How can businesses manage their remote workforce through efficient communication?

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage global health and economy, most businesses are beginning to accept the fact that they need to change their work culture to help sustain operations during such difficult times. One of the most successful ways that businesses small and large have followed to remain operational during the pandemic was by implementing remote workforce management at a larger scale.

Almost all staff of several organizations except those in critical roles that demanded physical presence at the office were asked to work from their homes. Several companies expect this form of work from home culture to last throughout the rest of 2020 or even extend beyond into the next year. With remote work culture becoming a mainstream norm, employers need to understand the importance of communication when a majority of their workforce is working independently out of their homes.

Here are 5 best practices that you need to incorporate to effectively communicate with your remote workforce:

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

1. Set Guidelines for Communication

When almost everyone works remotely to deliver business services, it is important for employers to set standard communication policies and protocols to prevent any disconnects or inconvenience from occurring due to lack of physical proximity. 

Your staff needs to be made aware of the different communication channels that are available, which to use for different scenarios, and how to approach others by respecting their privacy while working from homes. 

There needs to be a proper understanding of business hours and the need to complete any official communication cycles within stipulated working hours to ensure that employees get to spend quality time with their families as well.

Read More: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

2. Ensure a Seamless Communication Platform

The first step to empower your remote workforce to stay connected with their peer groups or the larger organization as a whole is to ensure the availability of world-class communication platforms. 

Having an email tool alone will not be enough to facilitate seamless communication. 

From instant messaging to social media-inspired intranet feeds, your business must set up a comprehensive platform that allows employees to stay connected, informed, and engaged throughout their work schedules. A digital platform can unify communication efforts, help co-ordinate multiple tasks simultaneously, and help employees to easily gain access to support from their peers or management.

3. Proactive Work Communication

It is important to ensure that employees are not left out of communications related to work updates or new service requirements. You cannot expect employees to put in their best effort if you reach out to them at the last moment with requirements which may even include direct customer interactions. Managers need to plan work schedules in advance and communicate the same to employees for them to plan and manage workloads efficiently.

4. Encourage Video Calls

When employees stay away from the office for months together and work remotely, it is natural that they feel a sense of incompleteness in their work schedules. The frequent tea break chats, lunch and dinner outings, workplace fun activities will all be missed terribly and this can add up stress levels. As the situation doesn’t permit employees to catch up with their peers directly, the best solution could be to encourage meetings and discussions to happen over video conferencing. 

It will be much easier for employees to work together or maintain their relationships when they frequently see each other and interact with video conferencing. Video calls bring in a sense of togetherness virtually for teams who are distributed at different locations.

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

5. Transparent Leadership Communication

As you work on strategies to remain sustainable in your business operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is equally important to keep your employees updated on the progress of the same. You need to assure them on aspects such as their job security, business performance updates, and other important strategic initiatives that you plan to take to combat the scenario. It is important to keep your employee communications transparent and ensure that they can freely reach out to the highest management level should a need arise for support. 

Read More: InfinCE Helps You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

Your employees are your biggest asset and it is important to establish a clear communication channel for them to alleviate their fears. This communication could be established through newsletters, video broadcasting of leaderships, Q&A surveys, feedback collection, etc. which could all happen on a weekly or monthly basis.

The new workforce management culture induced by COVID-19 is sure to pave the way for a future of open work policies wherein employees can work from anywhere they want and only ensure that quality work is delivered on time. As businesses, you need to have in place the proper communication and collaboration channel for your workforce to operate seamlessly during remote operations. This is where InfinCE can be a game-changer in your business. Get in touch with us to explore how InfinCE can create the best remote working digital infrastructure for your business to tide over a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.

How SMBs can attain positive business outcomes from remote working

It’s barely 6 months into 2020 and COVID-19 has pushed more than half of the world into some form of lockdown. Businesses are losing revenue either due to shutdown or lack of customers. Travel restrictions and social distancing norms are forcing small and medium businesses to limit their operating hours and ask their staff to work remotely most of the time.

However, the remote work culture isn’t that bad as many companies have found it to be a savior in this pandemic. In fact, a good majority of small and medium businesses are now of the opinion that they can continue this mode of remote work even post the pandemic as it will reduce operational costs significantly. 

Related Reading: How InfinCE Helps You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

So, the question on everyone’s mind now is “How can we manage the business efficiently during and after the COVID-19 pandemic with a remote workforce?” Here are 4 tips to help you out:

1. Improve Communication

The most important aspect of maintaining relationships with your employees when they work remotely is communication. As employers, you need to facilitate a seamless communication experience for employees to interact with each other, share information, and foster a culture of continuous engagement. 

Remote work collaboration platforms like InfinCE facilitate this by offering a seamless communication platform that allows employees to interact over a variety of channels such as instant messaging, video calls, video meeting conferences, and much more. By ensuring that employees have the means to communicate efficiently, you can assure consistent productivity levels while they are working remotely.

Related Reading: Why Is InfinCE A Better Choice For Safe Video Calling Than Zoom

2. Empower Collaboration

Most of the daily work done by your employees influence end customer service quality. It also requires the contributions from multiple teams working on different facets of a project or customer engagement. There needs to be a seamless collaboration mechanism that has to be in place to help employees easily connect with their peers, exchange information and files securely, set up meetings and discussions, manage projects virtually with diligence, and so on. To facilitate these activities, SMBs require a powerful virtual collaboration and enterprise management platform. 

