The 20 Best Team Management Apps for Small Businesses

According to a 2017 Gallup report, 70 percent of employees are not engaged at work. So for businesses with small teams, keeping employees active and on top of their daily tasks is absolutely essential. Meetings and constant email chains can lead to a lot of wasted time, so having an app that’s specifically geared toward managing your team can be a huge benefit.

Benefits of Using Team Management Apps

Team management apps have become essential for coordinating tasks, improving communication, and enhancing productivity in the business world. These tools streamline workflows, foster collaboration, and help teams achieve their goals efficiently. Here are five key benefits of using team management apps:

• Enhanced Collaboration: Provides platforms for real-time communication and sharing of resources, enabling seamless teamwork, regardless of location.
• Improved Organization: Features like task assignment, scheduling, and progress tracking keep projects and daily operations well-organized and transparent.
• Increased Productivity: Automates routine tasks and gives a clear overview of deadlines and responsibilities, allowing teams to focus more on core activities.
• Easy Access to Information: Centralized storage of files and data ensures immediate access to necessary information for all team members.
• Better Time Management: Time-tracking and reporting features help in effective allocation of time, ensuring teams meet deadlines and manage workloads efficiently.

Our Methodology to Choose the Best Team Management Apps

In our commitment to assist small businesses in finding the most effective team management apps, we have established a set of criteria to guide our reviews and recommendations. Each criterion is assigned a value from 1 to 5, where 1 represents the least importance and 5 the highest importance in our evaluation process:

1. User Interface and Ease of Use
   • Importance: 4
   • A user-friendly interface is crucial for ensuring quick adoption and efficient use by all team members. We look for apps that are intuitive and easy to navigate.
2. Collaboration Features
   • Importance: 5
   • Essential for team productivity, we prioritize apps that offer robust collaboration tools such as file sharing, real-time editing, and effective communication channels.
3. Task and Project Management Capabilities
   • Importance: 5
   • The ability to track tasks, set deadlines, and manage projects effectively is key. We focus on apps that provide comprehensive project management features.
4. Integration with Other Tools
   • Importance: 4
   • We consider how well the app integrates with other commonly used business tools and software, as seamless integration can significantly enhance workflow efficiency.
5. Affordability
   • Importance: 3
   • Cost-effectiveness is important for small businesses. We seek a balance between features and affordability.
6. Scalability
   • Importance: 4
   • The app should grow with your business, so we look for options that are scalable and adaptable to changing business needs.
7. Security and Reliability
   • Importance: 5
   • With business data at stake, high standards of security and reliability are a must. We only recommend apps with strong security protocols and dependable performance.
8. Customer Support
   • Importance: 3
   • Accessible and helpful customer support is essential, especially for resolving technical issues and ensuring uninterrupted business operations.

Through these criteria, we aim to ensure that the team management apps we recommend are not only capable of enhancing team productivity and collaboration but also align with the unique needs and constraints of small businesses.

Best Team Management Apps

Here are some of the  best team management apps for your small business to consider.

Slack

To stay in constant contact with everyone on your team, Slack offers an easy-to-use communication hub where you can set up threads for specific departments or projects. You can also send private messages and schedule voice and video calls.

Asana

Asana is designed to help you assign tasks and keep an eye on your team’s progress through various projects. You can set deadlines and priorities and then your team can check items off their lists to keep you apprised of what has been completed and what still needs work. It’s easy to use and integrates with other tools for a seamless solution.

Trello

Trello allows you to create boards, lists and cards that share details about projects and tasks with members of your team. Then they can add comments, collaborate on docs, or check off to-dos within each item. It’s customizable and offers an array of advanced features.

Zoho Workplace

A fully featured office suite, Zoho Workplace includes an email platform, collaboration options, and word processing. It’s essentially a suite full of various options so that you can build the platform that works best for your team’s individual needs. It also integrates with other Zoho tools for maximum ease of use and scalability.

Microsoft Project

Available as part of Office 365, Microsoft Project offers templates and scheduling tools that help you manage products with your whole team. It also lets you set business objectives and track the use of resources over the course of each project.

Podio

Podio is a work management solution that lets you start conversations, set up workspaces for specific projects or departments, and even bring clients or freelancers into just the workspaces or conversations that are relevant to them.

Evernote Business

From the creator of the popular note-taking app, Evernote Business provides a cloud-based productivity solution that lets you share notes and files with team members and then manage workflows for specific projects. It also integrates with other popular apps like Slack, Outlook and Google Drive.

Fuze

Fuze lets you stay in communication with your team at all times through voice calling, video conferences and online messaging. You can set up group chats for larger projects or call individuals for more targeted conversations.

Scoro

The Scoro platform essentially lets you every aspect of your business operations in one easy-to-use platform. As far as team management is concerned, you can use it to set tasks and workflows for projects and manage your calendar of meetings, events and important deadlines.

SmartSheet

For small businesses that are looking to grow, SmartSheet offers team management features like project workflows and communication. It also offers automation features to help you save time and scale your business more efficiently.

MeisterTask

MeisterTask allows you to create visual project boards that can be completely customized. You and your team members can work together to evolve each project in the way that make the most sense for your particular work style.

Hubstaff

A time tracking solution, Hubstaff offers a desktop, web and mobile app that’s made to help teams increase productivity. Basically, it runs on team members computers and keeps track of activity levels. It even offers screen tracking for remote employees and GPS functionality for fleet workers.

Toggl

Toggl is a time tracker that provides reports and insights about how time is spent. You can set it to provide alerts when team members are idle for long periods of time and track the profitability of various tasks. It’s available on desktop and mobile so you can stay on top of your time management from anywhere.

Bitrix24

An online collaboration suite, Bitrix24 offers more than 35 different communication options for your team, including chat, video, document collaboration, CRM, emails and calendar management.

Yammer

Another Microsoft tool, Yammer offers project tracking, communication threads, document sharing and groups. It’s available with Office 365 and also offers mobile apps on iOS and Android.

Notion

Notion bills itself as the “all-in-one workspace.” It offers to-do list management for the whole team, along with note-taking, document collaboration and the ability to set up a knowledge base to help your team with FAQs and common issues. It’s completely customizable and affordable.

ProWorkFlow

A web-based project management solution, ProWorkFlow lets you set up projects, assign tasks and track progress and time. It integrates with a number of accounting and file storage solutions so you can access all of the reports and documents that are relevant to your projects in one spot.

Freedcamp

Freedcamp is a cloud-based planning and project management solution for teams and individuals. It lets you create tasks and subtasks and then share them with members of your team. You can then view charts of your to-dos and progress and make adjustments along the way.

ProofHub

ProofHub lets you manage communication with your team and clients in one dashboard. You can set up departments, tasks, milestones and chats to keep everyone on task and make sure that each team member knows what is expected of them through every step of the process.

Teamwork

Teamwork offers project management functionality along with chat and help desk functionality, for a scalable and customizable solution. You can assign tasks and track progress in the same place where you help clients or customers with specific issues on your site or app.

Top Team Management Apps Summary

Image: Zoho

This article, “The 20 Best Team Management Apps for Small Businesses” was first published on Small Business Trends