10 Communication Tools That Office Managers Should Know About

When it comes to running an office like a well-oiled machine, communication is one of the most important tools that the office manager has in their toolkit. By coupling communication with technology that makes the act of communicating easier, more productive, and more efficient, that’s where the magic really happens.

As part of our inaugural Swag 100, we’re taking a closer look at the resources in each category. The first category we’ll explore is — you guessed it! — the Communications category.

The tools in the Communications category may seem like a motley crew but they all share a common theme of making workplace communication more productive. So, let’s dive into how office managers can leverage each of these tools to upgrade their office communications.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a project management platform that’s been around for awhile. Not only can it help you to manage your own work and projects, but you can invite other people on your team to collaborate on a project as well. It’ll keep the wheels on the track and help you and your coworkers get projects of all types done quicker and more efficiently instead of endless email threads and rambling meetings.

Dropbox is arguably the gold standard for cloud storage. By utilizing Dropbox with your team, you’ll all have access to files from wherever you are (on desktop or mobile) and you won’t have to worry about losing files on someone’s computer locally.

Evernote may just change your life. Evernote is your notebook in the cloud and can keep track of all of your notes, images, scanned files, pdf’s, and whatever else you want to throw at it. You can access your Evernote from your desktop app, browser, or mobile devices and any note or notebook can be shared with your team or 1-1. One of the best features is the OCR, optical character recognition, search. This feature allows you to search for words that may be in your typed notes or on scanned documents, photos, pdf’s and other images.

Managing an office often means creating, streamlining, and optimizing processes like employee onboarding, gathering feedback, planning events, managing invoices and budget requests and so much more. KiSSFLOW will help you create and automate as many of those processes as you wish to manage the avalanche of information that comes at you every day.

How many times have you or your managers had the back-and-forth of setting an appointment to try and find a mutually-convenient time? Pick is a tool that’ll make it fast and painless to invite anyone to book an open time on your calendar that’ll work for them. Are you an EA? Save yourself some serious time and set it up for your executive, too.

Need an easy, free way to document and share workflows? Process Street offers a lightweight (but powerful!) way to manage your recurring workflows so that you can operationalize and collaborate with anyone who needs to see or participate in a workflow. The sky is the limit!

Slack is, for the uninitiated, a messaging platform with unlimited integration functionality. Not only does it make your team’s communication instant, organized, and tremendously productive but it can connect into almost any business tool that you use to create a hub for all of your communication needs. Many teams that embrace Slack find that it speeds up communication by removing the email lag.

Survey Monkey allows you to collect input and feedback from your team, your customers, your vendors, and anyone else using easy-to-create surveys, questionnaires, and forms. Facilitate employee surveys, client feedback, and customer data gathering.

Sometimes it’s easier to verbally explain something or talk through a message than to transcribe it. You and your team may find Voxer to be a more efficient alternative to hammering out emails or messages for communicating on-the-go.

Think of Yodel as a telephone switchboard for 2018. It’s a way to manage, route, respond to, make and take phone calls from Slack. It allows you to handle calls without answering them so you can forward them to the right person as well as make calls directly from Slack.