Summer Productivity Hacks and the Workplace Apps That Help

As part of Solutions Review’s Expert Insights Series—a collection of contributed articles written by industry experts in enterprise software categories—Andy Boyd, the CPO of Appfire, shares some summer “productivity hacks” and workplace apps that can help businesses maintain their workforce’s morale and efficiency.

Teams seem to be constantly shrinking yet are being asked to do the same amount of work, if not more, with fewer people. They’re faced with the question of how to remain productive, meet deadlines, and achieve goals—and the pressure will increase as we head into vacation season.  

Summer travel is expected to increase, with more people planning to take trips to make up for the lost time during the pandemic. As family activities increase, the workforce will experience more people logging in from more places. Still, the remote/office debate continues, and some employers are concerned about their workers’ ability to be creative, innovative, and collaborative in a remote setting.  

But dips in productivity and creativity don’t have to happen—even when economic-induced staffing shortages, hybrid work, and summer months collide. Enterprise collaboration apps can help optimize teamwork and performance, especially when organizations spend $172 billion on SaaS solutions. In a SaaS-powered workforce, teams can collaborate as dynamically as companies can dream of equipping them.  

Chances are your organization uses Atlassian, monday.com, Salesforce, Slack, and other top platforms. Here are five ways to lean on SaaS apps to help teams achieve peak productivity, collaboration, and creativity that, in turn, leads to precious free time.  

1) Whiteboard From Wherever  

Teams no longer need to sit in a room with dry-erase markers to host a dynamic brainstorm. Whiteboard apps enable creativity to flow in a virtual brainstorming format. Look for whiteboard options that integrate with project management software (like Jira and Confluence) to feed in meeting notes. No one likes to finish a brainstorm and then have to complete transcription work and data entry from the whiteboard to a shared doc, for example. These days you can create a virtual sticky note with ideas stemming from a brainstorm and then push them to Jira with a single click.  

2) Automate Workflows 

Automation is a significant trend with productivity software. For IT and development teams facing immense pressure to deliver results faster and under tight deadlines, the workflow needs to be streamlined, and tools need to communicate with each other. Apps can significantly reduce context switching to streamline ticket submissions, capture and share communication threads and create more efficient daily scrum meetings.  

3) Let Slack Help You Stay On Track 

For many businesses, Slack or another messaging platform is the heartbeat of the company’s processes through which everything flows. Syncing Slack and your calendar help teams stay organized. Another popular Slack efficiency aid is the Reminders feature, which “makes sure nothing slips through the cracks,” according to the company. “Reminders are great for one-time, same-day notes to yourself, like /remind me to ask Melissa about the product brief in two hours, but they can also be directed at a coworker’s username or a channel. You can set recurring reminders by including phrases like every day, every Monday, every weekday, or even every two weeks. Once a reminder is set, you’ll get a Slackbot message saying so.”     

4) Track Your Time to Spot Improvement Areas 

When time management is crucial to productivity, time-tracking apps can help you understand where time is spent to ensure you focus on the most critical work and help forecast future project time. Look for apps with platform integrations that can capture data within a team’s workflow and provide integrated reporting to provide deep insights to improve work. These types of workplace apps and the data gleaned from them pair nicely with popular time management techniques like the Pomodoro method. In turn, you’ll have more time to innovate—or enjoy the summer. 

5) Stay Security-Minded by Encrypting Data 

Speed and security should not be at odds, mainly when teams are distributed and potentially under-resourced. When moving sensitive data within or to and from your organization, app options exist to store and share sensitive data with end-to-end encryption. Take users of Atlassian’s Confluence collaboration platform, for example. They can easily leverage Confluence groups to restrict access to confidential content. This way, data sharing can be done quickly and seamlessly with the confidence that security is a priority.   

These workplace apps and automations can help employees sustain peak productivity when under-resourced in a tough economy, empower teams to collaborate from wherever they’re logged in, and free up time to focus on things that move the business forward. Not just that, but these tips help us strike the elusive balance between being productive and efficient and finding the freedom to enjoy time off.