Flexible working goes beyond the accepted concept of working from home. It offers your employees the freedom to work from anywhere, on any device of their choice! It is a way of working that considers your employee’s personal needs and gives them the freedom to work from home to a certain degree. The term refers to a non-traditional working arrangement wherein the employee can choose a flexible start and finish time, unlike a conventional nine-to-five work schedule. 

Flexible work could mean flexible working hours or any permutation and combination of remote and hybrid work put together. Agreed, multiple lockdowns during the pandemic forced companies worldwide to adopt remote work. But having experienced the benefits of remote work, especially in terms of increased productivity, companies have decided to accept a certain degree of remote work post covid to keep their dispersed employees happy while ensuring improved bottom lines.  

Benefits of Flexible Working

Flexible working brings to the table multiple benefits both to the employee and the employer. These include:

1. A better work-life balance for the employee
2. Lowers levels of absence
3. Decreases stress levels
4. Employees are motivated to be more productive
5. Reduces overhead expenses like rent, utilities
6. Increases employee engagement
7. Betters employer-employee relationship
8. Fosters employee retention

Flexible working hours and remote work have thus become the new normal in an anywhere work scenario.

Read more: Why Does Employee Well-being Matter in a Hybrid Work Model?

How Flexible Working Contributes to Company Efficiency?

1. Workplace flexibility can be leveraged to increase employee engagement and productivity, thus improving overall company efficiency.  
2. Flexibility at work leads to increased happiness of your employees, thus motivating them to work harder to meet goals.
3. Leverage technology to enable seamless communication and collaboration across geographies.
4. Increases the agility of your company in general and your workforce in particular, thus catering to improved customer service and increased customer loyalty. 
5. Reduces attrition levels, a fact that is likely to attract future talent.

A flexible work culture calls for accepting ‘flexibility’ as an essential strategic tool for managing your business and integrating it with all your business systems and processes. There has been a paradigm shift in how companies let their employees work, post Covid-19. The McKinsey-Ipsos study “The American Opportunity Survey” reports that 58% of the 25000 employed Americans surveyed confirm having the option to work full or part of the week from the privacy of their homes. 35% of the respondents of the same study say that they can work from home full time, and another 23% confirm that they can work from home one to four days a week. Stats indicate that remote and hybrid work is here to stay. Both employers and employees have realized the fact that flexible work serves to help the latter find a better work-life balance. 

The ongoing changes in the realm of work have changed employee expectations of work. Hybrid work would be an excellent opportunity for your geographically diverse teams to better their career prospects. Gartner’s “Future of Work Trends Post Covid-19,” says hybrid work is all set to become mainstream. 

Future of Work

• The future of work and the workplace involves embracing digital culture and tools to support flexible work. Adopting smart digital workplace solutions help companies break silos and give transparency in their internal communications. This motivates your employees to work towards realizing the organizational mission and vision better and more efficiently. You need the backup of smart communication and collaboration tools to implement flexible work successfully. Your company needs the right technical capabilities to support your ‘anywhere workforce’ for the successful implementation of flexible work. 
• As employee expectations of working remotely have changed, companies would be designing work around employee-driven flexible schedules to create a human-centric model and culture to promote a healthy hybrid environment.   
• Companies must develop processes and infrastructure that help upskill their current workforce and enable them to move to higher roles, optimize their present manpower and save money in the event.
• Employers must ensure well-being as a critical part of their Employee Value Proposition (EVP) to attract and retain talent.
• Companies will leverage technologies to ensure their hybrid employees remain connected to their organizational culture. Also, investments are to be made in talent processes to help expand employee networks. 
• Good manager-employee relationships pave the way for excellent employee experiences. Managers would require the support of proper tools to develop proactive relationships with their diverse teams.  
• Data analytics is essential to assess employee engagement and well-being to enrich employee experiences. Smart digital workplace solutions come with tools to track employee productivity as well. 

Read more: 6 Tips To Guarantee Data Security in a Digital Workplace

How Can a Smart Digital Workplace Solution like Infince render Your Business Futuristic

Infince is a modern workplace solution powered by cloud technologies and smart tools. It can unify your data, simplify your business processes, and enable seamless communication among your teams to deliver, no matter which corner of the earth they work from! The feature-rich digital platform brings to the table a multitude of benefits to ease your business operations and make your company future-ready in the ever-evolving digital ecosystem. Here is how Infince can be your best buddy to shore up your digital endeavors:

1. Infince is purpose-built to enable real-time collaboration through varied collaboration apps to support remote and hybrid work. The platform comes with an array of collaboration tools like employee directory, business phone, live chat, individual and group audio and video calls, etc., to help your teams work better and faster. 
2. It can simplify data analytics by building custom dashboards to suit your business needs. Better access to data and improved transparency help increase employee productivity.
3. Enables effective communication through online office tools, secure file sharing, email, and task manager.
4. Its curated application marketplace comes with several open-source and commercial business apps, allowing you to choose the right tools that suit your line of business, no matter which industry you represent.
5. It allows you to easily manage your information assets and scale efficiently as your business needs change.
6.  You can centrally control your IT assets through a single login.
7. It has stringent access controls to safeguard your critical data.
8. Allows your employees to access your business management software from anywhere on any device of their choice.
9. Infince is your one-stop solution for all your IT infrastructure needs.  
10. And what’s more, Infince mobile app allows you to access your data on its intuitive Android/IOS apps to deliver an engaging experience to your mobile workforce!

Infince is a smart, futuristic digital platform equipped with everything you need to ease your business operations and manage your mobile and diverse workforce efficiently as you scale up. Get in touch with our experts to know more, or sign up for a live demo.  

Remote and hybrid work has gained more popularity during and after the outbreak of Covid-19. Flexible work has been found to keep employees more productive and happy, a fact acknowledged by employers worldwide. Working from home/anywhere has become a vital strategy for organizations to increase employee productivity.  

Post Covid-19, companies are increasingly adopting hybrid work schedules by encouraging employees to work from the comfort of their homes for part of a week. The Accenture 2021 study “Future of Work: A Hybrid Work Model” found that 83% of the 9326 employees surveyed confirmed their allegiance to hybrid work, wherein they got to work at least 25% of the time remotely. Another key finding of the study was that “responsible leaders must move beyond physical location to shape the future of work by giving people resources tailored to their needs.” The same study report also documents that 63% of high-growth companies have already embraced a ‘productivity anywhere’ workforce model. And more companies are expected to follow suit! This data indicates companies that enable their employees to be productive and healthier anywhere have succeeded in improving bottom lines.    

Read more: 5 Tips to Improve Remote Collaboration

How Hybrid Work Model Increase Employee Efficiency?

A hybrid work model serves to improve employee efficiency in a multitude of ways. Here are a few:

1. Hybrid work calls for smart digitization of business processes.

Hybrid work requires the adoption of smart digital workplace platforms to enable your dispersed employees to communicate and collaborate with their remote team members to get their work done. Digitization of business processes endows your business with technical capabilities to fast-track its operations while training your employees in state-of-the-art technologies to help the latter upskill themselves and improve their efficiency.

2. Increases productivity   

Flexible work lets employees work to their strengths, thus serving to increase their productivity. The hybrid work model encourages teams to leverage cloud technologies to find an optimum balance of creativity and collaboration to meet goals.

3. Improves employee satisfaction and culture 

Getting to decide on how, where, and when to work to meet the organizational goals increases employee satisfaction by leaps and bounds. This autonomy in decision-making serves to boost productivity.

