In the last few years, the world of remote working has expanded enormously, making it more important than ever for employers to stay on top of the latest apps for businesses. Among these, there’s now a wide range of apps that can help with everything from productivity to performance tracking, and even spy apps.
At the same time, employees may also need to know about the kind of apps their employees may be using. In some cases, knowing the best apps under the right circumstances can be very helpful to a business. With this in mind, here’s a look at seven types of apps all employers should know about, whether they run remote, office-based, or hybrid businesses.
Spy Apps
Spy apps can serve a multitude of different functions. According to tech writer Anwesha Roy, there are a variety of free spy apps that can be useful to everyone from parents to spouses and employers. These can be used to track, monitor, or view a person’s browsing history, view their email communications, chats, and social media use, or monitor their exact location.
While there are a variety of free apps available, those that are most useful for these purposes are usually premium versions that can be paid for once-off or available via monthly subscriptions. However, despite the obvious appeal of these kinds of apps, employers should note that they can lead to a variety of legal problems if not used with the employee’s consent.
To use these consensually, employers should not just let the employee know that they are being used but also provide the full details of the parameters and things that will be monitored. In legitimate cases, these apps can be used to monitor how an employee uses their time, whether they use company resources responsibly, or how often they are away from their devices.
Remote Work Apps
Building on these last aspects, remote working apps and tools are very useful for any employer who runs teams of people who work remotely. Not only can these monitor performance, and track time, and productivity; they also help remote teams coordinate and communicate effectively.
Widely used apps for these purposes include the likes of Asana and Trello. These allow for efficient task management, provide functions to effectively delegate work, and provide convenient means of tracking work projects and different individuals and teams.
For team environments, they are especially useful for helping everyone stay on the same page. Updates to projects or workflow processes can be done centrally, making it easier to boost productivity and ensure that deadlines are met since employee activity can all be monitored and managed from a single app.
In most cases, these apps allow for compartmentalization so teams and individuals can be kept separate. This allows for different teams, work, and projects to be easily delineated amongst them while being managed centrally.
Time-Tracking Apps
Time-tracking apps are also just as useful. These can be used via functions of more generalized work apps or work as separate and more specialized apps. Specialized time tracking apps are very useful in environments where employees are paid hourly or according to the amount of time they spend on tasks.
In large teams, the ability to coordinate everyone’s times and collate the information to make payments or analyze performances can be vital. Many time-tracking apps are now so sophisticated, they can monitor an employee's times down to a millisecond, enabling far more accurate stats than ever.
Most of these kinds of apps also have the ability to simultaneously monitor PC activity so they can tell if an employee is being productive or simply just letting the clock run but not doing any work. Functions like idle time are crucial for not just tracking time but monitoring how it’s being used.
For employers that run businesses that are time-sensitive, every second lost can be a huge loss. According to DataReportal, the average person currently spends around 145 minutes a day on social media. That equates to over 2 hours a day and over 11 hours a week that’s lost due to unproductivity brought on by just casually scrolling through social media.
Instant Messaging Apps
If broadly-used remote working apps like Trello aren’t necessary for your team to communicate, simpler instant messaging apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams can facilitate quick communication between colleagues. Meanwhile, the likes of WhatsApp are fast becoming just as useful as they can now create groups, facilitate live video calls, and cater to large-scale teams.
Most aren’t free, or at least, don’t offer the full range of their services with free versions. These apps are much faster than emails and can greatly enhance team collaboration. They often also provide useful features like file sharing and team video calls that make them ideal for sharing or coordinating vital training sessions and materials, or setting up meetings.
Despite their amazing utility, employers should take care to ensure these apps are used in a professional and secure manner only. This is to protect sensitive information from being shared, so guidelines should be established to prevent misuse of such apps and platforms.
Fitness and Wellness Apps
While most businesses are primarily concerned with metrics that deal with their bottom line, productivity, and other core business functions, it’s also vitally important to find time for self-care. Staying fit and prioritizing our mental and physical wellness has become just as important given the demands of modern businesses.
As a result, fitness and wellness apps can help employers take care of themselves and employees while they take care of the work of the business. Apps like these can go a long way in promoting a healthy lifestyle for both the employer and their employees.
Apps like Fitbit and MyFitnessPal encourage physical activity and wellness tracking. On the other hand, there are just as many apps out there for mindfulness and mental wellness too, given just how many types of mental health concerns there are now.
Apps like Calm and Headspace have become revered for their ability to help people develop mindfulness routines. These do wonders for overall mental wellness amid all the stress that modern work lives can bring.
Social Media Apps
This is a little bit of a tricky one. On the one hand, social media apps can be a major distraction, especially in a work environment. There’s a ton of data from a wide array of studies that now prove just how distracting social media can be, how it can affect focus and concentration levels, and how it can often become bad for our overall mental health.
However, on the other hand, social media apps can also be greatly beneficial to employers. For one, they can be massively useful for advertising and marketing purposes. In that sense, they can be used to drum up new customers and are even capable of causing small businesses to explode and go viral—changing people’s lives overnight in the process.
Apps like LinkedIn can also be amazing for networking and building up a professional database of contacts or recruiting new employees. To get the most out of social media apps without them being detrimental to a business, employers need to strike a balance.
This can be done by setting clear usage policies for employees without being overly restrictive. At the same time, as a business tool, they should always be used professionally and with the business’s main objectives for growth in mind.
Conclusion
As we can see, there are a wide variety of apps that can be highly beneficial for employers to use. Whether these serve a business function, cater to better overall health, or aid employees in monitoring and increasing the productivity of employees, there are many great categories of apps now available to modern employers.
