Introduction

Employee engagement is a crucial factor in the success of any business, and InfinCE is a leading platform designed to provide a centralized hub for communication, collaboration, and performance management, making it easier for organizations to improve employee engagement and achieve their goals.

IN THIS GUIDE

InfinCE is an employee engagement platform curated to keep you connected to your work and team from anywhere, at any time. With its mobile app, InfinCE makes it easy for you to stay connected and collaborate with your team, even if you’re working remotely or on the go. In this guide, you’ll understand the nitty-gritty of employee engagement software to the benefits of using InfinCE’s tools and resources, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of how InfinCE can help your organization achieve its goals.

But, first things first!

What is an employee engagement platform?

An employee engagement platform is a tailor-made digital solution that enables organizations to improve the level of engagement and satisfaction among their employees. This platform comes equipped with a suite of features and tools designed to enhance the overall employee experience that includes communication resources, recognition, and reward systems, surveys, and pulse poll.

The goal of an employee engagement platform:

• Aimed at improving employee retention rates, boosting productivity, and reducing absenteeism.
• Foster better relationships between employees and their managers, 
• Provide employees a voice in the decision-making process.
• Help increase employee morale, reduce turnover, and improve overall business performance
• Businesses can establish a culture of openness and transparency, leading to higher levels of employee morale and job satisfaction.

Read more: Turning Employee Resignations to Employee Retention in Modern Workplace!

Unlock the benefits of Employee Engagement

Nearly one-third (32%) of US organizations have seen an increase in employee engagement as a result of their engagement initiatives. Employee engagement initiatives have been found to lead to a 2.5x increase in post-engagement performance, a 3.5x improvement in job satisfaction, and an impressive 25% reduction in absenteeism.

Additionally, 91% of employees who are engaged in the workplace report feeling a strong connection to their employer. With an employee engagement platform, organizations can empower their employee base and help them to develop the skills and competencies that will enable them to reach their full potential. Such platforms like InfinCE provide the necessary tools for fostering collaboration, engaging in team building, and improving communication and productivity in the workplace. 

By unlocking the benefits of employee engagement, US companies can expect to see improved morale, better job satisfaction, and improved productivity — all of which will contribute to an overall boost in performance.

Types of Employee Engagement Platforms

There are a wide variety of employee engagement platforms available, each designed to meet the specific needs of various organizations. Some of the most popular types of employee engagement platforms include

• Virtual Workspaces: Virtual workspaces allow employees to access their work from any location, helping to foster collaboration, reduce turnover, and increase productivity.

• Social Media Platforms: Social media platforms are used to build relationships, encourage engagement, and provide employees with a platform to share ideas and collaborate on projects.

• Knowledge Management Platforms: Knowledge management platforms are used to store, organize, and share information among teams. This helps to improve communication, reduce redundancies, and create a better overall work environment.

By providing employees with the tools they need to succeed and fostering a positive work environment, an employee engagement platform like InfinCE can help to increase productivity, reduce turnover, and create an environment in which employees are highly motivated and engaged.

Top Benefits of Employee Engagement Platforms for Business Success

Employee engagement platforms are critical for businesses to remain successful in the modern workplace. By utilizing an effective platform, businesses can create a stronger sense of connection between employers and employees, facilitate collaboration, and promote a positive work environment. Furthermore, there are several tangible benefits of using employee engagement platforms, including improved morale, increased productivity, and better customer experience.

Here are the irresistible benefits you need to consider:

1. Communication Tools: Communication tools such as chat boards, video conferencing, and file sharing are essential features of any employee engagement platform. These tools allow for efficient communication between the employer and employees, enabling employees to quickly and easily ask questions, get feedback, and share resources.

2. Employee Feedback Mechanisms: Employee feedback mechanisms, such as surveys, polls, and employee reviews, are an important part of any employee engagement platform. These mechanisms provide employers with valuable insights into employee satisfaction, morale, and productivity, allowing them to make necessary adjustments to their business practices.

3. Performance Management: Performance management tools allow employers to track and evaluate employee performance. These tools enable employers to set objectives and goals, measure progress, and provide feedback to employees. According to a study by Gallup, companies with effective performance management systems have 24% higher profit margins than those without.

4. Recognition and Rewards Systems: Recognition and rewards systems are another essential feature of employee engagement platforms. These systems allow employers to recognize and reward employees for their efforts and accomplishments. According to the same study by Gallup, companies with effective recognition and rewards systems have 22% higher productivity than those without.

5. Gamification and Engagement Activities: Gamification and engagement activities can be used to foster team collaboration and encourage employees to participate in activities that benefit the company. Examples of gamification and engagement activities include team building activities, competitions, and virtual events.

6. Personalized Dashboards: Personalized dashboards are a great way to make the employee engagement platform more user-friendly by providing employees with a personalized view of their tasks and progress. Dashboards can be tailored to each individual employee, providing them with a better understanding of their own performance and that of their colleagues.

Read more: How Does The Intranet Contribute To Digital Employee Experience

Experience Seamless Collaboration with InfinCE: The Ultimate Remote Work Platform

In a remote work environment, it is especially important that employees feel engaged and motivated. With the right strategies, an organization can create a culture where remote work is not only accepted but embraced.

