In today’s article, I’m going to be digging into a platform called Connecteam and teach you five ways that you might use Connecteam to better improve your employee engagement, satisfaction, training, and management.
What exactly is Connecteam?
Connecteam is an all in one solution that you can use to better communicate, manage, and train your team.
It can be used for pretty much any business team. But their intended use case is really for desk-less employees. That said, though, I think there’s a lot of different ways that you can use their platform as well if you’re running an online business, or if you just have a team of virtual assistants.
When you create your free account on Connecteam, the first thing that you’ll notice when you log in is that they have a ton of features that you can immediately start using. And that’s what I love about Connecteam is that they are so customizable to the different use cases of business owners.
Connecteam’s Chat feature
The first way that you can improve the management of your own team is simply by using the chat feature on Connecteam.
And what’s really cool about Connecteam is that you can customize all the sorts of ways that you want to use their platform. If, for example, I wanted to create a new chat, I can create a new chat for just another person or I can create a new team chat or it can even make an entire channel. And when I do that, you’ll see all these different customizations in terms of whether or not I want to just add a particular team member or if I want to just select certain team members.
So maybe I want to have something like backlink builders, and then I want to go ahead and select next. And from here, I can select who I want for this, and then I can go ahead and confirm that group. And just like that, I now have a team channel for backlink builders.
The reason why this is really powerful is because maybe you have a team of virtual assistants in different time zones, and you want them to be able to communicate with one another where you’re also in the room and able to stay in the loop on the different things that you guys are working on.
Well, you can do that all in Connecteam. And you don’t need to set up a separate Slack instance or a separate Discord server just for this to happen. It all lives in the same platform. So that’s just the first use case that you can use connecting for.
How to use Connecteam Updates feature
The second use case that you might use it for, for your business though is on the left-hand side for updates. And the reason why I love updates is because I have found myself often having to copy and paste the same message to all my Upworkers in the past about a particular SOP change or some sort of update that I’ve made to the way that I run things. And it’s really annoying. Whereas on Connecteam, I can do this all in a matter of just a few clicks.
By simply going to the update section, I can go ahead and click add new and what you’ll see is that you can either start from scratch or you can use an existing template. When I use an existing template, you’ll see the plethora of ways that you can use Connecteam’s updates in order to update your team on important news. You can even use it for updating things just in general to build more.
Say for example, I want to update my team on the birthday of a team member, or I want to tell them about some new teammates. What you’ll notice that all of these things already exist in Connecteam, ready for you to plug and play.
The reason why this is super powerful is because again, it allows you to communicate with your team in a more meaningful way. When you create one of these templates what’s going to happen is you’re going to be able to actually customize all the different ways that you want to send this message and then send it to a particular team member as well. And then when I do that, I can go ahead and choose whether or not I want to publish it now or schedule it for later.
Connecteam is so powerful because it’s incredibly customizable. You can customize the way everything looks and feels as well as when certain things are published. So in this case, maybe I want to schedule it for a few weeks from now in this case and then go ahead and schedule that. Well in this situation, I’m going to go ahead and select remind your day as well. And then I’m going to go ahead and click confirm and what I’ve gone ahead and done that, I now have this message all in one place.
And the cool thing about this updates feature is it actually holds your team accountable. It will actually update you when people have viewed each of these particular updates or liked it or commented it.
So it’s kind of like having a personal Facebook wall for your team while also being able to see exactly who has viewed all of these updates. So as opposed to having to use another platform like Asana or Trello and not knowing whether or not people have actually seen that particular task in this situation, you get all the insights in terms of which of your team members have actually been reading and staying up to date with your updates.
Connecteam employee satisfaction surveys
The third way you can use Connecteam is for employee satisfaction surveys. There’s nothing more important than knowing that your team is happy because if you have a happy team, then you have a productive team. And if you have a productive team, then your business is growing and Connecteam makes this super simple.
What you need to do is in the left side, you’re going to see a skill section. And what you can do is you can actually select surveys and then from here, what you can do is you can go ahead and add new and then use a template and one of the top templates is going to be an employee satisfaction survey. You can use this just for an employee satisfaction survey, but you can also use it for all different sorts of use cases as well.
These surveys can be a great way to drive even greater performance from your team. Instead of having to just ask people how they feel about their work, you can actually send performance surveys to different team members that are working with other team members to see exactly what they think about working with that team member.
And when I do that, what you’ll notice is that all of these are customizable. In fact, I can even make this particular satisfaction survey anonymous if I choose. In this case, what you can do is you can go ahead and customize any of these fields as you would like. And so this is really cool because essentially you’re able to create anything that you might be able to create in another tool, like a Typeform or a Google Forms, but do it in the same place as where all the other things that you have around employee management or operations lives.
