Everything You Need to Know About Digital Workplace

The term “digital workplace” has seen too many interpretations over the past decade. As companies worldwide started looking for proactive ways to move ahead with their digital transformation strategies, one thing that gained the most attention is managing a digital workforce. However, adopting a digital workplace approach is much more than having a remote team. While that is a part of the digital workforce, it is not limited to the generic definition of managing employees digitally.

In the modern era, a workplace has evolved beyond physical spaces. It has become an always-connected environment where your team can instantly access everything they need to get their job done. A digital workplace makes this more practical by being a virtual workplace setting.

Read More: Key Predictions on How Workplace Technology and Culture Will Evolve in 2020 & Beyond

What is a digital workplace?

According to Deloitte, “The digital workplace comprises all the technologies people use to get work done in today’s workplace – both the ones in operation and the ones yet to be implemented. It ranges from your HR applications and core business applications to email, instant messaging, and enterprise social media tools and virtual meeting tools.”

Gartner observes that the “digital workplace facilitates new and effective ways of working; increases employee engagement and agility; and exploits consumer-oriented styles and technologies.” 

A digital workplace is a connecting hub where your employees get all the tools needed to deliver their best output. 

Different explanations tag a digital workplace to using specific software applications. It is more about employing digital transformation at work that drives superior employee productivity and operational efficiency. Upgrading traditional business processes and workflows with modern digital technology is a crucial part of a digital workplace.

What are the key elements of a digital workplace?

The recent developments in technology have simplified communication and collaboration between teams, irrespective of their physical locations. With cutting-edge all-in-one team management platforms like InfinCE, it has become much easier for businesses to tap into the entire ecosystem of digital applications to connect and collaborate on a project. Here are some of the crucial elements that make up a digital workplace.

A reliable communication and collaboration platform

A reliable communication and collaboration platform is a must in your digital workplace. 

Instant messaging solutions help your team to communicate in real-time. But you need an instant messaging platform that offers add-on features like file sharing and document management. InfinCE has it all!

We ensure that everyone in your team has easy access to everything they need in one place to perform their job roles. Our digital workplace orchestration platform also includes video meetings, one-on-one audio/video calls, multiple screen-sharing, file sharing, etc., to ensure effective communication.

Read More: A Guide to Improving Workplace Collaboration for the Modern Enterprise

Data sharing

Data sharing is another important aspect of having an efficient digital workplace. While many communication platforms these days allow file sharing, it is vital to check the privacy features and ensure optimal security of the data shared over the channel. InfinCE comes with end-to-end data encryption and added security features like single sign-on, versatile storage management controls, secure file sharing, and more. We help you safely manage your sensitive business data. InfinCE seamlessly integrates with your existing applications so that you can rest assured that your projects run without any glitches or downtime.

Read More: How Successful Leaders Engage Employees Using Modern Business Communication Tools like InfinCE

What a digital workplace is not

While using different digital tools and technologies is a core part of a digital workplace, it is not limited to that alone. For instance, a team collaboration platform will only be efficient if the employees using it are well-versed in making the most of it. InfinCE digital workplace focuses on building a work culture that employs different applications and solutions to work hand-in-hand with the digital transformation strategy of your company. InfinCE is user-friendly, intuitive, and requires minimum training for enterprise-wide adaptability. 

A digital workplace is not merely the following:

1. Digital workplace is not just an intranet 

Even though enterprises rely on intranets to share company information, they have limited scope and do not allow any room for active project discussions. Building a successful digital workplace will not need an intranet if all the information can be stored in the integrated database of the all-in-one collaboration platform. Besides, moving the internal data from the intranet to the digital communication channel to handle remote teams can also be very time-consuming and expensive.

Download White Paper: Reinventing the Corporate Intranet with Employee Experience at the Center 

2. Digital workplace is not an amalgamation of applications

Using multiple applications for managing different things like communication, file and data sharing, web conferencing, document processing and management, employee performance tracking, and the like can be pretty hectic. It will also increase your third-party license and subscription costs. Having multiple applications can create a fragmented and disoriented work environment, affecting the company’s overall productivity.

Download White Paper: How A Digital Workplace Streamlines Business Performance 

3. Digital workplace is not only meant for large enterprises

Having a digital workplace is all about figuring out the needs of a business and adopting the right tools and technologies to ensure smooth execution of operations. Companies can build an efficient digital workplace regardless of their size and industry type. Finding the right solution matters the most in a digital workplace that can facilitate automation and execution of business processes and manage teams and projects.

Case Study: How Fingent Achieved Breakthroughs in Collaboration with InfinCE Digital Workplace

The necessity of a digital workplace

The digital transformation wave is sweeping every industry today. It is the right time to adopt digital systems and build a sustainable digital workplace that aligns with your company’s vision. A dynamic digital workplace contributes to business strategy development. It helps manage your company’s operations as your business grows and expands. It is a significant decision that covers choosing the right digital solutions to ensure that no communication lags or information gaps affect work management.

Using a standalone collaboration tool may not effectively create an efficient digital workplace environment, as it can be limited to communication purposes or data sharing only. 

Read More: 5 Ways to Ensure that Digital Workplace Complexity Doesn’t Bog Down Workforce Productivity

InfinCE digital workplace orchestration platform avoids the need for switching between apps to perform a task. Your team can rapidly make informed decisions through InfinCE’s unified digital work environment. Our goal is to help you build a robust work culture where everyone thrives to their best potential.

Get in touch with us to learn more about InfinCE. 

Best Practices to Optimize Project Management Communication

Agile project management is highly crucial in today’s remote-first, digital-first workplace. The remote work culture has emerged as a potential solution for handling various operational aspects across companies. Remote work management brings several benefits to the table, but it is not devoid of challenges. One of the biggest concerns in managing remote teams is effective communication.