According to US data from 2022, employee engagement is essential for organizational success. This is especially true in a remote work environment, where managers must take additional steps to ensure employee engagement. Companies have found that positive engagement strategies such as encouraging wellness, hosting virtual meetings, and fostering personal connections have helped to keep remote employees motivated and engaged. The best way to gauge employee engagement levels is to ask them directly about their work and passion levels.

Importance of Employee Engagement in Remote Work

The level of employee engagement has a direct relationship to an organisation’s performance. Engaged employees are more productive, which leads to greater earnings and higher customer satisfaction. Additionally, engaged employees are less likely to leave the organisation, leading to improved job security and less need for costly recruitment processes. Finally, engaged employees are more likely to be creative and come up with innovative solutions to business problems.

Benefits of a Remote Work Platform for Employee Engagement

A remote work platform can be a great tool for enhancing employee engagement. A platform can facilitate tasks such as setting up video calls, providing access to documents, and allowing collaboration over long distances. Additionally, a platform can also enable coworkers to stay in touch with one another, creating a sense of unity and connectedness.

Strategies for Enhancing Employee Engagement in Remote Work

Organisations should strive to create a culture of engagement, even in remote work environments. Here are a few strategies to help enhance engagement:

• Provide frequent feedback: Remote workers often feel disconnected from their teams. Providing regular feedback can help bridge this gap.

• Set clear expectations: It’s important to set expectations for tasks and deadlines. This will help employees stay focused and motivated.

• Encourage collaboration: Collaboration can help generate ideas and foster a team atmosphere, even when working remotely.

• Offer incentives: Incentives can help motivate employees and encourage them to do their best work.

By taking the right steps, organisations can create an engaging remote work environment that helps employees feel motivated, connected, and productive.

Bottom Line

Organizations today are more competitive than ever, so they need to rethink their strategies. In order to progress, organizations need to prioritize their employees’ wellbeing, and create an environment of engagement. If organizations fall short of creating engagement, employees are likely to switch jobs until they find a suitable workplace. To ensure that employees remain engaged, organizations must take proper measures.

Here is a quote by Annette Franz on employee engagement:

“Employee engagement cannot be a strategy because engagement comes from within the employee. It’s the emotional connection or commitment that an employee has to the organization that then causes the employee to want to put forth the additional effort to ensure the organization and the brand succeed.”

This quote is an important reminder that employee engagement is more than just a strategy; it’s something that comes from within the employee and is characterized by an emotional connection to the organization. This connection can then lead to greater levels of effort and dedication, resulting in a more successful organization and brand.

Recognition is a very important aspect of employee engagement. However, manual recognition can be time-consuming and lack transparency. To that end, organizations can take advantage with InfinCE, a rock-solid employee engagement platform that collects and records data in real-time to avoid disputes and inaccuracies.

InfinCE also recognizes employees immediately after they accomplish something to ensure that recognition efforts are effective. With its range of essential features and support for remote work, InfinCE makes it easier for organizations to improve employee engagement and achieve their goals.

Introduction

Are you struggling to retain top talent in your organization? You’re not alone. Resignations are rising, with many employees citing a lack of career growth and work-life balance as key factors in their decision to leave.

Since the great resignation In 2021, employees have started leaving their jobs at record rates. In September 2021 alone, 4.4 million people quit their jobs – a record high. This has shifted the focus of the organization to employee experience & retention.

In fact, According to a survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, there has been an increase in employee dissatisfaction and resignations in recent years. 22% of employees who have left a job cited company culture as a key reason for leaving.

But what if there was a way to improve employee satisfaction and retention while increasing efficiency and productivity?

Enter the modern intranet and digital workplace!

The shift towards remote work has been a major driving force behind the adoption of modern intranets in recent years. One area that has seen significant growth due to the shift towards remote work is adopting remote workplace tools and employee intranet software.

A modern intranet and digital workplace can help control various workplace situations by providing centralized communication, collaboration, and access to information. This can help:

1. Streamline communication: Everyone is kept informed and up-to-date by having a centralized platform for all internal communication.
2. Increase collaboration: Teams can collaborate more effectively by sharing real-time documents, tasks, and ideas.
3. Improve efficiency: Automated processes and access to information from anywhere help employees make decisions faster and reduce downtime.
4. Foster a sense of community: A digital workplace provides a space for employees to connect, share ideas, and collaborate, promoting a sense of belonging and engagement.

A digital workplace and a modern intranet can help organizations improve productivity, reduce confusion and errors, and promote a positive work culture.

Read more: Is Remote Work Culture Hindering Your Company Productivity & Growth?

Disengaged Employees Impair the Advancement of Digital Workspaces

Dissatisfaction among employees can hold back from uncovering the full potential of work. A recent study by Gartner showed that nearly 60% of organizations believe that improving the employee experience is a top priority. When it’s highly impacted, it can lead to high turnover rates and a constant need to hire and train new employees. This can be costly and time-consuming, and it can also disrupt team cohesion and productivity. Various factors that lead to employee dissatisfaction at work:

• Work culture shift frustrations: Rapid changes in work culture and technology can confuse and overwhelm employees.
• Collaboration difficulties: With remote work becoming the norm, it can be challenging for teams to collaborate effectively and stay on the same page.
• Low transparency and limited access to data: Employees can feel disconnected and in the dark about key decisions and developments within the company without proper access to information.
• Not feeling valued: A lack of recognition and appreciation can lead to a demotivated and disengaged workforce.
• Lack of learning and development opportunities: Without access to training and development programs, employees may feel stuck in their careers and unable to grow and advance.