4. Increases collaboration and  betters work relationships 

Regular virtual meetings help track the progress of projects while facilitating your geographically diverse teams to communicate and collaborate effectively and efficiently over the digital platform in a connected world. A digital workplace solution offers your employees an avenue to contribute proactively toward meeting goals smarter and faster, thus strengthening relationships in the event.

5. Better work-life balance improves mental health

Hybrid work enables your employees to have a better work-life fit which is very important or their mental well-being. Getting to weave their work around their life allows your employees never to leak their energy into their work, thus decreasing their stress levels. This flexible work schedule prevents your employees from burnout, increasing their productivity.

Digitization improves the efficiency of both the employees and the employers, thus rendering your business processes smarter. Having said that, it doesn’t imply adopting hybrid work would be a cakewalk for companies. Hybrid work poses its own share of challenges to employers. 

Read more: 12 Ways To Drive A Connected Workplace

Two Major Challenges of the Hybrid Work Model

1. Nurturing company culture when working remotely

Companies are worried about growing a company culture around remote work that aligns with their core values and beliefs. The fear of physical distances hindering the development of company culture is amiss. Smart digital workplace solutions come equipped with the right communication and collaboration tools to keep your employees engaged at work and involved in team-building activities to enrich their experiences. Decision-makers must implement an employee-first culture to nurture their remote teams. 

2. Fear that employee well-being might be at risk 

Digital workplace solutions enable employees to seamlessly access data vital to their business operations. Increased levels of communication and collaboration might lead to your employees being bombarded with an overload of information that they may fail to disseminate, leading to higher levels of work stress and burnout. This will adversely affect your employees’ well-being. This problem can be resolved by choosing a smart digital workplace solution with custom capabilities to integrate the right tools to suit your business. Infince is a smart digital workplace solution that ensures the right data reaches relevant people through its highly customizable smart features. You needn’t settle for a one-size-fits-all kind of digital workplace solution anymore! You can use custom dashboards to simplify your employee data analytics and streamline the management of your information assets. Custom dashboards help analyze performances through smart people analytics and use it to manage and assign tasks to optimize your manpower.   

Tips to Reimagine the Well-being of a Hybrid Remote Workforce  

1. Hybrid working model helps make human connections 

A fully remote workforce might miss the human connections and relationships they once enjoyed at their on-site workplaces. Hybrid work would allow your teams to meet at their physical office premises periodically and enjoy casual, personal interactions with their peers like they once did. This will help eliminate the feeling of disconnect that fully remote employees might feel. 

2. Implement hybrid work as a strategy and train leaders to manage new work schedules

Business leaders and managers need to be trained to leverage cloud technologies to manage their hybrid workforce and track their work effectively so that their teams remain engaged and productive. They should be empathetic to the needs of their employees.

3. Integrate smart tools to streamline communication 

Digital workplace solutions come equipped with an array of smart tools to facilitate file sharing, virtual meetings, chatbots, etc., to enable seamless communication among your diverse teams. The right sets of tools ensure that data remains transparent and silos are broken while ensuring the communication remains relevant. 

4. Make employee wellness programs an essential part of your business strategy 

HR teams must plan workshops and programs to help employees destress and unwind. These could include classes on meditation, stress management, fitness challenges, etc. Employee wellness programs help boost employee loyalty and reduce attrition. 

5. Build digital fluency

Digital fluency is critical to improving revenues. Companies must adopt digital working solutions tailor-made to suit their business. Technology is vital to help your remote teams stay connected in a physically disconnected work scenario.

Read more: 6 Ways to Improve Engagement of Your Digital Employees

Summing up

Creating opportunities that optimize communication and cater to the mental well-being of your employees is thus vital for business growth. You must maintain transparency in your communication to build a culture of trust among your hybrid working teams. Hence, you must adopt the right kind of tools and applications to help your business remain agile to meet its ever-changing needs. This is where a smart digital workplace solution like Infince comes in handy. 

Infince is a feature-rich digital platform that can help you manage your hybrid workforce through its,

• Custom dashboards that enable smarter data analysis and improve business efficiency by tracking the progress of projects in real-time
• Varied collaboration apps that enable seamless communication among your dispersed teams through a comprehensive employee directory; live individual and group chats; and individual/group audio/video calls
• Curated marketplace that includes a multitude of applications to suit any business or industry 
• A suite of productivity apps that includes online office tools, business email, and secure file sharing to enable faster and smarter execution of tasks
• Seamless IT infrastructure management from a single place to enable better visibility and much more!

Get in touch with our experts or experience a live demo to know how Infince can be an asset to your digitization endeavors.   

The pandemic caused remote and hybrid work cultures to become the new modes of work. When workplaces shifted to homes, it compelled many companies to adopt digital workplace solutions to enable their employees across diverse geographies and time zones to stay connected. But why are connected workplaces increasingly becoming the need of the hour for businesses today? Why are companies striving to prepare for the future direction of the workplace?

Connectivity offers flexibility to workplaces, and employees tend to be more engaged at work when they can choose how they spend time at work. Remote work allows employees to work from the comfort of their rooms, thus letting them save the time required for daily commutes to the office. 

Read more: How a Unified Environment Promotes a Successful Digital Workplace

So, what is a connected workplace?

A connected place is essentially an integrated, secure network of tools and systems that brings together personnel, information assets, and business services on a single, centralized platform to improve efficiency and productivity. Powered by cloud technologies, a connected workplace is equipped with all the aspects you require to manage the services of your business to the employees and customers alike. Connecting with employees at the workplace is vital for sustained business growth. 

Benefits of connected workplaces

Connected workplaces bring a host of benefits to the table, a few of which are:

1. Inculcate a sense of belongingness among employees, which gives rise to good employee experiences, leading to good customer experiences.
2. Carrying out all tasks on a single platform gives transparency to employee activities, easing collaboration across all departments.
3. The progress of every task can be tracked, which would help in their timely completion.
4. Enable seamless internal communication among all departments.

Connected workplaces help increase cooperation among employees. Your employees can connect with team members, their work, company goals, and work culture. Thanks to the smart tools on a connected digital workplace platform. Hence, keeping your geographically dispersed teams connected at work is important to meet organizational objectives and attain sustained business growth. 

Here are 12 ways to keep your workplace more connected,

1. Make sure you know your employees personally
2. Allow a free flow of information to one and all
3. Focus on employee engagement
4. Integrate collaborative software suites with the digital platforms
5. Ensure your onboarding process is hassle-free
6. Conduct online surveys and opinion polls among employees
7. Set up a peer mentoring program
8. Recognize the voice of your employees
9. Nurture communities of practice
10. Encourage employees to connect on an intranet   
11. Set up an employee directory
12. Plan virtual social events to build a rapport among team members  

1. Make sure you know your employees personally

The managers and HR executives must make sure that they connect well with the employees to create a sense of belongingness in their minds. Several companies make it a point to send a gift to their employees on their birthdays. Such gestures would give the message that employees are important to the company.

2. Allow a free flow of information to one and all

The information must freely flow from top-down, bottom-up, and peer-to-peer while working from home. The multi-directional flow of information required for your day-to-day business operations calls for connecting to digital workplace platforms. Content should be well documented and made accessible to one and all through intranet and other tools for communication available on your digital platform. Employees must have the liberty to ask questions and offer feedback to their superiors as and when required. The free flow of information is an important factor in determining how to stay connected with teams while working remotely.  

