The new year is a great time to look at your company’s processes and root out any inefficiencies or disorganization. Often, one of the main reasons processes become inefficient or badly organized is a lack of supporting software.
Storing information in Word documents or managing projects via email may have worked when your company was just starting out. But as your organization grows and matures, your software should, too. Good software can sometimes be the difference between organized productivity and frustrating chaos.
What types of software are most likely to help your company stay organized? Here are some categories to consider.
A Company Wiki
A company wiki is a repository of all information related to your company. It includes basic administrative information like HR policies and company structure, as well as essential information employees need to do their jobs. Best practices, project templates, expert tips and tricks, and onboarding resources can all be included in a company wiki.
Setting up a company wiki can work wonders for organization and efficiency, and wiki software like Guru can help you get started. Employees unsure how to tackle specific projects can get guidance on wiki pages. New hires can find all the info they need to understand company culture and the specific duties of their roles. And users can refer to the wiki as a single source of truth for any questions they may have about company-wide best practices.
Project Management
A central project management platform is an absolute must for an organized company. Trying to manage deadlines and deliverables over email will inevitably lead to crossed wires and miscommunication. With project management software, your teams can keep track of timelines, make step-by-step plans for completing a project, and assign tasks or deliverables to individual team members.
Popular project management platforms include Trello and Asana. These tools let you collaborate on to-do lists, organize tasks by category, and assign users to own parts of the process. They’ll help ensure your team is on task and on deadline at every step of the way.
Document Management
In the course of doing business, you’ll inevitably create spreadsheets, project documents, slide decks, and more. When these float around in email folders or sit on local hard drives, employees have difficulty finding documents when they need them.
Fortunately, there are plenty of platforms where team members can save all documents in a centralized location and easily share them. Some of the most well-known options are Google Workspace, Dropbox, and OneDrive.
These platforms support most document types, and they allow users to customize viewing permissions so sensitive files remain secure. Saving documents in the cloud offers the added benefit of letting employees work from anywhere. Many project management and company wiki platforms allow you to import content directly from these document management tools as well.
Team Communication
Email can only do so much. When you need instant messaging, large group conversations, or the ability to pin information, it’s time to look at adding another tool.
Slack is probably the most well-known corporate communications tool, but there are plenty of other platforms to explore. In this age of increased remote work, a good instant messaging app is all the more important. But communication software doesn’t just help your employees confer in real time. It also lets them create channels and group chats to coordinate across teams, pin and save information for reference, share documents, etc.
IT Ticketing
When users need something from IT, they usually want it done right away. This can be daunting for IT professionals, who often find themselves flooded with requests. Streamlining the way users are allowed to contact IT can make the process more efficient for everyone involved.
Software that lets users file IT tickets helps IT pros better organize their time and prioritize their tasks. It’s good for users, too, because it ensures that their request won’t get lost in the shuffle. Most ticketing systems let users label their request with a priority level and preferred deadline and upload screenshots of the problems they’re experiencing. This gives IT all the information they need to fix a problem without going endlessly back and forth with the user.
Digital Marketing
Modern businesses need social media accounts, email blasts, and other promotional tactics to reach potential customers. The more these can be streamlined and automated, the better.
Social media, in particular, is an area of marketing primed for automation. Instead of hiring a marketing professional to sit on Twitter all day, you can schedule posts to go out across all your company’s accounts in one click. In return, these tools will often tabulate your content’s impressions and engagement, delivering metrics you can use to refine your marketing efforts. There are also tools that will monitor mentions of your brand or relevant keywords, alerting your marketing team so they can react in the moment.
Automation can help you grow and use your email list to best advantage. With platforms like MailChimp, you can schedule messages to be sent to the most appropriate email lists. You can automate any data collection or follow-up actions that may follow as well.
Recruiting
Hiring is a massive drain on your HR team’s time, but there are plenty of tools that can make the process easier. With recruiting software, you can post online job ads and make sure they get in front of the right eyes.
Software can also be used to scan résumés and cover letters for particular keywords. That way, your hiring managers don’t have to waste time sifting suitable applications from obvious bad fits. Instead, they can dedicate their time to only the most promising candidates. ZipRecruiter is likely the most well-known recruiting tool, but there are plenty of others to consider.
Getting organized on a company-wide level is difficult, but several software solutions exist that can make the task easier. Not every tool will be useful for every company, but the above categories are great places to start when working to keep your company organized and productive.
Laila Azzahra is a professional writer and blogger that loves to write about technology, business, entertainment, science, and health.