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For Business
January 29, 2014

The silent superhero in your team



When you have the right technology as part of your team, it can save the day by cutting your workload, making things run more smoothly, enabling better communication and helping your team to reach the magical state of flow.

So how can you elevate the technology in your team to superhero status?

Think about tech like an employee

Firstly you really need to think about each device, piece of software, app, or social network you use as a team member. You don’t let just anyone into your team: you carefully vet each applicant for a job vacancy and pick the right person for the job. There’s no reason why the tech members of your team should be any different.

Think carefully about what the best tool for the job at hand will be – you don’t want a piece of technology that’s over-qualified or under-qualified, and shouldn’t pick the tool that just happens to be the closest to hand. Really think about the overall goal that you want to achieve and which technology can help you get there.

You value the human members of your team for their contributions, you invest in them and you don’t hire or fire lightly. It can be helpful to think about tech in the same way – looking for the value and unique contribution that it can bring to your team. You will get more out of tools if you value them – by investing time in choosing the right ones, and in learning the best way to use and implement them.

Superhero team tools

Here are some tools that we think could just prove to be the silent superhero in your team…

Lync

lync1

lync2

Lync makes meetings better, wherever you are. It gives you the ability to host and join voice and video conferences, plus information on meeting participants, data collaboration and sharing to make your meeting run more smoothly. What’s more, it works just as well on your Nokia Lumia phone as on your desktop.

Yammer

Yammer is an enterprise social network. It’s a great addition to your team when it comes to sharing information, improving communication and reducing the strain on your inbox. It allows your team to share content and ideas, comment and discuss, ask questions and get answers wherever they are, and opens up discussions to people who might not otherwise be involved.

iDoneThis

iDoneThis is a simple tool to help your team keep track of its progress. It’s very quick and easy to use – you just reply to an evening email reminder with what you did that day. The next day, you get a digest with what everyone on the team got done, keeping everyone in the loop without the need for a meeting or a long email chain.

Basecamp

When you use it to its full potential, Basecamp can act like a project manager (or provide your project manager with some extra support). With its accompanying Windows Phone app, Camper, it allows you to manage all your different projects with file sharing, to do lists, deadlines, and discussion functionality – keeping everything organised.

Nokia Lumia

Finally, the Nokia Lumia range has a phone to suit all different kinds of team. With Microsoft Office and Outlook built-in, you can communicate and collaborate on the go, and your work emails and data will sync with your PC automatically.

Which tools are the silent superheroes of your team? How do they help your team to work better?

Image credit: brett jordan