3. Focus on employee engagement 

To increase productivity, your employees need to feel enthusiastic and involved in what they do. Lack of enthusiasm might lead to lesser productivity. Being connected on digital workplace platforms renders transparency to work. Tracking and reporting tools like custom dashboards display the progress of tasks and motivate people to work hard. 

4. Integrate collaborative software suites with the digital platforms

A digital platform integrated with collaborative suites like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and other collaborative tools helps employees stay connected and join hands with team members to realize organizational goals. 

5. Ensure your onboarding process is  hassle-free

Your new recruits deserve a suitable environment virtually to familiarize themselves with the tasks they would be entrusted with. Conducting well-designed virtual induction programs will help the new recruits connect with their colleagues while familiarizing themselves with your digital platform. Existing employees will get to hone their skill sets by attending virtual orientation programs designed to introduce new software updates. 

Read more: Modernize and Simplify Your HR processes with a Digital Workplace Platform

6. Conduct online surveys and opinion polls among employees

A connected environment would give all your geographically dispersed employees an equal opportunity to engage in conversation with each other. Online surveys and opinion polls would help keep your employees stay connected and engaged while giving insights into employee conceptions and work culture.

7. Set up a peer mentoring program

Workplace mentoring enhances the employee experience and well-being. Peer mentorship helps build unbiased relationships among employees wherein participants encourage and support each other by sharing knowledge on digital workplace platforms. Peer mentoring programs testify that employees stand to gain knowledge and personal growth through social connections via the Internet.

8. Recognize the voice of your employees

Your employees must be encouraged to drop their suggestions and opinions on your company’s performance in virtual suggestion boxes. Managers must appreciate these ideas on their merit and act on them. Internal communication channels on your digital platform can also be used to voice employee opinions on business performance. Your employees’ voices deserve to be heard!

9. Nurture communities of practice

Harvard Business Review defines communities of practice as “groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise”. These groups allow your employees to freely share their experiences and knowledge in novel ways to develop new methods to resolve issues. Communities of practice focus on taking advantage of the expertise within the company by letting your employees across multiple locations connect, brainstorm, and collaborate on your digital workplace platform.

10. Encourage employees to connect on an intranet   

Post good content on the intranet that focuses on specific activities of employees and teams. The special events and campaigns held in the company also must find mention in the content shared on the intranet. Excellent performances must be duly appreciated, thus making the intranet an employee recognition center. This gives people a chance to recognize the good work done by their peers, thus improving your company’s culture. 

11. Set up an employee directory

Having an employee directory on your digital platform would mean having the contact details of all your employees at your fingertips. This would help an employee to communicate with the right person to resolve a crisis. The valuable opinion of the expert can be initiated through an audio or video call or even an email, all of which would be available on the digital workplace platform.  

12. Plan virtual social events to build rapport among team members  

Your geographically dispersed teams can be brought together at virtual social events. Online games and campaigns are other events that help employees connect with peers. 

Your employees deserve to be heard, and their opinions merit appreciation. They need the support of a smart digital workplace solution like Infince to help them stay connected with their peers and company goals. Infince offers many features to help your employees stay connected at work. 

How does Infince help in keeping workplaces connected?

“Employees who feel their voice is heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work”, says Forbes. Infince is a smart digital workplace solution with many features to help your employees stay connected to voice their opinions and share their knowledge. 

Infince offers a pool of effective collaboration tools to help you connect with your teams faster and work together better for greater business achievements. 

• You can create custom dashboards with Infince that offer deep insights into your business operations and track the progress of projects to ensure they are on schedule. 
• The platform offers a wide range of productivity tools to help you manage tasks, organize data, and share files seamlessly in a secure environment. 
• The curated app marketplace of Infince provides your organization with many open-source and commercial business software options from multiple vendors that cater to varied industries. 
• The extensive list of apps available on Infince includes Vanilla Forums to manage interactive community forums for customers and potential clients; LimeSurvey to conduct surveys and gather feedback; MediaWiki to build, track and share a hub of knowledge internally and externally; Mautic to manage campaigns, track metrics and generate reports; and many more! Besides, you can seek the help of our experts to integrate custom apps into the platform.
• The platform helps you streamline communication through live chats, video calls, and meetings. 
• Infince has an extensive employee directory that fetches important details of your company staff and other external contacts, including their designations, email ids, and contact numbers, with a few clicks. You can view their online presence status and initiate a chat, call, or email directly from the directory!

Get in touch with our consultants for more information about our smart digital workplace platform, or just Sign Up for Free! 

Digitization of workspaces has changed how businesses operate and connect with their employees, customers, and other stakeholders. The value your geographically diverse teams gain from digitalizing your business processes is multidimensional, be it in flexible working hours, enhanced productivity, the sheer convenience of mobility and security, or the ease of efficient communication and collaboration. It has redefined how work is getting done on a global scale. 

Digitalization automates your business processes to enable your employees to communicate seamlessly through multiple collaboration tools built into your digital workplace solution. It equips your employees with the right capabilities and tools to collaborate with their remote teams to work better and keep themselves engaged on the digital platform, thus motivating them to strive more toward attaining the goals set.     

How Digitalization Keeps Your Employees Engaged?

Remote work caused employees to miss the social interactions they enjoyed with their colleagues when working in physical workplaces. Organizational silos reduce engagement, resist information sharing, and adversely affect productivity. 

Digitalization helps improve employee engagement and ease data sharing, enhancing productivity in the event. Virtual gatherings in digital workplaces make up for the face-to-face interactions in physical workplaces to a large extent. Employee engagement depicts how emotionally engaged your employees are at work. Engaged employees make it their mission to work toward business success. Forbes defines employee engagement as “the emotional commitment the employee has with the organization and its goals”. Engaged employee wants to be heard and to feel that they are valued members of the company they work for. They hate to be treated as income-generating tools but want to be part of a winning team that works towards a common goal: improving the bottom line. 

A smart digital workplace solution like Infince leverages cloud technologies to improve employee engagement. 

Read more: How a Unified Environment Promotes a Successful Digital Workplace

6 Ways to Enhance Employee Engagement Through Infince

1. Offer real-time appreciation 

Instant access to information in a connected world helps your employees achieve targets faster. Engaged employees value recognition more than their paychecks and deserve accolades for their contributions. They will likely leave the organization when their sincere efforts go unnoticed and unappreciated. Companies must acknowledge the achievements of their employees in real-time, even while working remotely. This is made possible through a digital workplace platform like Infince, with great scalability and ease of use. Creating custom dashboards would give explicit visibility and showcase employees’ achievements in real-time, thus motivating them to remain loyal to the company.

2. Peer-to-peer recognition

Smart companies have adopted peer-to-peer recognition to boost employee engagement on digital platforms. This works wonders in cases where your employees do not get along well with their superiors. Infince helps build strong support networks by recognizing peers’ efforts, thus causing your employees to feel valued and appreciated. Building a culture of recognition will help create a new attitude and outlook toward the company in the employees’ minds.     

3. Improved data security 

A smart digital workplace solution like Infince can secure your data through virtual private servers. Critical data will be safeguarded with stringent access controls. Other safety features like secure file sharing, password protection, and edit access services to ensure authorized access. Your employees can access data and perform tasks in a secure digital environment.

