Question: What Web tool do you recommend to help small business owners manage people better — whether hours logged or feedback about job performance, or other HR-related tasks?
15Five Measures Performance
“15Five is an online survey tool that gets your employees to spend fifteen minutes writing a report, that their manager/CEO can spend five minutes reading. Surface problems, celebrate wins, and keep a pulse on morale and impending problems.”
– Matt Mickiewicz | Co-Founder, Flippa and 99designs
Asana Manages Tasks
“I use Asana with my team every day to track tasks, hours and deliverables, and plan meetings. By creating systems in Asana projects for the tasks my team manages, I can review their output and compare it to the detailed process I gave them. It resolves so many questions about what I, as a business owner, actually wanted to see!”
– Kelly Azevedo | Founder, She’s Got Systems
Basecamp by 37signals
“Basecamp is a great tool to manage ongoing or time-specific projects that a business may have. Basecamp is great because I can assign individuals on my team tasks and know exactly when they complete them. Also, I can give immediate feedback on their work as soon as they post it within the system. You can track time with Basecamp, or you can connect to one of their many third party apps to do this.”
– Lawrence Watkins | Founder & CEO, Great Black Speakers
Stick With Smartsheet
“We use Smartsheet to document tasks, prioritize projects and log employee hours every month. I receive alerts when employees update a sheet so I can passively keep an eye on projects. Plus, I can also reprioritize tasks at any time when we need to switch gears.”
– Phil Frost | Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Main Street ROI
Silk Road Suite Is Complete
“I like the entire suite of Silk Road cloud-based products. Point especially is a great employee-centric social talent management and collaboration solution. Wingspan also makes the performance review process painless!”
– Alexandra Levit | President and Founder, Inspiration at Work
Try Out Trello
“I highly recommend Trello as a tool to manage subgroups within your organization. It is a project management tool that is simple enough so everyone can catch on quickly, and you can see the status of each task as it moves through stages. On WSO and jdOasis.com, we also use Trello every day.”
– Patrick Curtis | Chief Monkey and Founder, WallStreetOasis.com
Harvest for Hourly Tracking
“Harvest is an extremely intuitive and useful tool makes it super easy to manage projects and hours with staff and freelancers. Its mobile app also makes it simple for our distributed teams to log time accurately while working from remote locations.”
– David Cohen | Vice President, Round Table Companies
ezTimeSheet for Payroll
“I recommend using ezTimeSheet. It costs only $39 and can really cut down on the time you spend on payroll. It tracks regular work hours, vacation time, PTO and sick days. It’s also very easy to use!”
– Andrew Schrage | Co-Owner, Money Crashers Personal Finance
Freckle Time Tracking
“Freckle is a great online tool to track employee hours. Your team can log in from anywhere, so if they want to put in a few hours work from Topeka during a layover or log some time while at the beach, it’s just a click away. It allows the project manager to keep an eye on how many hours people are spending on what projects, and generates comprehensive payroll reports.”
– Nick Reese | CEO, Microbrand Media
Go With Google Calendar
“Google Calendar is one tool everyone should use. Leaders should schedule one-on-one meetings every week with their direct reports to understand their concerns and frustrations, as well as guide them and provide positive and constructive criticism. There’s no substitute for face time, but you need to make sure you schedule it and religiously adhere to that schedule.”
– Bhavin Parikh | CEO, Magoosh Test Prep
TribeHR for Team Management
“TribeHR is a breath of fresh air in the world of human resources. The software is beautiful and focuses on building an amazing team of people who are empowered, engaged, and inspired, which will ultimately allow you to build the best company you can. It covers everything from recruiting to performance and employee recognition to payroll.”
– Natalie MacNeil | Emmy Award Winning Media Entrepreneur, She Takes on the World
Pick Up Paychex
“Paychex save our company a lot of time and money. All of our employees have direct deposit, so I never have to hear, “I lost my paycheck, may I please have another one?” Paychex provides logins for each employee so they can view their paychecks, commissions, taxes and vacation days. When W-2s are released, employees are able to log in and print those off too. Our rep also rocks!”
– Nancy T. Nguyen | Founder/Sweet Sylist, Sweet T Salon
Replicon Removes Stress
“Replicon is a great way to track employee hours in the cloud and avoid tedious offline tracking.”
– Josh Weiss | Founder and President, Bluegala
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched  #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.