The necessities of Covid-19 made companies rethink their priorities regarding managing their workforce. As a result, remote work shifted from being a short-term quick fix to a  long-term solution for increased efficiency and productivity. And in the post-pandemic world, work has become more partially remote, aka hybrid, than fully remote.

Hybrid Work Defined

A hybrid workplace blends both virtual and on-site arrangements to give employees the flexibility of dividing their working hours between the office and home. As a result, the employees enjoy more autonomy and life-work balance while remaining more engaged and productive at work. 

So, Why is Hybrid Work Relevant?

A Salesforce post says, “today’s hybrid workplace would soon be called just “the workplace”. A survey of 278 executives by McKinsey revealed that the surveyees planned to reduce their office space by 30%, indicating an increased acceptance of remote work, be it partial or otherwise. Cloud technologies and the right online tools would enable your employees to access data, connect with their colleagues from anywhere, and get their work done in a networked environment. 

The McKinsey study “The postpandemic future of work: Hybrid, remote and what’s ahead” surveyed 100 executives across multiple industries and geographies say that 9 out of 10 companies would go for a blend of remote and on-site working. As work culture gets increasingly hybrid, companies need to ensure efficient online tools are in place to enable their employees to collaborate and communicate seamlessly to get their work done. Organizations need to enforce the specifics required for a mix of remote and on-site work on a permanent basis to keep their hybrid workforce productive. 

Read more: Tips in Building a Hybrid Workplace for the Future

Benefits of a Hybrid Workplace

A hybrid workplace brings quite a few benefits to the table. 

1. Flexibility at work leaves workers happy

Increased flexibility and reduced commute would help employees enjoy a better work-life balance.

2. Reduces operational costs

Hybrid workplace solutions reduce the cost of real estate and office supplies considerably. The money saved on rentals can be invested in technology, marketing, etc.

3. Increases productivity and efficiency

Working from the comfort of their homes and flexible working hours have proven to increase employee productivity and efficiency.

4. Boosts employee engagement

A hybrid working model boosts collaboration among your remote teams, thus keeping them more engaged at work. 

5. Offers location independence

A hybrid work model will essentially have a remote work infrastructure in place, enabling your workforce to work from anywhere in the world.

6. Enhances company culture

A blend of remote and on-site work would motivate your employees to remain more productive and engaged and proactively contribute toward the company’s goals and culture. On-site working days can hold face-to-face meetings and build interpersonal relationships among employees.  

Post-pandemic, companies are increasingly opting for a hybrid working model on a global scale. The Accenture study “The Future of Work: Productive Anywhere” says 83% of the 9326 employees surveyed agree that a hybrid working model would be optimal wherein they get to work remotely for at least one-quarter of their working hours. This calls for adopting smart digital workplace solutions marked by flexibility, scalability, and connectivity to stay efficient and competitive. As remote work evolves into hybrid work, companies must reimagine their digital workplaces to stay competitive. 

Read more: How Can Your Business Be Future-ready to Embrace the Flexible Work

How to Reimagine Your Digital Workplace to Nurture a Hybrid Work Culture?

1. Choose the right set of digital tools 

Your business needs the right set of digital tools and technologies to support hybrid work. You need to choose a smart digital workplace solution well-equipped with state-of-the-art communication, collaboration, and remote technology tools to connect your entire workforce to support a hybrid culture. The platform should enable a seamless and secure flow of data across multiple departments, thus connecting your geographically diverse employees. It should also have smart analytical tools like custom dashboards to get intelligent reports on the progress of projects. As the digital workplace comes integrated with all the tools required for your business operations, your employees needn’t waste their precious time switching from one app to another.

2. Connect employee experiences to business outcomes

Make sure that new technologies enhance employee experiences. Modern tools integrated into the digital platform should recognize your employees’ efforts. Care should be taken to put your employees at the center of the design so that your digital workplace solution transforms how people collaborate and communicate to get work done and meet business goals. Employee surveys help realize what your workforce actually needs to get their work done efficiently. Integrate productivity tools on your digital platform to boost employee performance. The architectural elements should be synced to delight the end users, viz., your employees, while serving to meet goals smarter and faster. Better employee experiences help boost business outcomes.

3. Create a great workplace experience

Your employees deserve a good on-site experience whenever they report to their physical offices. This is very important to make your hybrid working model succeed. Better on-site experiences lead to better in-person collaborations, which boosts better online collaborations among your employees. On-site events should support virtual events to delight your employees. Good on-site experiences make the office a place your employees would love to go.  

4. Build digital fluency

Digital fluency is vital to meet business goals as well as enriching employee experiences. You need to leverage technologies to offer training programs for all segments of your workforce to upskill them.   

