Teamwork is messy right now to say the least. Ironically, people are spending more time in meetings than ever, and they are feeling the impact that has on their productivity. See how Sortd can help you with the practical challenges of keeping things moving when managing a remote team.

The number one rule for remote work management is – Communicate Communicate, Communicate!  But that comes with an unintended consequence – more communication, and less time for productive work.

If your conversations are not well aligned with some kind of action plan, you’ll struggle to build momentum.

Apps like Slack make remote communication easier, but instant messaging is definitely not the right tool for keeping track of deliverables.  Email, on the other hand, is still used as an ‘official’ channel for asking other people to do stuff – everything from a simple Go / No-go decision, to preparing for this year’s company retreat (let’s hold thumbs).

"Please see email from the client and prepare a quote"
"As discussed this morning, here are the Next Steps..."
"Please review this contract and approve"

The requests never end, and that makes email a pain in the butt for most of us.  No one thinks about all the other commitments you have – they hit that Send button faster than you can say “Where’s the Zoom link?”

So how do you keep track of all the deliverables for customers, and the commitments you’ve made to suppliers and partners across the company (without the informal, coincidental updates that usually happen throughout the day)?

Here are the 10 Ways Sortd can help you manage your remote team

1. Turn your Email and your Work Management tool into one system

You and your team already use Gmail – you can make it work a little harder for you.

Email is the app you spend the most time in.  You know you’ll always come back to it, so it’s a reliable place to store actionable information. You even send emails to yourself, don’t you??

With Sortd, rather than duplicating work with multiple systems – you can work from a single all-in-one, collaborative workspace in your email. It’s an ideal (and very practical) way to keep track of your own work, your team’s work and follow-ups.

One of the main things our customers love about Sortd is this…

Sortd replaces a bunch of pipeline and teamwork tracking apps with one lightweight tool that does it all, in Gmail!

Less app switching, less context switching, less time wasted looking for tabs.

2. Supercharge collaboration & remote work with visual Kanban boards

Collaborative workspaces for you and your team allow you to manage Email, Tasks and Teamwork in an organized, all-in-one, email-native workspace.

3. Delegate and assign Emails & Tasks, and keep track of how they progress

With Sortd, assigning work to members of your team is really easy.  Let’s say you receive an email from a customer requesting a quote.  All you need to do is drag it to one of the stages on your board and assign it to a team member to take it on.

Emails on a shared board can be viewed and replied to by all members of the team on that board, like any email in their own mailbox. Replies on the thread stay in sync for everyone.

4. Drag & drop related email conversations into groups and add notes for context

With the ability to group email conversations together, you can keep everything related to a project or customer in one place.

Notes give you a comprehensive history so that anyone who looks at a deal or project later will see the full picture.

If you use this right, you’ll have the simplest CRM imaginable, with no elaborate setup or complexity.

5. Turn your team’s email into organized workflows without the need for complicated systems

Sortd allows you to easily map out any business workflow that typically starts in email (e.g. order processing, sales admin, sales pipeline) which means that every team in your organization can use the same system, regardless of the type of work they need to manage.  That makes it easy for you to see everything that’s going on in your business.

6. Know the state of play at all times with Next steps

Because Sortd works in each individual’s mailbox and helps with both teamwork and personal task management – all people on your team can use the same system for tracking their own work, and collaborating – ensuring everyone has the same version of the truth, and information is current and up to date at all times.

The Next Steps feature on Sortd tasks gives you a snapshot of what’s going on with any team at a glance.  You can see what’s next (and when), without the need to click around and waste your time looking for that information.

7. Transform productivity for your team and yourself to keep things moving

Sortd places a particular emphasis on making it easy for the people who use it to be on top of their own work, without the need for additional tools or much habit change.

With features like a simple Day Planner in your Gmail (where you can add both tasks and emails), it becomes much more realistic for people to get a complete, stress free handle on the work that needs to get done.

People who have committed to using Sortd as their go to system have seen radical improvements in productivity and have freed up headspace to direct their creative energy into producing their best work.

8. See when people are dealing with the things you’ve asked them for with Read Receipts

This helps to align efforts and even simply time conversations better.  If you know when a coworker is on top of your request, it’s a good time to start a conversation to add the missing details.

9. Use follow-up reminders for delegated work and create more headspace to focus on your own agenda

You can’t always trust that if you send an Email it’s as good as done.  Everyone has their own agenda and getting those into alignment is always a challenge.

If there’s something that absolutely needs to be done by a certain date, set a follow-up reminder as you send the mail.  On that date, the email will come back to the top of your Inbox, and you can shoot off a quick reply to follow up.

10. Keep track of your sales team, and your deal pipeline flowing

In the current environment it’s hard to maintain a steady sales pipeline (for many companies that’s unfortunately putting it mildly). So any benefit you can get from better tracking, time saving and more efficiency will go a long way to improve your closing rate and keep revenues up.

Sortd sales boards make it easy to keep the pipeline current and organized without the need to spend time on admin maintaining it.

Conclusion

With the Remote Work challenges that we are facing, productivity has taken a real knock – we need to do what we can to keep the ships afloat, so increases in efficiency and time saving matter now more than ever.

Any thoughts or questions on this – please feel free to comment below. Or email us 😉 If you need to install Sortd again, look for the red button at the top of the page on sortd.com

Be well, and hope you can keep your head above water in these trying times.

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