Traditional communication, collaboration, and knowledge management approaches are becoming increasingly obsolete in today’s digitally-driven workplace. Overlooking workplace challenges jeopardizes productivity greatly. Intranet platforms have found a substantial place in today’s modern workplace, and they deliver results that drive productivity, improve communication, and enhance workplace collaboration. Intranets reduce employee onboarding time by an astonishing 50%, rapidly assimilating newcomers into the corporate fold. They also reduce email overload by 40%. An Intranet is more than a tool; it’s a corporate Atlas. The rise of remote and hybrid work has necessitated new tools for connectivity. Intranets have risen to this challenge, supporting organizations as they adapt to these dynamic paradigms. Remarkably, a study by Gartner reveals 85% of forward-thinking companies employ Intranets to ensure seamless remote and hybrid work experiences. Check out this infographic for more on why your intranet is a crucial tool in addressing gaps and solving workplace challenges.

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.  

Benefits of Implementing IT Assets and Inventory Management Software

During 2020-2024, the IT Management software is predicted to grow at a value of over USD 353 Million, with a 7% CAGR year over year. These estimates were from the pre-COVID era, which means that the growth rates could be accelerated now. In the new normal, workforce worldwide is undergoing a seamless transition from desk-based jobs in the office to work from anywhere culture. Fueled by the pandemic’s necessity, remote working from home became a mainstay for professionals in almost every country that bore the pandemic’s brunt. With this culture becoming mainstream, there is an essential requirement for two major components for succeeding:

1. Flexible Enterprise IT Policies

2. Flexible IT Asset Management Software

Flexible enterprise IT policies are needed to ensure that employees are readily connected to the organization’s technology ecosystem from their home networks without facing any issues.

Flexible IT asset management software is needed to accommodate and manage the entire spectrum of IT assets that are now distributed between employees’ offices and homes.

Read more: 4 Tips To Attain Success In The New Normal Remote Work Environment  

Once a strategic enterprise IT policy is in place, the next important thing a business needs for enabling a seamless remote working culture is efficient IT management software. Such a platform would allow easy control and management of an organization’s IT assets. Companies often rely on outdated IT inventory management software or manual spreadsheet-based mechanisms to organize their crucial assets. These will increase overhead and lead to utter chaos when the business faces disruptions on scales as massive as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Benefits of having a Modern IT Inventory Management Software

With more companies expected to have a hybrid model of work in the future, employees may get the privilege to decide whether they want to work from the office or home. In such a mode of operation, having powerful IT management software can empower organizations to achieve agility in their operations. Let us examine the top 4 benefits that can be realized when an organization deploys a modern IT inventory management software:

Read more: Top 5 Productivity Tools Every Small Business Needs Today  

1. Manage IT Hardware

An organization’s IT hardware includes components ranging from small network hardware to servers, data centers, and intelligent sensors that are used to aid work. It is vital to enable secure and seamless access to each of these assets when authorized employees need them. Also, there is a need to manage every hardware’s lifecycle from procurement to installation, deployment, maintenance, and retirement at correct intervals of time to maintain a sustainable IT environment for your staff.

2. Manage Devices

With digital being of paramount importance, every business will require employees to have some form of a computing device to be with them for official purposes. In most cases, it will be a desktop PC or laptop, or it could be smartphones with dedicated company apps for work management. Additionally, there will be a host of supporting devices such as printers, webcams, projection devices, etc. It is essential to keep a record of who has access to what to ensure that costly IT assets are not lost or misplaced.

3. Manage Software Licenses

Irrespective of the business sector that a company operates, there will be a range of software products that their employees would use to work better. It could be productivity apps, HR software, digital storage, enterprise work support apps, etc. The IT team will have a hard time administering licenses to employees who need access to different software at different times to progress in their work schedules. With robust IT Assets management software, they get the required dashboards to view, control, and administer licenses to cloud-based or on-premise software used within the workplace.