How does a modern intranet help tackle these issues?

A modern intranet can help tackle the issues contributing to employee dissatisfaction in several ways:

1. Improving Communication and Collaboration

A modern intranet provides a centralized platform for teams to communicate and collaborate effectively, regardless of location. Employees can stay connected and work together in real time with features like instant messaging, team chat rooms, and document collaboration tools. This helps to overcome the difficulties of remote work and improves overall collaboration.

2. Increasing Transparency and Access to Data

A modern intranet provides a single source of truth for all internal information and data. This can include company news, policy updates, project progress, and more. A employee intranet software can increase transparency and reduce confusion by giving employees access to this information. This can also help improve decision-making by giving employees access to the data they need to do their jobs effectively.

3. Providing Opportunities for Recognition and Appreciation

A employee intranet software can provide a platform for recognizing and rewarding employees for their contributions. With features like employee profiles, achievement recognition, and peer-to-peer recognition programs, employees can feel valued and appreciated for their work. This can help foster a more positive work culture and improve employee morale.

4. Access to Learning and Development Resources

A employee intranet software can provide employees access to training and development programs, promoting career growth and development. This can include online courses, webinars, and other resources that employees can access at their own pace. By providing these opportunities, a modern intranet can help employees feel like they are continuously learning and growing in their careers, reducing frustration and dissatisfaction.

A  employee intranet software can help tackle the issues contributing to employee dissatisfaction by improving communication, collaboration, transparency, recognition, and access to learning and development resources. This can help organizations create a more positive and engaged workforce, improving productivity and success.

Read more: What is a Digital Workplace: A Complete Guide!

Choosing the Right Modern Intranet: Understanding the Differences and Key Features

A modern intranet is a digital workplace platform that provides centralized communication, collaboration, and access to information for an organization. It is designed to help employees stay connected, informed, and productive, regardless of location or device.

A traditional intranet, on the other hand, is often limited to simple file sharing and basic communication tools. It may not be designed for mobile use or include features like social collaboration, gamification, and personalized experiences.

When choosing a employee intranet software for your company, some key features to look for include:

1. Mobile-responsive design: The ability to access the intranet from any device, anywhere, at any time.
2. Collaboration tools: Features like instant messaging, team chat rooms, and document collaboration to help teams work together effectively.
3. Personalization: Employees can customize their intranet experience based on their roles, interests, and preferences.
4. Social features: The ability to share information, connect with colleagues and recognize and reward employee contributions.
5. Integrations: The ability to integrate with other tools and systems, such as HR systems, project management tools, and more.
6. Analytics and reporting: The ability to track usage and engagement, measure the impact of intranet initiatives, and make data-driven decisions.
7. User-friendly interface: A modern intranet should be easy to use and navigate, with a simple and intuitive design.

By considering these key features, you can ensure that you choose a modern intranet that meets your organization’s needs and supports a positive and productive work culture.

Conclusion

A modern intranet is a powerful tool for organizations to engage their workforce, drive collaboration, and improve operational efficiency. With the rise of remote work and the need for innovative solutions, upgrading your traditional intranet to a modern, collaborative platform that supports your employees and aligns with your organizational goals is essential.

InfinCE provides a comprehensive, modern intranet solution to support employee engagement, regardless of where they work. With features such as shareable dashboards, blogs, wikis, communication apps, and productivity tools, InfinCE is designed to transform employee communications across your organization. Whether your employees work together in-person or remotely, InfinCE ensures seamless communication, connection, and engagement, leading to better collaboration, productivity, and success for your organization.

Connect with our experts today or Request a Free Demo!

Is a Digital Workplace platform what your company needs to turn employee resignations into employee retention in today’s modern workplace? 

In today’s changing business environment, organizations must rank employee experience to improve retention rates and attract top talent. This involves creating a workplace culture that supports and values employees, providing opportunities for learning and development, and implementing processes and technologies that make it easier for employees to do their job. By strategizing employee experience in the modern workplace, organizations can improve employee retention, foster a more positive work culture, and drive business success. 

A study by Gallup shows that 48% of US employees are on a job hunt. One-third of new employees quit after about six months, according to statistics. It has been recognized that 44% of employees are stressed at work. It is vital for companies, both big and small, to focus on employee retention to maintain a stable and productive workforce. This can involve offering competitive salaries and benefits, providing opportunities for professional development and career advancement, and creating a positive and supportive work environment. 

By focusing on employee retention, companies can reduce the costs and disruptions associated with high levels of turnover and create a more positive and productive work culture.

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

How employee experience contributes to employee retention

Research shows that in August 2022, attrition stood at 29% for the companies that put an end to working from home. In comparison, the companies that allowed remote work or hybrid work models saw only 19% attrition. According to Statista, 72% of people looking for a job believe that work-life balance is an essential factor to consider. 

Employees who do not have a work-life balance tend to burn out more quickly. Employees struggle to have a great work-life balance or even overall EX (employee experience), leading to rising employee resignations. On the other hand, for companies shifting to remote or hybrid models, tracking employee tasks and performances, providing regular training, maintaining transparency, developing trust & build a positive work environment are challenging. 