4. Use productivity tools to increase engagement

An efficient digital workplace solution, Infince comes equipped with an extensive suite of productivity tools to ease your day-to-day business operations. Once the platform is deployed, your employees will realize that creating documents, handling emails, scheduling events, and managing tasks have never been easier. Efficient digital platforms collaborate with online office tools to help your employees manage business data better. Infince has in-built capabilities to let your employees fine-tune documents through comments and simultaneous edits. 

5. Collaboration apps enable seamless communication and employee engagement   

A good digital platform comes with an extensive suite of collaboration apps to help remote employees better connect with their teams, work together to meet goals, and stay engaged. Infince streamlines communication while enabling seamless remote work. 

6. Conduct virtual team-building activities

Virtual team-building activities bring your geographically dispersed employees together and help them achieve goals through collaboration. You can use the digital apps on Infince to host virtual team-building activities like online office games, campaigns, etc., to shore up your team efforts to improve your digital employee engagement. 

Read more: Ensuring Digital Wellbeing With The Right Digital Workplace Platform!

In a scenario where remote work has become the new trend, companies need the backup of a smart digital workplace solution like Infince to boost their digital employee engagement. Infince has built-in capabilities to create custom dashboards to report your employee’s activities and recognize their achievements. The platform offers seamless IT management from one place while ensuring the safety of data rendered. It also enables seamless integration of third-party tools for communication, collaboration, and increased productivity. Infince has a curated marketplace of varied business apps from multiple vendors from which you can choose the apps that suit your business best. Custom apps can seamlessly integrate with the platform to make your digital transformation more productive. 

Digital technologies empower your employees to proactively involve themselves in their work with the kind of flexibility they require to manage their work from remote locations. Get in touch with our experts to know more.

Human resource departments always focus on long-term HR strategies and functions that strengthen employee relations and cater to business growth. These strategies revolve around very important activities of any business, viz. employee engagement, and well-being, company culture, talent recruitment and management, new employee onboarding, etc. Unfortunately, HR teams often employ outdated manual processes and systems to carry out their responsibilities, despite the fact that they manage every company’s most valued asset, which is their workforce. This practice entails inefficiencies that need to be addressed with the right kind of technical support for the smooth functioning of the personnel department. The routine tasks of the personnel department, like job application screening, revision of pay, employee induction paperwork, etc., can be handled with much more ease and efficiency if these processes are automated. 

Read more: 5 Ways To Improve Business Growth Through Employee Engagement

Why should you modernize your HR processes?

PWC’s 2021 Global Culture Survey says 54% of the HR leaders surveyed have confirmed that instilling a digital culture is high on their transformation plan. Embedding a digital culture calls for digitization of all business functions while enlisting the HR function to support the digitization drive. 

Automation simplifies your HR functions while ensuring that state-of-the-art systems increase efficiency by leaps and bounds.

Technology can streamline and simplify HR functions, rendering them simple and accurate while saving precious man-hours. With the digitization of HR functions, your team is relieved from focusing their time and energy on rote manual and repetitive tasks like responding to emails and screening job applications. Also, data accuracy empowered by automation tools helps HR teams make intelligent decisions. 

A smart digital workplace solution is what every business needs to run its HR operations with matchless efficiency, powered by cloud technologies. The intranet and other collaboration tools on a smart digital workplace solution enable the HR team to operate paperless, while workflow automation tools would ensure the smooth conduct of all the HR functions. 

How does digitization impacts HR functions?

A smart digital workplace platform would help your HR team to digitize its prime functions. 

1. Recruitment process
2. Induction process
3. Communication with employees
4. Employee data management
5. Addressing employee grievances

Digitization of HR activities also increases your HR team’s efficiency manifold by bringing quite a few benefits to the table. 

A few benefits of digitizing your HR activities include:

1. Installs an efficient leave management system in place, thus increasing the overall efficiency of HR. 
2. Leverages technology to boost communication and simplify your internal processes.
3. HR dashboards give actionable insights to help make strategic decisions.
4. The employee directory on the digital workplace platform centralizes important data on all your employees.
5. Increases the overall efficiency of your HR processes and human resource capital through big data, cloud technologies, smart integrations, and chatbots, thus enriching your overall employee experiences. 

How can you simplify and modernize your HR processes?

A well-managed workforce indicates how efficient the company’s HR department is and vice versa. Anywhere working has become the new normal, and HR teams have also caught up with the ‘remote’ way of getting things done. Adopting a smart digital workplace solution is the first step toward simplifying and modernizing your HR processes. A smart digital workplace platform would enable your HR teams to ‘remote’ manage your personnel functions to meet organizational goals in a number of ways. Digital platforms come equipped with cloud-backed tools to increase employee engagement,  collaboration, and efficiency. 

Read more: How a Unified Environment Promotes a Successful Digital Workplace

How do digital workplace platforms simplify and modernize your HR processes?

HR processes can be automated using employee dashboards on digital workplace platforms. Creating custom dashboards would meet your unique business needs and ensure that the right data reaches the relevant people to relieve the HR department of answering an endless flow of queries. Smart digital platforms come integrated with a multitude of apps to simplify your HR activities in varied ways. 

A few pointers on how digitization untangles and enriches HR functions

1. Simplifies onboarding and offboarding process
2. Drives employee engagement through multiple collaboration tools
3. Improves communication through a variety of tools, including dashboards
4. Equipped with a comprehensive employee directory that fetches important details of all your employees
5. Simplifies HR reporting through built-in productivity tools
6. Eases the training of employees through learning tools integrated with the platform.

When you decide to adopt a digital workplace solution, you are signing up for the digitized HR transformation along with the digital transformation of your other business processes. A smart digital workplace platform would meet all your HR needs under one roof and simplify all HR activities to engage and support your employees all the way through. A smart digital workplace solution like Infince can be your best companion to translate digital HR transformation into the day-to-day business activities of your business in more ways than one! 

Infince is a people-first digital workplace platform that can enrich your employees’ experiences right from their onboarding until their exit. The collaboration tools on the platform can increase employee engagement and align new recruits to the company’s core values, culture, and branding. Customized feeds in employee dashboards help HR executives keep track of employees’ leave records. Company updates can be communicated effectively through emails, live chats, individual and group audio/video calls, etc. Integration with learning platforms like Skill Lake offers your employees the right kind of training and mentoring to help them advance in their careers while adding value to their organization. The curated marketplace on Infince has an extensive library of apps from which you can choose the ones that best suit your business. In short, an infinite cloud platform like Infince is your answer to all the digitalization needs of your business. 

Get in touch with our team to guide you to digitize your HR operations. 

Teamwork is always the underlying element for business success, now more than ever, considering today’s remote working environment. The remote work revolution has caused companies to increasingly let their employees work from home, requiring geographically diverse team members to work in unison to attain corporate goals. 

So, why is remote collaboration important? 

74% of Fortune 500 CEOs expect to reduce their office space, thanks to anywhere working. Remote work calls for seamless collaboration among teams, and the digitalization of business processes endows companies with remote work capabilities. Remote collaboration is essential because it can:

1. Increase productivity, 
2. Optimize workflow processes,
3. Strengthen team relationships,
4. Help manage projects better, and
5. Improve communication.

A robust virtual collaboration environment must be in place for remote work to be productive. Your business needs the support of a smart digital workplace solution integrated with efficient collaboration tools to enable its dispersed team members to seamlessly share data to meet goals faster. 

What are collaboration tools?

