Connecteam Review: the Best for Employee Management?

In today’s fast-paced and interconnected business landscape, effective communication and streamlined workflows are crucial for any successful organization.

Whether you’re a manager or a managee, smooth communication can be greatly appreciated and can enhance daily processes by cutting out the to-and-fro of interpersonal communication.

While doing your task management and employee scheduling on physical paper may work, it isn’t the most effective way to get those jobs done in today’s age of technology. On top of that, if you have deskless employees, it is especially inefficient to do those tasks physically.

That’s where employee management apps come into the picture, especially of the all-in-one variety.

Enter Connecteam, the self-titled all-in-one employee app for deskless teams aims to facilitate simple employee communication, employee engagement, and task management.

Connecteam is an incredibly versatile tool, and the perks I’ve just mentioned only scratch the surface of what Connecteam users can do with the app.

In this review, I’ll go over what you should expect when signing up with Connecteam, what features Connecteam includes, its pros and cons, and whether or not Connecteam is the right employee app for you and your team.

Connecteam Features:

Connecteam offers users three different feature-oriented “hubs”; one for operations tools, one for communication tools, and one for HR and professional skills-development tools. Thus, I’ll cover each hub as its own feature in-depth as opposed to just rattling off each feature by itself.

1. Operations: With features like employee time tracking software, employee scheduling, quick task management, live GPS tracking and more, the Operations hub is meant to consolidate all of your business operations under one roof, managing when employees clock in and out while keeping an eye on their GPS location.
2. Communications: Connecteam’s Communication tools enhance employee communication through chat channels, team chats, file attachments, a knowledge base, and much more.
3. HR & Skills: As for employee management from a resource perspective, Connecteam allows users to upskill employees via courses and quizzes, give recognition and rewards for their work, and create work-based timelines.
4. Customer support: Connecteam gives users access to many customer support resources, such as their helpful customer service via email and knowledge base.
5. Integrations: Despite their limited integration roster, Connecteam still connects with important apps like Google Calendar, QuickBooks Payroll, Gusto, and NextBee.

Operations

Breaking the Operations hub down into its core features, we have a time clock, a job scheduling solution, forms, and quick task lists.

Time Clock

Connecteam’s time clock was designed to save time for managers and employees when it comes to time tracking and payroll, plus a whole host of other features.

For example, included GPS tracking allows you to see employee location when they are clocking in and out, also making sure that your employees are always clocking in on-site. Additionally, breadcrumbs allow users to manage non-desk employees when they’re on the go.

Job Scheduler

To accelerate daily processes and save time, Connecteam’s job scheduler makes planning, dispatching, and executing shifts much simpler for everyone involved, from employee to manager.

Standout features include schedule templates, bulk shift editing directly from the schedule, and easy communication between everyone on a shift.

Forms

Designed to eliminate pen-and-paper solutions, Connecteam’s forms allow users to fill in reports, forms, checklists, requests, and more all from their mobile app.

This includes features like automated follow-up capabilities, automated reports based on gathered forms and employee data, and bulk actions to allow users to easily download form entries as PDFs.

Quick Tasks

Connecteam’s Quick Tasks feature set includes recurring tasks to eliminate recurring scheduling work, employee reminders (automatic or manual), task tags to classify your tasks, and customized mobile permissions to decide who can create and assign tasks through the mobile app.

Communications

As Connecteam breaks their Communications hub down into its core features, there is chat, updates, a directory, surveys, events, and a knowledge base. I’ll cover the most important features; most of them are self-explanatory.

Chat & Updates

Connecteam’s chat is fairly self-explanatory; it provides teams a place to communicate, divide groups into separate chat channels, and send shortcut links to chat from any other Connecteam app feature.

Additionally, through this chat, users can post updates and announcements, including media/file attachments, live polls/surveys, comments, and more.

Knowledge Base

The ability to create a knowledge base for your team can be vital due to its ability to store archived knowledge assets, and Connecteam delivers a system that users can divide into knowledge categories, individual bases within a category, and a full library.

HR & Skills

Similarly to the Communications hub, the HR & Skills hub has a lot of overlapping content. Thus, I’ll compile multiple sections into one bit so I don’t waste any more of your time.

Time Off, Recognition, Rewards, and Celebrations

These four all fall into the bin of rewards, just of different types.

