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Author: Jimmy Rodela

Jimmy is a freelance writer and the owner of the GuildofBloggers.com. He has contributed to several reputable websites like SEMRush, SeachEnginePeople, and Business.com

8 Ways to Optimize Your Collaboration Through Team Emails

Many teams still use email to run projects and collaborate.

Whether it’s for graphic design, marketing, or sales, among other business processes, email seems to remain the go-to communication channel.

Sadly, standard email platforms are usually inefficient and unsystematic.

And so the issue becomes, what if you need to continue using team emails? Is there some way to optimize your collaboration through them?

The good news is: yes, there is a way — eight of them, actually, which we will cover in this guide.

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1. Integrate with other communication channels.

Email is not the only effective way to coordinate with your team, so supplement the platform with other communication channels.

Use all-in-one team email tools that can connect with your email provider and offer audio and video meetings and other collaboration features.

That way, you can bolster and streamline your discussions better without leaving the email platform.

2. Invite team members to co-create wikis.

Create project wikis on email to share important, often-forgotten information that can help members accomplish their tasks.

Use wikis as references for your project’s parameters and deliverables, contract scope, client details, quick troubleshooting tips, and others.

Then invite your colleagues to add to the wikis as necessary. Leverage your email platform’s (or a comprehensive third-party tool’s) “Notes” feature for wiki creation and sharing.

To enhance your collaboration, opt for “Notes” features that show a history of changes made by which person.

3. Organize your messages and files.

Keep your documents and messages orderly to find what you’re looking for quickly. Making your virtual mailboxes and filing cabinets neat also helps clear your mind and make you productive.

Organize your emails with tags, stars, pins, and labels. Create easy-to-remember categories and subcategories to sort and find the right messages quickly.

For your files, attach easily understandable tags and labels, and configure access settings as necessary. Keep them also in a centralized repository integrated directly with your inbox.

4. Make teamwork on email fun.

Depending on your company’s dynamics, keep your working environment (whether physical or virtual) relaxed rather than rigid.

Loosen up a bit and urge your team to make working with colleagues more enjoyable — even on email. Doing so can enhance their coordination, work satisfaction, and productivity.

Encourage them to converse casually (as appropriate), especially during afternoon breaks or quick dialogues at work.

You and your colleagues can even add multimedia functionalities to your chats and messages. Insert emojis, photos, GIFs, stickers, doodles, and other creative elements.

Also, add your personality when sending voice messages and using type-to-speech instead of written emails for inquiries and updates. (These features are also excellent when you’re in a rush or inconvenient position to write.)

Initiate conversing a bit casually if you find your team members hesitating to do so. You’ll soon see the working atmosphere ease up and become more inviting for productive collaboration.

5. Recognize positive contributions.

Reward and recognize your team’s achievements and positive contributions to the success of your project by email.

Doing that is an effective way of writing project management emails. It boosts their morale because it shows that you notice and affirm their outstanding work. It also makes them feel valued and inspires them to keep giving their best for the team.

Reward and recognition can also increase your colleagues’ work satisfaction and motivate them more effectively than a higher salary, training, or promotion.

Openly recognize your members by sending appreciation messages to everyone in the team and company. Personalize or mention the people’s names to affirm them.

When applicable, you can even show your appreciation in small ways. Send short thank-you emails to the team by chat or directly to the person.

Even quick affirmations like that can uplift your staff and spur them to power through their assignments and perform excellently.

6. Sync calendars into your email.

Calendars are indispensable to implementing projects and daily assignments. They help you catch up with deadlines, see upcoming events and appointments, and more.

However, switching between virtual calendar apps and email platforms makes workflows inefficient — especially when using several devices.

Integrate your working and personal calendars into your email tools and synchronize schedules on your laptops, mobile phones, etc.

Establish comprehensive working and project calendars as well for your team. Share it with the group members and encourage them to sync it with their devices to keep tabs on changes.

Additionally, leverage the calendar tools’ RSVP functions to confirm your attendance at any activity (e.g., team meetings) in a single click.

7. Harmonize all your inboxes.

Do you have multiple email accounts from the same provider or even separate platforms? If so, harmonize these inboxes to avoid opening and moving between different tabs.

By integrating multiple accounts into one email platform, you can quickly toggle between them and browse through your messages seamlessly.

