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.  

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. 

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!