In short, the pandemic and multiple lockdowns have caused companies to revisit their long-term business strategies and revamp their business processes to make them hybrid compatible. An April 2022 study of 800 business leaders, “At Work: The 2022 Workplace Trends Report,” says 77% of the companies surveyed have adopted a hybrid working model and that an “at will” hybrid policy has gained momentum. 

Read more: How to Keep Your Remote Teams Connected

To Conclude

You need the tech support of a smart digital workplace solution for your hybrid work model to succeed. This is where an efficient digital platform like InfinCE comes to your aid. InfinCE can support and improve the performances of your hybrid workforce in more ways than one. Here are a few:

1. InfinCE has efficient office and collaboration tools to help your remote teams collaborate efficiently, share files seamlessly, and improve their productivity.
2. It keeps your data private and safe on a secure, private virtual cloud.
3. The curated InfinCE application marketplace offers a multitude of both commercial and open-source business apps from multiple vendors to suit your unique business needs. 
4. Single sign-on access enables your geographically dispersed employees to have unified access to your data.
5. InfinCE offers seamless IT infrastructure management from one place to help you manage your information assets with ease and scalability.
6. It comes with a pool of varied collaboration tools to help your teams connect with each other as well as external contacts through live individual and group chats; secure file sharing; audio and video calls, etc.
7. Helps improve your business efficiency by simplifying your data analytics with the help of custom dashboards and tiles for enhanced visibility and productivity across all departments.

InfinCE is, thus, your one-stop technology solution that caters to anything and everything your hybrid workforce needs. Get in touch with our experts to know more.  

Today’s workforce is witnessing a massive shift in culture. The pandemic disrupted the workforce in every way. We may be inching back to normalcy, but many companies still work remotely, and remote work seems to become a permanent fixture. It also has benefits, including giving companies access to talent pools across locations.  

This Gartner report published in 2022 finds that a company will risk losing up to 39% of its workforce if it returns to a full on-site arrangement. Even an office setting involves collaboration and communication with employees from other time zones and office locations. The hybrid work culture has led employees to witness better physical and mental well-being, indicating that companies need to evolve with the changing workforce and embrace this new reality.   

This increases the need for a new work model that values employee connection, team building, and collaboration. The role of a manager is changing too. Managers should invest in the right tools and team workflow technologies to ensure teams are connected, whether remote or hybrid. Collaborative notes, shared documents, and tools to monitor response times and communication standards will ensure that all team members are on the same page. Companies should focus on consistent communication and a purposeful agenda to make the best of hybrid and remote work cultures.  

With all its advantages, managing a remote workforce is not easy. According to this Harvard survey, remote workers often feel lonely and disconnected. This proves that keeping remote workers connected is more important than ever. Companies must use employee experience software and digital workplace solutions to keep their remote workforce invested in the work. Here are some ways in which you can keep remote teams connected. 

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

1. Use the Right Communication Tools

Streamlined communication is the key to keeping remote workers connected. In fact, ineffective communication can negatively impact your productivity and team morale. Most teams face problems when they choose the wrong messaging apps to solve complex problems. When handling high-priority projects, for example, teams must use apps that give complete information exchanges and team interactions. Companies should not leave employees struggling with perception and communication gaps. Look for digital workplace solutions that offer multiple communication tools to meet different requirements, all in a unified platform. 

Channel selection also plays a role in effective team communication. Companies should use high-bandwidth and synchronous, face-to-face channels like video conferencing for complex projects, tasks, and exchanges. Similarly, they can use low-bandwidth and asynchronous channels like email or apps for simple and linear tasks and interactions. 

Another crucial piece of the puzzle regarding communication among remote team members is the need for a comprehensive workplace chat app. This is different from virtual meetings and video interactions or calls.  

2. Invest in the Best Collaboration Tools

A common problem in a remotely functioning team is that when using different collaboration apps like Zoom, Slack, Google Hangouts, and Spreadsheets, switching between multiple apps becomes a huge problem. Look for a digital workplace solution that integrates different apps under one roof. 

Before companies onboard remote teams, they must choose and implement collaboration tools like video conferencing, meeting rooms, and group chats to ensure that team members can communicate instantly.  

Collaboration tools include everything from apps and video-sharing technologies to programs that let employees revise documents, share interactive presentations, and brainstorm together in real time. InfinCE, for example, ensures that companies can bring partners and clients on board for a video conference or online meeting without downloading the app and even has features like simultaneous document editing. Such features are designed specifically for remote or hybrid teams and to improve productivity significantly. 