Related Reading: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment

Security is a prime essential when you choose a collaboration platform for your remote workforce since your employees need to handle sensitive customer information like financial data or social security credentials.

3. Promote Work-Life Balance

It is true that remote working was one of the most preferred ways to guarantee a healthy work-life balance for employees. But such a scenario wasn’t meant to be for such a long period of time and that too with almost everyone in the family also at home due to the pandemic induced lockdowns. 

As employers, you need to understand that an employee may not be always capable of putting in their 100% concentration on their computers while at home. They may have to attend to their kids or spouse or parents periodically and engage in some quality family time. As such, you need to instruct managers to be strict on time commitments just for the sake of making it an 8- or 9-hour working day. Let employees take breaks in between and work in their comfort zones keeping in mind only the quality of the work they are engaged in. You will be amazed to find that employee engagement and productivity levels would improve under such a relaxed schedule.

4. Team Bonding

While it might take a while before everyone gets back to their old office regime and talk to friends and colleagues over a sip of coffee in the pantry, there are a lot of activities that companies can initiate over digital platforms to help improve team bonding when everyone works remotely. There could be weekly fun activities where teams can participate over video calls and they can even involve their families who might be around at home. There are several competitions that the HR team can run online, and employees can participate to remind themselves of the fun they had while at the office. In times like these, such positive motivational activities would be much appreciated by employees.

Related Reading: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

Managing your business successfully during the COVID-19 pandemic with a remote workforce requires more than just interpersonal skills. A digital backbone is essential to ensure seamless communication and collaboration between your employees to ensure disruption-free customer service. This is where InfinCE can be your one-stop solution to managing your entire business operations remotely. Our cloud-based enterprise platform offers a host of features ranging from communication to collaboration to help enterprises build a sustainable workforce culture during the pandemic situation. Talk to our experts to learn more. 

As the competition tightens and consumers have more choices, small businesses often face the challenge of bringing the message out about their products and services. In other words, they seek innovative marketing opportunities to improve sales. Today, one of the biggest assets a small business can rely on to market their offerings is undoubtedly video marketing. If you are wondering why these figures will prove it:

• Up to 16 hours of video is consumed over the internet by a user every week (Forbes)
• 66% of all consumers would like to learn about a product through video demonstrations (Wyzowl)
• 71% of marketers agree that video converts more prospects into leads than any other form of content (Vidyard)

So now that you understood the impact video marketing can make, it is time to have a look at what the industry demands today in terms of video content and approach. 

See Also: Creative Marketing Videos of InfinCE

Here is a short glimpse of the top video marketing trends for small businesses in 2020:

1. Stories of Inspiration

Plain product demonstrations or glitzy advertisement videos many not excite today’s crowd. Besides, expensive advertisement videos may not be a good option for small and medium businesses as they need more financial muscle to run their core operations rather than diverting all funds into just marketing. So, the best way forward is to come with inspiring themes for your brand story. 

People tend to side more with brands that can resonate with stories of common folks who made it big. By pushing out such a story and getting a connection to your business diligently, the video you make creates a lasting impact that will reside in consumer memory for a long time.

2. Smart Video Creation Services

Today, there are several video-making apps and websites that allow you to create simple yet powerful video clips that position your brand appropriately. Once you have the script ready, it is just a matter of choosing a platform. It takes just over 20 minutes or so to make a video if you have ready-made templates and simple editing tools. While sophisticated tools and specialist editors can do a better job, it is always good to try something fresh on your own using the numerous tools and platforms available today.

Related Reading: Becoming Small Business Leaders In 2020: What You Need To Know

3. Optimized for Channels

A decade ago, videos were primarily hosted and viewed on YouTube. Fast forward to today, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc., are the new arena for video distribution and viewership. The biggest advantage is the large social interaction capability on video content that is facilitated by these social networks. 

Videos that go viral on Facebook and Twitter bring unprecedented traffic to businesses that marketed it. So, a small business that wants to target video marketing today needs to create videos that are optimized for different social media channels. The optimization is not just on file size but also on the length of the video, content tone and voice, demographic choices for scenarios, and much more. 

The number of personalization options you can try with social media-based video marketing is tremendous. The right fit video can change the fortunes of your business in a matter of hours or days.

4. Shorter videos in larger frequencies

Videos are not just a tool to demonstrate product features but can be used as an informative piece of content like what blogs do. Thus, a healthy video publishing schedule is a growing trend among small businesses today that wish to succeed with video marketing. 

The videos would be short and crisp in terms of messaging and context but they need to be published more frequently, say for example, twice a month. Some businesses go to the extend of publishing one every week. The more video content you have, the greater are the opportunities to win customer loyalty through regular posting.

Related Reading: 5 Digital Capabilities Every Small Business Needs To Invest In 2020

5. Interactive Videos

While this may not be possible for all kinds of businesses all the time, every small business can consider publishing an interactive video message at least once in their marketing calendar. With VR and AR devices becoming more mainstream, more people have the capability to view interactive video content at their convenience. The most important element for small businesses to consider while generating interactive video content is to incorporate their core business activity in the video theme.

