Using The Mobile App to Maximize Your Business Productivity

The intent and purpose of going into a business are primarily to make good returns on investments and this borders around the productivity of your employees. For your business to really thrive in this highly competitive global market it’s absolutely necessary that your employees are freed from bottlenecks and distractions, which you can enhance and maximize by using the relevant mobile app

The fact that in 2019, the number of mobile phone users is forecast to reach 4.68 billion globally is a pointer that you need to catch in on the trend. App usage and smartphone penetration are still growing at a phenomenal rate and there are no signs that this will slow down in the foreseeable future.

You should also take into consideration that there are 1.23 billion tablet users worldwide, to really appreciate the impact mobile apps can have on your business. Studies also revealed that the average American checks the phone every 12 minutes and 90% of the mobile time are spent on apps. This is an avenue you can utilize to maximize your business productivity since you will only be capitalizing on the interest of your employees to boost productivity.

You can also factor in the fact that;

• Mobile apps are expected to generate $189 billion in revenue by 2020.
• The Apple App Store has 2.2 million apps available for download.
• There are 2.8 million apps available for download on the Google Play Store.
• 21% of Millennials open an app 50+ times per day.
• 49% of people open an app 11+ times each day.
• 57% of all digital media usage comes from mobile apps.

If mobile apps are not working for businesses, the rate of app downloads worldwide will not increase as we have observed over the years. What everybody is doing can’t be overly wrong.

Credit: Statista

Mobile apps are the rave of the moment but you need to find out what works for you. According to Kris Duggan, Founder and Ex-CEO of BetterWorks, “First, identify the areas where you’re regularly wasting time after which you select mobile apps or services that will enhance a smooth, stress-free running. Nearly every problem you may face today has a technological solution but if you embark on using every app and service out there, your productivity will plummet.”

Let’s take a look at how you can use these five types of apps to maximize your business productivity.

1. Productivity measuring apps

In today’s knowledge economy, businesses deal in ideas rather than appliances coming off an assembly line. Some businesses even employ the use of mobile apps to track the users to understand the buyer behavior through their searches or the products that they bought.

This in effect has rendered the classic formula for productivity useless. The measurement of business productivity is no longer just the case of dividing output by input.

Professor Lynn Wu of Wharton Business School said that productivity is hard to measure when it has to do with knowledge work. “It’s nowhere near as simple as the number of bushels a worker picked in an hour,” says Lynn.

A Forbes article (“The New World of Monitoring”) identifies two types of employees that businesses need to keep an eye on—the “time thieves” or employees who use work hours for leisure, and the “data thieves” or employees who illegally access critical information that can jeopardize the entire business organization. While the latter is a far more serious violation with serious consequences, both are bad for the business, thus, more and more business owners resort to the use of monitoring software over the years.

There’s no gainsaying the fact that whatever you can measure, you can effectively manage.

Measuring productivity appropriately is now more important than you may have thought and that boils down not only to value the quantity of work but also the quality. You must resist the urge to implement blanket policies that can alienate high-producing employees and cause overall morale to nosedive.

To adequately and appropriately measure productivity for today’s business environment, you need a productivity-measuring app. Using these mobile apps ensure that you are monitoring, streamlining, and managing projects across your entire team in a way that’s intuitive.

2. Ease the stress on employees

Your employees are after all humans and do have frailties. They are sometimes bogged down by worries and would gladly resort to any device that would ease the tension encountered especially from doing mental works.

Mobile apps like Google Drive ( to store all your documents), Google Docs ( to create, edit, and combine with your team documents), Google Sheets ( to do the same on the spreadsheet), and Expensify ( a great expense report keeper) are just a few that you capitalize on to maximize productivity.

Expensify allows you to stay organized while the app handles your accounting jobs.

Using a DIY automation platform will bring about a certain sense of ease and efficiency as you go about maximizing your business productivity.

3. Flexibility, collaboration, and time apps

Undoubtedly, about the greatest feature of mobile apps is that they enhance greater levels of flexibility for the employees. If you don’t confine your employees to a strict 9-5 schedule, you will be surprised at how they can benefit from individual peak times to improve overall performance. 

A recent survey by Vodafone found that 83% of businesses were able to maximize productivity as a result of the flexible working policy. Employees find it easy to update themselves or even train each other for better outputs using enterprise social media as well as other channels.

This collaboration can be easily adapted to mobile apps. Why this approach is necessary is due to the proven ability that it connects workers at remote and distant places who get to merge or blend their expertise when it is most needed even in highly innovative ways, such as sketches and other visuals.   

A study shows that 45.8% of respondents mentioned that sharing information across teams and communication problems are the biggest reasons for business failures. The mobile app will always come in handy when your team is probably out on the field for deals, being able to carry on the real-time inputs of the data (of prospective customers or of orders) result in faster sales’ process.

4. Apps that keep you in tune with events

An area you can utilize the mobile app to maximize your business productivity is the ability to be constantly and promptly armed with the most important piece of information.  A study shows that an astounding 96 percent of professionals believe their employees aren’t using time tracking correctly, for one reason or another and also, time theft accounts for 2.2 percent of gross payroll losses. 

They might be logging their time retroactively (and therefore inaccurately), or may forget to start and stop the timer at proper intervals. You will be able to track a person, place, project, or a task by date. 

This ensures that balance is created in work and life. It lets people stay on top of all tasks, goals, and projects. Time tracking is a good way to ensure employee engagement thereby maximizing your business productivity.

5. Management apps

Keeping work hours reasonable will maximize productivity. A study conducted on employees in Greece who worked an average of 42 hours per week or 2,042 hours a year and German workers, who averaged a 28-hour work week, or 1,371 hours a year, discovered that the Germans were more productive by 70 percent.

“For me, time management tools are super important,” Andrew Chen, an investor in the San Francisco Bay Area said. “When you are in [a] tech job, the scarcest thing is your own attention and other peoples’ attention. Money isn’t usually the bottleneck. So you need tools to help manage this scarce resource so you can maximize it.”

It’s the duty of management to ensure that randomness and waste are totally eliminated. This can be ensured by using task management apps. They enable executives to use tags for assigning priorities, context, time, and other work thereby saving time. 

Anything that meets business workflow work is managed through these applications. The apps also allow filtering time-sensitive tasks and relevant work for completion on required time.

An important feature of management apps is a quick entry window, which enables professionals to brainstorm and enter their ideas. Through this feature, new tasks and instant ideas can be promptly added. 

You possibly have all along been running it on your own, now is the time to allow the mobile app to take over and bring about productivity maximization. It’s true that Desktop apps have been always a great way of doing work while sitting, however, you don’t need to stay glued to a spot stressing up your life.

Feel free, enjoy your work while being more productive at the same time. You can let your smartphone act as a powerful computer for you. Just download the right mobile app or better still allow a DIY application builder like Appy Pie to build your mobile app that comes along with everything that will help you maximize productivity at your work.