Remote collaboration tools are the different kinds of software and services that allow your geographically diverse teams to work together to meet business goals. They eliminate the limitations of geographical locations as impediments to teamwork and equip your team members with the right capabilities to work in conjunction with each other to complete projects. You need a suite of various collaboration tools integrated into your digital workplace platform because they bring diverse benefits to the table.  

Read more: How A Collaboration Software Can Improve Productivity

A Few Benefits of Remote Collaboration  

1) Increases productivity   

Productivity is vital to increasing profits and efficiency. A productive workforce is a key to sustained business growth. Your remote employees have more time saved by eliminating unnecessary commutes, which can be effectively used to complete tasks faster. Likewise, virtual meetings consume less time than face-to-face meetings. In short, remote work helps your employees save a lot of time which they can productively use to complete their work faster and smarter.

2) Eases problem-solving

Collaboration enables diverse skill sets to come together to carry out tasks and address any challenges. Seamless sharing of knowledge can help resolve problems with more efficiency and address the blind spots, if any, with more ease, thus optimizing workflow processes. 

3) Allows freedom and flexibility at work     

One of the biggest boons of remote work is enabling your employees to enjoy more freedom and flexibility at work. The employees have ample time to accommodate their personal and professional lives while clocking the required work hours and completing tasks on time. This serves to ease work pressure and foster trust while leaving your employees more satisfied. 

4) Saves cost for both employers and employees  

Remote work relieves employers of the need to pay huge rentals for their office premises. Even in a hybrid environment, the physical premises of the office need to be retained only on a limited scale, thus saving huge costs which are otherwise incurred in the form of rents payable to huge commercial spaces. Remote work eliminates the costs of transportation, childcare, and work wear for employees, thus adding up to their savings. 

Thus, it is imperative for businesses to foster smart and effective collaboration among their employees to help the latter thrive in an increasingly digital working environment. Remote collaboration requires your teams to leverage technology to nurture communication among their members to work collaboratively to complete projects.    

Here are 5 Tips to Improve Remote Collaboration 

1. Set clear-cut goals and allocate tasks effectively

Your employees must be given a clear idea of the goals set. Removing uncertainty around the goals would help improve remote communication, increase productivity, and track the progress of projects. Set periodic milestones in well-defined terms, the progress of which can be tracked and displayed on custom dashboards to be viewed by the relevant persons.

2. Plan and schedule regular meetings  

Meetings should be set in a recurring pattern such that your employees get to know beforehand about it and plan their home and work life around it. Video calls and meetings, single and group chats can be done in real-time on digital platforms and made more fruitful by the data sharing feature of digital workplace solutions.

3. Set boundaries for communication 

Timelines should be set for communication which the teams should strictly follow to avoid false assumptions and misconceptions that could adversely affect team relationships and dynamics. Respecting the timeline for communication is important because the line between personal and professional lives blurs when working remotely and because diverse teams would be working in different time zones. The importance of the matter to be conveyed merits the type of communication that needs to be used, like email, instant messaging, phone calls, etc.

4. Create a collaborative environment by setting up multiple communication channels 

A torrential flow of data through a single channel of communication can cause the information to get lost and people to disconnect. Your teams need a digital platform that streamlines communication by dedicating separate discussion channels for separate tasks such that the right set of data reaches only the relevant personnel. Smart digital workplace platforms offer a multitude of avenues for effective communication among teams, like email, audio calls, one-on-one, and group video calls, individual and group chats, etc. 

5. Create custom dashboards for smarter data analysis 

Creating a custom dashboard on your digital workplace platform is the smartest way to track the progress of your projects. A smart, personalized dashboard simplifies data analysis and displays the right sets of metrics to the relevant people, thus giving transparency to the progress of tasks. Your employees get to stay on top of company updates and seamlessly share data through standard and custom tiles on custom dashboards designed exclusively to meet your unique business needs. 

Read more: How Can Organizations Profit More from Collaboration Software?

Effective remote collaboration thus improves productivity and builds healthy relationships among your employees while keeping them engaged at work. Businesses must embrace smart digital workplace solutions to make them future-ready and create a smart digital working environment for their remote employees. The challenges of cloud technologies are ever-evolving, and so are your business needs. A smart digital workplace solution like Infince would be your best buddy to promote smarter collaboration among your dispersed teams because:  

1. Its feature-packed collaboration apps affect smarter and streamlined communication among your teams. 
2. The employee directory on the platform lists all details of your internal and external contacts, allowing you to initiate a call, chat, or email directly from the directory.
3.  You can choose the right collaboration application from our extensive collaboration suite to help your employees connect better with remote team members and work together to meet goals.  
4. Individual and group chats can be made more meaningful through seamless and secure sharing of files.
5. Build trusted relationships through the multiple communication apps integrated with the platform.
6. Leverage centralized data using custom tiles on multiple dashboards.

Infince is the one-stop digital workplace solution that can make your business future-ready with infinite scaling-up capabilities to meet the ever-evolving challenges of the digital ecosystem. Get in touch with our experts to know more. 

A digital workspace is the virtual equivalent of your individual workstation. It is an integrated technology framework that leverages evolving technologies to enable you to work online by providing and managing a hoard of features like apps, data, task management functionality, desktop delivery, etc., on any device, anytime. Global Workforce Study 2021 by BCG and The Network says 89% of the respondents expect their jobs to be partly remote when the pandemic ends. So, remote work is here to stay, fully or partially. 

The pandemic caused businesses worldwide to quickly adopt digital workplace solutions to prevent disruption to their workflows. What started as a move triggered by the force of circumstances later proved to be so highly productive and beneficial that most forced adopters became strong advocates of digital technologies. Adopting a digital workplace solution is the first step toward creating a digital workspace. 

Read more: 6 Tips To Guarantee Data Security in a Digital Workplace      

Essential features of a digital workspace    

1. App and desktop virtualization to provide seamless access to your remote workforce
2. Secure and hassle-free access to SaaS apps in one place
3. Easy and seamless file sharing
4. Content collaboration tools to let teams create, edit, review, and post content that can be accessed by the right people
5. Automated workflows that save time and man-hours
6. Unified endpoint management of all devices by a central management console 
7. A single sign-on that provides your employees quick and secure access to data and apps  

You can improve the productivity and efficiency of your remote workforce by choosing the right kind of digital workspace with task management functionality that matches your business needs. Hewlett Packard Enterprise defines a digital workplace as “ a virtualized form of the traditional, in-person office environment, where many elements of collaboration and productivity are performed through some combination of digital applications, cloud computing, and other technology”. 

A digital workplace solution leverages cloud technologies to integrate all the apps and services required for the internal operations of your business on a single platform so that your remote teams can seamlessly access and share data in a secure environment. Companies create unified environments to enable seamless collaboration among their systems.  

So, what is a unified environment?

A unified environment or platform is an efficient, effective, collaborative, and scalable ecosystem consisting of people, systems, and data that work in unison to meet business goals. It enables seamless collaboration among teams and offers secure data access, independent of device and location. 

Salient features of a unified platform  

1. Secure and hassle-free exchange of data between systems and apps.
2. Seamless collaboration among teams across geographies.
3. Central and controlled access to data across all access points.
4. Scalable to accommodate the changing needs of your business. 
5. Enhanced security and protection against data breaches. 