If your small business is not capitalizing on video marketing, then it is missing out on a big opportunity to grab a sizeable number of potential leads. Videos are the best way to improve engagement and build brand loyalty. Once leads turn into deals, you have to be prepared to meet customer expectations. This is where operational efficiency and digital proficiency take the driver’s seat. To ensure a seamless digital-first experience in your business, get in touch with us to explore the possibilities of InfinCE – one of the best digital business platforms for small and medium businesses.

Why is ERP an Irreplaceable Asset for Small Businesses?

Cost factor appears to be the primary reason why many small businesses show resistance to adopting an ERP solution to run their business operations. With the advent of SaaS-based solutions, the scenario has changed today. Software-as-a-Service or SaaS allows SMBs to onboard the latest technology solutions like ERP into their business and pay according to their usage. 

Market Research Engine reports that among growing businesses, 96% of those who are successful rely on an ERP solution to run their daily operations seamlessly. Enterprise Resource Planning has grown into a critical business application for small and medium businesses as it connects data across their functional departments and allows unified decision making and service automation.

If your business is yet to consider implementing an ERP system, here are 5 compelling reasons why you need to invest in an ERP solution in 2020:

1. Unified Business View

ERP solves the biggest challenge faced by any business- data consolidation!

An Enterprise Resource Planning software consolidates data from across departments to help management make informed decisions. 

• From analytical reporting to inter-departmental approvals and workflows, an ERP system allows smooth operations in an enterprise by bringing every workflow into an organized digital framework. 
• From inventory to accounting and employee schedules, an ERP system can help trace the root cause of performance issues in your business easily. 

It gives an overview of where you need to focus on and how you can make critical decisions such as cost optimizations, resource management, and much more. 

Related Reading: 5 Digital Capabilities Every Small Business Needs To Invest In 2020

2. Encourages Transparency

With an ERP system, you can cultivate a transparent work culture in your organization.

Across functions or departments, an ERP system allows you to map dependencies, track progress, raise alerts on areas demanding attention, and keep employees and management updated with real-time performance metrics of the business. 

• ERP forms a centralized database from which all departments can access and share information thereby ensuring a transparent information flow within the enterprise. 
• It also eliminates errors and manipulations from spreading into entire business processes by deploying quality checks across departmental management modules. 

Transparency at the workplace ensures that all units within your organization gain access to accurate information for their daily working needs.

3. Empowers Automation

An ERP offers centralized and automated management of work files as well as reporting for decision-makers.

Without an ERP system, most business units will have to work with a barrage of spreadsheets and documents to arrive at decisions. The amount of manual work to be done for processing documents, preparing reports for management and other work-related files would be severely high. 

ERP application helps automate a lot of manual tasks that employees have to spend time daily like for example, adding a new employee record in multiple business units such as payroll, project management, leave management, finance, compliance, and HR units, etc. If there was no ERP all these entries would have to be done manually and chances of errors and mistakes are relatively higher for manual work.

Related Reading: Automation In Small Business: 4 Areas To Get Started

4. Support Digital Business Transformation

An ERP serves as the backbone for an SMB to propel itself into new-age digital revenue channels. 

It promotes a culture of data-driven operations across the business and makes it easier for transitioning traditional business models into newer and more exciting customer touchpoints. For example, if you are into retailing, an ERP system can serve as the best resource for you to transition into an e-commerce business. With visibility into inventory, processes, accounting, revenue management, and supply chain efficiency, it becomes easy to deploy an e-commerce solution to derive data from your ERP and offer a superlative experience to online shoppers. 

Additionally, implementing new digital experiences in your physical business locations too becomes easier, as you already have data points to explore with APIs and have new tools act on your available data to create new experiences. A good example would be marketing automation wherein digital marketing platforms can be deployed to act on data in your ERP to roll out campaigns to attract new buyers.

5. Turn Competitive

One of the major reasons why several SMBs today are turning to ERP solutions is the ability of such systems to place them in a competitive position in the market. 

An ERP solution gives data-backed insights that help SMBs offer experiences to customers that any bigger and more established businesses can offer. Cloud-based ERP systems ensure that you can roll out these experiences without burning a hole in the pocket for expenditure. The easy scalability it gives to your business systems ensures that you can always forecast demand and adjust your entire business operations to meet this demand on time.

From managing your entire value chain to enabling memorable experiences for your customers, ERP unlocks tons of possibilities for small business enterprises. At InfinCE, we believe that ERP is the digital core of your business. InfinCE is designed to overcome your remote working woes. It combines numerous productivity and enterprise solutions including ERP, CRM, CMS, and HRM solutions, hosted on secure cloud environments, dedicated to your need. 

Related Reading: Why should a small business opt for InfinCE

Leverage the best value from your technology investments with InfinCE. Talk to our experts today to find out more. 

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

The rise of flexible, remote work culture and the need to address a large population of mobile-savvy millennial workforce is creating an unprecedented demand for enterprise mobility. 

Over 86 % of email users worldwide use their smartphones to access emails, reports Adobe. By enterprise mobility, we do not just focus on accessing emails on smartphones. It is a cultural and business transition that involves technology, people, and processes spanning departments. Hence every step a small business takes in the direction of implementing enterprise-wide mobility involves challenges that they need to mitigate. 

