Online Team Management Tools: Do they really work?

Team management is that tricky puzzle that every firm looks to solve. While there are many traditional ways like building collaboration, cohesive culture, accountability, etc that are talked about, something new has made its way into this discussion. That new is online management tools (as you might have gotten that idea from the title). With remote work culture getting popularized post-pandemic and becoming the new normal, remote teams have become a reality in the corporate world. So, all those team-building and management activities have gone digital. Even if we take the pandemic out of the equation then remote work and remote teams were emerging as the future, it’s only COVID-19 that accelerated its popularity.

Online management tools

As the name suggests these tools are software solutions that make management easy. While they are generally seen as useful for remote teams such solutions are equally important and effective for office-based teams as well. However, when we look for such tools in the market there is a mushrooming of solution providers. This makes us wonder whether such tools actually work or are just temporary hype. If you want an answer in short then it is yes. Yes, online team management tools work and they improve the productivity and efficiency of the team. One such example is Task Tracker, which has helped over 1,600 firms to enhance productivity by 60%.

How these tools help

What these online team management tools do is that they offer flexibility to the employees while ensuring accountability and transparency. They offer flexibility in terms of:

• Attendance and leave management: Whereby the employee can mark his/her attendance from anywhere without a physical visit to the office. Further, the long email threads to HR are replaced by simple leave applications and quick and smooth approval.
• Progress tracking: Each team member can track their work progress with the help of these tools. Task Tracker, an online team manager allows each member to assess their performance based on measurable metrics. This ensures transparency when it comes to appraisals.
• Accountability: Unlike manual office reporting the online accountability created by management software is more neutral and fair for all. For example, if a project is assigned and a deadline is set then everyone gets to know the D-date and there is an automatic responsibility to perform the work. Task Tracker enhances this part by sending regular WhatsApp reminders about the tasks and deadlines.

Apart from flexibility, these tools bring in good control for the employers and team managers in face of:-

1. Geo-location monitoring to help track the movement of employees. This comes in very handy for firms having an on-field team.
2. Attendance monitoring helps to monitor whether the employee is logging in and out of work at a defined time or not.
3. Performance tracking to see the productivity and contribution of the employee.
4. Give feedback and inputs based on reports and facts
5. Keep a check of everything from anywhere and anytime right from the smartphone.

Thus, these tools help both ways and provide that necessary push that every team needs. So, the question of whether these tools work or not has an answer, yes and now you have the explanation for that as well. The trick here is to choose the right tool based on your needs. Now, that is something that would need some discussion at length. We could come up with that discussion in our coming blogs. Till then stay tuned.