Kathleen is a productivity enthusiast and the CEO of an event management company. What started out as a favor to a few friends has grown to a 40-member team, thanks to her prolific enterprising spirit and her focus on getting things done.
High on productivity
Kathleen is the kind of boss that won’t come to a meeting unless it is stand-up and less than 20 minutes, and keeps a Pomodoro tomato timer at her desk at all times. Her team likes her quirky ways and appreciates being able to spend less time in the office and more time out making sales or hosting events.
To increase efficiency, Kathleen recently migrated her company to Google Apps for Work or G Suite. She was really looking forward to the improvements from a better email platform, shared calendars, and real-time document collaboration.
Kathleen is also a sucker for productivity apps. Her team is used to her coming in from her 12 minute commute (aka ‘podcast time’), talking about a new way to be more productive using productivity apps for business like Trello, Evernote, and Asana.
Too much to handle
However, even with the Google Workflow platform and with these new apps, Kathleen somehow feels that her business is still missing something. It isn’t quite as…well…productive as she had hoped. She keeps getting excited about new task management apps, but she starts to realize that something isn’t right.
A lot of her team members find most of the apps redundant and they end up spending just as much time inside the ‘productivity’ platforms as they did before when they were just managing with email and documents. They started to seem just like shiny tools that added colors and nice typography to systems that hadn’t got any faster.
Much of her team didn’t see the benefit in using these tools and found they were spending most of their time jumping in and out of the platforms.
What was missing?
Kathleen knew her team still loved G Suite, but she needed something that improved the efficiency without adding a lot of manual data transfer. Most of her team’s email inboxes were overflowing, but much of the discussion was about typical requirements for events. Oftentimes, it was just informing other people that something had been completed or needed an approval.
Kathleen got to thinking that if she could somehow focus only on these regular processes, she could speed those up and stop the email deluge. She looked up “google apps automation,” “g suite workflow automation,” and she quickly found plenty of workflow apps to choose from.
The discovery of true productivity zen
She soon found out that productivity apps weren’t the answer. Automated workflows were. By focusing on her existing processes, mapping them out, and automating them, Kathleen could save tons of time not worrying about email and managing different projects.
For example, every event her company managed followed the same basic pattern of steps. She started with a spreadsheet template to manage the workflow, then moved to a Trello board, but soon found that by automating the process with a tool like Kissflow Workflow, she could be entirely hands-off except for where she wanted to participate.
G Suite apps are not built for automation, and Kissflow seemed to perfectly fill that gap by providing a Google workflow solution that looked and felt intuitively like part of Google’s domain.
Kissflow’s 30-day free trial tempted Kathleen to give the software platform a try, and she automated a few processes to test her theories.
It didn’t take her more than 3 days to be amazed by how smoothly things flowed through the Kissflow apps. Kissflow’s deep integrations with Google Apps means it didn’t even feel like they were using yet another tool to manage their work.
So are productivity apps really productive?
Productivity apps are not designed to handle workflows well. They need constant attention and need a manual push from users in order for data to progress. But this constant monitoring and activity is not best for processes that are already standard and can operate on their own.
Kathleen found the so-called productivity apps shallow in comparison to a workflow automation tool like Kissflow. They neither moved data automatically or readily synced with the G Suite apps.
You can try Kissflow Process for free and test it on your processes. It’s simplified enough for everyone in your team to start a workflow, and intelligent enough to help your business untangle your complex process. Give it a try today!
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