Here are five challenges that SMBs should overcome to ensure sustainable mobility adoption in enterprises. 

1. Cultural Resistance

When your organization comprises resources from different generations, there is friction that is bound to happen in several areas and your technology infrastructure is no exception. Most of your staff will be accustomed to their desktops or laptops and prefer working from the office. For them, the idea of transitioning to a highly decentralized and mobile workforce where remote working is a norm and smartphones become the mainstay device could be overwhelming. 

Related Reading: InfinCE Can Help You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

As a business owner, you need to step in to resolve this cultural challenge by creating awareness among your staff on the benefits of mobility. Having a well-planned migration into mobile-friendly collaboration channels is highly appreciable. It can help soften the transition and give space and time for employees to gradually accept the new norm rather than forcing them to accommodate a new way of working one fine day.

2. Business Process Alignment

Even if you are a small business enterprise, there are certain standard and well-defined business processes and workflows your employees follow to help serve customers efficiently. While incorporating mobility, a considerable effort must be put into re-aligning your key business processes. This will boost the adaptability of mobility best practices.

Polices like BYOD which are critical in enabling enterprise mobility make it necessary for business processes to be re-defined. These may include information-sharing protocols, work management policies, timeline management, security policies, and much more.

3. Seamless Collaboration and Communication

When employees begin to opt for a culture of remote and mobile-first work experience, there is a huge demand for interactive and real-time collaboration capability. Through digital channels like InfinCE, SMBs can facilitate employees to stay connected with their peers, share information, work on tasks together, manage responsibilities and dependent activities, conduct virtual meetings or video conferences, and so on. 

Related Reading: 5 Workplace Innovations You Can Welcome with Video Conferencing

For customer-facing roles, it is important to deliver insights and information on the go on handheld devices. Knowledge archival and sharing via cloud platforms need to be highly encouraged. This is vital for field employees to deliver value during client interactions. 

4. Flexible Application Support

As more enterprise functions and capabilities get mapped to mobility mode, small businesses need to ensure that your workforce gets dedicated applications to leverage these functions completely from their smartphones or remote devices. Hence your technology ecosystem needs to support the development of custom enterprise mobility apps for various business functions. It could be CRM, HRM, ERP, CMS, document management, collaboration, and project management, and much more.

For instance, The InfinCE mobile app gives you access to most of the features of your virtual desktop, formatted for the smaller screen of your smartphone. You can view all your Dashboards, contact everyone in your organization, Chat or Video call with colleagues, access your Business Applications, and attend the Online Meetings.

5. Security and Device Management

With the advent of digital channels, there is a large volume of customer data that passes through different enterprise systems daily. When your business incorporates mobility deeper into its operations, then a lot of devices come into the network like personal laptops, smartphones, and even smart IoT devices. Confidential data and information get exchanged through these devices regularly. Hence security and data privacy becomes a huge challenge. 

SMBs must ensure that standard encryption protocols, data protection policies and access control are implemented to prevent any untoward incident. There should be intelligent monitoring of data logs and employees must be transparently held accountable for their responsibilities to ensure that no modification or manipulation of data happens without approvals from concerned departments. Compliance laws like GDPR make it necessary for enterprises to enable secure experiences for customer data across all channels through which it is shared.

Related Reading: Why Is InfinCE A Better Choice For Safe Video Calling Than Zoom

Enterprise Mobility is rapidly being adopted by small businesses across the globe. From ensuring business continuity at times of crisis to empowering employees to sustain a perfect work-life balance, the advantages are numerous. With an enterprise platform like InfinCE powering your digital backend, the transition can happen seamlessly. InfinCE allows small businesses to unify their digital infrastructure and empower employees with the flexibility to rapidly increase mobility. Secure cloud-based infrastructure, an extensive app ecosystem and a 24 X 7 support team guarantees that your mobility transformation happens seamlessly and without disruption. Get in touch with our experts to know more about InfinCE.

4 Reasons to Use InfinCE for Remote Workforce Collaboration

COVID-19 pandemic has pushed more than half of the world population into staying confined within their homes. As social distancing is the only solution available today to prevent the pandemic spread, travel and physical social interactions are at near-zero levels worldwide. For the business world, however, this posed yet another humongous challenge. They had to enable their workforce to shift to a culture of remote working on a massive scale. While several companies have offered flexible work from home options for their staff in the past, this is the first time that such a mandatory remote work culture had to be enforced for almost every single staff.

While the cultural shift was immense, one of the best ways for businesses to keep their staff connected virtually and enable seamless collaboration among them was to use digital enterprise collaboration tools. Video calling became the de-facto mode of employee interactions. But a few weeks into the new culture, there have been serious issues that plagued the digital infrastructure that several businesses relied on.

The widely popular Zoom video conferencing app was used by businesses, educational institutes, government authorities and a whole plethora of other organizations to help their employees and communities stay connected and continue service delivery through remote video conferencing. However, security experts soon revealed that Zoom’s privacy and data integrity claims for its services were not trustworthy. It was found that the app dangerously leaked private confidential and business data of millions of people to other parties such as Facebook as well as being exploited by cybercriminals. Within days, several governments, schools, and thousands of private companies banned the usage of Zoom for their video conferencing needs due to the privacy concerns and dubious data handling policies of Zoom.