Thus, unified platforms have multiple features that help employees improve productivity and meet goals. The pandemic-induced lockdowns and new health protocols have paved the way for increased adoption of remote work among businesses worldwide. The BCG Employee Sentiment Survey 2020 reports that 75% of the 12000 surveyees are able to maintain or improve productivity on individual tasks, while 51% confirm being able to maintain or improve productivity on collaborative tasks. As working from anywhere is becoming the new pattern of work, companies are increasingly embracing digitalization to overcome the challenges of an ever-evolving business environment.  

Read more: Ensuring Digital Wellbeing With The Right Digital Workplace Platform!

So,  how does a unified environment promote remote work? 

1. Provides a central hub for all business processes, thus eliminating the need to switch between apps to get work done. Multiple modules are integrated on the centralized platform, which can be accessed on dashboards.
2. Allows users to create their own workflows sans coding. Workflows can be reconfigured or changed to meet changing business objectives.
3. Offers flexible integration of apps and data. Data updates are synchronized across all tools, thus breaking silos to enable all pervasive integrations.
4. Uses dashboards for smart reporting. Smart dashboards simplify data analysis and help track and report KPIs and other metrics.  

Digital workplace solutions thus bring together people,  processes, and cloud technologies to deliver secure, efficient, and enriched employee experiences across multiple devices and geographies. They come endowed with a host of features to help your remote teams work smarter for your business growth. 

A smart digital workplace solution will have an extensive suite of collaboration apps to help you connect with your teams faster and smarter to meet your goals. It will help you streamline communication through a series of channels like email, live chats, easy file sharing, individual and group audio/video calls, etc. Above all, you can centrally control your entire IT assets from one place and manage your information assets with ease and security. You can even leverage private business IT infrastructure custom-built to meet your end-to-end needs for enhanced security. 

If you are looking for a digital workplace solution that unifies all your business tools to increase your employee productivity, Infince would be your answer. The curated marketplace on the platform includes apps from multiple vendors to meet all your business needs. And what’s more, our experts can guide you through adding custom apps to the platform to increase productivity and improve the experiences of your employees. Whether creating documents, handling emails, scheduling events, or managing tasks, Infince’s vast library of productivity tools will help you accomplish your day-to-day activities easily and raise your workforce efficiency. 

Get in touch with our experts or take a demo to know more.   

Digital transformation leverages cloud technologies and modern processes to enable businesses to operate faster and more efficiently. As a result, applications are increasingly moving out of data centers to cloud-backed networks to help businesses work smarter and more collaboratively. Once you drive your applications to the cloud, the service provider will henceforth manage your IT infrastructure, thus relieving you of the complexities of managing your own IT assets. As a result, your employees get to work from anywhere, accessing data on devices of their choice. Digitalization of your business operations ensures seamless IT infrastructure management from one place. When you move your workloads into cloud-backed virtualized networks, it is imperative to adopt new technologies to secure your data. 

Read more: All You Need to Know About Dashboards and Data Security

Why is securing solutions essential for digital transformation?

Your remote employees use their personal devices to access various apps in the cloud, including multiple collaboration tools, to access data on your corporate network to get their work done. This calls for the adoption of enhanced security measures across your network to safeguard your data. Embracing security transformation is essential for successful digital transformation.

So, what is security transformation?

Security transformation refers to the integration of security, combining all aspects of digital technologies to operate your business securely once you embrace digitalization. Integration of security protocols would radically change how security is architected, deployed, and operated to safeguard your data. Therefore, it is crucial for you to choose the right digital workplace solution that suits your business, with capabilities to integrate additional security patches for added security. 

A few tips to secure your solutions to shore up your digital strategies 

1. Ensure password protection rules are in place. 

Strong passwords protect your data against breaches and cyber attacks. Ask your employees to update their passwords mandatorily. They should be taught to create strong passwords and remember them too. 

2. Consolidate all tools on your digital workplace solution to get a single view of your network.  

Creating a single view of your IT infrastructure by integrating tools from multiple vendors will offer control and visibility in one place. 

3. Implement regular security updates

As any connection to the Internet is susceptible to cyber attacks, you should always be prepared to defend against such threats by fortifying your IT assets with security patches and enhancements.

4. Install Virtual Private Network (VPN) for all connections

Networks are more susceptible to cyber attacks as they often have just the protection of generic security measures alone. Make sure your office locations have the added protection of VPN connections. Your employees who may connect through public wi-fi services should be instructed to use the VPN service mandatorily. 

5. Leverage the security features on your digital platform     

Optimize the existing security features on your digital workplace solution to safeguard your data. 

6. Build a multi-layered defense to fortify your current security

Integrate more security solutions, if necessary, to fortify your IT assets.  All your employees and partners who have access to your systems need to be educated on the added-on security protocols to protect your information assets and optimize your cyber security measures. 

Read more: Transform your Data Sharing Practices to Win Customer Trust?

Thus, it would be best if you had adequate measures in place to facilitate the secure operation of your business, to let it remain vigilant against potential cyber-attacks and resilient too, should such attacks happen. Analyze the value of your information assets to assess the potential threats that may occur to them clearly. Your partners and other external players who have access to your critical data should be asked to submit security and audit reports regularly to keep track of the efficacy of your security measures. If you are looking for a smart digital workplace solution that can be scaled up to safeguard your valuable data, Infince would be your answer. 

How does Infince help boost digital security?

Infince can help secure your valuable information assets in a number of ways by offering:

1. Private business infrastructure custom-built to meet your end-to-end needs for improved security 
2. Data security options from multiple vendors, 
3. Scalable private virtual servers that prevent data sharing with third-party software vendors
4. Secure access controls through encrypted keys and strong passwords
5. Seamless and centralized IT management of your processes through a single log-in credentials
6. Secure file sharing through password protection and select edit access to further protect data from unauthorized access. 

Not just that. Get in touch with our experts or take an Infince test drive to know more. 

Changing market patterns, rising consumer demands, and gaining a competitive edge against the big fishes in the market have forever been challenging for small businesses. But as the economy tries to recover from the recent pandemic-driven recession, SMBs are predicted to foresee more challenges up ahead.

Since February 2022, inflation is known to have increased by 2.47% worldwide, making it the top challenge for SMBs in recent quarters. Subject to this, small businesses are now desperately trying to up their game by providing unique customer services, improved customer relations, and enhanced operational efficiency. However, COVID-19 issues stay relevant, disrupting the work patterns and productivity and creating a significant concern over employee safety, wellbeing, and morale.

Adopting the right technology seems like the only key to sustainability and resilience for small businesses. Yet, 80% of small businesses are not fully utilizing available technology.

Why?

This blog will take you through the top 10 challenges small businesses might face while adopting technology in 2022 and ways to tackle them. But before that, let’s look at how technology can benefit small businesses.

Top Benefits Of Technology For Small Business Owners

Considering today’s market challenges, small businesses must primarily prioritize: customers, employees, work efficiency, and profitability.

How can technology help achieve these priorities?

The rising capabilities of the cloud, artificial intelligence, and automation are impacting businesses tremendously, enabling operational efficiency, reducing human labor, promoting transparency, quick decision-making, and much more. Here’s a look at the top benefits small businesses can gain with the right technology.