Without consistent and effective project communication between the teams, it can be challenging for the managers to execute actions as planned. Likewise, lack of proper communication will make it impossible to ensure that everyone is on the same page about the project’s status and what changes have been made to it. Ineffective project communication can lead to transparency issues between the teams, affecting their productivity and overall results.

Download White Paper: Adapting to The Changing Face of Enterprise Collaboration

Common Challenges in Project Management Communication

Most managers fail to drive the optimum outcome when managing remote teams. It is because they do not start with a well-planned communication strategy. Remote work and project management should always have a robust communication strategy so that no unwanted scenario pops up. It prevents project teams from using ineffective channels at inappropriate times.

For instance, while dealing with an urgent customer request, email communication alone may not be effective. You may have to use telecommunication, video conferencing, or instant messaging platforms to solve the customer challenge immediately. At the same time, an everyday instant messenger may not support screen sharing or file sharing. Hence, it is crucial to adopt Digital Workplace Orchestration platforms like InfinCE to manage your projects. 

Read more: How Successful Leaders Engage Employees Using Modern Business Communication Tools like InfinCE 

Communication gaps in project management can also arise when some team members are not updated with the project’s progress. For example, suppose someone is handling the design aspect of the project and fails to update the design status to other members. In that case, the production team will have to wait until they receive notification regarding design completion. This can lead to trust and transparency issues and minimize employee productivity. 

Another challenge in project management communication is that managers often do not have the means to fine-tune their strategies as per the project’s progress. Even though the project communication management approach fits the implementation needs, companies may need to accommodate frequent change requests from the customer. It’s crucial to refine the communication and collaboration strategy to match the changing project management demands.

Read more: Business Process Management Strategy for your Small Business 

How to Ensure Project Management Communication Success

When developing the project communication plan, you need to determine how you can pass on the relevant information to the team members in due time. It’s also important to decide how you can share the necessary files and documents with the appropriate parties for carrying out their jobs. InfinCE’s project collaboration software can simplify all these processes.

How to Choose a Project Management Platform

An all-in-one project collaboration platform like InfinCE can come in very handy in team management, as it gives you an effective communication channel for different purposes. InfinCE’s project management software helps you handle knowledge management and data sharing functions. It allows you to oversee the progress and status of various project aspects on a unified dashboard.

Read more: 5 Key Features Every Project Management Dashboard Should Offer 

By adopting a reliable project management platform like InfinCE, you can rest assured that a proper communications workflow is in place. InfinCE helps deliver the data that your team members require to perform their job roles at every stage of the project. Moreover, it can also serve as a channel to collect feedback and improve the project management communication system to guarantee optimal results. InfinCE helps build trust among the team members by making your process more transparent.

Read more: 5 Ways A Project Management Tool Can Help Your Business Grow 

Best Practices to Handle Project Management Communication

Along with an all-in-one project management platform, you also need to implement the best project management communication strategy. The next step is to confirm if the strategy works as intended. As a business owner, you should regularly monitor the strategy. It includes conveying insights generated at each point of the project management process, how and where the data is processed, and how the team members apply insights to improve their work. 

Analyze the efficiency of your project communication strategy at regular intervals to identify any communication gaps and take steps to address them. Keep an eye on how your team members use the project communication platform. Review how project managers use the digital workplace platform to share team and project updates and dashboards. Project management software like InfinCE also helps encourage virtual socialization among team members. You can also use it to assess the performance of your project communication strategy and make changes if needed. 

Read more: 5 Best Practices To Enable Seamless Communication For Your Remote Workforce 

Tips to Manage External Communications

An agile project management tool allows you to communicate with all the parties involved in a project to ensure that you can reach your target outcomes on time. For instance, InfinCE OpenProject enables you to grant access to external users like your clients and other stakeholders. This improves the stakeholders’ visibility over the project’s status. They can recommend insights relevant to the execution of a specific project process. 

You can also manage access to the communication funnel for document sharing internally and for other purposes externally. This will help the team members find the required information instantly, which leads to improved transparency and productivity. On the other end, having a unified communications channel will make collaboration with clients and suppliers much easier for your team members.

Read more: 5 Must-have Features In A Project Management Tool For Small Businesses 

The Closing Note

Besides a robust communication strategy, you also need to ensure appropriate communication at the end of a project. Project management communication will help you confirm that the results meet the intended quality. You can also refine the approach and the process in due course.  

Communication should continue even after completing the project. Employee recognition, social conversations, and casual interactions go a long way in boosting remote team morale, which will eventually lead to high-end productivity and performance.InfinCE is a digital workplace orchestration platform that offers a vast array of collaboration apps, productivity tools, custom dashboards, centralized and private IT infrastructure, custom branding elements, a curated app marketplace, and a host of other features. Talk to us and find out how InfinCE can be your best project management companion.

Demystifying Digital Workplace Complexity for a More Productive Workforce

The concept of a digital workplace has picked up steam ever since the COVID-19 pandemic forced thousands of companies worldwide to shift to a completely remote mode of working for their employees. The scale at which this transition happened and with no preparation time meant that enterprises needed to be at their killer best in enabling seamless adaption of the new normal of work. A Gartner survey points out that over 68% of C-Level executives have agreed that they have active involvement in enabling a digital workplace within the organization.

Read more: 10 Tips for First-time Remote Managers to Handle Their Teams Effectively

On the business front, the enterprise world is witnessing a massive shift to digital that was unprecedented and driven mainly by the need from customers who are now more digital-savvy and demand more digital-friendly services for all their needs. The COVID-19 pandemic was an accelerator to this phenomenon as now people rely on digital for pretty much all needs ranging from shopping to education, banking, and entertainment. Nevertheless, the pace and scale of growth in the digital ecosystem have also put enterprises in a tough spot requiring them to accelerate their operations into the digital realm. In other words, they need to adopt digital workplace solutions to remain competitive.

