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!

How InfinCE’s Online Collaboration Software Facilitates Effective Business Communication

Effective communication plays a significant role in business success. Having proper business communication channels means having a highly-engaged workforce, which boosts employee morale, performance, and productivity, leading to higher returns. Employing robust business communication tools will enhance communication within your organization.

The importance of ensuring seamless communication between the team members can be felt more deeply at present, as every industry is shifting toward a more remote-friendly work culture. Hence it is essential to have a reliable online collaboration software that offers all the features for improving employee engagement and productivity. With an all-in-one collaboration platform, enterprises can facilitate effective employee communication and address many existing gaps in their productivity and work environment to achieve better revenue.

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

The role of business communication tools in today’s work culture

Business communication can be defined as the process of “exchanging information to promote an organization’s goals, objectives, aims, and activities, as well as increase profits within the company.” Effective business communication also implies how the management and employees interact to realize the company’s goals while focusing on improving organizational practices and reducing errors.

Enterprise collaboration software allows businesses to keep the communication channels open for better teamwork between different company departments and between the management and employees. Organizations can use business communication tools to generate new ideas, find solutions for specific problems, make proposals and sales plans, identify the right marketing strategies, reach agreements, and execute the decisions.

Read more: 6 Ways Online Collaboration Software Helps Manage Your Virtual Team 

Advanced online collaboration software like InfinCE comes with features to capture various forms of data to track sales performance, monitor employee productivity, analyze your marketing campaigns’ performance, and more. It results in better collaboration between the teams and helps foster a work environment that motivates everyone to achieve better results.

How to make the most of enterprise collaboration software

By integrating an all-in-one online collaboration platform in the company work culture, you can stay on top of the employee engagement problems, recognize any communication gaps, get instant feedback from employees, and predict your workgroups’ changing needs. 

Below are some ways to leverage the maximum potential of business collaboration software and ensure superior employee engagement.

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

1. Keep your team aligned with your mission

Defining your company’s mission and values to your team members will help them provide sincere feedback on how they feel about that and play a role in achieving the business goals. You should also answer any questions they have and keep the channel open for discussions. Encourage a free exchange of ideas, which you can incorporate for making future decisions. At the same time, keeping your employees aligned with the objectives will make them feel more valued and lead to better productivity.

2. Plan strategic initiatives with your team

You need to express the strategic initiatives of your organization clearly with your team and ask them to provide any inputs and ideas that they may have. Real-time collaboration software can help you plan the strategic initiatives alongside your team, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and understands what they need to do to achieve those goals. Likewise, it will also ensure that your employees brace themselves for the upcoming changes in the company’s direction that may affect their work.

3. Create a dedicated two-way communication channel

Listening to your employees is very important to ensure that you have a flawless two-way communication channel in your organization. Just as you deal with your customers’ grievances, you should make sure that you address the problems cited by your employees. Following a feedback system and encouraging employees to express their views during team conferences can help you gain valuable insights into your company’s work culture. It will also enable you to identify any roadblocks that affect productivity. 

Advantages of choosing InfinCE for business communication

InfinCE is an all-in-one enterprise collaboration software that allows you to maintain a competitive edge in the industry with innovative features. Unlike the usual business communication tools, InfinCE offers you a complete suite of productive features to ensure effective collaboration between your employees and the management and do a lot more.

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

1. Streamlined communication with live chats

It is possible to miss out on important messages when you communicate through emails, especially if they have multiple recipients or long threads. InfinCE solves this problem by allowing you to communicate through individual and group chats. You can also share local files through the live chat for real-time collaboration.

2. Seamless team meetings with audio/video calls

Video meetings can quickly eliminate communication gaps, due to which most online collaboration software mainly focuses on offering video conferencing features. InfinCE goes a step further by providing group or one-on-one audio/video call options with file-sharing capabilities and high-end security features so that you can enjoy enhanced business communication.

3. Improved collaboration with online office tools

InfinCE gives you access to a wide range of online productivity tools to make employee collaboration simpler in your company. You can easily access these office tools to manage your company data in various forms and collaborate with your employees on the go for realizing efficient results.

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

You can also get many other functionalities with InfinCE that make business communication effortless while allowing your employees to be more productive and achieve the company goals quickly. As employee engagement relates to your team’s level of commitment and their connection to your company, such an all-in-one enterprise collaboration platform can be a critical driver for your business success. Contact us to explore InfinCE further. 

The Role of Business Communication Tools in the Growth of a Business

Effective communication is the backbone of every successful business. This is even more applicable for modern businesses because of the massive shifts in the workplace culture of late. Technology advancements and the impact of COVID-19 have made robust business communication tools more than a necessity in every industry today. Fortunately, there are many impressive business communication apps, which make it easier for leaders and managers to collaborate with their teams, connect the missing dots, and drive improved performance and productivity.

