time-consuming deficiencies in communication.
While certain collaborative and informational meetings and face-to-face communication is essential to an office workflow, here are some tools that can save your office from the pointless meetings that kill productivity.
HipChat (www.hipchat.com)
Heather actually introduced this to me not too long ago, and it is a great way for teams and individuals to communicate. Hipchat is a desktop and mobile app where teams can conduct closed chats and have past chats stored for documentation. The ability to also segment certain chats to certain team members also keeps discussions focused and on-point to those who are relevant to the conversation. A collaborative chat environment can allow everyone to have input on a matter and discuss certain topics without having to break away from their current projects and tasks. (Note from Heather: I heart Hipchat. I really, really do. They’re not even a client … I just like the service that much!)
Podio (www.podio.com)
Podio is the project management platform that doubles as a team social network. Podio allows teams to segment conversations and projects, plan meetings, track leads and community interaction in addition to dozens of other collaborative features. This open environment allows team members to discuss projects, track progress, and communicate in an efficient manner that can cut down on those weekly CTW calls that only a few people actually benefit from.
BuzzStream (www.buzzstream.com)
If you’re in communications and not using BuzzStream, go do so NOW. BuzzStream is a great way to track your contacts, websites, and blogs where you can document your correspondence and relationship stages with each entry. What’s even better is that your logged communication stage with each contact is stored so your team members can see who is your contact and the relationship stages of each one. This eliminates the need for meetings to update the team or managers on communication developments and whom each other have contacted. This puts it into one manageable, collaborative portal.
In addition, there are many more collaborative tools that are at a company’s disposal including the #1 platform, Google, which can allow a team to be communicative, collaborative, and efficient without wasting time on meeting after meeting. That said, meetings still have a great importance in the workplace in moderation. Face-to-face communication and work relationships are an essential component to a team. However, in the communications industry, we pride ourselves on the ability to streamline messaging and correspondence to the outside world and it’s about time we do the same within the office.
Other Tools to Check Out:
Your turn: Tell us your can’t-live-without-it productivity tool, as well as a productivity or organizational tool/service you recently discovered and are loving.
Harrison Kratz is the Community Manager for MBA@UNC, an online MBA program from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He sticks to his entrepreneurial roots as the founder of the global social good campaign, Tweet Drive. Feel free to connect with him on Twitter, @KratzPR!
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