Why are the best companies performing better? Have you ever wondered why?

Their ability to produce contributes to their success. They perform better because they are efficient.

To be efficient, they have a proper organization, but they also use the right tools. The need for the right tool is particularly true when it comes to a remote team, as they need effective ways to communicate and manage tasks.

And this is a growing need, as more and more teams are hiring remote employees.

This is why we want to discuss the importance of picking the right tool and what it takes to get one. We will particularly cover some examples of WordPress solutions.

So, without further ado, let’s dive right in.

What is a good productivity tool?

First things first, a good productivity tool is something that will increase the efficiency of your entire team. increase in a way that improves their efficiency and, ultimately, their results.

You can listen to more on the topic of managing a remote team and the importance of working with the right tool in this podcast episode from CoSchedule.

You’re essentially looking for something enhanced, easy to use, and easy to manage.

This leads us to our second point: WordPress.

Why would you use WordPress?

WordPress is the most frequently used CMS in the world. Although it initially started its journey for blogging purposes, it is now used for any type of website or web application.

• Some mind-blowing statistics:
• Powering 30% of the web: 74.6 million websites depend on WordPress;
• 62 translations of WordPress;
• WordPress.com is more visited than Twitter;
• 45,000 WordPress plugins and growing daily.

You can find more of them here.

Besides those outstanding figures, WordPress is cheap to use and maintain, it is very flexible and extendable, but you also own the data.

This is why it’s fair to say that WordPress is very interesting when it comes to creating a productivity or collaboration hub for your organization.

One way of doing it would be to use a theme built for internal/external collaboration, such as Woffice.io, featuring most of the needs for collaboration, such as chat, knowledgebase, team directory, and project management.

If you want to get your intranet up and running, you can go on over to Woffice.io and start in 10 minutes. 🚀

But you can also go one step further, and use additional plugins on top of such themes. We could imagine adding a forum feature, a recruitment management tool, a more advanced project management tool, a Kanban tool, and much more.

You might be wondering how on earth you would find the most reliable plugins.

We have some suggestions for you.

Examples of productivity and collaboration tools for WordPress

To start with, we have explored the categories in the WordPress plugin directory, and here is a list of productivity tools that we found useful:

Social network

This is most likely the most valuable commodity when it comes to the collaborative environment. Giving your users the ability to chat, connect, interact, and post is your bread and butter.

There is one go-to solution in WordPress: BuddyPress.

This plugin turns your WordPress website into a social network with:

• Member pages – each user has their page/dashboard with avatar, profile, activity, notifications, private messages, friends, and subscriptions.
• Member directory – easily find other users
• Site-wide activity – like Twitter for the whole site
• Groups – similar to Facebook groups
• Forums – we can even create forums using bbPress (separate plugin – see later)
• Frontend Posting, Registration, and Profile Builder – WP User Frontend can let you allow your users to post from the front end. Besides that, you can create amazing registration forms, and your users to edit their profiles from the front end.

There are already several hundred add-ons for BuddyPress, and many existing plugins and themes are also being integrated with it.

Collaborative documents

Firstly, instead of using the likes of Google Suite, have you ever thought of using WordPress? I doubt it. Yet, it’s possible to set up a fully-fledged collaboration environment in WordPress.

One great example is BuddyPress Docs, which offers a collaborative workspace to your BuddyPress community.

File management

Another important aspect of team collaboration is access to the different files, and how you manage the roles between the users.

We find WP Download Manager and Post Table to be very effective solutions. They offer search, sorting, filtering, and management of files.

Project and task management

Project Management is all about being efficient and making sure a project goes from start to finish in the expected timeframe. Which is where our project management add-ons come in.

One great example is WP Project Management Pro. It features all the must-haves of project management – namely:

Time tracker: look after the time spent on each project and task, optimize your resources time, and efforts

Team collaboration: you can collaborate, exchange ideas, and work with your teammates.

Task assignment: give the right task to the right person—and make sure it goes through. You can also assign subtasks, and break down bigger chunks.

Shared calendar: you can check your progress on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and change the task due date right from the calendar.

And much more to improve efficiency: advanced filtering, customizable roles, files and documents manager, charts, and reports.

Visualization of tasks: If you do use WP Project Manager with the Kanban Board feature, you will be able to open new tasks, change dates, and drag and drop tasks from one board to another to mark a particular task as done, in progress, overdue, and many more. This visualization of tasks is pretty handy because you can not only see all the tasks in one place but can also change their status anytime.

Wrapping Up

When it comes to gaining productivity and going one step further than the standard Slack-like environment, WordPress is an interesting solution to explore. That’s because WordPress will let you implement all of these tools along with your website management and it’s much like killing two birds with the same stone. 🙂