Find a team email tool that can bring together multiple mailing services, e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, iCloud, Hotmail, and more.

8. Streamline your email workflows.

Being able to complete several tasks on email platforms simplifies your work and team coordination. You don’t need to open many programs and risk confusion and error in your assignments.

Streamline your workflows to make the most of working and collaborating from emailing tools. Here are some ways to do that:

  • Schedule your message delivery. Use “send later” or equivalent functions to schedule sending emails to your team. Doing so ensures you don’t forget to deliver your message and clears that nagging to-do from your mind. This feature is helpful when working with teams across time zones or a hectic working schedule.
  • Snooze tasks for later. Set reminders to complete your emailing tasks, e.g., replying to a message, for a later date and time. This helps you prioritize and manage your to-dos efficiently.
  • Identify priority notifications. Customize receiving notifications to more important messages by adding “Priority” or similar labels to specific email types and senders. You can also configure your email notifications settings accordingly.
  • Create to-do lists. Use task lists built into your email platform or team email tools to centralize assignment delegation and progress checking.

Collaboration perfected through team emails

Team emails can powerfully optimize your collaboration when you execute these tips. So, contemplate how you can weave them into your management techniques and invest in the best team email tools. See how your coordination improves and adjust your implementation of these tips until you get the desired results.

How to Streamline Your Business to Increase Your Productivity

It’s easy to get caught in the daily whirlwind, especially when you have a long list of tasks and boatloads of firefighting to do.

However, if left unchecked, all these, on top of sticking to manual processes, can bog you and your employees down — leading to inefficient workflows, low productivity, and even cost you money.

The solution? Streamline your business processes to save time and resources, manage your workload better, and ensure your business operates optimally.

While there is no one-size-fits-all formula to achieve efficient business processes and workflows, there are tried and true ways to help you pull this off — which we’ll cover in this guide.

1. Leverage cloud-based apps

Completing tasks efficiently can be challenging and almost impossible when your critical tools are only accessible from one physical location.

After all, this kind of setup means your team would need to travel to access your tools. They could also overlook tasks easily because they couldn’t do them immediately.

This can seriously impact your team’s and company’s overall productivity and add to your already full workload.

This is where cloud-based software comes in handy.

With a cloud-based solution, your team can access your tools anytime and anywhere using compatible devices with an internet connection.

For instance, Record360’s equipment inspection software can streamline processes through digital workflows and forms.

The company provides paperless equipment inspection forms users can easily access and process through its cloud-based software.

This allows teams to conduct equipment inspections seamlessly, whether at a project site, at a different branch, or anywhere else, as long as they are connected to the internet.

With the cloud-based tool, your team won’t need to travel to your nearest branch or office, obtain paper forms to perform the inspections, and send the document after completing it.

Users can accomplish all these steps from the app, and everything gets stored in the cloud for managers and other authorized users to access with ease.

Cloud-based apps can streamline business processes by allowing quick and easy access to tools anywhere and eliminating the long back and forth of manual, non-cloud tools. This makes your workflows more efficient while saving you work hours and resources.

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2. Use task management tools

An inefficient task management process can be one of the biggest killers of productivity.

Without proper task management, you and your teams would be hard-pressed to collaborate and communicate efficiently and, in turn, streamline your business processes.

Team project management tools provide a solution through functionalities that expedite your team communication, collaboration, and task management processes.

These features include showing task updates and progress in real time, interactive board views, and other collaboration tools.

Project team management tool ClickUp, for instance, has document, goals, and task modules on the mobile and browser app. This allows your team to plan and organize tasks while collaborating seamlessly.

Some of the software’s other key features include docs, goals, calendars, reminders, and an inbox that make assigning, tracking, and managing tasks more efficient.

The software offers proprietary and customizable features, allowing you to adopt multiple views and functionalities for specific teams and functions.

A reliable project and task management software helps eliminate the friction and resource-draining aspects of using separate tools. It also provides features that simplify tasks, speeding up your workflows and increasing productivity.

3. Automate where you can

Adopting automation into your systems is one of the fastest ways to improve your business’s process efficiency while making your team’s lives a lot easier.

For instance, if your customer support team spends hours each week gathering contact details from potential leads and answering basic client queries, automate critical parts of the process by using Artificial Intelligence or AI chatbot software.

Chatbot platform ActiveChat, for example, combines AI natural language understanding with decision-tree chatbots to automate your customer communications.