Why Business Communication Tools are Inevitable in Today’s Workplace

It has become a norm for employees to use business communication tools for efficient collaboration. A recent Facebook Messaging Survey found that more than 63% of people across generations prefer messaging apps for communication instead of emails or calls. The impact can be seen in the business world as well with around 60% of businesses of all sizes using collaborative chat apps today. That is because business communication apps perfectly suit the evolving workplace culture while opening up ways to ensure improved employee productivity.

How Business Communication Apps Contribute to Business Growth

Business communication tools offer a flexible platform to furnish the varying demands of interaction within the company. Below are some of the fundamental advantages of using business communication tools that help in business growth.

1. Unmatched Adaptability

The nature of the modern workplace is changing rapidly and businesses across industries are promoting remote work. With a reliable communication app, leaders can collaborate with remote workers as needed, while allowing them to work as per their schedules. As more than 70% of millennial employees prefer working in a flexible environment, it is high time for businesses to adapt to the change and ensure proper communication channels to boost productivity.

Read more: 5 Tips To Effectively Manage Remote Teams During Challenging Times 

2. Easy Data Sharing

Modern communication tools come with simple features to share all the data and information needed for any task. Team leaders and employees can share files, upload links, or even directly stream content to make sure that everyone is on the same page. Business communication apps like InfinCE allow you to save files and data on the integrated cloud system. This makes collaborating on a project further easier, as anyone can access the required files later.

3. Effortless Task Management

Leaders can have a very difficult time managing a project if the team communicated through multiple channels. A business communication tool is much more than an everyday messaging app. It brings everything in one place so that managers and leaders can have a quick overview of the processes and stay updated with the progress of the project. It also makes planning tasks, assigning duties, setting deadlines, etc., simpler while improving accountability amongst the team members.

4. Real-Time Communication

Team collaboration apps keep employees posted on what is going on and make it easier to focus on their job roles. Messages can be sent to individual employees or in a group to make sure that everyone stays on track and performs their duties on time. Business messaging apps like InfinCE come with video conferencing capabilities to make meetings more interactive and engaging.

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

5. Less Unproductive Meetings

Physical team meetings can waste a lot of productive time. As per the Harvard Business Review, around 65% of employees believe that “meetings keep them from completing their own work, while 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient.” This serious problem needs to be fixed as quickly as possible to ensure better employee efficiency. As team collaboration apps allow you to access relevant information anytime and from anywhere, they help avoid the need for any physical meetings.

6. Improved Employee Engagement

Business communication apps are much different from mundane emails. They can act as a platform to share inspiring stories, exciting news, motivational messages, and have some fun too. Team messaging apps are not necessarily limited to sharing business-related data; many of them also come with emojis and stickers to add a personal touch to the messages and make it a bit lighthearted.

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

7. Integrated Modern Technologies

An enterprise collaboration app can also be customized to accommodate various modern technologies, such as Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation, Natural Language Processing, Predictive Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence. These technologies can help streamline business communication by sorting information, analyzing data, generating reports, creating policies, and much more. This will, in turn, help to ease the stress of performing routine tasks from the employees and they can focus on other productive duties.

8. Performance Tracking

A business communication app can also allow leaders to track the performance of their teams effectively. Team collaboration tools allow managers to create jobs and determine goals before handing over those to the team members. They can then track the progress toward the specific goals and see how each employee is collaborating to achieve them. This brings more transparency to the team, boosts accountability among the employees, and motivates them to perform better.

Read more: 11 Online Collaboration Tools That Facilitate Remote Work In 2020

9. Mobile Apps

Everyone prefers to use mobile apps these days to read emails, track work, share information, and more. Forrester reports that around “66% of employees now use two or more devices every day.” With an integrated mobile app for business communication, employees will not have to manage multiple channels to communicate with each other. Instead, it will make it easier to access all the data and information across devices.

10. Improved Productivity

The most obvious benefit of workplace apps is that it improves employee productivity. As business communication tools make it easier to set goals, assign jobs, track progress, generate reports, and interact with the team members in real-time, they help boost employee morale and efficiency. Having a single channel for all business communication also avoids the need for multitasking, which further helps to improve time management.

There are countless ways for team members to interact with each other, but business communication apps give a more dedicated platform for building a productive work environment. While it cannot be predicted how the future will shape workplace culture, it can be said that advanced and feature-rich business communication tools will certainly be integral in the coming days.InfinCE brings you a pool of effective collaboration software to help you connect with your teams faster and work together better, for greater business achievements. Get in touch with us to learn more.

How can businesses manage their remote workforce through efficient communication?