Besides enhancing the workflow, collaboration apps capture a lot of data and insights from projects and tasks, which can be used in the future. Companies should choose digital workplace solutions that support custom app integrations to meet specific needs. For example, developers and project managers who are collaborating remotely on a project rely on cloud-based tools with task-management capabilities. This means that they need tools that let their team members merge changes, schedule meetings, update events, check member availability, coordinate better, and reduce planning time.  

Read more: 5 Tips to Improve Remote Collaboration

3. Opt for Intuitive and Visual Dashboards

Dashboards are superb information management tools that enable visual facilitation. Visual tools are great ways to help employees focus, get involved, and access information on demand. Dashboards are also great analytics tools to generate reports to drive business decisions.

A centralized dashboard is essential for collecting data from multiple sources and providing a unified workflow view. It also keeps employees engaged by sharing a snapshot of the team’s projects or the company’s performance. Dashboards are also useful for organizational communication. Senior management can set objectives that can be broken down into action items, and these actionable tasks can be attributed to overall company goals and metrics. Apart from being an excellent organizational tool, this dashboard feature makes employees feel invested in the company’s growth, and they can track the company’s achievement milestones in conjunction with their own projects and efforts. 

Some digital workplace solutions also offer dashboard tiles that further customize the dashboard experience and strengthen communication, especially with application tiles that help to visualize business data on the dashboard.

4. Use Productivity Apps and Management Tools 

Remote team workers can stay connected with the right project management tools and productivity apps. The right productivity apps are built to be intuitive and to improve the employee experience. They keep teams and projects connected and synchronized. Productivity apps also track performance and enable professional growth across the team. You can also choose productivity tools and project management software that automate workflows and save valuable time.

There are multiple productivity apps but pick a digital workplace solution that can integrate all the productivity apps of your choice. Employee disengagement is a silent killer in the remote workplace, and having an integrated remote work platform will ensure that all team members are focused on the work and believe in the team. 

There are so many other factors that keep remote teams connected. It is important to implement a good remote onboarding program. InfinCE’s collaboration platform, for instance, makes it easy for managers and administrators to onboard employees quickly, instantly assign new job roles, and address personal employee needs. Data security is another matter of concern. Opt for apps that let you share files securely and a digital workplace solution that enables you to run your enterprise on a secure private cloud location. 

According to Gartner, organizations will be forced to adopt digital solutions to support remote and hybrid work, an investment that will drive business growth like never before. Companies that don’t adapt could slip out of the race.
InfinCE offers future-proof digital workplace solutions that truly lead to cross-functional collaborations, exemplary teams, and high-value business outcomes. Book a demo today to set your company on the path to digital transformation.

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! 

Digital transformation is essential to your businesses primarily because it enables effective and efficient management of all your resources, be it technical or human. It empowers your business with technologies to help you stay relevant in today’s challenging market. Pandemic-induced lockdown forced businesses to increasingly adopt digitalization to enable their employees to stay connected and agile while working from the comfort of their homes or any place they preferred, thus preventing disruptions to workflows. 

Digital workplace statistics definitely demand the attention of non-adopters of digitization. McKinsey’s The Future of Work After the COVID-19 report says that 20-25% of the labor forces in advanced economies now have the capabilities to work from home between 3-5 days a week which is nearly four to five times more remote work than the pre-pandemic period. Reports from other market research firms also speak of an overall increase in digital adoption worldwide, endorsing a growing trend among businesses to embrace future technologies to remain competitive.

Foundry’s 2021 Digital Business Study report says 91% of the organizations surveyed have either adopted or have expressed their plans to adopt a digital-first business strategy. The report also says that the sample members plan to invest as much as $16.5 mn on digital initiatives this year on cutting-edge technologies like machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and public cloud. What is important is once you decide to digitize part or whole of your business processes, you must wisely choose the right technologies that suit your operations best and ease your digital transition. Here is where a digital workplace solution comes in very handy.  A digital workplace solution is your best buddy when it comes to making your digital transformation journey productive, cost-effective, and meaningful.     

A digital workplace platform lets you have virtual meetings with any or all of your employees beyond the barriers of time, geographical location, devices, or network connections. It is an integrated platform that offers your employees all the right tools required to carry out their working tasks effectively and efficiently. It digitizes all the workflows related to your internal business processes and relocates your business space from a physical location to cloud space. This is achieved by moving all the data and technologies related to your business’s internal operations to a secure web interface that can be seamlessly accessed by your employees from anywhere on any device of their choice. InfinCE is a one-stop technology solution that simplifies the cloud by offering a wide array of applications and tools to help your business run its internal operations smoothly and productively. 

Having said that, adopters shouldn’t mistake that everything will always be hunky-dory in a digital workplace environment. Of course, a digital workplace solution has its own share of advantages and disadvantages. But the advantages always outweigh the disadvantages, and the latter should never deter your decision to embrace digital technologies.  