The software lets you create a flexible, no-code chatbot you can easily implement on various platforms such as Facebook messenger, your website, SMS, email, and other communication channels.

You can use the software’s native website chat to begin client conversations and continue them on channels your customers use. It can automatically match users across your channels, allowing you to provide a seamless multi-channel customer service experience.

A powerful AI chatbot can take the load off your customer service team by handling the majority of repetitive, less complicated tasks.

With this, your team can automate tedious, time-consuming customer service jobs and focus on more complex tasks instead. This can speed up workflows and issue resolution, improving your customer service quality and increasing productivity.

4. Minimize meetings

While meetings are critical for planning, collaboration, and other activities, they’re not always the most effective option. Some meetings are better off as quick phone calls, chats, and emails to help you optimize precious work hours.

Assess where you can replace in-person meetings with an email, team chat, or video conference. This way, you won’t need to wait around until everyone’s schedule is clear to hold the meeting, no one has to travel anywhere, and everyone can use the time saved for work.

Use free video conferencing tools such as Google Meet as an alternative to holding in-person meetings. You can also use it to meet with your remote team members regularly with little to no expense.

Google Meet offers a simple interface, and all you need to use it is a Google account. You can schedule meetings on your Google calendar, and it auto-generates a Meet room link included in your meeting invitation.

The tool offers meeting/conferencing features and tools, including a whiteboard, in-call chat, auto-captions, and a screen sharing option for seamless presentations and other uses.

Make your meetings more productive by using a reliable tool. This also streamlines communicating with your team members and prevents them from eating into your productive hours while minimizing the strain of long meetings.

The bottomline to achieving an efficient and productive business

While getting your business to work like clockwork with no kinks can require a bit of elbow grease and investing in the right tools, it doesn’t have to be rocket science.

Iron out what your business needs and use tools that work best to streamline your workflows, automate your tedious tasks, and increase your company’s overall efficiency and productivity.

Establishing the right strategies on top of adopting the best-fitting tools into your systems and tech stack also helps you streamline your processes while saving time, cutting costs, and giving you more room to focus on growing business.

Take the first steps into streamlining your business processes to boost your business efficiency and productivity, starting with the tips in this guide.

5 Tactics to Successfully Handle Multiple Projects Simultaneously

Managing multiple projects at the same time can be an absolute n-i-g-h-t-m-a-r-e.

 

You need to keep track of your projects’ moving parts, ensure you’re using the right processes and strategies, stay within deadline, keep your employees motivated, and be mindful of your expenses.
Data even shows that on average, 88% of remote workers experience miscommunications and inconsistent leadership with team members, highlighting the importance of proper program and project management.

Sadly, we just scratched the surface. So much more goes into project management than the things we pointed out.

The good news is, there are tips and tricks to help you manage multiple projects simultaneously.

Continue reading to learn five proven tactics that will help you run your projects efficiently.

1. Stay on top of your work schedules

Regardless of how carefully you planned your projects, everything can easily go off track if you don’t establish a schedule that includes your team’s work for the month, quarter, or year.

For instance, without a clear schedule, team members might fail to prioritize tasks, overlook critical jobs, and miss deadlines, which can seriously hinder your project’s completion and even impact the result’s quality.  

Use reliable work scheduling software to ensure every project team member is on the same page, keep your workflows moving seamlessly, and keep everything on track.

For instance, Deputy lets you build work schedules in minutes by using its easy-to-use interface to schedule the right team members at the right time across various locations and roles.

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You can easily create shifts, assign them to staff members, drag and drop to change them, copy schedules, modify them accordingly, and export them to a CSV file, spreadsheet, or print them.

You can also send the schedule directly to your team through mobile or desktop. If you change the schedule, the assigned person gets a notification, and they can accept the confirmation request.

A robust scheduling tool helps ensure your lines don’t get crossed, work gets done, and your project deadlines are met.

This helps keep your multiple projects on track and your team members more productive. Your project schedules will also be maximized for optimum efficiency, avoiding potential delays.

2. Prioritize tasks

With so much on your plate, it can be tempting to tackle the easiest projects first, but you must resist, or you could kill your team’s productivity and efficiency.

Prioritize based on tasks that will have the most significant impact on your project and program goals. This helps you manage several priorities while working on multiple projects effectively.

