Smaller businesses are challenging larger firms as competitive sources of commercial innovation. The success of these businesses is reflective of the benefits of intentionally-smaller operations – they have smaller teams that can actively react to new trends and changes in client expectations as well as have a unique ability to be innovative in less risk environment.
However, smaller businesses often have smaller budgets. Expenses such as expensive office space and high salaries may mean that small businesses find themselves spread over large geographic areas. The trend towards remote working is not all bad, and with a range of collaborative tools on the market to make ‘spread-out’ teams more efficient why shouldn’t you be looking at some of these tools to help your business also?
Our team at BookingHound have put this blog together by sifting through a range of collaborative software solutions available. We’ve taken some of the most-referenced and most-popular pieces of software and have put them into categories. Depending on your business’ field of work, you may find any one of them useful for YOU to use.
Communication tools
Slack is the best primarily-text-based communication application available for smaller businesses but works great with larger businesses as well. It helps remote employees in a fast way and makes it much easier to communicate in text while doing other work. The point of the application is to minimise email exchange (although it wouldn’t replace email.)
Yammer is essentially Facebook for business, it is the closest thing to a social media platform and its specifically designed for workplaces – letting you post updates, communicate privately or in groups, and share documents. Large organisations have put Yammer to work – including international agencies in the United Nations.
Tools for visual thinkers
For lots of businesses, distance communication requires looking at each member of your team and communicating with them in real time, seeing their ideas laid out in front of you, rather than just describing them orally.
Mural and Cage are two products that serve as ‘digital whiteboards’; giving you and your business an ‘interactive space’ where ideas can be expressed, exchanged and commented on, helping to involve staff that may be working from home or working all around the globe. Again, both these tools have similar functions and properties, the differences being their costs and styles.
Cage is a great tool for graphic artists and visual creators, who want to share their work with clients. As such, it’s a strong collaborative tool and one that creates a bridge between creatives and clients.
Mural is a great tool that is trying to “revolutionize the way you educate your team”. They offer a way for you to combine different ideas and disciplines.
Project management
Last but not least, there is also software dedicated entirely to project management. Coming away from being just a communication tool, this software helps keep different teams correlated and coordinated with each other, and an example of this is Trello.
Trello is a set of digital notecards, lists & boards, which allow for the detailed planning of projects by putting everything in front of you as a ‘board view’. Integrated with the likes of Google Calendar, Dropbox and Outlook, it helps establish integrating tasks and project milestones. It also assists teams in sharing files and organising deadlines, and it provides a real-time newsfeed, and all of this is also free to use!
Booking Events, Courses and Activities
“We don’t have enough staff, we can’t keep our sales office open 24 hours a day, we get too many phone calls to deal with” – these are just some of the reasons why our customers use the BookingHound online booking system to help automate their business as well as improve their customers booking experience.
Don’t manage your bookings with a paper-based or manual system – use BookingHound and make it easy to manage everything in one place.
To see ‘why business choose BookingHound’ click here for more!
Let us know what you think about these software solutions and which you might recommend to other businesses. We are interested in your perspectives and views.
To learn more about BookingHound or to arrange a 1:1 screen share demo, please call us on +44 (0)20 8736 0566, email letstalk@bookinghound.com or click here to book your 1-to-1 demo of our system.