Read more: Five Myths Around Hybrid Workplaces Demystified

A few advantages of digital working places  

1. Promotes employee engagement 

In today’s digital world, businesses need engaged workforces to stay agile and competitive. Engaged employees are motivated to invest their best at work. Seamless communication in digital workplaces enables easy access to data, which helps simplify decision-making and improves employee engagement. 

The communication and collaboration tools of InfinCE help better engagement among your geographically dispersed employees and promote an interactive culture. The custom dashboards available on the platform are powered by a variety of tiles for enhanced visibility. Efficient collaboration and easy file sharing enabled by InfinCE help create a better user experience and bring your workforce together. The in-built digital workplace tools of InfinCE have capabilities to address all the internal operations of your business. 

2. Increases revenue and reduces costs

Digital workplace services improve the overall efficiency of your business operations by optimizing its capabilities while saving time and human efforts. Consolidation and automated processing of documents serve to eliminate the manpower previously required to accomplish the task in a non-digital environment. Centralized data offers information at the fingertips, which saves a lot of employee time. Digital capabilities help save time and human efforts while reducing the operational costs of businesses. 

With InfinCE, you get to run your business without a full-fledged in-house IT team. Thus, saving you much on your operational costs. 

3. Increases business productivity

A digital workplace streamlines business processes and removes communication hazards, thus increasing productivity. Integrating a wide range of tools and software into a digital workplace platform allows end-users to choose the right applications that suit their business model. Furthermore, automation of processes helps save time which can be productively used to achieve organizational goals. 

InfinCE is a perfect digital workplace platform for organizing work and managing your data, thus improving the efficiency of your workforce. The platform empowers your business with a wide range of productivity tools to create documents, manage emails, oversee tasks, and schedule events. Thus, the day-to-day activities of your business can be achieved with ease, and the efficiency of your workforce increases by leaps and bounds.  

Read more: How Digital Workplaces Improve Employee Experience

A few disadvantages of digital working place 

1. Increased dependence on technology

There is no guarantee that the software infrastructure of your digital workplace will run smoothly 24/7. Every aspect of work is likely to get technology dependent which can become a drawback in the long run as a technical glitch on the server-side may lead to a loss in productivity. In addition, if the system crashes, workflows will be disrupted until the issue is resolved. 

With InfinCE, you can enjoy concierge support from a technically adept team. The digital workplace services offered by InfinCE include a dedicated team to assist with the hosting, maintenance,  and updates of the software. The services of our dedicated support time include email, live chat, and phone support round the clock.  

2. Software upgradation can prove expensive

Technology keeps evolving, and so do your business needs. The cost of the upgrade has to be followed up with the cost of training your workforce to handle the upgraded software. A repeated need to learn new applications would be stressful for the employees, adversely affecting their performance and job satisfaction. But with software upgrades, efficiencies improve at all levels.  

The scalability feature on InfinCE helps you increase your server capacity and storage space without any hidden costs. The platform also allows you to scale down your cloud technologies in tune with your changing business needs, and you need to pay only for the applications you use. 

One of the biggest advantages of digitization is facilitating virtual and global collaboration through digital workplace solutions. A digitally integrated workforce enables businesses to keep their geographically dispersed employees on the same page logistically and coordinate their efforts toward meeting organizational goals. Digitization is here to stay, and businesses cannot afford to turn their backs on it if they want to stay competitive.

Reach out to our team for a quick demo or to know more about the InfinCE platform.

How Can CIOs Contribute Toward Sustainable Work From Home Experience

As the world tries to wipe out the pandemic, businesses are looking to adopt a more flexible work culture that can accommodate various working requirements. We are in a remote working era that undoubtedly increases the significance of CIOs and IT teams. CIOs now have the responsibility to create a work environment that caters to the agile work models of their employees while ensuring the best work from home experience.

Gartner recently released a report on how CIOs should “embrace radical flexibility” to deliver great remote work experience in the post-COVID world. According to the report, “CIOs need to create a post-COVID-19 work environment that supports radical flexibility for the evolving IT workforce. CIOs must now consider and plan for the purpose and structure of the emerging work environment for the IT organization and workforce.” 

Here is a quick look at the actionable steps CIOs can take to meet the varying employee and employer needs and expectations.

1. Building a robust remote work culture

Most leaders are used to managing people at the office or primary work location, but they often feel uncomfortable when it comes to managing remote teams. More trouble arises when legacy systems and remote work policies cannot address the changing needs for working from a different location or not being scalable to meet the evolving demands. Therefore, to create a sustainable work from home experience, CIOs need to adopt flexible work patterns and the right tools to manage remote teams.

