12 COO Tools to Improve Your Workflow (+ Free Template)

Business process management (BPM) is a huge priority for a lot of companies because it saves money, improves employee engagement, and allows teams to produce more products (which in turn, generates higher revenue). Focusing on BPM is so critical that many companies are even hiring designated staff to oversee and improve the overall efficiency of the company. With 40% of leading companies having a COO in 2022, it’s about time that companies hone in on fine-tuning processes and the types of software tools that can help your COOs do so! 

• What does a COO do?
• Benefits of COO tools
• 12 COO tools to improve your workflow
• Streamline COO productivity with Fellow

What does a COO do? 

A chief operating officer (COO) is one of the main people responsible for the success of an organization. At a high level, their goal is to optimize the efficiency of the company’s processes and ensure the necessary resources are in place to help each team meet their goals. Because of their dominant role in process optimization, COOs also hold their own key performance objectives (KPIs) centered around team and project efficiency. They are also vital for handling crises as they arise. There are many types of COOs depending on an organization’s size, departmental needs, relationship with external stakeholders, use of the chief executive officer (CEO), and future succession plans. 

Benefits of COO tools

• Improved efficiency
• Increased productivity
• Better organization
• More accessibility

Improved efficiency

Improving efficiency is the primary goal of a COO’s job, so the best tools to support COOs also need to be able to aid this responsibility. For example, COOs can get notified of duplicate tasks so that one can be removed and team members don’t accidentally put in double the work for a project when it’s not necessary. Additionally, these tools can assign team members to be responsible for a project which ensures it gets started right away! 

Increased productivity

COOs can leverage tools to accelerate their productivity! A primary way that software tools can support this is by automating simple tasks such as calendar scheduling or meeting agenda planning so that the COO can spend their time on tasks that involve more critical thinking skills, like determining a strategy for process improvement on a specific team. 

Better organization

Since COOs oversee improvement projects and crisis handling across all departments of an organization, they need to be well organized and quick to respond. Software designed for COOs can help prioritize inbound requests, filter tasks by project type or related team, and notify individuals of upcoming due dates automatically. By leveraging software to stay organized, COOs can immediately see what items they need to tackle first and be prepared to jump into those activities right away. 

More accessibility

In the day-to-day role of a COO, there’s plenty of communication between teams and department heads. COOs need to be great communicators and they should also make use of software tools to improve the accessibility of their communications. For example, they can record videos of meetings to make it easier for employees to replay the conversation at a later time as needed. They can also add subtitles, visuals, or translations to requests so they’re more likely to be understood by the receiving team.

12 COO tools to improve your workflow

• Meeting management tools
• Project management tools
• Communication and collaboration tools
• Financial dashboard tools
• Virtual assistant tools
• Videoconferencing tools

Meeting management tools

Fellow

Fellow is where teams gather to have productive team meetings and meaningful 1:1s, build collaborative meeting agendas, record decisions, and keep each other accountable. Fellow drives engagement and productivity before, during, and after every meeting. Before your meetings, Fellow makes meetings collaborative and productive with AI-enabled meeting preparation tools that provide context, structure, and accountability. With Fellow, meeting organizers can also choose from over 500 pre-built templates, generate an agenda using AI or create one from scratch.

During your meeting, Fellow centralizes the meeting experience and leverages AI to make it easy for attendees to participate, record, and action what was discussed. Fellow is everywhere you need it during meetings. Integrations with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet mean no more switching between tabs and screens to find and record notes.

And after your meeting, Fellow keeps the momentum going after the meeting is over with AI meeting summaries, searchable meeting minutes, automated feedback, and meeting analytics. Fellow’s AI-transcribed meeting notes with AI-summaries make it easy to browse meeting highlights. Get granular by tagging important meeting moments so you can quickly refer to them when you need them. 

Plus, with Fellow’s built-in Meeting Guidelines, you can get your team working together to transform meetings across your organization with meeting best practices integrated into every Google Calendar event. Enable thoughtful meeting creation, boost meeting engagement, and make room for deep work and execution now!

Fellow also helps COOs:

• Keep attendees accountable for the success of the meeting
• Enhance cross-functional communication
• Create alignment among scaling teams and departments
• Never lose track of what was discussed
• Sync meeting notes and action items with your existing workflows

G2 score: 4.7/5

Pricing: Starts at $7 per user per month

Learn more about Fellow’s plans

Range

Designed for teams that work remotely, Range can help COOs oversee asynchronous communication across various teams. Through meeting agendas and online conversation areas, the app allows operational leaders to conduct check-ins on process improvement projects in a timeframe and manner that’s convenient to the department lead, no matter what time zone they’re working in.

 G2 score: 4.6/5

Pricing:

• A free plan is available
• Paid plans start at $8 per team member per month

Project management tools

monday.com

monday.com is an action plan software designed to help teams organize complex projects across multiple teams. COOs can use monday.com to create and assign tasks, track progress, add comments, and receive notifications of upcoming due dates or project delays. This is a great platform to set up and oversee detail-oriented projects from a management perspective! 

