The 5 Best Tools For Internal Business Communication

When CEO Thierry Breton declared a zero-email policy for Atos in 2011, many people thought he was crazy. But this was not a PR exercise. Breton realized that email was wasting hundreds of hours in employee productivity and initiated a project to replace internal email within three years.

While there’s still a place for email, more businesses now realize there are smarter tools available to improve internal communication and collaboration.

Let’s take a look at five of the best tools you could use in your company.

Brosix

Brosix has been developing an easy-to-use, secure communication tool since 2006. Their messaging solutions are suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises.

Brosix provides real-time business collaboration across a secure team network. Administrators can set up and manage user and group permissions from a web control panel.

With Brosix contact management, you can control who converses with whom, on various internal levels as well as peer to peer, for more efficient and productive internal communication.

For example, if you have a 20-person marketing team and a 10-person sales team, you could allow only the Marketing Manager to communicate with the Sales Manager, while the other users could be restricted to communicating only inside their respective department.

Because grouping users within your Instant Messenger Network is straightforward, you can also create custom groups for projects or special interests within minutes.

Brosix Group Chat keeps everyone on your team connected and focused on the task at hand. You can hold real-time conversations with individual team members or send announcements to the whole group.

But Brosix is not limited to Text chat; you can also use Voice and Video for more personalized communication. And if you need a brainstorming session, then you can take advantage of the Whiteboard to visualize concepts and ideas as you chat.

Keeping everyone updated on the latest company news is a breeze with the Welcome Plugin.

BaseCamp

Since launching in 2004, Basecamp has streamlined project management and internal communication for businesses of all sizes. Wave goodbye to stickies and endless email chains:

“Basecamp organizes your projects, internal communications, and client work in one place so you have a central source of truth.”

When you use BaseCamp, you can consolidate your project in one central location. There’s a repository for documents, files, and assets; a To-Do list where tasks are assigned to individuals; a calendar with important milestones; and a group chat and instant messaging tool.

With everything organized and centralized, everyone knows exactly what’s happening in the project and what’s expected of them.

Redbooth

Redbooth is a simple task and project management app that helps you and your team to plan and track your work. The dashboard divides tasks into status lists: To-Do, In Progress, and Completed. Each task is assigned to an individual with a due date, so it’s easy to prioritize the most important tasks first.

“Redbooth is an easy-to-use online task and project management software for busy teams.”

When you start a new project, you can use templates of your internal processes like New Employee Onboarding or Weekly Meetings to get things rolling straight away and keep everyone on track.

Redbooth integrates with many apps including Outlook and Gmail. You can transform an email into a task, assign an owner, and set the status right from your email inbox.

Wrike

Wrike is a cloud-based collaboration and project management tool that’s suitable for all sizes of business. Furthermore, Wrike has developed some vertical solutions tailored for different departments, including Marketing, Design, Product Development, Business Operations, and Professional Services.

Whatever your team, the core features remain the same.

Start by creating a project and adding tasks to it. Then you can assign an individual to those tasks, add comments to the task, and set deadlines.

Project planning is made easy with visual Gantt charts and a resource workload overview. You can check your project schedule and set dependencies to keep your team on track.

Bitrix24

Bitrix24 offers a complete suite of 35+ social collaboration, communication and management tools for your team.

Inspired by Facebook, Bitrix24 developed a social media style interface to improve communication.

The Activity Stream uses an interactive update feed that displays all the latest changes and announcements from your organization. Each employee chooses what types of updates to display in their personalized feed. There’s even a ‘Like!’ button so users can view, comment, and like content in their stream.

Also included in the suite are a choice of real-time communication tools including instant messaging, group chats, video calls, and video conferencing.

Tasks and projects are built around the Groups functionality. Each project has a dedicated group containing all of the files, discussions, and tasks. Only users in that group can access the information. There’s also a group calendar listing all the scheduled tasks and meetings, plus the time spent on each task can be tracked and reported.

Checking project progress is easy to view in the Gantt charts that display the status of tasks and subtasks. Other project management features include Task Dependencies, Kanban Views, and Employee Workload.

Conclusion

Is it time for you to ditch internal email? Try one of these five communication and collaboration tools to streamline your projects and boost productivity for your teams.

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