Use Spike email
The Spike email client for web and mobile is the world’s first conversational email app, designed to help you and your team get more done in less time.
Spike syncs with your existing email account (or accounts), such as Gmail, and turns new messages in your inbox into chat-style conversations. In other words, instead of scrolling through endless, cluttered email threads to read the latest replies, you see them as instant message-style bubbles in the Spike app on your phone or computer.
The primary goal of Spike is to eliminate the distracting noise from emails and make it feel like less of a chore to sift through the junk and read/respond to important work emails from clients and colleagues — and the app does this very well.
The amount of time you and your team save by switching to using Spike for your professional emailing is a valuable resource that you can invest elsewhere for higher productivity.
But, that’s not the only way Spike boosts your team’s work efficiency. The conversational email app also has a whole suite of built-in productivity and collaboration tools, so you can unify your workflows in one central location.
This helps reduce the amount of time you waste switching between tons of different apps and screens throughout the day, allowing you to concentrate all your attention on getting the job done.
Spike features that we love to include:-
- Conversational email (chat-style emailing)
- Priority email inbox (filters out promotional and other low-priority emails)
- Video meetings (start a video conference from within Spike)
- Groups (for creating group/team chats)
- Online notes (real-time collaborative notes)
- Tasks and to-do lists (project management tools)
- Voice messages (make it easier to explain things quickly)
- Super search (find information from past emails/chats with advanced search)
- File management (preview files and attachments without opening them)
- Calendar (can sync multiple work and personal calendars)
Create organized to-do lists
As simple as they are, to-do lists are an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to getting things done. This is especially true when you create collaborative online to-do lists using an app like Spike.
To-do lists allow you to organize tasks into clear, visual groupings based around certain projects, teams, or other common identifiers. They also let you efficiently prioritize tasks to get the most important ones done first, as well as hold everyone at your company accountable for their individual responsibilities.
It’s up to you to decide what style of to-do list works best for you and your team. But generally grouping similar tasks together by project or type of task is a good way to organize your lists. That way, everyone knows exactly where to look to see how certain tasks are progressing and what needs to be done next, which provides a good idea of the bigger picture for projects.
Make videos to explain things or answer questions
Sometimes, explaining a task or answering a question via email or instant message isn’t enough, or it takes too long to provide all the relevant information in text.
This is when it can be incredibly helpful to your employees for you to create short video recordings of you speaking about a topic and sharing your screen to provide context and specific instructions.
For instance, if a colleague asks you how to update their tasks on your team’s to-do list as they make progress on them, record yourself doing the process on an example task and talk them through the steps.
Short, explanatory videos like this can eliminate tons of back and forth and avoid confusion that leads to delays down the road, ultimately improving work efficiency and productivity.
Invest in your employees’ workspaces
Whether your employees are co-located in an office or working remotely from home, investing in their workspaces can go a long way towards productivity.
For co-located team members, ask them what they think could make their workspaces more comfortable and efficient and see what you can do about supplying them with these things with your office budget. For example, they might want more comfortable chairs, better monitors, or more ergonomic mice and keyboards.
In terms of remote employees, remember that not everyone has the ideal home office setup — it’s easy to forget this when you don’t see where your employees are working from. Consider offering some sort of stipend or home office allowance to your remote employees that they can use to improve their workspaces and increase their efficiency.
Keep your employees’ mental health in mind
Mentally healthy employees are naturally going to be more efficient, so don’t forget to check in on your employees’ mental well-being from time to time. This can be as simple as asking people how they are feeling stress-level and workload-wise in regular one-on-one meetings, and taking steps to take some pressure off if they are struggling mentally at all.
There are also small things you can do as a manager or boss to help improve your employees’ mental well-being, such as shortening the work day by 30 minutes or offering more paid days off. In the long run, working less can actually translate to more efficient work, because employees are leading a more balanced life.