So, the challenge for businesses now is to find a replacement for Zoom to manage their remote work collaboration needs. Well, they don’t have to look further than InfinCE, the most trusted digital enterprise platform for small and medium businesses. It facilitates remote work management and safe video conferencing to help businesses continue their operations with remote staff without compromising on security, efficiency, and productivity.

Related Reading: InfinCE Can Help You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

Four reasons why you should try InfinCE for a safe video conferencing and efficient collaboration experience:

1. Secure Video Conferencing

InfinCE offers an integrated enterprise digital video conferencing solution that delivers video calling facilities to employees only on access-controlled shared links. It is exclusively aimed at business organizations and hence prevents leakage of any data or information about callers as in the case of Zoom. Only employees with authorized enterprise credentials can join a virtual video meeting using a meeting URL shared by the host of the meeting or via a secure “peer to peer calling link” between two employees. All video conferencing accesses and permissions are securely logged to prevent misuse or unauthorized access.

2. Interactive Collaboration

When enterprises use multiple apps to maintain a remote work culture like Zoom for video conferencing, G-Suite for communication and productivity tools, Dropbox, or other cloud storage apps for storing files, it creates a huge overhead for employees to manage their work and meetings by switching between these. 

InfinCE offers a unified cloud-based platform that brings together the best of digital conferencing tools like Email, Chats, and secured virtual video meeting rooms for uninterrupted communications. It also combines enterprise management tools like document editors, project management, CRM, etc. for collaboration. All information and data exchange processes and interfaces are secured with information security policies and encryption algorithms for privacy compliance. It enables real-time collaboration between employees seamlessly and in one place.

Related Reading: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

3. Safety Firewalls

InfinCE is an enterprise-grade cloud-based platform that has been designed ground up with strict adherence to global standards in security and data encryption. With advanced firewalls, intelligent threat analysis, and multi-level access control permissions, InfinCE ensures that your business data remains confidential during internal transactions and collaboration environments.

4. Smarter Sharing

One of the biggest demands in virtual meeting platforms is the sharing of information, files, and even remote screens for issue fixes and configurations by your IT team. Using less secure tools like Zoom can result in such access controls being exploited by cybercriminals since communication occurs via the internet. With InfinCE, every virtual meeting is encrypted end-to-end and occurs via a secure enterprise calling URL. This prevents external parties from gaining unauthorized access into remote meetings, which was one of the key security threats pointed out with Zoom. Employees can securely share files or even hand over control of their remote screen to concerned departments for configurations and issue management.

As the COVID-19 inflicted lockdown is likely to continue, it is sure that remote working will be a mainstay culture for a long time to come. You need to empower your employees to seamlessly carry out their daily routine from anywhere in the world without having to worry about collaboration problems. This is where InfinCE can be the game-changer. With uninterrupted video calling, real-time collaboration, and cloud-based subscription, it is the perfect and most cost-effective remote workforce management tool for any business organization. Talk to us to explore the possibilities of InfinCE in your business today.

Why automation is key to boosting small business productivity?

Most often, we realize the potential of technologies like automation when a critical situation arises. The impact of COVID-19 has forced organizations around the world to transit to a work-from-home productivity model, and many of us are able to execute remote work successfully due to automation. In this post, we’ll explore how automation in small business improves productivity and the different areas where companies can implement automation.

Related Reading: Quickly Transit to Remote Working with InfinCE

From small tasks such as electronic document signature to intelligent data processing, automation in small business offers limitless possibilities to improve productivity in the small business environment. It is important for decision-makers to invest in the right areas. 

If you are a small business owner looking to turn your workforce more productive through automation this year, then here are 4 areas you need to look at:

1. Automating Sales Workflows

Your sales team often creates the biggest customer impact zone in your business and hence is a worthy contender for incorporating automation in its daily routine. So, what are the sales processes that can be automated within a small business? 

Some examples include assigning associates for leads, setting automated response channels for incoming leads such as emails, IVR based tele-calling or any other contact channels like social media. Once a lead is assigned to an associate for nurturing and conversion, then the next area where automation can kick in is for reminders and follow-ups. Activities involved in deal nurturing and closure can be automated to make the lives of sales folks easier and ultimately improve the productivity of the whole team.

2. Project Management

Today’s workforce demands increasing flexibility in their work and may avail benefits such as remote work. When there are multiple people working on a single customer project or task, and if there are remote resources involved, then project management becomes a challenging endeavor if everything is to be manually handled by managers using spreadsheets, IM and email conversations. This is the right area to bring in automation using state of the art project management platforms. 

Related Reading: 5 Ways A Project Management Tool Can Help Your Business Grow

By enabling automated monitoring of project schedules, individual work progress, and dependency metrics for collaborative tasks, it becomes easier for managers to have a grip on project timelines and ensure that everyone is at the same pace transparently.

3. Procurement and Logistics Processing

There are several routine tasks within procurement departments in a small business that takes up too much time and effort if done manually. A good example would be invoice processing once supplies are obtained. As your business grows, these routine jobs would incur a significantly high volume of effort and can lead to highly inefficient business outcomes due to errors in manual processing. This is where bringing automation in small businesses can be a game-changer. You not only eliminate errors but also improve the speed of processing and completing redundant tasks. 