G2 score: 4.7/5

Pricing:

• A free plan is available 
• Paid plans start at $8 USD per seat per month

ClickUp

ClickUp is a comprehensive platform that focuses on designing and executing complex projects. Features such as unlimited whiteboards and to-do list builders allow teams to brainstorm new ideas for efficiency improvements. Then, COOs can have insight into the progress of implementation of those ideas through custom in-app goal trackers and dashboards! 

G2 score: 4.7/5

Pricing:

• A free plan is available
• Paid plans start at $5 USD per user per month

Communication and collaboration tools

Slack

Slack is one of the most popular communication tools for remote or distributed teams. It’s easy to understand for new users and allows leaders to see how much time team members are spending on the platform. It also has a “huddle” feature for channel members to jump on a call instantaneously, which is great for handling crises as they arise.

G2 score: 4.5/5

Pricing:

• A free plan is available
• Paid plans start at $6.67 per active user per month

Asana

Asana is a great software product for team collaboration as members can easily create, sync, and communicate about tasks from one spot. Asana also makes it easy for COOs to assign tasks and add priority labels to ensure team members work on more urgent requirements first. To keep organized, each team or department can collaborate within individual workspaces—this makes it easier to oversee and communicate with each team separately, too.

G2 score: 4.3/5

Pricing:

• A free plan is available
• Paid plans start at $10.99 per member per month

Financial dashboard tools

Scoreplan

COOs often manage big budgets to get their goals met! Scoreplan can help COOs measure the budget and return on investment (ROI) of their projects. As the software is specifically tailored for strategic management budgeting and planning, it’s easy for COOs to get approval from a chief financial officer (CFO) or CEO, all while tracking project requirements and budget requests in one place. 

G2 score: N/A

Pricing:

• No free plan is available, but Scoreplan does offer a free trial
• Paid plans start at approximately $9 USD per member per month

Wrike

Through easy-to-understand dashboards and unlimited custom request forms, Wrike makes it easy for COOs to create resource requirements lists, get approvals, and then track spending and results. It’s also easy for users to download reports and share them with the CEO when updates on progress are required! 

G2 score: 4.2/5

Pricing: 

• A free plan is available
• Paid plans start at $9.80 per team per month

Virtual assistant tools

Fellow AI

Fellow, the top meeting and management software, makes it easier than to plan, attend, and capture great meetings with AI-powered features. AI-generated meeting agendas, suggested topics, and AI meeting transcription elevate your meetings from start to finish. Meeting preparation is fast and easy with Fellow’s AI-generated agendas, topics, and suggested talking points. Fellow’s AI meeting assistant takes cues from meeting titles, meeting descriptions, previous meeting notes, and attendees to suggest relevant meeting structures with topics and talking points so your meetings are set up for success. Fellow’s AI meeting assistant also takes care of recording and transcribing meetings so participants can stay focused and engaged in the discussion. Additionally, AI meeting summaries, paired with recordings and full AI meeting transcriptions are all in one place to keep all stakeholders in the loop, even when they’re not in the meeting. Fellow is a central repository for all meeting records so everyone is aligned and follow-ups are clear.

G2 score: 4.7/5

Otter

Otter helps COOs who attend a lot of meetings document and summarize their meeting notes effectively. Otter also works well for meetings that have a lot of attendees as it can identify individual speakers and their contributions to the conversation! Having well-documented meeting notes is necessary for ensuring accountability on decisions from department leaders and building lists of areas for improvement across the company.

G2 score: 4.1/5

Pricing:

• A free plan is available
• Paid plans start at $16.99 per user per month

Videoconferencing tools

Zoom

Zoom is one of the most popular videoconferencing software to date. It allows teams to connect with remote members and enables meeting hosts and team leads to track participation, record calls, and take surveys—which helps with organizing projects. 

G2 score: 4.5/5

Pricing:

• A free plan is available
• Paid plans start at $14.99 per host per month

Google Meet 

If your company operates within the Google Cloud Suite, then Google Meet is a great option to use for videoconferencing. Google Meet syncs well with other Google products like Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Chat. And it even integrates with Fellow in a Chrome extension to allow you to have meeting agendas available directly within your calls!

G2 score: 4.6/5

Pricing:

• A free plan is available
• Premium version available for $6 per user per month

Streamline COO productivity with Fellow

As a COO, a big part of the role is to ensure the wider company can operate more efficiently. For example, Josh Andrews, the COO at Square, was able to do this at his company by leveraging Fellow to make every company meeting more productive. Part of how he accomplished this was by using meeting agenda templates in every call to ensure high-priority talking points and action items are included. And using these templates works for executive team meetings, too! 

Parting advice 

Finding the best tools for COOs can help improve your workflow by making it easier to ideate, find, organize, and track opportunities for development within your company! There are plenty of tools like virtual assistants, financial reporting dashboards, meeting management tools, and more that can help COOs coordinate and execute projects across multiple teams at once. Leveraging these tools is an easy way to make a difficult role a little bit easier!