4. Manage Data

In the digital economy, data is the King, and this notion works in the operational side of businesses. When organizations deploy more software or platforms to empower their employees to work better and serve clients faster, these applications will generate a vast gamut of data daily. This data fuels in-depth analytics and yields insights on improving productivity, better allocation of IT and human resources, optimizing costs, etc. A modern IT management software can handle enterprise data as an IT asset and help companies build internal data workflows and processes to ensure that the data is put to fair use and ROI is derived faster.

Read more: How IT Teams Can Prepare to Support Remote Workforce During COVID-19  

A modern IT management software can help businesses realize untapped potential and value from their IT infrastructure. As we have broadly covered in this blog, enterprises of all sizes have an opportunity to make their entire business’s digital backend more flexible to support employees when they want to work from anywhere. This will significantly improve the organization’s preparedness for future disruptions similar to the COVID-19 pandemic. If your organization is on the lookout for a comprehensive enterprise management software to manage your digital landscape, get in touch with us to see why InfinCE can be the ideal solution.

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

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

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

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

1. Approval Matrix

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

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

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

2. Building Awareness

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

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

3. Encourage Autonomy

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

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

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

4. Drive Data Generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Smart Workflows

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

2. Budgeting

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

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

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

3. KPI Indicators

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

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

4. Team Management and Collaboration

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

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

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

Related Reading: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

5. Reporting

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

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

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

Simple Ways to Perfect Your Work From Home Routines

With this being the ultimate solution to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses are now highly encouraging remote working environments. But, it’s also true that “working from home” is not an easy job. When you have your kids and family around, no maids coming in, and your email loaded with urgent work messages amidst loaded household chores, work from home seems nearly an impossible task.

But at this point of time, where your business needs more efficient employees at toes, it’s no time to go down on work or get distracted. Although balancing your work time and home time might seem a bit challenging, it is not impossible if you know how to do it right. Here are some simple yet effective tips to help you work better, stay productive, and keep aside valuable family time.

District Hall, 75 Northern Ave., Boston, 6pm April, 2019:

On 4th April 2019, INFINCE is sponsoring a free workshop targeting the tech needs of small industries. The workshop to be held in the District Hall of Boston aims at preparing small business owners to beat market challenges with available technology options.

In today’s world where market competition is intense and customers expect a faster response, businesses are striving to enhance their efficiencies by turning into “internet companies”. However, numerous factors like limited budget and lack of tech awareness restrain a majority of the new and growing business owners from transforming digitally.

Considering these hurdles, INFINCE has pulled together this workshop to help growing businesses make better technology decisions for rapid industrial growth. The workshop will present ways to organize a firm’s IT options in the most cost-effective and streamlined manner.

“In today’s world innovation is no longer an option but a necessity. The workshop aims at leaving attendees well informed on choosing the right digital options to solve their prevailing business situations and prepare their whole organization for a remarkable future”, says Stephen Cummings, Senior Vice President, Fingent.

Focusing on better preparing small enterprises to accommodate growing technology changes, this workshop will walk small business owners through the many do’s and don’ts of digital transformation. The workshop will be a technology guide for those small businesses who are taking their first step towards a technology future to battle immense market competition. After the workshop, those interested will be able to have a hands-on introduction to INFINCE, a new platform designed expressly to provide small business owners control over their digital capabilities now and in the future.

For free registration sign up at: https://www.infince.com/request-demo

About INFINCE

INFINCE is cloud technology optimized for small businesses and a platform to run IT without any hassles. Stephen highlighted some of the key traits of INFINCE that makes it different from other cloud platforms. Quick deployment is one such, where a company can set up and run INFINCE within minutes. INFINCE is also economical as it integrates optimal cloud configurations that cut down cost without sacrificing on performance.