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

Gartner recommends that it is important to survey managers and workers about workplace expectations, preferences, requirements, and limitations. It will help employers determine their employees’ work location preferences to create a flexible post-COVID-19 work environment. At the same time, it is also essential to communicate all the changes, work expectations, and deadlines to the relevant team members using a unified platform. This is where an all-in-one work management solution like InfinCE can be of great help.

InfinCE is a modern, innovative digital workplace orchestration platform that helps you manage every aspect of your business, including:

• workplace collaboration
• project management
• communication (video, audio, chat, email, video meetings, etc.)
• ERP, CRM, finance, accounting, and a host of day-to-day workplace activities 

When you have InfinCE adapted to your workplace, you can easily integrate it into your existing applications. You can also choose to adopt a wide range of leading, open-source third-party applications supported by the InfinCE app marketplace. InfinCE has everything to support your business – Office online tools, productivity apps (calendar, task manager, chat, email, video, and audio meetings, etc.), and a plethora of enterprise applications to manage your business from anywhere. 

Read more: How Successful Leaders Engage Employees Using Modern Business Communication Tools like InfinCE 

2. Adopting a flexible work pattern

According to a 2020 survey about the post-COVID-19 work experience by Gartner, most employees have a “clear preference and expectation of having flexibility in selecting their primary work location and in arranging their schedule.” The report also suggests that “around 80% of workers expect to continue to work from home at least three days per week”. What’s more, around 50% of employees even indicated that they would quit their jobs if they do not get a work from home option from their employers.

These stats clearly show the importance of building a work culture that embraces and delivers the right remote work experience. However, as adopting a flexible work environment can mean including new variables that were not part of the usual work culture earlier, CIOs should clearly understand the emerging work patterns before defining workforce policies.

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

A study from Owl Labs and Global Workplace Analytics highlighted that following a hybrid work culture that combines remote work with office work can be a potential solution for most companies. “The majority of the workforce expect to work from a home office two or three days per week, with the option to attend the employer office the other days. Although this hybrid combination is emerging as the dominant pattern for the majority of workers, it only accounts for 50% to 60% of the workforce,” the report said.

This means that CIOs should understand employee needs and work patterns across different variations and make adjustments to create the right work policy for the company. Collaborating with the HR team and surveying the staff, managers, and executives can be pretty helpful here. That data can determine the different expectations of the company and employees and help CIOs develop the most flexible work policy guidelines that accommodate everything.

Download White Paper: Adapting to The Changing Face of Enterprise Collaboration

3. Communicating the expectations

Another crucial role of the CIOs in building a robust and flexible work culture is to communicate the relevant staff’s expectations appropriately. The Gartner report says that remote work has increased from around 29% before the Coronavirus pandemic to more than 75% by April 2020. The report further states that “On average, clients expect that 57% of their workforces could work entirely remotely, and 63% could work remotely at least sometimes.”

This indicates that leaders should plan for around half of their staff working from home in the post-COVID-19 era. It could either be working from home every day or a couple of days every week. No matter what, CIOs need to develop remote work policies that go beyond the traditional pre-COVID criteria and definitions. As legacy remote work policies do not have room for scheduling flexibility and guiding decisions, CIOs must adopt new work policies that address the expectations from everyone across the organization.

Nonetheless, developing a flexible work policy should not be limited to sending a signal to the staff and management about how new patterns and expectations are incorporated into the work environment. Instead, it should also focus on delivering consistency across the different functional areas of the company, especially when there is no enterprise policy in effect.

Read more: 7 Ways to Improve Team Collaboration in 2021

Discussing the work policy changes with the HR manager and various department leaders can help CIOs identify how the planned approach can work out to support the needs of the staff while keeping up with the management decisions. Meanwhile, CIOs should also determine how they can replace legacy practices and applications with modern solutions to benefit remote work experience. The new remote work solution should also support the growing needs of the company. Likewise, CIOs should figure out the contractual obligations and regulatory requirements before implementing the remote work policy.

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

Looking forward

CIOs also need to realize what types of interactions or meetings are common in the remote workplace and find the right digital workplace solution to address all their needs. You need an all-in-one team management platform that can furnish all kinds of communication needs, be it video conferences, audio calls, file sharing, and instant messaging. The platform should also help you track time and attendance, assign tasks, monitor the progress of a project, etc. CIOs need to take the appropriate actions now to support the purpose and structure of their evolving work environment.

Download White Paper: The Business Value of InfinCE for Business Owners and Employees

InfinCE is the preferred choice of many CIOs in managing virtual teams. Interested to know why? Drop us a message, and let’s help you realize a seamless workplace collaboration and project management with InfinCE. 