Here’s more to understanding how ineffective work environments can lead to dissatisfied employees, which can deeply impact the entire organization’s growth and performance.

1.  Lack of effective communication

The relationship between employer & employee is very fragile & can be only maintained via constant two-way communication. This makes employees feel more engaged, motivated & productive. To deliver a promising employee experience, organizations should focus on effective communication channels like video meetings, internal chats, conferences, etc.

2. Connected workplaces are turning imperative 

When employees are involved and connected, they feel valued and tend to be more productive. Maintaining transparency on project progress, sales performances, and other key metrics can help improve employee experience and strengthen their relationship with the company. Businesses can rely on custom dashboards to centralize & customize information to ensure everyone is working towards the same goals and objectives.

3. Ensuring employee well-being in hybrid work culture

When work culture is constantly changing, employees may feel uncertain about their roles and responsibilities, leading to confusion, frustration & decrease in productivity. Statistics show 46% of employees seek mental health benefits in a new job. Shifting to a digital workplace can help improve employee experience and work efficiency in hybrid and remote work cultures through seamless communication and build a culture of trust & focus with transparency.

4. Motivation & career alignment

Employees who feel supported and motivated are likelier to be engaged and motivated to do their best work. Creating a positive work culture and supporting employees’ professional growth can increase job satisfaction and retention. Offering regular training programs, mentorship, coaching, and career growth opportunities and creating supportive growth & learning environment can help employees feel valued and invested in work.

Read more: What is a Digital Workplace: A Complete Guide!

How a digital workplace contributes to improved employee experience

Digital workplaces improve connectivity, be it human-to-human, human-to-machines, or human-to-data. In today’s digital era, where work is impossible without tools, apps, and other technologies, digital workplaces ensure one can leverage them from anywhere, within any work culture. Moreover, maintaining transparency, tracking in real-time, and accessing information securely, get simpler with digital workplaces. For companies trying to stick to hybrid and remote work cultures, digital workplaces can make work collaboration and communication much smarter. Here’s more on how digital workplaces can help tackle workplace challenges and keep employees productive, motivated, and happy!

1. Improved work collaboration

In today’s digital era, you need more ways to stay connected and collaborate at work. A digital workplace, with multiple communication channels, chat facilities, and video conference options, enables employees to reach out faster to the right person, leaving no communication gaps that might hinder work or work relationships. Digital workplaces also come with a pool of productivity tools that allow employees to work together from different locations and track tasks in real-time so everyone stays on the same page at work. Improving work collaboration alone can help employees feel involved and valued at work and strengthen the employer-employee relationship.

2. Improved transparency 

The most effective way to make employees feel valued is by maintaining transparency. Keeping everyone on the same page on several matters of your project or company could get tricky, especially if employees work remotely. But digital workplaces that facilitate intuitive dashboards enable seamlessly keeping your selected employees informed on the respective projects, performance metrics, or company policies. This way, no employees would feel left out on important announcements or updated company targets and goals.

3. Keeping employees engaged

Keeping your staff engaged and motivated all the time is challenging. Along with company goals, most employees look forward to achieving personal career growth as well, the lack of which leads to resignation. With digital work platforms or workplaces, companies can seamlessly integrate training platforms to monitor employee performances and provide regular training to help staff feel encouraged and have clearly defined career paths. Such platforms and apps can also be leveraged to offer regular exercise or mind training programs for employees to keep them active, healthy, and stress-free, regardless of the work culture.

4. Bring your team together

With work cultures shifting rapidly, depending on tools and technologies at work has turned imperative. But when different employees work on separate tools and disparate systems, keeping everyone on your team together gets tricky! Digital workplaces not just bring people together but also tools and technology, enabling seamless integration and centralized management of productivity tools. What’s more effective than having one platform to store and centrally manage all the tools, tasks, and data of your entire team or company?

Read more: The Best Ways to Improve Your Digital Workplace Management

Is InfinCE the right Digital Workplace Platform for your company?

If your company is focused on achieving operational efficiency and growth through a dedicated and future-ready workforce, then InfinCE is your digital workplace platform! InfinCE makes it seamless to keep employees productive, motivated, skilled, and ready to tackle the changing workplace scenarios and challenges. Besides effective management, instant communication, enhanced work collaborations, and a pool of productivity tools, InfinCE is top-notch when it comes to data security and business transparency. Here’s a quick rundown of what makes InfinCE the ultimate digital workplace platform!

• A cloud-based, all-in-one digital workplace platform that allows you to manage multiple workflows effortlessly.
• Offers seamless  IT management from one place while ensuring the safety of data rendered.
• Custom dashboards to quickly keep track of important metrics.
• Application marketplace enabling seamless integration of third-party tools. 
• Free Guest User options.
• Business Phone System, keeping business contacts and communications smarter.
• Employee Directory, enabling everyone in your company to stay connected regardless of departments. 
• Secured and centrally managed IT Infrastructure.
• 24/7 customer support.

Besides the above-mentioned top features, InfinCE can make your brand instantly recognizable with white-label service. Establish boosted credibility and brand consistency with a custom domain, custom business email, custom branded software, personalized workplace solution, and more such white label services from InfinCE that will help provide your clients, customers, and employees an enhanced experience. 
So wait no more! Connect with our experts today, or request a Free Demo to learn more about InfinCE!