“90% of CEOs believe the digital economy will impact their industry, but less than 15% are executing on a digital strategy.”
                         — MIT Sloan and Capgemini

Here’s a look at the benefits of technology for small business owners:

• Operational Efficiency: With tools to effectively collaborate, communicate, quickly track performances, and keep everyone on the same page, technology today contributes majorly toward operational efficiency.
• Improved Productivity with Automation: Eliminate redundant tasks with automation to save time and focus energy and resources on essential matters.
• Better Storage Solutions with Data Security: Deploying the rising capabilities of the cloud companies can resolve the most eminent issues of all – data storage and security.
• Remain Future-ready: With the changing market, especially work cultures, staying equipped with technology makes companies relevant and future-ready.
• Enhanced Customer Experiences: Woo today’s customers with services at their fingertips in no time with technology.
• Lower Cost and Improved Efficiency: Save costs on multiple resources, reduce downtime, improve efficiency and drive ultimate ROI.
• Digital Transformation: Deploying the right technology tools from the start of a business gives much ease to transform digitally and deploy rising technologies with time.

Why are small businesses still reluctant to adopt new technologies despite the benefits? Here’s our pick of the top 10 tech challenges small businesses face in their technology journey!

Top 10 Technology Challenges Of Small Businesses

1. Choosing the right software
2. Complexities with new technology
3. Easy accessibility
4. Keeping up with updates & integrations
5. Information security
6. Staying relevant to today’s changing work culture
7. Difficulties in integrating with existing systems
8. Offering employees a unified user experience
9. Cost concerns
10. Getting the right advisory

1. Choosing the right software

With thousands of vendors out in the market, selling more or less the same features, choosing the right software or technology solution itself becomes a major challenge. This challenge is especially major for small businesses due to the lack of proper information they are offered by the software vendors. Plus, today’s competitive work environment might prompt adopting multiple tools cause it’s hard to find all you need in one platform. But of course, investing in all the products that look suitable is quite unreasonable.

Tackling the challenge: It’s crucial that before SMBs make their decision on purchasing software, they thoroughly analyze their technology needs and identify their technology opportunities. Merely adopting technologies to match the competitors can result in huge losses, especially if your company is new to the digital transformation journey. Thus, choose a platform that quickly adapts to your ecosystem, is scalable with your changing business needs and tech capabilities, and can satisfy all your tech needs through a single platform.

2. Complexities with new technology

Adapting to a new digital tool takes time, be it a subtle or advanced technology. This is one reason why SMBs with fewer resources, less time, and more to achieve often hesitate to deploy new technologies. However, the right technology will eventually blend into your routine, making tasks more efficient and time-saving. But a technology that complicates your workflow further cannot be called the right solution.

Tackling the challenge: Invest in a technology that’s user-friendly, easy to navigate, can quickly be set up and get started with, and closely aligns with your workflow. Although, as mentioned before, the first few days of implementing new technology are always rough. Thus, try and invest in technologies that come with a tech consulting service or partner who can walk your company and your workforce through the transition.

3. Easy accessibility

Another reason why small businesses are reluctant to adapt to new technologies is due to a lack of accessibility. Tools or software that can be accessed from only certain premises limits its benefits and usability. Especially for SMBs that need their business up and running from anywhere are likely to lose interest in a platform that limits feature accessibilities.

Tackling the challenge: An apt software for small businesses would be the one that provides secure access to data, productivity tools, dashboards, performance metrics, and other features from anywhere. A platform enabling easy tracking, quick decision making, and effective and centralized IT management from anywhere can be called an ideal technology for small businesses. Plus, mobile support and accessibility are like the cherry on top of the cake!

4. Keeping up with updates & integrations

Most technology platforms come with subscription schemes that, after a while, turn out costlier than expected. There are monthly updates and integrations that one needs to keep up with, or it might affect the effectiveness of the tool. Imagine if you are using multiple apps for your business. Tracking the updates, subscription expiry, and integrations of all the tools would turn out to be a whole new task in itself, challenging the entire workflow and business effectiveness.

Tackling the challenge: Investing in a unified solution that integrates multiple features or functionalities into a single platform would be the best way to avoid such drawbacks. When you have all that you need under one platform, you have more visibility and can better manage your updates & integrations.

Read more: Why Does Your Business Need An Intelligent Digital Workplace?

5. Information security

Information or data security is the most crucial challenge for businesses today. Ransomware attacks were up by 150% in 2020 and grew even faster in 2021. And over 28% of such data breaches in 2020 involved small businesses. Ensuring one’s financial data, IP data, customer information, and other confidential data are safe can be challenging, especially when transitioning to new technology or using multiple apps. The fear of loss to such threats restricts small businesses from deploying new technologies. Also, secured data storage is often a concern for many companies

Tackling the challenge: Utilizing technology solutions that are known to provide effective data security would be the best way to tackle this challenge. Cloud technology is emerging to be most effective when it comes to information security and data storage. Thus, ensure to invest in technology platforms that guarantee data and IT security through virtual private servers, advanced firewalls, and access controls.

6. Staying relevant to today’s changing work culture

The changing work culture today is adding to the tech challenges of small businesses. Companies can no more fix solutions that are strictly apt for office workflow or remote work environments. However, the sudden and inevitable shift to remote work culture has shown an increase in the adoption of technology among small businesses. And that’s why it’s imperative that SMBs choose the right platform.

Tackling the challenge: Be it remote, hybrid, or office work culture, work efficiency, and productivity is what counts at the end of the day. That’s why it’s imperative that SMBs focus on technology that promotes effective collaboration, instant communication, easy and secured accessibility to tools and data, business transparency, and effective and centralized IT management from anywhere.

7. Difficulties in integrating with existing systems

Companies that may be using outdated systems are often reluctant to switch to new technologies, as this would need them to upgrade their entire ecosystem, losing time, money, and resources along the process. However, the reluctance or limitation to adopting newer tools and technology might end up affecting smooth functioning with clients and vendors or even a new digital opportunity.

Tackling the challenge: If your company is new to digital transformation, then choosing a platform or technology that scales with time is highly recommended. A platform that enables seamless third-party integrations and custom integrations will benefit in the long run. And if you are already using a technology that limits integrations, then it’s never late to shift to a solution that enables flexibility.

8. Offering employees a unified user experience

With staff working from various locations today, it has become challenging to keep everyone equally engaged, motivated, and on the same page. Of course, technology is doing much to solve this challenge, but what happens when your staff starts complaining of accessibility issues, incorrect credentials, or server errors?

Tackling the challenge: With the cloud, one can now enable easy and secured access to tools, applications, data, files, and more from anywhere. One can also grant temporary access to clients and vendors for further smooth functioning and unrestricted operations. And when such cloud abilities are added with Custom Dashboards, employees can stay engaged, updated, motivated, and remain connected from anywhere.

Read more: Driving Employee Engagement In Today’s Changing Work Culture!

9. Cost concerns

When running a business on a restricted budget, investing in technology platforms that may or may not be fully utilized for your operations might not be a wise choice. However, most SMBs end up paying on technology more than the benefits received, eventually prompting them to withdraw completely from the investment. That is why it’s imperative to ensure that the technology you invest in is 100% effective for your business.

Tackling the challenge: Invest in a platform that allows centralized IT management. When you have all your data, IT assets, storage, and even employee & client management done from a single platform, through a single login, you gain greater visibility and control over your operational costs. Moreover, let’s not forget the versatile storage management controls, enhanced security, and single sign-on convenience such a platform could bring to the table for your small business. Plus, in time, when you are thinking of expansion you can seamlessly and cost-effectively scale your server configurations and capabilities, and effortlessly power your business goals with technology.

10. Getting the right advisory

Most small businesses might not have an expert IT council or advisory panel within their workforce due to cost pressures. However, bigger organizations often have in-house technology advisory teams that can evaluate and select suitable technology solutions for their prevailing issues. For small businesses, getting the right IT advisory partner or consulting partner is often not considered an option for fear of escalating budgets.