Managing a Remote Team Successfully During COVID-19

The remote work culture has become more than a trend today and evolved into the mainstream practice for many companies across the world. While remote working does have many advantages, it comes with quite a few challenges, especially when you have to start managing a completely remote team all of a sudden.

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

To effectively navigate the challenges of remote team management, you need to be aware of the significant factors that can affect job performance and level of engagement. You also need to prepare a robust strategy to ensure that everyone in your team delivers their best capability along those lines. This post covers a few tips to manage remote teams efficiently and drive success for your organization.

1. Get the right project management software

This is the most critical aspect of managing a remote team. When working across different time zones, you need to invest in a reliable digital workplace orchestration platform with excellent online communication and work management features. This will help to add more value to your remote working culture while ensuring that you have the right tools to plan tasks, manage projects, track employee performance, and do much more, all under one roof.

Read more: 5 Ways A Project Management Tool Can Help Your Business Grow

2. Schedule every day check-ins

Daily check-ins may seem tricky in a work from home scenario, but it is a vital ingredient for managers and teams new to remote work culture. An email, call, or text message is enough to check with your team and know how they are doing. However, it would be even more effective to use video conferencing to bridge the gap of face-to-face interaction. You can get all these features in an all-in-one team collaboration software, which makes daily communication so much easier for you.

3. Set your expectations right

Your company will have certain expectations for each of the employees in your team. You need to communicate those expectations clearly to your team and get their feedback on whether they align with the same. It is even more critical to reassign your team members to new tasks. Having clear targets for the work hours, availability, team meetings, and project deadlines will help ensure that everyone delivers their best performance to meet the expectations.

4. (Re)Work on your communication skills

You are going to use an online communication platform for managing your remote team. This means that you need to understand how the team management software works, its features, and how you can use it to bring value to your team. You may be familiar with using some online communication channels, but the stakes are higher when it comes to remote team collaboration. So you need to develop your writing skills and virtual meeting strategies to ensure that your team is on the same page when you work on a project.

Read more: 7 Ways to Improve Team Collaboration in 2021

5. Use video conferencing often

While telephonic and written conversations should be a part of your day-to-day team management regime, it is also necessary that you incorporate video conferencing to build rapport. This way, you can assess the body language of your employees and see how they react to a change in plans or a new assignment. It will also help you identify some non-verbal clues that indicate if something is wrong with your team members. That will, in turn, allow you to address the situation proactively before it becomes a significant problem.

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

6. Have regular team meetings

Apart from daily check-ins, you should also schedule regular team meetings to discuss the current project and its status. It will help you assess the progress of the job at hand to meet the deadlines as expected. Moreover, regular team meetings can help brainstorm different ideas for new projects while imparting a sense of involvement to everyone in your team. You can also ensure that everyone is up-to-date and works towards realizing the company’s common goal.

7. Focus on the outcomes

It is imperative to focus on the result rather than the process to ensure the optimal engagement of your team members. At the same time, you should also evaluate the process constantly and find ways to improve it to drive better efficiency from your employees. Therefore, you need to define the goals upfront and focus on reaching the target by letting your team members develop the plan of action they feel more comfortable with and execute well.

Download White Paper: Adapting to The Changing Face of Enterprise Collaboration

8. Provide help whenever needed

To build a successful remote team, you should be able to address the requirements of all your employees whenever needed. For instance, if your team comes across an unexpected problem related to the project at hand, you should be there to clarify whatever doubts they have to minimize downtime. Here too, video calls can help you identify if your team members feel low or unmotivated to complete a task. At that point, you can pitch in and give them a helping hand to finish the job as required.

9. Encourage social interactions

Social isolation is a significant challenge in remote working. Therefore, you need to build a remote work culture that integrates informal social interactions in a traditional office setting into your online communications. From virtual weekend meet-ups to after-office casual talks, encouraging social interactions within your team will boost employee morale and engagement. You can even plan virtual pizza parties, happy hours, or employee recognition sessions for non-work-related conversations.

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

10. Mentor more, manage well

The best remote team managers prefer to be mentors who guide their teams on different aspects of their job roles rather than “managing” them. Leading by example always works, be it in a traditional office scenario or remote work culture. Make sure that you are more of a mentor and coach to your team. It may require taking new initiatives to address the challenges your team is facing, but it will be worth the effort to develop a successful remote workforce.

These are a few ways, which will help you ensure effective remote team management. As every industry is going global and digital, it is high time to adopt the right approaches and tools that make your team more efficient and gain a competitive advantage in the market.InfinCE is a digital workplace orchestration platform that allows businesses to manage their employees, projects, and operations seamlessly in a remote-first world. Request a demo to see InfinCE in action.

“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” – Henry Ford.