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.

Employee engagement is critical for businesses to retain their talent and improve their employee experiences. Engaged employees tend to believe that their employers have their well-being in mind which motivates them to put in their best efforts towards the realization of corporate goals. Disengaged employees are more likely to lose commitment towards the company or start distrusting employers. Such employees fail to see the vision and the objectives of the organization they work for. 

In today’s digital world, employees prefer to be highly involved in what they do and be active contributors to their company’s success. Aligning personal goals with corporate goals would inculcate a sense of belongingness in the minds of the employees which is very important for boosting loyalty, a fact substantiated by Microsoft’s employee survey 2021. The report says 90% of the Microsoft employees surveyed globally have responded that they feel included in their work. 

It has long been established that good employee experiences beget good customer experiences, a fact which was proved time and again during the pandemic. 

Forrester’s study report “Predictions 2022: The Future of Work,” says that 48% of large companies in the US have dedicated programs to improve employee experiences, a number which is expected to rise to 65% in the year to curtail their attrition levels. 

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

Employee Engagement vs. Employee Experience

“Gallop defines employee engagement as the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.” Employee experience, on the other hand, refers to an employee’s entire journey with respect to his association with the company and is greatly influenced by his engagement at work. 

Why Is Employee Engagement Important?

Employee engagement is vital to companies to help assess employee perspectives on the existing workplace culture which could serve as terms of reference for making future policy changes. Employee engagement catalyzes team engagement, which in turn promotes business growth. 

Employee engagement demands your attention more in today’s business scenario for 3 reasons:

• Companies operate from diverse geographies
• Work is becoming increasingly remote
• There is an overload of information on business systems.  

As work switched from on-site to remote and workplaces transitioned from physical to virtual during the pandemic, with the added bonus of flexibility thrown into the mix, employees increasingly quit jobs that didn’t meet their needs.  “Gartner’s 9 Future of Work Trends Post Covid -19” says 16% of employers surveyed are using technologies to monitor employee activities including employee engagement and their well being to have a better understanding of employee experiences. 

The report advocates responsible use of employee information and analytics to improve employee engagement and enrich employee experiences while working remote, and create a culture of inclusiveness to help employees grow in team culture. 

This is where an efficient digital workplace solution comes to your aid. Backed up by cloud technologies, digital workplace platforms have the capabilities to keep your employees at all levels stay connected and engaged through a multitude of communication and collaboration tools built into them.

Read more: The Definitive Guide to Perfect Digital Workplace Solution

3 Ways Digital Platforms Can Improve Your Employee Engagement

1) Internal communication is rendered seamless through a suite of collaboration apps

A digital workplace facilitates engagement across multiple departments of your business with the help of an array of communication tools and collaboration applications integrated into the platform. These tools can be accessed across geographies, enabling your diversely spread employees to have the right data on their fingertips. Effective internal communication and collaboration are critical to improving employee engagement. Digital workplace solutions ensure that your employees remain connected from anywhere in the world. 

The feature-packed collaboration apps on digital workplace platforms will let your employees at all levels communicate with each other and also with external contacts. Digital platforms ease collaboration from a central hub connecting your employees dispersed across multiple time zones and geographies. 

2) Enable smarter data analysis by creating custom dashboards and tiles

A custom dashboard is a data visualization cum business intelligence tool that showcases a specific set of metrics and KPIs on a single page. A smart digital workplace solution brings to the table the right capabilities to build multiple custom dashboards and tiles for analysis varied purposes. 

Multiple dashboards powered by a variety of tiles can be created on digital workplace platforms for enhanced visibility and productivity. Dashboards serve to track your employee activities and the progress of projects which can be accessed by all team members, thus increasing employee engagement at all levels. Personalized dashboards offer intelligent analytics of data to ensure that the relevant data is visible and accessible only to the right persons. 

You don’t have to go for a ‘one size fits all’ kind of dashboard meant for your industry or your line of business in general, when you have the advantage of creating custom dashboards that uniquely suit your business. Pre-built tiles extract information from business apps and display it on custom dashboards to help track projects, campaigns, and other key metrics in one view, thus motivating your employees to strive more toward goals set, thus keeping them engaged. 

3) Seamlessly integrate multiple apps that cater to the business needs of varied industries  

The successful day-to-day operations of your business demand access to a series of business apps from multiple vendors. Switching between apps will incur huge amounts of time loss which can be prevented by adopting a smart digital workplace solution. A smart digital workplace platform integrates a wide range of apps that find uses in diverse industries. These apps can be managed from a central hub, thus saving time, and serving to improve productivity, communication, and collaboration among your teams.  Your diversely spread employees can access data through these apps from anywhere to get their work done. 

Read more: How Digital Workplaces Improve Employee Experience

In Conclusion!

Good employee experiences stem from good digital experiences, no matter whether companies embrace a fully remote working environment or a hybrid one. This calls for the adoption of a smart, highly interactive digital workplace solution like InfinCE to improve your employee engagement, enhance your employee experiences, and shore up your digitization endeavors in more ways than one. 