From customer interactions to internal celebrations, nearly all events have now transitioned into a virtual model. These add up the digital complexity levels in the organization that already had a long list of digital workplace solutions to help them out even before the pandemic made its impact felt. Simply adding newer tech into the digital enterprise ecosystem can negatively impact workforce productivity. A business needs to execute an effective digital workplace strategy that can help employees leverage the right software tools and work more efficiently in their daily routine.

Read more: 10 Benefits of Using Business Communication Apps to Future-Proof Your Company  

Here are some tips for building a digital workplace strategy to ensure that digital workplace complexity does not reach extreme levels and negatively impact workforce productivity:

1. Create awareness

The first step in ensuring that your employees have a firm grip on the digital ecosystem within your organization is to build awareness about the ecosystem. Employees need to be trained and made aware of the need for each tool or the digital workplace solutions that the company invests in and how they can perform their roles better with their aid. Awareness building should be a continuous activity wherein different teams can be segregated based on the applications they need access to and regular sessions on new features, updated functionality, and usage instructions to be followed during different phases. The process should start from the employee on-boarding stage itself, and companies need to keep a tab of their activities that promote awareness.

Download White Paper: How A Digital Workplace Streamlines Business Performance

2. Focus on employees instead of tech focus

While enterprises love to boast about having the latest tech on board in their digital landscape, the practical use of the solution should empower employees to do better in their jobs. Just because a new platform has the latest tech stack, it does not really need to be in your organization. Evaluate software based on the usability it has for your employees, the scope it covers for your unique digital workplace needs, and the business purposes or challenges it can address.

3. Define business goals and metrics for digital workplace solutions

A critical issue that leads to digital workplace complexity is the lack of understanding of the enterprise’s goals. Most organizations do not know why they need to adopt a digital solution or integrate it into their present ecosystem. They also fail to understand how the new digital workplace solution can help them measure progress with the right metrics to evaluate their competence. By defining quantifiable goals for the business and creating relevant metrics to measure progress, the organization focuses on utilizing digital solutions for their intended purpose or outcomes. For example, one key goal for bringing in a digital collaboration tool is to minimize the number of physical meetings or utilization of meeting rooms. For this goal, the metric evaluated could be the number of meetings that have been done online instead of utilizing a meeting room.

Read more: An 8-Point Checklist to Enhance The Modern-Day Digital Workplace

4. Establish communication guidelines

When communication between folks in different hierarchical and organizational structures happens, there will be situations where these could be confusing and ultimately create trouble for the organization. One such challenge for employees is that they need to pay attention to multiple channels when communication happens virtually and through different media like email, intranet, organizational VOIP. 

You can overcome this challenge by including proper guidelines in your digital workplace strategy. Set the policies on which medium to use for a relevant topic or context of communication. The policy should also include which information is to be communicated through which medium. For instance, an organization-wide policy update information should be circulated throughout the company and hence would be wise to publish it via email or the company-wide intranet.

5. Fostering decentralization

In the traditional enterprise ecosystem, decisions were mainly made at the C-Suite or leadership level with very little autonomy for staff in lower hierarchies. But today, the scenario is different as successful organizations focus on empowering staff at all levels to reduce dependencies and make their own decisions for tasks that impact their operations. When digital workforce solutions are incorporated to help employees, this principle of decentralized decision-making needs to be considered. By enabling employees to have a fairer share of participation in an enterprise’s decision-making, they can innovate faster and scale up efficiency without delays. Your digital workplace strategy should focus on incorporating tech that empowers employees to take ownership rather than be plain users.

Read Case Study: How Fingent Achieved Breakthroughs in Collaboration with InfinCE Digital Workplace

From enabling better collaboration to fostering an engaging environment for employees, a digital workplace is a crucial pillar for a sustainable future in the business world. Reports show that over 77% of organizations have prioritized digital workplace as one of their key goals for growth. As the workplace embraces a host of digital solutions, businesses need to ensure that their productivity and efficiency aren’t affected due to overly complex digital environments. Creating the perfect digital workplace strategy combined with a world-class digital workplace orchestration platform like InfinCE can bring out the best in your people. Chat with an expert to learn more about InfinCE. 

Managing a Remote Team Successfully During COVID-19

The remote work culture has become more than a trend today and evolved into the mainstream practice for many companies across the world. While remote working does have many advantages, it comes with quite a few challenges, especially when you have to start managing a completely remote team all of a sudden.

Read more: Best Practices to Remotely Manage Your Business During COVID-19

To effectively navigate the challenges of remote team management, you need to be aware of the significant factors that can affect job performance and level of engagement. You also need to prepare a robust strategy to ensure that everyone in your team delivers their best capability along those lines. This post covers a few tips to manage remote teams efficiently and drive success for your organization.

1. Get the right project management software

This is the most critical aspect of managing a remote team. When working across different time zones, you need to invest in a reliable digital workplace orchestration platform with excellent online communication and work management features. This will help to add more value to your remote working culture while ensuring that you have the right tools to plan tasks, manage projects, track employee performance, and do much more, all under one roof.

Read more: 5 Ways A Project Management Tool Can Help Your Business Grow

2. Schedule every day check-ins

Daily check-ins may seem tricky in a work from home scenario, but it is a vital ingredient for managers and teams new to remote work culture. An email, call, or text message is enough to check with your team and know how they are doing. However, it would be even more effective to use video conferencing to bridge the gap of face-to-face interaction. You can get all these features in an all-in-one team collaboration software, which makes daily communication so much easier for you.

3. Set your expectations right

Your company will have certain expectations for each of the employees in your team. You need to communicate those expectations clearly to your team and get their feedback on whether they align with the same. It is even more critical to reassign your team members to new tasks. Having clear targets for the work hours, availability, team meetings, and project deadlines will help ensure that everyone delivers their best performance to meet the expectations.