Team collaboration is the main element in a business that spurs innovation, develops creativity, enhances productivity, and boosts employee satisfaction. When individuals come together openly, all the processes and objectives become more streamlined, steering the team towards a better success rate of achieving a common goal. A collaborative atmosphere makes each team member a potential resource or a tool that other members can rely on to make better decisions. This healthy employee relationship is what makes a company anticipate better business performance and productivity.

Team collaboration has always played an essential role in ensuring business growth. Post-pandemic, it has become indispensable to unite your employees and overcome the work silos that remote work culture has spiked. Setting up effective team collaboration in your organization requires proper planning and strategy.

The inevitable role of a team collaboration software

For creating an impactful collaborative environment, you may want to make use of team collaboration software like InfinCE. A team collaboration tool comprises all the essential features and functionalities needed to enhance your organization’s teamwork. 

For instance, InfinCE facilitates quick and streamlined communication among employees through live-chat, video calls, and virtual meetings, a crucial factor in improving teamwork.

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

As far as improving your team’s collaboration strategy, you can consider these tips in 2021. 

1. Combine innovative ideas

In addition to bringing ideas and plans to the table, a project manager is also responsible for weaving in their teams’ suggestions, ideas, and objectives to achieve a perfect amalgamation. A project involving complexity and multifaceted elements require agile policies, including innovation from all stakeholders and parties to achieve goals. Real-time data availability helps participants comprehend and differentiate between advantageous and disadvantageous actions and instantly make amendments. It implies that successful team collaboration combines the most-suitable ideas and the promptness of being adaptive and flexible.

2. Everyone must have a say

Effective team collaboration is an art that requires filling the gaps between differing ideas and transforming them into feasible solutions. A collaborator needs to be an active listener to get to the root of an idea or proposal. Listening patiently to everyone with a stake in the outcome is inevitable to map the course better. When everyone has a voice in the room, it becomes easier to confirm and clarify the information shared and discuss the details in real-time. This way, a great collaborator can respond effectively when all participants’ suggestions have been duly heard.

Implementing this strategy for team collaboration is very important as team members want to feel valued and be ensured that they are more than just employees.

3. Create an energetic environment

An ideal collaborator must ensure that everyone is working with enthusiasm. For this, they can stimulate motivation and energy into a team meeting or group conversation by allowing the team members to share their ideas and suggestions. A collaborator must always appreciate team members who play their part well. Criticisms should be polite and thoughtful and help employees realize their role and its significance in making the project successful.    

Issues that need attention should be discussed in such a way that the discussion motivates the team. The most vital asset of a successful project is a team that collaborates well.  

4. Sustain a friendly atmosphere

As a collaborator, you must always be open and available to suggestions as you never know from where you may get that million-dollar idea. Not only this, but a friendly atmosphere is also vital for building trust among team members. When employees feel confident and comfortable to share their opinions and concerns, it becomes easier to make workplace relationships successful. Keeping your door opens to new suggestions, accomplishments, and thoughtful criticisms empower the team collectively. This practice leads to healthier teamwork, better trust, quick problem-solving, and eventually enhanced business performance.

Read more: How Successful Leaders Engage Employees Using Modern Business Communication Tools like InfinCE 

5. Transparency brings excellency

An effective collaborator is not concerned with roles and titles as much as they are with the results. When a group member brings a sound suggestion to the table, the collaborator should always give full credit to the team or individual to motivate them.

Besides, an effective collaborator should share information and define expectations throughout the board. Such transparency in communication allows team members to trust the company for keeping things apparent. When the required details are shared with the team, it brings a sense of workplace community, augmenting the spirit of collaboration among employees.

6. Work should feel like fun

A project or a company tastes success when trust, motivation, and morale are high among the employees. Organizations need to motivate team members by organizing team outings, dinner parties, games, and events that help build strong connections between various departments. 

Building such a fun and friendly atmosphere among team members fosters a sense of accountability that goes past schedules and deadlines.

7. Rise above inflexibility

Just like the joined blocks that make up a building, team collaboration builds up a workplace. Although workgroups are known for tending to the silo, modern workplaces function well when employees have the freedom to work without boundaries. Instead of working individually, foster team collaboration to ensure that all the members are accountable for their participation.

Effective team collaboration in business ensures that individuals realize their value in helping a company achieve the desired objectives collectively. Team collaboration helps transform a business environment into an atmosphere that makes employees feel like family.