INFINCE Presented with the 2018 Great User Experience Title for Business Process Management Software by a Reputable Directory for Business Software

The highly reputable website for B2B and SaaS reviews FinancesOnline has certified INFINCE Cloud Servers with the 2018 Great User Experience award for delivering a well-designed IT solution with a consistent quality user experience. FinancesOnline conferred this award after they conducted a thorough evaluation of all our platform’s elements and features, from the “economical” INFINCE pricing to its core capabilities that simplify one’s technology needs.

To be eligible of FinancesOnline’s 2018 Great User Experience award, a solution must have an intuitive design, clutter-free interface, and user-friendly features. Comparing us against the top business process management tool in the market, FinancesOnline highlights INFINCE as a comprehensive solution that provides users with “total control” overall activities while simplifying repetitive processes through automation.

Other highlights for the FinancesOnline team include INFINCE’s “top class” administrative control, frictionless interdepartmental communication and collaboration, accessibility on any device, and customizable packages to perfectly suit specific requirements and specifications. All of these allow businesses to start achieving more with less time and effort, within a secure environment.

Aside from the comprehensive review, FinancesOnline also praised the platform as an efficient business process management system, with INFINCE earning a spot in its esteemed top 10 list. The cherry on top is FinancesOnline’s 2018 Rising Star award presented to INFINCE. This award is given to software solutions that have quickly increased in popularity and have established itself as a reliable brand despite being newcomers in the SaaS market.

Simply your business technology today on a smart and modern workspace with INFINCE!

Leading BRB Reviews Firm Confers Rising Star and Great User Experience Award to INFINCE

The leading B2B ratings and reviews platform CompareCamp has recognized INFINCE for its reliable cloud model by conferring the Rising Star of 2018 and Great User Experience Award.

The expert review team at CompareCamp came to the conclusion after a close evaluation of INFINCE’s capabilities in serving both small and large scale businesses with cutting-edge cloud IT solutions. Together, the review team undertook a detailed analysis of INFINCE, particularly in its ability to deliver. According to CompareCamp, INFINCE’s “top functionality centers on IT essentials which include secure cloud hosting, run-your-business software, and concierge IT services.” This indeed confirms the usability and versatility of our infinite cloud solution for small and medium businesses alike.

CompareCamp gave an overall 83 points for all the capabilities offered by INFINCE combined. In their product quality score, the review team gave the highest rating of 8.4 for the array of features embedded in INFINCE. They highlighted key features that differentiate our platform from the rest, which includes optimized information management, total administrative control, enhanced team collaboration and availability of plug and play business applications. From utility apps to file sharing, management and communications capabilities, INFINCE encompasses everything that a modern business must have at their disposal to maximize productivity and thrive competitively.

For ease of use, INFINCE managed to obtain an 8.2 score with its perfectly streamlined and centralized dashboards that enable effortless navigation and usage. The Great User Experience Award is conferred to INFINCE by considering its simplified cloud administration and management model. CompareCamp also lauded the inclusion of complete support for deploying and managing cloud services in INFINCE with minimal costs.

We conceived INFINCE with the aim of equipping small and medium business with state of the art cloud technology. It relies on a flexible cloud infrastructure with complete support for open source, SaaS and custom applications that encompass the IT requirements of most businesses. Besides, CompareCamp especially noted the excellent support offered by INFINCE as reflected in its 8.3 score for customer support.

Having a dedicated cloud solution with proper customer support ensures that your business is served with the right IT needs at all times. Moreover, it comes handy when you need additional compute resources or applications to accommodate the growth of your business.

INFINCE corresponds to an economical cloud solution that uplifts your business by offering affordable software options running under its secure cloud environment. It drastically cuts your IT spendings significantly through its optimally configured cloud and open source licensing.

Besides, the pre-configured setup gives you the right amount of computing resources needed to run your business smoothly. With it comes a horde of essential computing resources that will ratchet up your business productivity, all the while giving you the advantage of a true cloud service that you can access anywhere at any time.