4. (Re)Work on your communication skills

You are going to use an online communication platform for managing your remote team. This means that you need to understand how the team management software works, its features, and how you can use it to bring value to your team. You may be familiar with using some online communication channels, but the stakes are higher when it comes to remote team collaboration. So you need to develop your writing skills and virtual meeting strategies to ensure that your team is on the same page when you work on a project.

Read more: 7 Ways to Improve Team Collaboration in 2021

5. Use video conferencing often

While telephonic and written conversations should be a part of your day-to-day team management regime, it is also necessary that you incorporate video conferencing to build rapport. This way, you can assess the body language of your employees and see how they react to a change in plans or a new assignment. It will also help you identify some non-verbal clues that indicate if something is wrong with your team members. That will, in turn, allow you to address the situation proactively before it becomes a significant problem.

Read more: 5 Workplace Innovations You Can Welcome with Video Conferencing

6. Have regular team meetings

Apart from daily check-ins, you should also schedule regular team meetings to discuss the current project and its status. It will help you assess the progress of the job at hand to meet the deadlines as expected. Moreover, regular team meetings can help brainstorm different ideas for new projects while imparting a sense of involvement to everyone in your team. You can also ensure that everyone is up-to-date and works towards realizing the company’s common goal.

7. Focus on the outcomes

It is imperative to focus on the result rather than the process to ensure the optimal engagement of your team members. At the same time, you should also evaluate the process constantly and find ways to improve it to drive better efficiency from your employees. Therefore, you need to define the goals upfront and focus on reaching the target by letting your team members develop the plan of action they feel more comfortable with and execute well.

Download White Paper: Adapting to The Changing Face of Enterprise Collaboration

8. Provide help whenever needed

To build a successful remote team, you should be able to address the requirements of all your employees whenever needed. For instance, if your team comes across an unexpected problem related to the project at hand, you should be there to clarify whatever doubts they have to minimize downtime. Here too, video calls can help you identify if your team members feel low or unmotivated to complete a task. At that point, you can pitch in and give them a helping hand to finish the job as required.

9. Encourage social interactions

Social isolation is a significant challenge in remote working. Therefore, you need to build a remote work culture that integrates informal social interactions in a traditional office setting into your online communications. From virtual weekend meet-ups to after-office casual talks, encouraging social interactions within your team will boost employee morale and engagement. You can even plan virtual pizza parties, happy hours, or employee recognition sessions for non-work-related conversations.

Read more: 5 Best Practices To Enable Seamless Communication For Your Remote Workforce

10. Mentor more, manage well

The best remote team managers prefer to be mentors who guide their teams on different aspects of their job roles rather than “managing” them. Leading by example always works, be it in a traditional office scenario or remote work culture. Make sure that you are more of a mentor and coach to your team. It may require taking new initiatives to address the challenges your team is facing, but it will be worth the effort to develop a successful remote workforce.

These are a few ways, which will help you ensure effective remote team management. As every industry is going global and digital, it is high time to adopt the right approaches and tools that make your team more efficient and gain a competitive advantage in the market.InfinCE is a digital workplace orchestration platform that allows businesses to manage their employees, projects, and operations seamlessly in a remote-first world. Request a demo to see InfinCE in action.

How can businesses enhance workplace collaboration in the digital era?

The COVID-19 pandemic is a crucial driver of change in recent human history. One of the most prominent disruptions it brought about was the closure of offices and workplaces worldwide, pushing millions of employees to work remotely from their homes as much as possible. Organizations that have long followed conservative policies and restricted employees from availing work from home options were forced to transition into an utterly remote mode of working in a matter of days. A year passed and what leading research and survey reports are pointing out is that the remote work culture that pushed its way into the spotlight in 2020 is likely to remain at large in the new normal. A Gartner survey of top CFOs revealed that 74% of respondents were planning to permanently shift a section of their employees to a complete remote mode of working even after the pandemic.

Firms opting for a majority remote work policy can leverage several benefits such as:

• Improved work-life balance for employees
• More productive work hours
• Lower operations cost with very little physical office space utilization required
• Better talent sourcing as remote work allows a global hiring scale. 

However, as firms move into remote work operations, the question of building a team culture arises. Many firms are wondering how to improve collaboration among their employees when most of the staff work remotely.

The answer to this problem lies predominantly in two parts. 

• The first part lies in creating a cultural shift to make your employees more accommodative of remote work demands and act responsibly with the freedom of flexibility granted. 
• The second part is empowering employees with the right digital workplace tools to help them succeed with their daily routine when working from anywhere. 

On this note, let us explore the top five ways to help employees improve workplace collaboration.

Read more: 3 Ways a Workplace App Helps Manage Your Business During COVID-19

1. Streamline communication

The most critical aspect of achieving collaboration efficiency in the workplace is establishing a seamless communication framework. Should leaders address employees from time to time, peer-to-peer communication, or external client or vendor communication, there should be a robust communication ecosystem. It should comprise a powerful email system, instant messaging capability, intranet facility for employee engagement, feedback surveys and corporate announcements, business phone systems functioning over VOIP technology, and so on. 

Read more: 5 Best Practices To Enable Seamless Communication For Your Remote Workforce

Organizations need to define and implement an effective communication policy that outlines a framework that guides staff to find the right personnel for a query and the right medium to reach out to them. This will enable better and more productive communication, especially when employees are not working together in a physical space.

Download White Paper: How a Digital Workplace Streamlines Business Performance

2. Enable productive meetings

In almost all workplaces, tasks are often driven to completion through effective teamwork. For team members to remain in sync with each other and other dependent teams in a larger project exercise, there is a need to facilitate effective meetings or discussion sessions periodically. Daily stand-up meetings and monthly or weekly review meetings are a few examples of sessions that team managers can plan to foster a unified work approach. When remote work mode comes into the picture, enterprises must on-board digital workplace platforms like InfinCE that allow seamless audio and video conferencing capabilities. These would enable online meetings and discussions to happen more engagingly and interactively. Besides, colleagues can also get a chance to see each other once in a while which is an excellent social culture that promotes healthy collaboration in the absence of physical office activities like teatime chats and team lunch breaks.