As time off goes, you can manage time off by creating a carryover limit, require admin approval for time off, manage permissions, apply limitations, and more.

When it comes to recognition and rewards, users can create custom badges for accomplishments and display them within the Connecteam app. Plus, management can attach messages to these badges and rewards to make them feel more personalized.

Celebrations is mostly about holidays or birthdays, where users can see the birthdays of their fellow employees on the employee calendar, automatically post celebrations for these birthdays, attach personal messages, and even enable team-based celebrations.

Courses & Quizzes

As for the “Skills” part of “HR & Skills”, users can create courses with unlimited categories, and have unlimited courses within those categories. Plus, on top of that, you can have text, images, PDFs, YouTube embeds, quizzes, insights, and more as a part of your courses.

The quizzes are less of an upskilling tool and more of a skill maintenance tool, with the ability to add up to 8 answers per question and includes many features of quizzes that you may expect, like showing/hiding final scores, showing which answers were correct if a user got a question wrong, randomizing question order, limiting quiz attempts, and more.

Customer Support

Connecteam’s customer support is fairly standard, being able to contact the company directly via email through a form on their website or via live chat also on their website. Connecteam claims to be able to reply to any question in under 5 minutes, but I didn’t test that for accuracy.

To compensate for their fairly standard customer support, Connecteam’s Help Center is extensive, and might even cover the topics I’m covering better than I am. They have detailed summaries of each of the three feature-oriented hubs, billing information, troubleshooting, basic app tutorials, and much more available for their customers.

This leads to customer support being more of a “do it yourself” situation, as their resources for users to solve their own problems are much more robust than their standard customer support solutions.

Integrations

While Connecteam doesn’t integrate with many apps, the apps it does integrate with allow users to consolidatemajor components of their business , from time management to payroll.

First, Connecteam integrates with Google Calendar, which allows users to receive email notifications regarding their shift scheduling and have those shifts appear automatically in their Google Calendars.

Next, Connecteam integrates with QuickBooks Payroll, which allows users to easily transfer work hours from Connecteam to QuickBooks Online. This does only account for total work hours; things like overtime, PTO, job-specific information, and contractor hours aren’t factored into that total.

Lastly, Connecteam integrates with Gusto, an all-in-one HR platform that can do everything from payroll to hiring/onboarding to employee benefits. This is a more precise way to do payroll, as not only can you transfer total hours from Connecteam to Gusto, you can also transfer overtime at both 1.5x and 2x multipliers. Again, PTO, job-specific information, and contractor hours aren’t factored in however.

Unfortunately Connecteam doesn’t integrate with Zapier, which leaves nearly 5,000 other integration options on the table. Users will have to work with the three integrations I’ve already mentioned.

Connecteam Pricing:

Connecteam offers three different hubs with different purposes, those being the Operations Hub, the Communications Hub, and the HR & Skills Hub.

Each hub has plans broken down into four tiers: Small Business (free for up to 10 users), Basic (starting at $35/mo), Advanced (starting at $59/mo), and Expert (starting at $119/mo).

These prices are for the first 30 users; every user past 30 costs $0.60/mo for the Basic plan, $1.80/mo for the Advanced plan, and $3.60/mo for the Expert plan.

Here is a summary of each hub, with images:

Operations Hub

This hub includes key features to easily schedule shifts and communicate visual job progress such as the following:

• Employee time clock
• Work schedule
• Employee scheduling
• Advanced checklists & digital forms
• Quick tasks

Communications Hub

This hub includes key features to promote employee connectivity and simplify internal communication, with multiple communication tools such as:

• Email/text messages
• Automated push notifications
• Organizational directory
• Surveys
• Events
• Searchable online libraries

HR & Skills Hub

This hub includes key features vital to managing and upskilling employees as well as promoting a company’s culture such as:

• Time off
• Courses & Quizzes
• Documents
• Recognition, rewards, & celebrations
• Timeline

Connecteam Review Conclusion: is it right for you?

In this Connecteam review, I’ve gone over the totality of Connecteam’s feature suite as an all-in-one employee app, hopefully in an objective manner.

I also want to make clear that Connecteam is incredibly user-freindly, with a myriad of support options as a part of their Help Center so users can solve their own problems if standard customer support isn’t coming fast enough.

Overall, regardless of your team’s size, I can say that Connecteam is a great all-in-one employee app with incredible space for expansion as your team grows.