If you're looking for a more efficient way to manage your employees, communicate with staff, and organize projects, Podio is a project management and CRM tool that's worth checking out. While I'm fairly new to it, one our clients has been using it for the last two years and gave it a great review. They said: Podio makes managing deadlines, assigning tasks, and keeping projects organized easier than ever. It makes sense to use if your company has more than two employees.

Podio At a Glance

Podio is defined as a “cloud-based collaboration service”. In 2009 founders Jon Froda and Anders Pollas brought it to the market with help from founding developer Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen. At that time, it was called Hoist. In 2012 Citrix acquired the service.

Podio Benefits and Features

One of the benefits of Podio is that it helps managers assign projects to his or her team. They can task out every step of each project if they'd like and assign deadlines. As each step is completed, each member of his or her team can check them off. The manager can enable email notifications to alert them as their employees check off tasks. As part of this, Podio serves as a digital to-list and helps users make sure every part of a project is accounted for. Through this service, users can update each other on where they are in various stages of each project and estimated completion times. Users can decide how to structure projects by adding workspaces and sharing them with parties involved.

A helpful feature is instant messages. If your company does not have inner-office instant messages, sending a message through Podio can be more productive than making a phone call. In the instant messages, links and attachments can be shared. This can really cut down on emails.

Another useful feature is Podio Apps. Create your own app or choose from already created ones. There must be hundreds. A few that caught my eye include:

• Meetings - organize, run, and record meetings using GoToMeeting integration.
• The Happy Pack - promote happiness, motivation, and energy.
• Intranet - you can use this app to create a company intranet. Post important messages for
staff, a department directory, and more.

Since Podio is cloud-based, it can be accessed anytime, anywhere via the web. Users don't need to download any kinds of software to run Podio.

How Much Does it Cost?

Podio pricing starts at $0 per month for up to five employees. As more users are added, pricing increases to $9 per employee, per month. Larger teams will need a Podio business account and should contact Podio for pricing.

What are some tech tools you're using for project management? Head over to our Twitter page and let me know.

And on that note, off to Podio I go to check off that this blog post has been written.