Read more: 10 Ways to Deal with Modern Workplace Distractions and Chaos

3. Seamless information access

Once communication policies are set in place, the next important aspect in facilitating an improved collaboration experience in the workplace is seamless information access. Employees may require access to critical organizational information such as contacts of other employees or customer information, access to marketing or technical collateral for work tasks and customer engagement, information such as policies or IT guidelines, and much more. To promote seamless information access, organizations must ensure that they have a centralized information repository on their internal workforce collaboration platform. It should promote secure file access, exchange, and privileged access provisioning to ensure that confidential information is guarded against unauthorized access. Information access needs to be ensured from multiple devices such as laptops, smartphones, and from anywhere.

4. Empower employees with productivity tools

In the digital era, employees need access to multiple productivity tools to manage their workloads. These may include document tools, spreadsheets, presentation tools, and report generation tools to ease their daily task effort. Enterprises must provide seamless access for employees to such productivity tools and ensure that these tools offer instant virtual collaboration so that different employees can work together using these tools and collectively drive tasks to completion. It will be vital in a scenario where a majority of the workforce is engaged in remote work.

Read more: An 8-Point Checklist to Enhance The Modern-Day Digital Workplace

5. Enable efficient project and task management

Another helpful feature or productivity tool to have in a workplace is an efficient task manager, which will enable seamless coordination between different dependent teams or individuals and help manage responsibility while transparently improving collaboration efficiency. Team members need to be aware of how their task progress impacts the work of others. They also need to know the dependencies that should be managed transparently. 

Read more: 5 Ways to Secure Your Meetings When Using Video Conferencing Software

As businesses continue to navigate new norms in the digital era, workplace collaboration becomes a significant pillar for overall business success. This is where InfinCE can be the one-stop enterprise management solution that helps manage people and serves as a robust digital backbone for your business. 

Read more: How Successful Leaders Engage Employees Using Modern Business Communication Tools like InfinCE

InfinCE covers all aspects from operations to customer relationship management and employee management with its wide range of enterprise apps available for each function. Get in touch with us to explore how your business can improve workplace collaboration by on-boarding InfinCE into your digital ecosystem. If you are excited to get on-board and try the powerful work collaboration software, we would like to invite you for a 30-day free trial here.

Why should small businesses invest in a cloud business phone system

In the past, a business phone system was not a small business priority. But did you know that nearly 65% of consumers prefer to interact with a business over a phone call rather than utilizing a web contact form? As companies rush to find more ways to engage their loyal customers, keeping their contact options flexible and open to customer demands is a critical area that they cannot ignore. In this context, having a business phone number is essential as customers may want to get in touch with you directly for various reasons. Traditional telephonic communication systems have transitioned into their digital avatars. Today VOIP based telecommunication is the backbone of every small business phone system out there.

The latest and most trending internet-enabled telephonic communication infrastructure for today’s digital-savvy small businesses is a cloud business phone system. The trend is attributed to the ROI that cloud business phone systems can provide to small businesses. Cloud business phone systems help companies deliver a seamless experience for customers to get in touch with them. 

Let us explore the top 7 benefits that a small business can enjoy if they switch over to a cloud business phone system:

1. Global access

A telephone system managed in a cloud environment enables businesses to globalize their communication infrastructure. It allows the staff to utilize the business phone for communication from anywhere in the world in just a few clicks. All it takes is a few configuration steps to be done on your cloud phone system. In a matter of minutes, your business phone system will be ready for use in any country you may shift your operating base to or open up new offices. All data related to your contacts, workflow mappings of different departments, or executives can be seamlessly moved to your new work location without any effort.

Read more: 5 Ways an Integrated Cloud Platform is Beneficial for Your Small Business

2. Cost-efficient

As we all know, cloud business phone systems rely on VOIP technology to make phone calls from the internet. Voice is transferred as data packets and not as analog signals found in traditional line-based telephonic infrastructure. Voice services over the internet are relatively inexpensive irrespective of the geographies connected through the line for customer interactions. Availing a cloud business phone system also allows small businesses to avoid hefty license fees as they can opt for economic subscription plans that best suit their needs.

3. Simplified infrastructure

A cloud business phone system doesn’t require enterprises to have physical telecommunication infrastructure components like a PBX box, telephones, and operational lines. Also, they do not require office premises to be modified to lay cables and wires to support a large user base of executives accessing different official phone numbers. The cloud system offers all employees a simple one-click call from their smartphones, and the cloud service provider handles all call routing, network optimization, and traffic management.

Read more: 8 Ways Cloud Automation Significantly Improves Your Legacy IT Operations

4. Flexibility of scale

Small businesses always need technology that can flexibly align with their growth prospects. Cloud telephone systems allow enterprises to seamlessly scale up the number of people who can access the business phone system with just a few clicks and no physical infrastructure additions. They can increase the number of subscribers in their monthly or yearly billing contract signed with a service provider. The same applies if they want to scale down operations as well.

5. Device independence

With a cloud-based business phone system, employees can make calls from any of their devices such as smartphones or laptops or any other work gear and have the recipient receive the call from the official business correspondence number. All call features such as recording, analytics, reporting, etc., can be done on the cloud. Companies can even route incoming calls to an employee’s number to another employee easily in the event of leave or absence.

6. Limitless geographical extension

One of the highlights of using a cloud-based VOIP business phone system is that it gives businesses the freedom to establish a local presence in a country with a business phone system tagged to a local number. They can do it remotely from anywhere globally, thereby empowering businesses to expand their reach to international customers seamlessly.

7. Recovery and security

With a cloud-based business phone system, your business’s entire telephone system has a virtual infrastructure hosted and secured in a cloud environment. In the wake of a natural calamity or a sudden migration of office space to a new city or locality, your business phone system can be up and running from the new area in a matter of seconds.

