5 tips to run your workforce remotely during COVID-19

The global economy is undergoing a tremendous shift as the COVID-19 pandemic rips through boundaries of trade, social interactions, and travel. With more businesses forced to let go of their stringent office-based work culture and transition into a remote working model, there are a rising number of challenges that employers must learn to cope with. With the pandemic showing vague signs of receding any time soon, it is important for businesses to learn to efficiently manage remote teams and ensure disruption-free customer service from their business. So how can they achieve this excellence of managing remote employees?

Here are 5 tips to effectively manage remote teams during challenging times:

1. Set Protocols and Agreements

Before you start to assign work orders or schedule delivery timelines for remote teams, it is important to arrive at a consensus on the operational model for remote employee management. Though lockdown and other government regulations indicate fewer chances of people moving out of their homes (except emergencies), it is important to set the terms on operating hours clearly so that the work-life balance of employees isn’t affected. 

Read more: 8 easy tips to effectively work from home

Organizations need to follow up with employees not only on work-related proceedings but also on the personal health and safety of the employees and their family members. As such, companies need to publish and make managers aware of availability guidelines for work. Employees need to be offered flexible working hours when they are continuously working remotely as they may need to attend to personal priorities as well.

2. Strategically Plan Meetings and Reviews

It is important for managers and their reports to be in sync with assigned workloads and ensure timely submission of customer deliverables. While provisions for any time communication will always be there, it is better to create a schedule to review work progress. 

There could be weekly or bi-weekly team review calls that can happen over video conferencing for the entire team to come together and interact as if they were in an office meeting. Task dependencies, support, and other mutually concerning matters can be taken up for discussions and managerial interventions could be made wherever necessary. 

One-on-One meetings between managers and employees who report to them should also be a trend that should ideally occur on a monthly basis. While the type of meetings can be sorted and agreed upon by employees, it is important to follow a time-sensitive schedule for such meetings. Ideally, any non-core meeting shouldn’t be scheduled for more than 30 minutes.

3. Leverage Collaboration Platforms

When employees work remotely, there is often a need for them to work together on achieving the desired results or customer deliverable value. Since meeting up at the office isn’t feasible under situations like COVID-19, companies must look at alternative ways to facilitate collaborative work arrangements. 

The best option is to have a powerful remote collaboration platform like InfinCE that can create a virtual workspace for employees to work together as a team on projects. From file sharing to virtual conferencing involving the entire team, digital platforms like InfinCE allow better project management and easy collaboration on customer deliverables. 

Read more: How InfinCE helps you quickly transit to remote working

Since customer data or other valuable credentials are likely to be managed by employees using these collaboration platforms, they need to offer high levels of security. It is important to maintain logs and traceable information on these platforms to ensure there is no compromise on security.

4. Organize Information

While it is a good thing to have multiple communication channels open for employees when they work remotely, it is equally important to have a well balanced and organized communication strategy to avoid distractions and eliminate loss of productivity due to these distractions. 

Effective use of project management tools, virtual repositories, file organizers, and knowledge management platforms can help streamline work communication efficiently. Employees can access information needed for work support, view their pending tasks, prioritize work, view progress of dependent tasks, and do much more when there is a structured and well laid out information and communication management practice. This allows remote work teams to be transparent about work commitments and avoid overwhelming responsibilities.

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

5. Encourage Engagement

While the merry of an office environment will always be missed in remote work culture, there is nothing that will stop you from setting up an engaging work experience when all staff works remotely. Try hosting weekly fun activities, brainteasers, music, and fun activities all via video conferencing so that employees get to connect with the fun side of their work more frequently. It is also a great gesture to allow families of employees to participate as it will create more social bonding. Use social media to promote employee engagement. 

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

Managing your remote workforce efficiently in times of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic can be less stressful if you have the proper digital infrastructure in place to support your workforce. This is where platforms like InfinCE has proven to be a game-changer for some of the world’s most successful businesses. Get in touch with our experts to learn more.