Approval workflows, scheduling, tracking inventory and vendor notifications are some of the key areas in procurement where automation in small business can vastly change the existing operational landscape.

4. HR and Payroll

Typical human resources work schedule has components that are grossly manual effort intense like payroll processing, profile and resume screening for recruitment, appraisal and performance tracking, rewards and feedback collection, and much more. Automation in any or all these areas will help the HR personnel to be more pro-active in managing employee relations while technology takes care of the manual effort in enabling the same. Ensuring that your employees are engaged is a fundamental goal that needs to be achieved for overall business success and making sure your HR team is empowered to do that via automation is hence a key focus area.

Related Reading: Tips For SMBs To Boost Growth With Increased Employee Engagement

Automation in small business is one of the key pillars for propelling companies into the next level for the coming years. As more disruptive business and market conditions continue to show its face every year, it is important for small businesses to remain competitive and allot enough core business skilled employees to handle newer challenges. By utilizing enterprise platforms like InfinCE, you can enable seamless automation across your key business units and leverage human manpower for more decisive operations. Get in touch with us to know how you can leverage the automation capabilities of InfinCE to create the next level of success for your business.

4 Key Pillars to Ensure a Seamless BPM Experience for your Business

Small business entrepreneurs often think about how much to invest in digital tools that empower their business operations. The question arises mainly because they are unsure if their organization has attained sufficient scalability to bring on-board a digital enablement platform. Among these, one area where most small businesses cast doubt on digital transformation is business process management. 

There is a notion that BPM and BPM software is meant only for large enterprises with well-defined processes and departmental policies. BPM is a practice even small businesses need to follow and cultivate as a cultural trait right from their startup days. 

Now, the question is when should a small business start adopting BPM in its operations? The need for BPM is driven by the demand for efficiency which ultimately leads to better customer service. On this note, here are 4 key pillars you need to build in your company to ensure a seamless BPM experience:

1. Approval Matrix

In most small businesses, bottlenecks in efficiency occur due to a lack of sync in processes. Employees often wait at managerial desks seeking approvals for implementing changes or customer requirements. Managers, in turn, wait for approvals from senior leadership for various essential affairs. 

Delays in submitting contracts and postponing commitments create a wrong impression on the customer. This can be eliminated by formulating an automated process workflow culture in the organization when metrics on items can determine its approval chances. A simple example could be classifying an approval matrix based on the size of the project. A smaller deal would require just a manger’s approval while bigger ones could require review and approval by higher authorities or leaders. Once this is defined, it will be easier to build a business process around it and ultimately automate it through a BPM software.

Related Reading: 5 Ways A Project Management Tool Can Help Your Business Grow

2. Building Awareness

As you grow from a startup into an established small business, there will be a rise in the number of employees as well as departments. For collective growth, it is important to ensure that all employees have access to the right information about the company and its offerings. Only then would they be able to handle internal business process improvement practices as well as become effective spokespersons for the company in front of customers. 

Employees should be aware of how every activity in the organization leads to better customer experience. This can be achieved by having a well-defined organizational induction program for new joiners and a continuous learning initiative for on-boarded employees. This learning experience can be used to integrate employee thoughts with business objectives which will ultimately transform employees into torchbearers for BPM practices within their respective roles.

3. Encourage Autonomy

This is a continuation of the learning experience element we mentioned. There are processes within the organization that may have been brought into existence from a very complex background and scaled meaninglessly over time. To break it into simpler business models, it is important to ensure autonomous decision making by employees involved in these complex business operations. 

Related Reading: 5 Ways To Improve Business Growth Through Employee Engagement

Employees should be given time to identify and map activities to processes with guidance gained from experts whenever needed. Hiring BPM specialists to disrupt and re-write such complex processes within one day is not advisable as it may throw employees into a tantrum and lead to highly frustrating experiences.

4. Drive Data Generation

This is one of the most important pillars that need to be established while adopting business process management in a small business. Every department or team in your organization needs to have a standard data generation policy. This generated data should be a base for determining the KPIs for tracking employee performance and growth, defining their intra-departmental or team dependencies, validating their customer satisfaction objectives and much more. Once everything is defined by data, it becomes easier to bring in automation between workflows, thus enabling better process management through BPM software.

Business process management is a transformational initiative that can bring about unparalleled operational efficiency in a small business. But as illustrated here, it needs a strong foundation and support from your entire organization for effective implementation. This is where a well-defined BPM capability built into your organization’s digital backend can be a game-changer. InfinCE, with its cloud-ready enterprise digital platform, can integrate seamlessly into your operations and enable a sound BPM strategy within your company. Get in touch with us to know more.

The key ingredients that make up an ideal project management dashboard.

Project management is an irreplaceable asset of any business. It plays a crucial role in driving successful business results. Across the globe, companies are increasingly investing in project management tools to help track the progress of their customer deliverables and ensuring efficient operations. 

But are you investing in the right project management capabilities needed to succeed?  

To answer this question you need to be aware of what a project management software needs to offer as features in today’s highly disruptive and digital-first business scenario. 

Here are our picks on the top 5 features you need to make sure are present in your project management dashboard. These will help your workforce to seamlessly deliver successful results for customer projects every time.