Doing so allows your team to work strategically on both micro (i.e., organizing daily to-dos based on importance) and macro (i.e., moving low-impact projects to the following quarter) levels.   

Let’s say your team is working on four product launches simultaneously with the overarching goal of increasing customer revenue.

While the four projects require about the same amount of time, effort, and resources to complete and roll out, assess which one has the potential to generate a bigger impact on your new customer revenue than the other three.

Prioritize the project (or projects) that have the most significant contribution to achieving your goals.

This helps you manage your resources and allocate your time better while ensuring your efforts align with your project goals and deliver your desired results.   

3. Establish goals and plans

Without establishing a standard project planning process or workflow, you’ll likely manage each of your projects differently.

This can lead to issues down the line, such as inconsistencies in your deliverables and precious time wasted on setting up new processes for each project. 

That is why you need to have a solid plan, establish standard processes, and identify responsibilities from the get-go.

Outline everything from your goals, each step, and task necessary for project completion, schedules and deadlines, and the persons and teams responsible for specific jobs at the project level.

At the program level, develop plans, processes, and clarify responsibilities. Establish team-level goals and communicate the projects crucial to achieving those objectives.

You can start outlining your goals using a Specific, Measurable, Accurate, Realistic, and Timely  (SMART) approach and this sample goal-setting template.

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You can use other templates as references and build on those to develop your project and program objectives.

Optimize your project management processes by setting team-wide standards. For instance, you can require project team leads to submit a brief before outlining a project plan for big projects.

You can also create templates for projects your team often handles to ensure consistency across projects and save time and effort.

Clear goals, plans, and responsibilities help your teams avoid inconsistencies in processes and deliverables.

4. Conduct systematic progress updates

Tracking status and progress updates in a multi-project environment are critical to keeping stakeholders and key project players in the loop.

After all, you wouldn’t want your clients, for instance, to be breathing down your neck because you didn’t give them any status reports, making it crucial to establish a systematic updating process. 


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Establish smart, systematic status updates so that you can manage stakeholder expectations efficiently.

Below are a few tips for doing strategic and systematic project status updates.

  •     Define expectations. Layout the specific steps task owners or the team members in-charge of particular tasks are expected to follow. Identify a time frame for updating relevant stakeholders, whether every three days, weekly, monthly, etc.
  •     Include a high-level overview of key areas in the project. Add several bullet points that provide an update on the accomplishments, progress, and upcoming work for each key area of your project’s status. This ensures essential points are covered, and stakeholders get all the necessary updates they need.
  •     Schedule accountability. Have third-parties, such as staff in another department, the project sponsor, or other stakeholders, conduct reviews to ensure the resource person or task owner follows protocol and the specified updating time frame to a tee.

Implement a systematic status updating process to keep your project team motivated, ensure they understand the project plan, why it’s crucial to stay up to date, and clearly see the multiple demands your team must meet.

5. Delegate and empower team members

Exercise effective delegation in your resource management by adopting clarity, authority, and accountability.

For instance, empowering your graphic designer to create a landing page for a new project means making sure he/she is absolutely clear about the task by providing a work breakdown structure.

This work breakdown structure of building a landing page campaign for a new product from Kanbanize is a good example.

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A work breakdown structure outlines the phases of the project process clearly.

Additionally, to ensure the project process and phases are when delegating, be sure to:

  •     Clearly communicate the work breakdown structure
  •     Set a project deadline
  •     Relay specific client expectations
  •     List down the available resources the task owner has
  •     Describe the workload
  •     Provide him/her the authority to make and carry out decisions

Clarity ensures your team is clear on the direction. Team members avoid any guesswork and prioritize critical tasks and projects. 

A clear work breakdown structure and project scope will also empower teamwork that boosts productivity while giving members a sense of fulfillment for meeting multiple demands.  
Leverage a reliable project management tool that can streamline your work breakdown structure’s workflows and processes. 

Data can back up the effectiveness of using the right project management tool with 77% of high-performing projects using project management software.

What’s next?

Handling multiple projects at the same time is inevitable in project management and any efforts you take on.

While the tips in this guide are in no way guaranteed formulas for success, these are good building blocks to help develop your strategies for effective and strategic multiple project management. 

Leverage the tactics we shared to stay on top of your projects’ moving pieces, meet your deadlines, and achieve your goals.