Download White Paper: The Business Value of InfinCE for Business Owners and Employees

As the world is increasingly transitioning to digital-first interactions, keeping your telecommunication system agile and flexible is vital for sustainable business growth. This is where investing in a cloud business phone system can make a tangible return on your investment. Get in touch with us to see how InfinCE can help create the perfect digital backbone for your small business by bringing all your enterprise applications, telecommunication, and collaboration capabilities under one roof on a SaaS model. 

Reinvent Your Legacy IT Operations with Cloud Automation

Cloud automation tools are capable of making digital transformation realistic compared to legacy IT and software platforms.

Conventional software is usually installed to work on virtual machines (VMs) and desktops. Whereas InfinCE was built in the Cloud and is known for representing the next generation of smart automation platforms that can significantly boost your legacy IT operations.

InfinCE allows businesses to effortlessly automate recurring, manual jobs such as email handling, systems updates, data processing, and documents management. Today, organizations are increasingly embracing cloud applications. However, some businesses are still unconvinced with cloud-based solutions. 

Are you among those organizations that don’t know much about cloud automation’s business benefits and its role in accelerating digital transformation? This post will help you gain a clear picture.

Cloud automation helps companies improve their legacy IT operations

1. Economical cost of ownership

Cloud automation allows you to bypass the maintenance cost, which is preordained when you own hardware. In addition to hardware costs, organizations also need to employ more human resources for installing, troubleshooting, securing, and upgrading the hardware. All these add up to the total cost of ownership. Now, it will be easy for you to understand the cost-effectiveness of cloud automation.

2. Centralized authority

InfinCE’s enterprise cloud platform offers a unified environment for your organization. It helps you organize, control, and audit the automation activity throughout the organization more effectively. You can also easily manage the access rights and multi-layered permissions at the organization, user, object, group, and data levels.

Read more: Top 4 Advantages of Centralized IT Administration for Your Business

3. Security and reliability

According to a report, more than 90% of businesses witnessed a significant security improvement when they adopted cloud automation solutions. InfinCE has the potential of working with both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure to offer unmatched cloud-hosting and related services. These organizations provide an abundance of resources strictly for cyber-security compared to a legacy IT department, which comprises physical and network security.

InfinCE offers not only multi-tenant hosting options but also facilitates security with single-tenant hosting plans. It implies that you can own a dedicated, isolated account that manages your data with utmost exclusivity. All data on InfinCE is encrypted in transit and at rest through enterprise-grade security norms. InfinCE has completed HIPAA and SOC 2 tests, audited by a third-party auditor. It indicates that the servers of InfinCE are placed in high-security data centers.

Read more: 5 Features of InfinCE that will Transform The Way You Work

4. Low risk and swift execution

InfinCE is capable of setting up a new customer account in no time. Once created, a user needs to sign in using their web browsers and start structuring automation. With the Software as a Service (SaaS) pricing model, any organization can begin development at a reasonable cost and invest further only after achieving success and ROI on automation. This contrasts significantly with in-house installed cloud automation tools, which usually demand substantial cost and time to get started.

5. Orchestration in cloud 

A business process includes numerous departments apart from employees, such as customers, suppliers, contractors, partners, job candidates, and third-party associates. Having a cloud automation tool like InfinCE that offers top-notch orchestration in Cloud, these various parties can easily contribute to the automated workflow by completing necessary forms, signing documents, and uploading files. Such an orchestration in the cloud allows you to easily automate the overall process, not just the steps that occur within your organization’s particular area.

6. Remote management

Usually, the most traditional automation software is installed on PCs, but that is not the case with InfinCE. Using a web browser, you can access InfinCE. This implies that InfinCE is compatible with Macs and PCs and can also be operated with a smartphone, credit to its remarkable responsive design. As today’s employees prefer to work outside the office, your automation software must be capable of keeping up no matter where the employees are or what device they are using.

Read more: 5 Ways an Integrated Cloud Platform is Beneficial for Your Small Business

7. Constant improvement with zero upgrades

Being a cloud platform, InfinCE ensures that a business is continually reaping its latest version’s benefits. You don’t have to install or update the software on your computer manually, and your end-users do not have to wait for upgrades. Moreover, InfinCE releases new features at regular intervals and adds more features with every release, ensuring growth in efficiency for your organization.

8. Cloud automation tools are scalable

Cloud automation platforms are scalable almost in any manner you want them to. For example, if you wish to store large data sets in data tables of InfinCE, you need not concern about increasing hard drive space as InfinCE is rightly equipped to manage that for you. The more departments and users you bring to the platform, the system management actions and centralized governance will minimize friction and manual effort. The SaaS model of InfinCE is designed to surge pricing as a fraction of the value you realize, meaning you always achieve a greater ROI.

Read more: 3 Strong Reasons for Your Business to Embrace Cloud-based IT Services

Final thoughts

To transform your organization digitally, you must implement a cloud automation solution that is economical, offers swift deployment, gets connected easily, and is designed to adjust as you grow. InfinCE’s reliable cloud automation tool makes digital transformation more attainable for your organization and ensures to improve the legacy of IT operations.

Download White Paper: The Business Value of InfinCE for Business Owners and Employees

In the modern business world, automation has turned out to be a boon for organizations as it provides better resource utilization, IT operations, and workload distribution. These are the reasons that today’s enterprises are moving towards cloud automation tools at such a fast pace. If you are also an entrepreneur striving to automate your business operations, the automated solutions of InfinCE can turn out to be advantageous for you. Contact us to learn more. 

Want to Tame the Chaos of the Modern Workplace? Here’s How!

Technology makes our lives better and simpler. Still, there’s no denying billions of hours are wasted each day staring at smartphones, surfing the internet for no reason, or merely browsing social media channels. This phenomenon is, indeed, widely visible at workplaces, too. Today, the modern digital workplace is facing a universal challenge- how to deal with workplace chaos.