The platform enables smarter, effective, and streamlined communication among all departments and teams. You can seamlessly share information and organizational updates on the custom dashboards created on InfinCE. The platform has an array of tools and apps to facilitate live chats, video calls, and meetings among your employees, keeping them engaged. The collaboration features of InfinCE include secure file sharing and live editing of documents, thus catering to employee engagement. With InfinCE, collaborative project planning is possible and project calendars can be managed, shared, and synced with personal calendars. The platform draws on data from various sources such as external APIs and apps to offer insights in the form of graphs and charts. 

InfinCE offers a curated application marketplace to meet your varied business needs. A few of those apps even come free of cost. And what is more, all business apps available on InfinCE, be it commercial or open-source, can be easily accessed through a single login. A few of these apps are WordPress Blog and WordPress portal for content management; Odoo and Rise for CRM; OpenProject and Kanboard for project management; MyBB to manage and moderate discussions among teams; and Vanilla Forums for interactions with customers and potential clients.   

Organizations are increasingly incorporating aspects of engagement into all elements of their employee experience to make it a fruitful journey for both the employers and the employees.  And InfinCE is your one-stop technology solution to digitize your business operations and keep your employees engaged such that personal goals are aligned with company goals and employees develop a holistic view of the company and their roles in its operations. 

To know more on how InfinCE can help enhance employee engagement connect with our experts today!

How to Improve Your Intranet for Better Employee Experience

Technology advancements and modern communication tools have changed the entire landscape of employee engagement and workplace collaboration. While intranets have been at the center of teamwork and business communication for years, they are seemingly competing with more contemporary technologies these days to offer the same level of seamless experience they did a couple of years ago. Besides, as today’s digital-first age heavily relies on a remote work culture with distributed teams, it is crucial to reconceptualize the intranet infrastructure and make it more efficient to stay competitive and relevant in the industry.

Below are ten ways to reimagine your intranet and ensure better employee engagement and collaboration in your organization.

Read more: 5 Tips to Analyze and Select the Right Business Intranet Solution

1. Focus on your usability

You need to re-design your intranet with modern features by focusing on its usability. Understand how your teams use the company intranet to collaborate with colleagues, find new information, and perform other tasks like filling the paperwork. Your goal should be to facilitate all these activities while ensuring that your intranet is easy to use and integrates with the latest tools that your employees need. Likewise, it should also have an inherent search function to let everyone find the information they are looking for quickly.

2. Keep it aligned with your business objectives

Your company intranet should not just cater to the organization’s communication needs but also help to realize broader business goals. You need to identify how your intranet can solve potential company challenges and how it can contribute to your enterprise success. Therefore, it’s crucial to identify the key performance indicators that will allow you to track your business performance and progress. It also helps create actionable insights for redefining your communications strategy.

Case Study: How Fingent Achieved Breakthroughs in Collaboration with InfinCE Digital Workplace

3. Bring mobile devices into play

Remote workers can collaborate in a much better way when you integrate mobile devices into the intranet infrastructure. With mobile-ready intranet solutions, your employees can connect to the central system to access the data and information needed to perform their duties from anywhere they want. This multichannel approach also boosts the reach of your company communications and allows you to engage your employees on multiple touch points such as instant messaging, news feed snippets, video calling, etc.

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

4. Promote two-way communication

Traditionally, intranets were used to receive messages but not as a tool that facilitated two-way communication. As modern all-in-one collaboration platforms go beyond being an information and announcements hub, you need to upgrade your intranet system to support bidirectional conversations to make the most of it. It can serve as a secure and seamless channel for your employees to interact and even run brainstorming sessions on new projects. Having comprehensive intranet profiles can work like social media networks.

5. Build a strong company culture

One of the fundamental elements of digital transformation is transforming the traditional workplace culture into a more collaborative, digitally-powered environment. It means you need to reimagine your intranet to meet those goals and build strong company culture by conveying your mission and business values to the entire team. When coupled with features like performance objectives, employee recognition, and a thorough onboarding process, your intranet can lead to defining thriving company culture.

6. Think beyond decentralized communication

Decentralizing business communications is an integral part of modern-day internal collaboration platforms. It takes the unconventional route of allowing all employees to be responsible for their intranet profiles instead of the core team managing everything. Decentralizing communication will instill a sense of freedom and independence within your company while allowing coworkers to interact with each other in their departments more actively. Eventually, this will lead to stronger bonds between employees, which is a crucial factor that drives improved efficiency and business success.

Read more: 5 Best Practices To Enable Seamless Communication For Your Remote Workforce

7. Manage the content wisely

Creating highly-engaging content has always helped businesses to capture the attention of their employees and ensure better engagement. No matter how the times have changed, content that provides value to your workforce will still be a decisive element in determining your company’s success. However, the way people consume content has significantly changed, so you need to consider how your employees interact with the content you deliver through the intranet to create a robust strategy.

8. Improve the search capabilities

As mentioned previously, improving the search function to let users find the relevant content without any hassle is an integral part of making your intranet more user-friendly. Therefore, you need to revamp your intranet’s traditional and outdated structure and make it simpler for your employees to search for content no matter which device they are using. This will facilitate seamless communication across the organization and make workflow management more efficient.

9. Publish personalized and targeted content

Targeted and personalized content makes it relatively easy to keep employees engaged and motivated. Several studies have found that targeted channels lead to nearly twice the click-through rates. So if you see that your employees use the company app more often than opening their emails, then directing your focus to in-app messaging can be a more efficient way to meet your needs. You can do this by segregating your workforce into different types of audience segments and then creating custom content for each segment.