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

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

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

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

1. Set Guidelines for Communication

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

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

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

Read More: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

2. Ensure a Seamless Communication Platform

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

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

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

3. Proactive Work Communication

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

4. Encourage Video Calls

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

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

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

5. Transparent Leadership Communication

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

Read More: InfinCE Helps You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

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

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

5 Ways Small Businesses Can Promote Collaboration Among Teams

For every small business today, the key to success lies in empowering their workforce to work together in the best possible way to deliver value to customers. This is true irrespective of the industry that your business focuses. Studies show that nearly 39% of employees feel that people in their organization do not value the importance of collaboration. Team collaboration is all about bringing everyone on the same page. But it is easier said than done. For small businesses, you have the benefit of having to bring fewer people into the same wavelength, but the core challenges of collaboration like communication, transparency, and accountability need to be addressed as much as what bigger players do. So how can small businesses improve team collaboration and promote a culture of continuous employee engagement in their work environment? Here are some tips:

1.Create a Unified Vision

To foster a culture of collaboration, it is important to ensure that all your employees work to achieve a common goal. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to create a powerful vision for the organization and then seamlessly connect the end objective of every project or work your company undertakes, to this vision statement. This will ensure that irrespective of the team or project an employee is a part of, they will work towards achieving the common goal as defined in the vision. For example, if the vision is total customer satisfaction, then every effort your workforce puts in can be seamlessly translated into steps taken in achieving maximum customer satisfaction. This vision statement or concept can be used in the awareness sessions to help team members bond with each other, understand their responsibilities and realize the need to be accountable for one’s own actions so that the collective effort of the team is successful in the end.

Related Reading: The Office Of The Future – 5 Innovations To Know

2. Smarter On-Boarding

It is often found that new joiners in a company or in a team face difficulty in getting acquainted with the culture and nature of work in the first few weeks or months in the company. This is predominantly due to weak onboarding policies at small companies which pretty much focuses on sharing a couple of PowerPoint slides about the company and expecting new joiners to automatically align themselves with the goals and culture prevalent. Instead, companies should cultivate a smarter onboarding experience by getting rid of boring presentation sessions and documents. They should instead, pair newcomers with an existing team member who can guide them into the company’s routine and help them adapt faster to the culture prevalent in the workplace.

3.Ensure Effective Task Management

There are many instances where employees need to collaborate and work together on projects. In today’s highly competitive talent market, some of these employees may be remotely located as well. Small businesses need to invest in empowering your resources to collaborate efficiently over tasks irrespective of where they are geographically located. Using a powerful platform like InfinCE, your business can ensure there is a virtual space for employees to work together and with accountability for each action. Such platforms allow you to monitor task progress, enable smooth interaction between colleagues, facilitate the exchange of files and documents related to work and much more. Managers can efficiently manage their team with improved transparency and unbiased decision, thanks to insights from such employee management solutions. The end result is better team collaboration and improved productivity levels in the organization. When tasks and people are brought under a common technology framework, it keeps employees organized, managers aware of their team’s progress and clients happy about fulfilled commitments on delivery.

Related Read: InfinCE – A One-Stop Technology Solution for Small Business

4.Encourage Transparent Communication

A key driver of team collaboration in any business environment is open and transparent communication. Only when people strike a comfortable level of conversation with each other, do they develop mutual respect, trust, and understanding for their colleagues. For organizations, there are several ways to encourage a culture of open communication. A big part of the exercise involves mentoring managers to promote a healthy atmosphere for open communication and not a culture that works by just giving and obeying orders. 

It is important to bring technology into the picture here to work as an enabler for open communication. Most of the organizations typically use just an email system for employees to communicate. However, employees need more than just a simple email system. Bring on-board a powerful intranet system with social media-inspired virtual news spaces for sharing news and information about the company, activities, and events planned and much more. Employees can express their responses for such intranet posts similar to what they do on social media like Facebook. Another option would be to have a good instant messenger system where employees can converse with each other in real-time for a better understanding of problems and scenarios.

5.Promote Socializing Outside of Work

Every employee in your small business has a side of talent, skill or ability that can help them create healthier conversations and relationships with others. As an organization, you need to create avenues for employees to socialize and celebrate their individual and personal skills. Team building exercises, lunches, dinners, and sponsored team vacations or holidays where employees can get to know their colleagues better are just a few ideas to use. This will enable them to build better working relationships in parallel and stand up for each other in collaborative tasks with more responsibility and trust.

Team collaboration is vital to ensuring the continuous growth and success of every small business. Having the right vision, the most relevant business processes and the best technology is the way forward to achieving excellence in team collaboration. Get in touch with us to see how InfinCE can be the game-changer in enabling a collaborative and productive work culture within your organization.