Read more: 5 Points To Consider While Choosing Your Enterprise Collaboration Software 

Benefits of integrating InfinCE team collaboration software

• InfinCE offers enhanced data security by ensuring data privacy through advanced firewalls, virtual private servers, and encryption-based access.
• Reliable support through various communication channels like phone, email, and live chat helps companies determine the appropriate solutions.
• The zero-coding feature of InfinCE allows you to set up a domain, mail server, website, and business applications in no time.
• No hidden charges if you ever wish to increase your server capacity and data storage.
• The user-friendly interface allows you to carry out tasks quickly and uninterruptedly.

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

Whether your business needs to build an IT infrastructure or requires specific apps for team collaboration, InfinCE helps you get the desired business tools and software to achieve your objectives. Get in touch with our expert to understand how InfinCE can boost team collaboration at your workplace.

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. 

Leading Examples of How Technology Helps in Managing Virtual Teams

Technology advancements have eliminated the constraints of physical boundaries for businesses. Today, every business is looking to serve a global customer base leveraging different digital channels. Even organizations that only serve regionally are increasingly adopting digital tools to improve their business processes better and cater to their customer’s growing needs.

All of that has led to the increasing popularity of remote work culture and virtual team management. Employees nowadays find it more convenient to perform their duties from remote locations using team collaboration apps. It also helps companies cut infrastructure costs. Today, it has become vital to employ the right online collaboration software to manage the virtual teams and ensure the right outcomes effectively.

How Team Collaboration Software Helps Manage Virtual Workforce

Virtual work culture has benefits as well as challenges. Common challenges faced by entrepreneurs managing virtual teams include scheduling work across different time zones, lack of transparency, ineffective communication, and other technical and socio-emotional issues. Leaders need to be more disciplined with their team management strategies and use a robust all-in-one online collaboration software platform to ensure optimum productivity.

Modern all-in-one team collaboration software comes with multiple features, such as instant messaging, video conferencing, file sharing, data storage, time tracking, reporting, and other capabilities to keep your team engaged and ensure better results. This way, you can also instill individual accountability, clarify job roles, define team norms, and do a lot more. Below are some examples of how technology and remote work tools can enhance virtual team management.

Read more: 5 Points To Consider While Choosing Your Enterprise Collaboration Software 

1. Improved Communication

Efficient and fast communication always plays a crucial role in facilitating the flow of ideas across the workplace. Online collaboration apps allow you to connect with team members at different locations via one-on-one or group video conferencing, audio calls, instant messaging, and other means. This way, you can remove all the communication barriers that often crop up among virtual teams and keep your team aligned with the business goals.

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

2. Superior Brainstorming

Remote work removes time pressure and allows all team members to contribute toward achieving the business objectives. Generating ideas through brainstorming helps find the most suitable alternatives and devise the best plans for realizing your short-term and long-term goals. Besides, online collaboration software also makes project management more effective by facilitating real-time interaction and access to essential data. You can also set realistic deadlines so that the brainstorming process yields the best results.

3. Informed Decision Making

The cloud-based document storage features in the collaboration apps allow seamless cooperation across different departments. In other words, it overcomes the hurdles of not being in the same location. Having a shared space for communication and collaboration empowers employees to work collectively and figure out the best strategies, inspirations, ideas, and tactics to achieve the business goals. Moreover, discussing the possibilities over video conferencing can help make more informed decisions while keeping the entire team in the loop.

4. Seamless Information Access

Gone are the days when you needed to inform your team members about the changes in business policies or other strategies by email. Using online collaboration software, you can let your virtual team know of the updates in real-time while also sending individual notifications about the changes. You can even tag different team members to review the updates or take the necessary action. As you can store all the data and files in a centralized location, remote employees can easily access the relevant information to perform their jobs.

5. Easy Reporting

Working with virtual teams means collaborating with people in different time zones. It can make monitoring team productivity and efficiency a bit confusing for project managers. However, modern team collaboration software platforms can make it painless by providing employee performance tracking and time management features. You can also generate reports on the progress of different projects and advise the team about what needs to be done to meet the shortcomings.

6. Better Relationships

Building good relationships is a vital aspect of a successful business, which may seem quite challenging for companies managing virtual teams. Remote teams usually spend very little time engaging with each other than what happens in a typical physical workplace. That is why you need to schedule regular meetings and keep the channels open for social conversations to build better employee-management relationships. That will go a long way to develop rapport and boost the confidence of your team members.

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

All-in-one online collaboration software can effectively tackle your virtual work culture’s challenges and let you make the most of your digital workforce. By following the best practices and getting the right virtual collaboration tool, you can ensure the most productive outcomes.

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

The pandemic showed us that it is possible to maintain your productivity levels while working from home to be on par with an office-based culture. Hence the only requirement is that you make the right collaboration platform available to employees. With secure information policies, seamless cloud-based deployment and management, InfinCE offers the best enterprise collaboration platform for today’s businesses. Get in touch with us to explore more.