Tackling the challenge: A tech partner is always an asset, whether a small or a big business. However, when the cost is a concern, it’s rational to depend on technology that comes with tech support or a tech partner who can help with the implementation or transition. If not, it’s always best to invest in a technology ecosystem with easy IT management, a quick setup process, and fewer or no complications when implementing.

In Conclusion!

The market is changing, and the competition is tough! If you need your small business to sustain and succeed, you need to invest in the right technology now! As discussed in this blog, deploying technology for small businesses might seem challenging. But if strategized the right way, it’s the best step you’ll ever take for your business. And that’s why we have platforms like Infince that makes transitioning to technology for small businesses quicker, simpler, and smarter!

Read more: How An Integrated Digital Workplace Solution Helps Mitigate Remote Work Hurdles

Infince is a complete digital workplace that allows businesses of any size and domain to easily adapt and deploy the rising capabilities of the cloud so that they can stay competitive and future-ready. Along with seamless communication, effective collaboration, business transparency, data security, and centralized management, Infince creates a secure environment for remote, hybrid, and office work cultures.

What makes Infince unique?

• Collaboration apps including video meetings, live chat & employee directory
• Online office tools
• Single sign-on
• Custom dashboards
• Application marketplace with custom integrations
• Centralized IT management
• Business Phone System with smart call management features
• Virtual private server
• Branded mobile app & more!

Read more: The Definitive Guide to Perfect Digital Workplace Solution

Transform your business with improved employee engagement and productivity.

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An intranet is a computer network comprising various operational systems and other computer services, created exclusively for internal communication and collaboration within an organization. What started as a powerful tool for effective top-down communication in an organization has now more value added to it as an efficient employee engagement tool. A more engaged workforce would be a more productive and a great asset to any company, constantly boosting its morale by remaining proactively connected across diverse geographical locations. 

This blog will take you through why intranet is turning increasingly essential and a few best ways to engage users on Intranet!

Importance Of Intranets 

Intranets play a significant role in creating a sense of belongingness among employees and motivating them to feel proud of their work. They also help align individual and company goals in an environment where their efforts are appreciated and valued. Employee engagement is vital to business success. One of the most common reasons for employee disengagement has been identified as ineffective internal communication or its lack thereof. An effective way to address the issue is by adopting an efficient digital workplace solution that comes with powerful intranet software. 

In a connected world where the pandemic has paved the way for work to be increasingly fully remote or hybrid, the intranet software on digital workplace solutions allows your employees across diverse geographies to connect and communicate with each other on devices of their own choice. 

Intranets come equipped with multiple features which can help your employees communicate better with each other, thus creating a culture of engagement. “Achievers Workforce Institute 2022 Engagement and Retention Report,” says that 41% of employees feel undervalued at their workplaces.  Underappreciated employees would be disengaged at work and are likely to increase the attrition levels. 

Employee engagement can be enhanced by adopting intelligent solutions and strategies. An intranet solution is an effective tool to keep your employees engaged and productive. You need to understand the intranet’s features clearly and what your employees need at work, be it for communication or carrying out their tasks, to enhance employee engagement on your digital platform. 

You can increase employee engagement on the intranet in a multitude of ways. Integrating the right elements the employees can access to carry out their day-to-day work will help improve intranet engagement.    

Read more: Game Changing Benefits of Intranet Software in Corporate Branding

A Few Ways To Boost Employee Engagement On Your Intranet:

1. Train your employees to use the intranet properly

The importance of the intranet should be communicated to all your employees before the rollout.  They should be adequately trained to familiarize themselves with all the software’s features. Recruits should be tutored to use the software’s various features as part of their onboarding process. 

2. Your digital workplace should be user-friendly and easily navigable

Adopt a minimalist approach while designing your intranet layout. Modern intranet software can be customized and configured to meet your business needs. Your intranet software should never be congested with unnecessary tools. Integrating the right tools alone would make it enticing to the eye while ensuring easy navigation, equally needed for enhancing employee engagement. Employee engagement is bound to increase when employees easily access the right information on the intranet.   

3. Create a content strategy plan

As intranet is an engagement tool that facilitates effective communication, the content generated and posted on it is very important and demands your attention. Your intranet must therefore have the capabilities to help your employees create content. Pre-built templates will help your employees post updates much faster and easier. Having a set of definite guidelines in place for creating content tags will ease search and navigation. Plan your content to post team-building write-ups to motivate your employees regularly. Also, seek the assistance of team leaders and other contributors to create good content for publishing in monthly reports and newsletters.

4. Use employee surveys and polls

Rolling out surveys and feedback polls is a sure-shot way to increase employee engagement on your intranet. Make sure to draft thoughtful questions on specific system areas and use the feedback to address any issues. Deliver surveys periodically to keep your employees engaged and use their feedback to improve your techniques and strategies regularly. 

5. Set well-defined goals  

Your employees must be given a clear set of goals right from the beginning to increase their engagement on your intranet. The transparency of intranet goals would give your employees a clear understanding as to why they are using the solution. This is vital to ensure the content created and posted aligns with the set intranet goals. Use the collaborative tools on the solution generously to assign tasks to your employees and ask them to share updates to record the progress of their work. Clear-cut goals set to improve internal communication, inter-departmental collaboration, and employee engagement should be conveyed to all team members across diverse geographies. 

6. Your intranet needs constant updation

The efficacy of your intranet heavily depends on the vigor and rigor of the content posted on it. Create an editorial calendar with engaging content that your employees can access and be inspired by. If your employees see the same old content on the intranet daily, they will eventually lose interest in logging in. The latest company news, fun-filled campaigns, and contests should find a place in the posted content. This would motivate your employees to engage proactively on the intranet platform as part of their daily work. Incentivize content creation to motivate your employees to create great content for sharing on the intranet. Intranet administrators must make sure to post industry-relevant write-ups on the platform.    

7. Include social activities on the intranet 

Remote work has left people longing for the social bonding they enjoyed with their colleagues during coffee and lunch breaks.  This can be addressed by adding team bonding activities and virtual hangouts on the intranet. Incorporating elements of appreciation like employee rewards, work anniversaries, and birthday celebrations would create a sense of belongingness and be valued in the minds of the employees.  

Read more: The Need for Seamless Business Integration in the Digital Era

A depository of all the vital information related to your business operations, a modern intranet gives relevant and engaging content to your employees. It also enables seamless integration with various third-party applications, from top collaborative suites like Google Workspace to social media apps and other tools. The cloud-based capabilities of intranet solutions render them reliable, secure, and flexible enough to meet the challenges of today’s enterprise requirements.  

Infince is an intelligent digital workplace platform that meets all the above requirements. Powered by an ever-growing library of collaboration and communication tools, Infince has the capabilities to keep your diversely spread teams positively engaged. A one-stop technology solution for all your business needs, Infince offers you multiple channels like audio calls, instant messaging, e-mail, video conferencing, individual and group chats, etc., to keep your employees engaged through relevant internal communication. Our ever-growing library of app marketplace addresses business needs across multiple industries. 

What more? Infince lets you seamlessly integrate third-party tools. Its custom dashboards and tiles help you stay posted on business performances and metrics at just a glance. Infince is a perfect solution to keeping your business transparent, connected, secured, and efficient!

Learn more about Infince today! Reach out to our experts or Sign Up for a Free Demo!