What is a modern workplace? It is, ideally, an amalgamation of a digital and physical space combined in such a way to meet the requirements of the end-users and your business. 

A modern workplace ensures that it eliminates obstacles such as:

• Poor communication
• Packed office spaces
• Clunky processes
• Beleaguered IT departments
• Inflexible contracts and software licenses
• Frustrated user-base
• Outdated service offerings
• Lack of cross-platform services

To boldly move forward into the future, you must handle the above chaos effectively.

Read more: An 8-Point Checklist to Enhance The Modern-Day Digital Workplace 

10 ways to deal with modern workplace distractions and chaos

Even highly-qualified and skilled employees, regardless of good intentions, struggle with workday overload – competing deadlines, attending meetings, bombarded by emails, constant phone calls, digital distractions, and never-ending office drama. Contemplating these – would you call it an ideal modern workplace? Is it the best environment to work and be productive?

Let’s dive deep and unearth the secrets to tune out the modern workplace distractions constructively.

1. Focus on creating a positive, harmonious, and professional work environment

Wouldn’t you agree – conflict and disgruntled employees are the significant reasons behind the modern workplace chaos? Creating a positive work environment is the need of the hour. To set up a professional environment, appreciate your employees when they accomplish good work and have an outlet for employees to share and address their concerns.

2. Ensure transparent and clear communication

“Communication is the real work of leadership,” and it is vital to understand what’s going on with your employees and what measures should be taken to tackle their concerns and the chaos.

Download White Paper: Adapting to The Changing Face of Enterprise Collaboration 

3. Unchain yourself from email compulsion

A constant watch on your emails is undoubtedly going to make you less productive. Monitoring personal emails excessively during office hours will kill remote workplace productivity. An alternate method to check your emails would be checking them at scheduled times. Or, concentrate on customizing your email to show only the urgent stuff.

4. Maintain a work journal

Having a work journal at your desk would come in handy organizing your daily routine – how much time you spend on long-term projects, how much time you dedicate to administrative tasks, and so on. This way, you will know when you are most productive and when you are engrossed in trivial stuff.

5. Focus on long-term goals or end goals

Not only will you have to maintain an open-door to your employees, but you must also remind them to focus on the long-term goals. This will minimize the confusion, doubts, and speculations during the short-term.

6. Define business hierarchy

It’s pertinent to have a clearly defined business hierarchy to tame the modern workplace chaos. For example, keep a deft employee in the middle, just like a meat shield, to answer your employees on your behalf. This will, to a great extent, reduce the chaos, thus boosting productivity.

7. Formulate a realistic business plan

In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Having a business with ambiguous plans and outlines will only add more pathos, leading to your business’s chaos and failure. 

Read more: Top 10 Ways to Set up an Effective Business Strategy in 2021 

8. Adopt proactive mindset and ponder over productivity

Having a proactive mindset and taking proactive steps will help you overcome the chaos and get the most out of your day. Instead of turning away from the common workday concerns like numerous emails and meetings, increasing workloads, immediate resignation of a supervisor, and changing priorities, you can focus on the following measures with a proactive mindset:

• Set up an uninterrupted work time
• Accomplish important tasks first
• Don’t overwork yourself
• Take breaks at regular intervals to keep your mind fresh and active

9. Recognize seductive office drama and stop it from creeping your peace of mind

You have to recognize and become aware of the office drama (or even the slightest distraction from work, such as gossiping, eavesdropping, spreading rumors, or sharing opinions without verifying the facts). You must assess your dedication to the drama and let your colleague tell you if it hurts work quality.

10. Improved self-awareness will tune out chaos from work

You must be aware of your positive mindset, mood, emotional level, and physical energy and pay attention to your zest, enthusiasm, reactions, beliefs, feelings, and thoughts while gearing up for your workday. Also, keep the challenges, priorities, and bright spots in the loop as these would help you reduce the chaos of the modern digital workplace.

Do you flaunt an integral urge to be distracted easily? If yes, it will be an arduous task to concentrate on when you are mentally exhausted. You have to reduce the number of decisions you make every day by letting industry-trained and adroit professionals take good care of you and your enterprise platforms. So, what’s the solution?

With InfinCE, you get to simplify decision-making and re-imagine your business with robust business management software. InfinCE is your go-to digital workplace platform for all your business needs.

Download White Paper: The Business Value of InfinCE for Business Owners and Employees If you are excited to get on-board and try the powerful business management software, we would like to invite you for a 30-day free trial here.

We know: it can be hard to get a visually appealing website up and running, especially when your time, budget, and design skills are limited. Here’s an offer from InfinCE perfect for new companies: a free, professionally designed website! 

Sign Up for the InfinCE Workplace and we will design your website for FREE! Yes, you heard that right. Our experienced designers will work with you to deliver an attention-grabbing website to market your company on the internet. Our marketing technician will show you how you use SEO (search engine optimization). SEO makes your site findable. If needed, the InfinCE tech experts will take care of the technical parts of registering your business’ domain name, too.

We will host your new website on your own dedicated WordPress server in the InfinCE Cloud. (WordPress itself is free, but cloud server hosting options start at $11 per month.) WordPress, the most popular website hosting platform in the world, is a powerful foundation for internet marketing.

More good news: As an InfinCE client you won’t have to worry about the technical details of managing the WordPress server – the Infince team handles that for you. You start by choosing a base design for your website from available predefined templates that we then customize for you. All you need to do is create, and as needed edit, the marketing content on your website using the straightforward editing tools that WordPress provides. Get stuck? Help is always just a click away.

Of course, the free website design services are just one of many benefits you get from your InfinCE subscription. The InfinCE Digital Workplace provides your team with customizable dashboards, collaboration apps, business email, video meetings, concierge support, and access to special software such as CRM and Project Management from a wide range sources.