Related Reading: 5 Ways A Project Management Tool Can Help Your Business Grow 

1. Smart Workflows

All your efficient planning and strategic direction of managing a project will not find a smooth ride to success unless there are automated workflows that help synchronize different stages of project activity. In simple terms, a workflow can be defined as a series of steps that will be automated to ensure that people and project tasks move seamlessly through defined project milestones. With smarter workflows, team members can be empowered with capabilities such as automatic tracking of project communication, approvals and status updates and much more.

2. Budgeting

The success of every project irrespective of it being a customer-facing or an internal one is primarily dependent on how well it has been budgeted. By budgeting, we mean that there is a transparent view of the project’s budgetary scope and it will be easier for finance or payment teams to view the progress of project schedules and raise invoices according to pre-defined contractual obligations. 

It becomes easier for decision-makers to get a holistic view of how the project is utilizing resources to efficiently manage budgets and scope changes. It also helps them to have knowledge about how much of these budgeted figures have been accepted by the customer or internal teams that required the project. The project management dashboard that you utilize should have a clear space for tracking your budgets and trace anomalies and unexpected escalations in billing.

Related Reading: 5 Must-have Features In A Project Management Tool For Small Businesses

3. KPI Indicators

In the age of performance-oriented work culture, there are quite a lot of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that every project manager needs to keep track of in a project. The KPIs could be related to the project’s budget, milestones and schedules, resource utilization, employee performance, time and effort, customer satisfaction indices and much more. 

The project management platform is the perfect place to have a comprehensive view of these KPI elements and hence your project management software needs to incorporate KPI visibility as a key pillar.

4. Team Management and Collaboration

Customer-facing projects often require a collaborative and constructive approach from multiple team members who may be spread across offices or continents in several cases with different time zones. Bringing them together and offering a seamless collaborative environment is an essential factor and the project management software you choose can play a big part in it. 

By having a dedicated section in the dashboard for team communication as well as collaboration options, platforms like InfinCE foster a culture of togetherness within the company that will be beneficial for sustained growth in the long run. Examples of collaborative options that employees can directly access from the project management dashboard could be joining meetings virtually through audio or video interfacing, sharing and working collaboratively on documents and files, tracking dependent task progress and much more.

InfinCE also supports you to quickly transit to remote working. InfinCE enables your workforce to get up and get running remotely, within the shortest time and without the need for any special equipment.

Related Reading: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

5. Reporting

Decisions are often made by leadership by analyzing reports from project managers. These reports cover a wide spectrum of operational and functional parameters of a business. It includes employee performance reports, budget and billing reports, marketing and pipeline or lead generation reports, profit and loss reports, project progress reports and much more. And each of these reports may have multiple variants or sub-reports depending on factors such as geographical classification, vertical or industry-wise classification, product or service wise classification and much more. 

A project management dashboard needs to incorporate a powerful reporting feature that can provide comprehensive yet simplified insights of the entire business or project which will then allow decision-makers to utilize it for their next step or strategic planning.

Managing a project successfully requires considerable effort from managers and team members. But without a digital platform to organize all activities and tasks, there is no way people can handle complex project activities of today manually. This is where enterprise platforms like InfinCE can be the game-changer. Our cloud-based enterprise collaboration platform enables you to successfully manage big or small projects seamlessly with intuitive dashboards offering all the necessary features you need. Our consultants can customize the platform to suit your unique business needs thereby ensuring continuous success for your project management activities. Get in touch with us to know more. 

With the ever-changing market scenario, working effectively from anywhere is merely turning into a necessity more than a luxury. 

Thanks to technology!

Now businesses are able to counter strike even this challenge by switching to remote working environments with the help of remote collaboration tools. Statistics reveal that the number of people working from home has increased by 400% in the last decade. 

But a question remains: 

Although technology and remote team communication tools are making work from home or remote team collaborations possible, how efficient and productive can this work culture be?

For instance:

With the assistance of a remote work tool, your workforce remotely working on a critical project seems absolutely fine, until you encounter a problem that needs an immediate fix, like: 

• You end up struggling between multiple apps to reach the concerned resource
• Raise necessary tickets
• Share important info
• Monitor the task progress

This is crazy:

Multiple work collaboration tools might be enabling you to successfully complete the task, but compromising on time and efficiency is not viable, especially when the market is rough.

So what is it that you need to ensure an efficient remote working environment?

You need the right technology or the apt remote workforce management software!

While working remotely, what’s essential is to ensure enhanced team collaboration and efficient time management. That is where you have to find the right tools for remote teams.

Here’s the deal:

With a remote work tool like InfinCE, you can achieve this by enabling your workforce to get up and get running remotely, within the shortest time and without the need for any special equipment. Eliminating the complexities of using multiple technologies, InfinCE, an integrated infinite cloud facility, makes the best collaboration tool for remote teams.

So, What makes InfinCE the best remote work tool in the market now? 

1. Reduce Technology Complexities with the Right Remote Work Tool

When initiating a remotely functioning workforce, it is obvious to first prepare a list of the must-have work-collaboration tools like Skype, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Google Drive, Spreadsheets and such. 

