No matter what the industry, employee productivity is paramount to the long term survival and profitability of any business. Effective collaboration and communication are needed to streamline processes and save time, having a significant impact on the employees’ performance.

Moreover, the fair allocation of work makes it easy for employees to finish their tasks on time and in the best possible manner. Keeping these facts in mind, this article talks about five smart productivity tools to boost employee performance in your organization.

You might be wondering how much of a difference workplace tools can cause in terms of employee performance. Have a look at some of these interesting productivity stats below.

• In their article titled, 'The Cost of Poor Communication' , Society for Human Resource Management reported small companies usually lose around $420,000 per year as a result of email blunders and miscommunication. As a relief, there are workplace communication tools available that can substitute the need for emails for good.
• Have you ever heard about the term 'work about work'? According to Asana, this refers to work-related activities that have little or nothing to do with employee productivity.

These non-essential activities include switching between apps, stressing about workload, looking for information, managing shifts, etc. As revealed in their survey, activities in this cluster often consume around 60% of employee time, which could have been otherwise spent on skilled work.

With these stats, you might just realize that there are a lot of things that are the result of sub-optimal human resource management practices. While it's hard to fully eliminate inefficiencies, distractions, and their causes, a lot can be done to boost employee performance and productivity, often recommended in many of the key questions for employee engagement.

Below is a list of the best smart productivity tools that can help to boost employee performance with proper work management.

Productivity Tools To Boost Employee Performance

1. ProProfs Training Maker

Given the advent of technology, the business world changes faster than anyone can imagine. A major implication of the changing business environment is that the tools and skills that were once relevant became obsolete in no time.

Consistent learning is key here. Online training software is a great way to keep pace, stay updated, and adapt the newer systems properly.

Why Choose ProProfs Training Software?

• Using ProProfs Training, you can train employees by giving them access to your online courses and learning material.
• This cost-effective tool offers practical training via its training software and personality quiz software where employees can retain information better, as they have the option to go back to the information later in the day.
• In addition to providing the software platform, ProProfs comes with a library of training courses that help people at all levels.
• Using the tools provided by ProProfs, you and your team can create text, image, or video-based standard operating procedures. Interestingly giving the employee access to such content eliminates duplicate work and time-wasting repetitions.
• Another interesting thing that comes with ProProfs is the employee questions and answers portal. From there, you'll be able to get good answers and solutions to pressing problems when you need them.

2. Slack

To understand the role of Slack in enhancing employee performance, think of the HR teams making more placements or sales teams closing more deals. Without streamlined collaboration, higher employee performance in these and other scenarios doesn't happen by accident.

Among many others, communication is one big factor that usually influences collaboration. When people are not communicating properly in a timely manner, both decision making processes and overall productivity tend to suffer. This is where smart tools like Slack come into play.

Using Slack's team-based voice and video communication, your company can begin to coordinate work more productively, without leaving anyone behind. Slack is a real-time communication tool that enables cross-functional team collaboration and fosters knowledge sharing.

By making unique knowledge, insights and experiences accessible to everyone, a higher number of employees are empowered to perform at their peak. This is one of the few ways through which smart productivity tools boost employee performance.

Why Choose Slack?

• Archiving - your team will have an organized channel for storing and sharing access to communication data. Having this kind of thing dispersed through email threads often wastes a lot of time.
• Search - whether through your mobile or web app, searching for information could be wasting as much as 20% of your time in a typical workday. Slack provides a real solution in this regard.
• Customizable Notifications - you can use this tool to get notified when some work-related events happen or when some important words are mentioned in your Slack channels.
• Diverse Integrations - depending on your type of business and the other business apps you use, having Slack integrated into some of these other tools will empower your team to become even more productive.

Recently, Slack has introduced an app QuickQuiz for corporate eLearning. The tool allows companies to get instant feedback from the team members via interactive quizzes within the Slack channel.

Overall, Slack will make it easier for you and your team to experience collaboration in a way that is significantly better than what you have now.

3. Time Doctor

Whether you are doing remote work or not, the time you spend on actual work as opposed to work-related or irrelevant activities affect performance in significant ways. Things get serious if you are managing a team from time to time; especially when you are managing knowledge work teams, knowing the amount of time spent on meaningful work can be very hard.

In such situations, Time Doctor comes to the rescue, providing a lot of insights in this regard.

Why Choose Time Doctor?

Using Time Doctor, you'll be able to identify some specific activities that may be less relevant or more relevant. It also helps find the collaboration opportunities for completing the tasks in a faster way.

With the insights provided by this tool, it becomes easier to identify the top performers in a team, the slackers, and specific areas with potential for the biggest improvement.

Time Doctor’s key features include the following:

• Time tracking
• Payroll management
• Screenshot monitoring
• Application monitoring
• Distraction blocker

On a higher level, Time Doctor helps HR managers to make proactive firing and hiring decisions based on employee performance. You don't have to wait until the entire team performance falls flat before taking prompt actions.

4. Rescue Time 

This one is similar to Time Doctor, but they are not the same. Instead of merely monitoring employee work, Rescue Time allows employers to identify patterns of employee productivity through level productivity reports and key tool reports.

Why Choose Rescue Time?

• This software records trends on how employees are spending their time across different toolsets and platforms. Through the insights provided in these reports, team managers are enabled to spot the opportunities for improvement. In simple terms, this tool allows you to help employees adjust and optimize how they spend most of their time at work.
• Another important feature of Rescue Time is that it helps to block out distractions from selected sources.
• Moreover, employees and their managers can set certain levels of privacy during and after work.

You can spare yourself from the unlimited stream of distracting notifications that kill productivity. This one feature alone sets Rescue Time apart from other employee tracking software tools.

5. Zapier 

Talking about the best smart productivity tools to boost employee performance, it wouldn’t be fair if Zapier isn’t on the list. A digital task automation tool, Zapier, is a distinct app on its own that helps individuals and employee teams accomplish a diverse set of tasks for its users, instead of doing one thing or a set of things.

Why Choose Zapier?

• Using this tool, you can integrate different types of workplace apps, including popular ones like Google Sheets, Salesforce, Hubspot, GoToMeeting, Trello, Asana, and over 1500 other work-related apps.
• When your favorite apps are integrated, you can begin to use them to automate as many time-consuming tasks as possible. This results in the elimination of repetitive work. With minimum distractions and better streamlining, employees can accomplish some of those minutiae tasks that are missed during the day.
• Beyond what is obtainable from normal Zapier automation, commonly referred to as zaps, you can also leverage their APIs to create custom reusable workflows that save time and drive efficiency.

Final words

Needless to say, productivity growth is important to a business. Companies will only be able to increase the output when there is an increase in the inputs. Productivity or performance-enhancing tools is a smart way to achieve this order.

From product management to marketing, finance, and customer support, you can find an “n” number of interesting tools that will help to boost your employee performance.

Possibly, you can start with the ones mentioned here. The benefits may not be immediately visible. But in the long run, the real benefits of smart productivity tools often outweigh the cost.

Using these tools, you and your company might become able to find answers to employee engagement questions that limit overall productivity.

About the Author: Samuel Alfie is a blogger at ProProfs Discuss, the #1 Q&A website with millions of wisdom seekers collaborating to ask questions and get the best answers. He loves reading and writing about a variety of topics including technology, business, e-commerce, science, philosophy, Pop culture, digital media, and more. With a knack for writing, enthusiasm for research and an editorial mindset, he loves creating content that resonates with the audience.