Establish an online presence with no technical hassles. Try InfinCE today!

Kindly note the terms and conditions listed below:

• The website can have up to 10 pages.
• You need to provide the text content.
• You need to provide images. We can suggest some free images.
• We allow multiple reviews, but you must complete all setup and design work in a week.
• The offer is not applicable in the 30-day free trial.
• This offer is of limited duration. Act now!

How to Improve Your Intranet for Better Employee Experience

Technology advancements and modern communication tools have changed the entire landscape of employee engagement and workplace collaboration. While intranets have been at the center of teamwork and business communication for years, they are seemingly competing with more contemporary technologies these days to offer the same level of seamless experience they did a couple of years ago. Besides, as today’s digital-first age heavily relies on a remote work culture with distributed teams, it is crucial to reconceptualize the intranet infrastructure and make it more efficient to stay competitive and relevant in the industry.

Below are ten ways to reimagine your intranet and ensure better employee engagement and collaboration in your organization.

Read more: 5 Tips to Analyze and Select the Right Business Intranet Solution

1. Focus on your usability

You need to re-design your intranet with modern features by focusing on its usability. Understand how your teams use the company intranet to collaborate with colleagues, find new information, and perform other tasks like filling the paperwork. Your goal should be to facilitate all these activities while ensuring that your intranet is easy to use and integrates with the latest tools that your employees need. Likewise, it should also have an inherent search function to let everyone find the information they are looking for quickly.

2. Keep it aligned with your business objectives

Your company intranet should not just cater to the organization’s communication needs but also help to realize broader business goals. You need to identify how your intranet can solve potential company challenges and how it can contribute to your enterprise success. Therefore, it’s crucial to identify the key performance indicators that will allow you to track your business performance and progress. It also helps create actionable insights for redefining your communications strategy.

Case Study: How Fingent Achieved Breakthroughs in Collaboration with InfinCE Digital Workplace

3. Bring mobile devices into play

Remote workers can collaborate in a much better way when you integrate mobile devices into the intranet infrastructure. With mobile-ready intranet solutions, your employees can connect to the central system to access the data and information needed to perform their duties from anywhere they want. This multichannel approach also boosts the reach of your company communications and allows you to engage your employees on multiple touch points such as instant messaging, news feed snippets, video calling, etc.

Read more: How SMBs Can Overcome Challenges to Build a Mobile-First Workplace

4. Promote two-way communication

Traditionally, intranets were used to receive messages but not as a tool that facilitated two-way communication. As modern all-in-one collaboration platforms go beyond being an information and announcements hub, you need to upgrade your intranet system to support bidirectional conversations to make the most of it. It can serve as a secure and seamless channel for your employees to interact and even run brainstorming sessions on new projects. Having comprehensive intranet profiles can work like social media networks.

5. Build a strong company culture

One of the fundamental elements of digital transformation is transforming the traditional workplace culture into a more collaborative, digitally-powered environment. It means you need to reimagine your intranet to meet those goals and build strong company culture by conveying your mission and business values to the entire team. When coupled with features like performance objectives, employee recognition, and a thorough onboarding process, your intranet can lead to defining thriving company culture.

6. Think beyond decentralized communication

Decentralizing business communications is an integral part of modern-day internal collaboration platforms. It takes the unconventional route of allowing all employees to be responsible for their intranet profiles instead of the core team managing everything. Decentralizing communication will instill a sense of freedom and independence within your company while allowing coworkers to interact with each other in their departments more actively. Eventually, this will lead to stronger bonds between employees, which is a crucial factor that drives improved efficiency and business success.

Read more: 5 Best Practices To Enable Seamless Communication For Your Remote Workforce

7. Manage the content wisely

Creating highly-engaging content has always helped businesses to capture the attention of their employees and ensure better engagement. No matter how the times have changed, content that provides value to your workforce will still be a decisive element in determining your company’s success. However, the way people consume content has significantly changed, so you need to consider how your employees interact with the content you deliver through the intranet to create a robust strategy.

8. Improve the search capabilities

As mentioned previously, improving the search function to let users find the relevant content without any hassle is an integral part of making your intranet more user-friendly. Therefore, you need to revamp your intranet’s traditional and outdated structure and make it simpler for your employees to search for content no matter which device they are using. This will facilitate seamless communication across the organization and make workflow management more efficient.

9. Publish personalized and targeted content

Targeted and personalized content makes it relatively easy to keep employees engaged and motivated. Several studies have found that targeted channels lead to nearly twice the click-through rates. So if you see that your employees use the company app more often than opening their emails, then directing your focus to in-app messaging can be a more efficient way to meet your needs. You can do this by segregating your workforce into different types of audience segments and then creating custom content for each segment.

Download White Paper: Reinventing the Corporate Intranet with Employee Experience at the Center

10. Add a workforce collaboration platform

The best way to optimize your intranet and make the most of the internal communications is by bringing a workplace collaboration tool like InfinCE to the mix. Work collaboration tools like InfinCE will boost your intranet system’s capabilities and functions to more actively deliver company news and information. At the same time, it will ensure that your employees get all the tools they need to interact and collaborate on a project effectively. Moreover, an all-in-one workplace collaboration platform can also give you a unified dashboard to monitor and manage everything.

Read more: 5 Benefits Of Having A Centralized Employee Dashboard In Your Business

The above-stated are some of the fundamental ways to transform your intranet into a more effective and collaborative platform that keeps your workforce engaged and motivated to deliver their best performance. As modern-day challenges need adopting innovative and forward-thinking approaches, it is high time to reimagine your intranet with the right upgrades and ensure optimal employee engagement for superior operational efficiency.

Whether your team is working together or remotely, InfinCE makes sure that your people can effectively communicate, connect, and engage seamlessly! InfinCE’s intranet, powered by shareable dashboards, blogs, wiki, communication apps, and productivity tools, can transform employee communications across your organization. Contact us to learn more.