But it gets worse:

Let’s not ignore that switching between multiple apps has its own difficulties. And it’s a common task you will find in every remote collaboration tools

Check how InfinCE is reducing the complexities of engaging with multiple technologies for better remote team collaboration

• Brings the ease of swift chats
• Efficient video conferencing
• Collaborated worksheets
• Online task managers
• Schedulers
• Secured cloud file sharings

But here’s the kicker: 

InfinCE is providing all of them under one roof. Enabling a much more streamlined and efficient workflow under remote working conditions, thus InfinCE provides the best work collaboration software solution for small businesses.

2. Effective Communication Through an Efficient Remote Work Software

Smooth and effective communication is always the key to better remote team collaboration and a successful business. When it comes to remote working environments, streamlined communication becomes a necessity. Connecting effectively with your team and ensuring that every member is on the same page, might take more than just a few standard emails in most of the remote team communication tools. 

What must be done? 

Before selecting tools for remote teams, companies must ensure it onboard a variety of conversational channels like group chats and video conferencing, to facilitate a smooth and timely flow of information. 

And, here is the best part:

An online cloud platform and a remote team communication tool like InfinCE is dedicated to streamlining work collaborations by: 

•  Providing seamless chat options
•  Enabling your team to join active online meeting rooms through shared links
•  Takes remote work collaboration to a whole new level. 

In addition to it, this remote work tool facilitates efficient screen sharing and makes it possible to create an impact with intuitive and interactive presentations, even while working remotely. The inbuilt calendar feature makes scheduling meetings, updating events and checking member availability a whole lot easier, reducing planning time and enhancing coordination.

Related Reading:5 Workplace Innovations You Can Welcome with Video Conferencing

3. Empower Your Workforce with Right Technology and Remote Collaboration Tool

Let’s face it! 

In today’s rapidly changing environment, it takes a whole set of advanced remote work tools and technologies for small businesses to gain competitive advantage, and survive in the market. When working from home, it often becomes difficult to access many of these required tools, compromising the quality and productivity of work. 

You might be wondering now:

InfinCE is a simple tool for remote teams and a platform built to improve employee efficiency and productivity. With a pool of online apps and remote collaboration tools, InfinCE facilitates seamless creation of online spreadsheets, presentations, and documents, letting multiple collaborators work together in the same document for better remote team collaboration.

The best part is: 

InfinCE enables members to place comments and suggestions in real-time, helps reduce errors and meets deadlines more easily even in remote working conditions. 

Moreover, InfinCE file storage facilitates secured file sharing, guaranteeing complete file security and enabling controlled access and monitoring of how your data is shared. Making InfinCE the best tool for remote workers.

4. Secured Cloud-based File Sharing: Crucial for any Remote Work Tool

Most small companies practice transferring files and data through USB drives or other hardware. Although such practices may feel comfortable and simple to use when working under remote environments, this may turn inconvenient, and in some cases, a huge loss and threat to the company if misplaced, damaged or gotten under the wrong hands.

To avoid such mishaps, it is always safe and effective to rely on the cloud when it comes to transferring and storing files.

Want to know the best part?

InfinCE, the infinite cloud platform, provides effective cloud-based file sharing, allowing employees to seamlessly access and transfer organizational data from anywhere while enabling proper monitoring and activity logins. Thus making it a very secured remote collaboration tool. 

Related Reading: 6 Ways to Build a Secure File Sharing Practice Within Your Organization

5. Complete Access and Control: A Must Feature for Any Best Remote Working Tools

While running a small business with multiple technologies, it takes immense time and effort to manage and administer the effective functioning of each tool. Such management and administration become even more complex and difficult when shifted to a remote working environment. So, any remote work tool has to address this problem. 

We make things simpler for you: 

• InfinCE makes administration simple with centralized intuitive dashboards enabling seamless user management, department creations, and usage tracking, across the organization through our remote work tool. 
• With a single sign-on remote collaboration tool, InfinCE allows employees of a company to access all their business and productivity tools under secured firewalls. 
• With one single remote work platform, a company can gain complete access and control, while least worrying about infrastructure management, storage, backups, security, and updates.

6. Enhanced Productivity & Efficiency: Important for Remote Team Collaboration

In a remote working environment, what’s most important is to have effective resource management. 

Having remote work tools that do not cater to your specific business workflows might leave you spending more time and effort in managing the tool itself, rather than enabling you to achieve an effective workforce or smart servicing environment. 

An integrated remote employee management software like InfinCE gives your company the flexibility to choose only those tools and apps that fit your exact business needs, facilitating easy performance monitoring, and project coordination. 

With advanced tools to assign tasks to remote workers and monitor progress in real-time, InfinCE helps organizations drive remote working efficiency and overall business excellency while contracting the efforts and time utilized for resources management.

A fully remote and flexible “work from home” environment, demands technology to replicate the smooth coordination and functioning of an office work culture. Implementing an integrated remote work tool like InfinCE, makes effective project management, resource monitoring, group collaboration, cloud storage, and other business solutions possible, within the comfort of homes or remote. Along with boosted productivity, InfinCE also ensures a safe, secure and hassle-free IT infrastructure management for the complete organization. In rough market situations, it is critical for small businesses to rely on technologies that are simple to use, cost-saving and initiates enhanced business growth.

To learn more about how InfinCE can help your business work from home effectively, get in touch with our experts today!

Also, check out our infographic to unveil 8 easy tips to effectively work from home!