And that’s the beauty of Connecteam. It brings everything to a single source of truth so that you don’t have to keep logging into 10 different platforms to accomplish the same task.
So in this situation, you’ll see that there’s a few different sample questions that you can use such as, does your work feel meaningful to you? Do you feel challenged in your work, and things like that. And you can go ahead and customize this. So maybe I want to delete a few of these questions and you’ll see how the preview updates on the right hand side when I do that. What’s really cool about Connecteam is that it’s actually built for both desk and desk-less employees.
So in the case where you have somebody that’s regularly in the field for something, maybe you are a security guard, or maybe you’re an executive assistant who is constantly on the run for your CEO, well you can use the mobile app of Connecteam to still track all of these sorts of updates and complete these surveys.
So in this case, when I saved my changes, what I can do is I can again, choose who I want to show this to and then from here, I can actually publish it now or schedule it for later. And when I’ve done so, what it’ll do is it’ll actually tell me exactly who has completed this survey at different points in time. Those are just three quick ways that you can use Connecteam’s platform.
Connecteam Time Clock feature
The fourth way that you can use Connecteam to improve the efficiency of your business as with the time clock feature. So what you can do is you can set up a time clock for your team to manage when they’re clocking in and clocking out. By doing so you’ll give your team members the ability to also leave notes for you, and you can also leave notes for them.
So what’s really cool about this feature is that you’ll actually be able to save all the time logs for your employees in a single source of truth. And you can even set up their pay scales and things like that to see exactly how much you owe them. This is really powerful in the case where you’re maybe using an old school Excel spreadsheet, or maybe you’re just using a simple Google sheet to track the sort of stuff or maybe you’re working with a virtual assistant on Upwork and you want to bring them off Upwork. So you want to set up a time sheet for them that’s similar to Upwork’s existing tracker.
What’s great about Connecteam is that they make it really simple for you as the business owner to export all of these insights and to customize it to what you find most interesting.
If I wanted to export this, I can export it just as a CSV or an Excel file or I can also export it as a PDF. And when I do that, I can go ahead and open up this report and you can see how, if I were to have some more data here, I would have all the information about this particular employee, along with their clock-in, clock-out notes and things like that, that I could then send over to maybe my virtual assistant and then what I could do is I could pass this along to my virtual assistant that helps me in payroll to essentially approve this particular timesheet.
So hopefully you’re starting to see the plethora of ways that you can use Connecteam’s platform to improve your business operations.
Connecteam’s Courses section
The fifth and final way that you can use Connecteam though, is for their courses section. I think this is so, so powerful because it essentially consolidates all the different ways that you might be training your employees right now to a single flow where everything lives as well. So in this case, on the left-hand side, you’re going to look for the courses section. From here, what you can do is you can click the add new button and maybe I want to call this uploading to YouTube backend because I have a virtual assistant that helps me upload these videos into YouTube backend.
So maybe I wanted to create a section which is YouTube tags. I will add this object. And then from here, maybe I would go ahead and upload my existing PDF of instructions in terms of the different ways that they need to approach tags.
So, what I could do is I could do that, but I could also go ahead and include a YouTube video, or maybe it’s a video where I’ve recorded myself doing the task myself, or maybe I just want to create a form where I want to have them start from scratch. In this case, I’m going to say YouTube tags. And maybe I’m going to add a question, like, have you reviewed the long tail keyword for this particular video?
And then I’ll have a yes and then I’ll have a no and confirm that. And then I’m going to say. Have you used all 500 characters? Yes and no, make it required. And then what you’d see is that you’d essentially be able to create a course that teaches your particular virtual assistant or your team the different ways that you want them to be thinking about this particular principle.
So from here, what I can do is I can go ahead and just save this and then choose who I want to see this particular file. And when I do that, this course is going to publish and what’s really cool about Connecteam is that it’s actually tell me which of my team members have started this particular course and which ones haven’t gotten around to it yet.
This is really powerful because it essentially makes sure that everybody is getting onboard in the same repeatable way. So, how might you use this?
Well, if you’re using a Notion board or maybe a Dropbox folder, or maybe even just Google documents to try to detail all the different ways you’re doing things you can now create interactive courses that your team can follow along with to truly master the skills that you’re teaching them.
Something I also want to mention though, is Connecteam’s customer support team. In the case where you decide to try them for free, you’re going to find that their customer support is super responsive. They have a team that works US-based hours, as well as Australian-based hours, which is great because it means that you can often get responses as quickly as within two minutes.
So in the case where you need any help along the way, you’ll find that their team is super happy to help you. In fact, Connecteam has a 4.8 rating as well as a four and a half star rating on Capterra and G2 respectively. Just to really speak to how good this product really is. They’ve been growing 350% year over year and with good reason because they are truly serving the needs of business owners like you.
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