Download White Paper: Reinventing the Corporate Intranet with Employee Experience at the Center

10. Add a workforce collaboration platform

The best way to optimize your intranet and make the most of the internal communications is by bringing a workplace collaboration tool like InfinCE to the mix. Work collaboration tools like InfinCE will boost your intranet system’s capabilities and functions to more actively deliver company news and information. At the same time, it will ensure that your employees get all the tools they need to interact and collaborate on a project effectively. Moreover, an all-in-one workplace collaboration platform can also give you a unified dashboard to monitor and manage everything.

Read more: 5 Benefits Of Having A Centralized Employee Dashboard In Your Business

The above-stated are some of the fundamental ways to transform your intranet into a more effective and collaborative platform that keeps your workforce engaged and motivated to deliver their best performance. As modern-day challenges need adopting innovative and forward-thinking approaches, it is high time to reimagine your intranet with the right upgrades and ensure optimal employee engagement for superior operational efficiency.

Whether your team is working together or remotely, InfinCE makes sure that your people can effectively communicate, connect, and engage seamlessly! InfinCE’s intranet, powered by shareable dashboards, blogs, wiki, communication apps, and productivity tools, can transform employee communications across your organization. Contact us to learn more. 

Is your KPI Tracking Software pursuing these 5 metrics?

Achieving sustainable growth is vital for businesses of all sizes today. With pandemics like COVID-19 showing how unexpected events have the potential of wrecking global economies in the blink of an eye, it is important for today’s businesses to have a well established Key Performance Index driven metrics to track for their business growth. By following these metrics closely, a business can be better prepared to combat threats from competition, changing market trends, disruptive market forces like pandemics, and ensure that there is steady cash flow even in the most challenging of times. These KPI metrics should be on the organization’s business dashboard software which will be reviewed and closely monitored by the leadership and will form the foundation of all strategic initiatives and decisions taken by the board or top management. So now the question is what are those KPI metrics that need to be tracked on an organization’s business dashboard software to ensure sustainable growth? 

Here are our top 5 picks:

1. Cash To Revenue Position

In the initial days of the COVID-19 pandemic, China was one of the worst affected economies. Studies showed that nearly 85% of small and medium enterprises (SME) were projected to run out of cash in a timeframe as low as 2 months due to severe lockdowns leading to restrictive economic activity. 

Cash to revenue position is an indication of how well endowed is an enterprise to deal with emergencies and how much liquid cash they have at their disposal to invest in measures to counter low revenue scenarios such as pandemics or weak consumer spending. When the position is better, business owners or management has breathing space to make amendments in their operational style when revenue channels are disrupted and without having to take drastic measures such as cutting jobs or delaying bills. This is definitely an important metric that needs to be on every business KPI dashboard software and monitored regularly.

Read more: Creating Organizational, Department, Team and Personal Dashboards using InfinCE

2. Customer Acquisition Costs

For any business to survive, there is a need for customers to spend money on their products or services. In the business world, it has been proven through studies that acquiring a new customer would incur more than 5 times the cost it takes to retain an existing one. As such, customer acquisition costs have the potential to consume the budgets of several departments like sales, marketing, and IT. So, leaders need to keep a tab on spending in this section and this is precisely the reason why customer acquisition costs are an important metric that needs to be tracked via an organization’s KPI dashboard software.

3. Outbound Marketing Performance

Marketing is the engine that fuels sales. The better a business is able to market its offerings to the right audience, the greater will be the business returns in terms of sales revenue. However, marketing needs to be a highly disciplined and well-tracked activity, especially for small and medium businesses. 

Conversion rates from marketing activities are important in ensuring that a business always has a healthy leads pipeline that the sales department can focus on and convert into deals in due course of time. Using intelligent marketing analytics and automation platforms, businesses need to track their ROI on every single dollar spend and correlate to the leads or business opportunity, or social influence that a marketing campaign was able to generate. 

While sales are in itself a large activity that can be tracked through a separate KPI in an organization’s KPI tracking software, it can also be clubbed with the marketing KPI in small businesses. The reason is that in smaller organizations, it is quite common for marketing and sales to be functioning as a single entity sharing a lot of human and technology resources and well synchronized towards a common goal.

Read more: Focus on these 5 KPIs to improve small business growth

4. Operational Efficiency

Improving the quality of labor is vital for businesses to survive in the long run. Studies show that 52% of SMB owners find it hard to hire a quality workforce. So, the next biggest challenge here is to maintain productivity. Every business organization will have its unique list of business processes, policies, and frameworks on which they operate daily. As the competition tightens, it is important to work as a lean business organization with more agility to ensure that customer needs are understood and fulfilled at the earliest. For this to happen, there is a need for seamless operational efficiency. 

Read more: 5 Key Features Every Project Management Dashboard Should Offer 

It is important to keep track of the time it takes for a sales process to be completed, the number of sub-processes involved, the amount of productive time an employee or team spends in a project or sales transaction, and other similar elements that need to be measured. Once these are known, it becomes easier for decision-makers to re-engineer processes and work frameworks regularly to cope with changing trends in the market and help employees adopt new additions to the business easily, such as new software or new machinery in a manufacturing unit. 

