5 Mobile apps

There’s another benefit of using cloud-based services – a lot of them work with smartphone and tablet apps, meaning your staff can be productive from wherever they happen to be using the smartphone they inevitably have.

That feeds in to another trend that you’ll likely see more of in 2017: that of staff working remotely, yet still as efficiently as if they were behind a desk in an office building.

This trend is a particular boon to sales people who are always on the go, but who in the past didn’t have access to the tools they needed to track leads and appointments efficiently and report back to their managers. Today, cloud-based tools like Honeybee let them do exactly that, and more, using just their phones.

On a more general note, remote team and project management tools like Trello and Slack have taken off in a big way, and will continue gaining popularity as 2017 marches on. Free to use (to a certain point – some features cost money) and available via any internet-connected browser, these powerful tools allow managers to allocate tasks, follow up on requests and generally communicate with their teams, even when they’re all not located in the same physical space. Both services have mobile apps, and both are based in the cloud.

So expect teams to want to work remotely more often in 2017, but rest assured that apps like these – and others – don’t mean a loss of control over staff activities or a loss of oversight on where they are with the projects and tasks they’ve been assigned.

Next: Mobile Money and Payment Tech