The training process can be tweaked in line with new learning norms prevalent in the market and made easy and highly accessible for employees so that they can speed up the learning activity. Both the employee performance as well as the operational efficiency of the business thus need to be tracked efficiently in an organizational KPI tracking software.

5. Employee Engagement

Employees are just as important as customers to a business. Ensuring that they are well-taken care of is a key milestone that every business must strive to achieve. Studies show that 71% of executives believe that employee engagement is key to ensuring successful business growth. While measuring it as a KPI, employee engagement will include a vast majority of key indicators of employee wellbeing. Some examples of items to be evaluated for this KPI include employee turnover, attrition rates, revenue per employee, hiring budgets, etc. Insights from this metric are important to plan the future expansion of the business as you always need employees to drive your business forward in all circumstances.

Read more: 5 Benefits Of Having A Centralized Employee Dashboard In Your Business  

The above 5 metrics give a clear picture of whether your business is progressing in the right direction. Having a regular watch on these will ensure that you are prepared well for any emergencies or disruptive situations that may occur in the future like the COVID-19 pandemic. To drive maximum results, it is important to have a digital backbone that will enable all units in your business to seamlessly measure KPIs and perform according to expectations in their respective tasks. This is what InfinCE can help you achieve with its range of business applications available on a secure cloud platform. Get in touch with us for more details.

Small Business Success In 2020: Overcoming Challenges

Small businesses and startups have today become a major driver of change across geographies irrespective of the business domain. This paradigm shift has been brought about by a number of factors with technology being the number one among them. With powerful digital tools and channels, small businesses were able to disruptively grab market share from established business houses with lower costs and fewer resources. 

2020 looks to be yet another exciting year for such businesses. But before they reap the benefits, we feel that there are still some challenges small businesses need to overcome to remain competent and successful in 2020. Here are 6 of them explained:

1. Employee Engagement

Your employees are your biggest strength. If they are happy and committed to your customers, then business growth is guaranteed to happen irrespective of the strategy you follow. However, building an engaged workforce is no easy task. Companies must try out innovative and intuitive ways to engage each and every employee in the workforce like creating channels for them to transparently share feedback and opinion, considering their inputs while taking crucial decisions and so on. 

Employees should feel that their voice is recognized and that leadership is approachable. Higher engagement levels are directly related to better productivity and profitability of teams.

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

2. Planning and Project Management

A business performs at its optimum when every department is organized and works together to achieve a common objective. This happens when proper planning and seamless project management are in place. 

Irrespective of the size of your workforce, project and task planning needs strict emphasis. Insights from such initiatives will be helpful in deciding the future course of action across multiple departments like recruitment, infrastructure, marketing, and sales. There is a need to bring in effortless project management tools to make it easier for companies to plan and schedule their work and meet customer expectations every time.

3. Cyber Security

It is estimated that in every 39 seconds, a cyber-attack or hack occurs globally. As more small businesses embrace the digital bandwagon, the amount of channels where sensitive data is stored or processed has increased monumentally. This means that there are more avenues for cyber threats to occur and every business big or small must address this issue seriously. 

Any breach of sensitive data can lead to damages worth millions as regulatory bodies and authorities across the globe have tightened their grip on user data security. Small businesses must, in particular, be aware of threats lurking in their digital channels and take appropriate measures to avoid any mishaps.

Related Reading: Top Technology Challenges Faced By Small Businesses

4. Intuitive Marketing

It doesn’t matter much if you have a great product with mouthwatering features. It must be discoverable for potential customers and this is where marketing becomes a key challenge. Today there are tons of channels where small businesses and startups can showcase their offerings to win business deals. The trick is applying intelligence to identify the correct audience, the best-fit approach, the right content and the most cost-effective propagation technique to reach them. 

From email marketing to social media advertising, there are several areas to explore for today’s businesses. Also using smart marketing automation platforms to understand sentiments of customers is also a very fruitful initiative for identifying the best marketing strategy.

5. Customer Experience

You are required to provide a great experience across any channel that customers interact with. They need faster responses to every query or concern they have and delays are usually punished with negative sentiments on social media. Additionally, there is a need to be aware of trends and interests that can be used to offer personalized experiences to customers. To bring all this in one place, small businesses need to have a Customer Relationship Management or CRM solution that is capable of encapsulating all customer relations in one spot and deliver insights to serve them better every time they reach out to you. A satisfied customer is your biggest marketing tool as their positive sentiments about your brand will bring in more customers through referrals.

6. Talent Management

In addition to employee engagement, there needs to be a powerful and seamless collaboration platform within your organization for managing talent. Right from onboarding to payroll and attendance management to complex records and file management, there is a need for seamless digital transformation within the workplace.

Employees demand flexibility in their work with options such as remote work options, shared collaboration spaces with secure file exchange. If you need to create a workplace for the future, it is important to equip your employees with the digital tools that make their work easier.

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

2020 looks to be an exciting year for small businesses that identify their core strengths and invest in mitigating their core challenges. As customers evolve with dynamic needs, small businesses and startups must bring on-board state of the art digital platforms that can help deliver meaningful experiences to end customers. This is where platforms like InfinCE can be a game-changer. From being the digital backbone of your small business and handling every critical aspect from employee collaboration to customer relationship management, InfinCE can be your success mantra for 2020. Get in touch with us to know more.