Here is a list of the leading remote collaboration tools of 2020

We’re nearing the halfway mark of 2020, and most of the world’s working population has shifted to remote working. This transition would not have been possible if powerful digital collaboration tools for employees to stay connected were not available. From schools to IT companies, every organization has integrated an online communication and collaboration platform to help their workforce carry out daily operations smoothly and interact with their peers, customers, or any relevant stakeholders in their work. 

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

Here is a look at the top 11 online collaboration tools that made a difference for businesses in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic:

1. InfinCE

While collaboration and communication are the key elements to look forward while choosing a digital platform for your business, InfinCE offers enterprises with a host of other features in addition to the key elements like an integrated CRM, Rich management dashboards, cloud-based secure web hosting, virtual desktops and much more. It is one of the best online collaboration tools for small and medium businesses.

2. Microsoft Office 365 and Teams

One of the most popular players in the global software industry, Microsoft has helped numerous organizations manage their remote work operations smoothly with their pool of collaboration tools and platforms. From productivity tools like MS Word, Excel, etc. to video and conferencing solutions like MS Teams, they offer a large set of options for businesses to choose from.

3.  Slack

Slack definitely needs no introduction to several global companies as it has helped millions to collaborate efficiently even before the COVID-19 pandemic took things in a different direction. Offering personalized experiences, video and team conferencing, mobile app support, and seamless integration with popular cloud storage services, Slack offers a solution for all your remote work needs.

4. Zoho Cliq

From simplifying team communication to managing real-time messaging, task schedules, and automation, Zoho Cliq offers enterprises of all sizes with a comprehensive suite of collaboration tools. It also offers easy integration with other 3^rd party platforms for storage, calendar management and even offers easy management of customer relationships by integrating seamlessly with Zoho’s own established CRM solution.

5. Trello

Trello has a massive fan base across the globe, be it amongst organizations or individual freelancers and consultants. The primary reason for this fan following is undoubtedly the simplicity of the platform to help organize multiple tasks that require collaboration from a number of employees. The simple interface and easy navigation within individual Trello cards help managers and employees to handle even complex projects efficiently with Trello and it integrates well with other platforms such as Slack, Google Drive, GitHub, etc. to make the experience even more rewarding for teams.

6. Asana

From organizing workflows, tracking work progress, and facilitating seamless communication, Asana is still one of the veterans in the online collaboration space and has been around since 2008. Companies like Intel and Uber rely on Asana as their core communication platform to stay organized, enable better conversations between staff, and manage diverse projects and their individual task progress.

7.  Google G-Suite

Undoubtedly one of the world’s most well-known tech brands, Google doesn’t want to be left behind in the race for online collaboration tools. Its G-Suite platform offers a host of capabilities with a collection of apps for various enterprise collaboration activities. You have everything from emails to video conferencing to productivity apps all rolled into different subscription plans that you may feel free to choose depending on your organization’s size. With top-notch security, support, and scalability, G-Suite is a trusted platform for thousands of businesses worldwide to help run their operations smoothly.

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

8. Ryver

Ryver offers a simple and easy to use interface for employees to connect and converse within an enterprise. From the ease of setting up teams to offering privileged features to different groups and the ability to manage private virtual spaces for individual project discussions, Ryver has grown into a strategic internal tool for several modern-day businesses. A major highlight of Ryver is the Facebook inspired intranet feed where employees can converse together/with each other on updates shared by the organization.

9. Facebook for Work

How amazing it would be if virtual office collaboration tools work similarly to Facebook with the same theme and inspired layouts? Well, this is exactly what Facebook themselves tried to offer when they launched the Facebook for Work platform. From productivity apps to seamless communication channels, the social media giant has brought several inspiring features into the product aimed at making internal enterprise communication interesting.

10. Podio

Podio makes for a great mobile-friendly workforce communication and collaboration platform. It offers flexible configuration options and easy integration with several functional and productivity apps like Evernote, Google Drive, Dropbox, and much more.

11.  Basecamp

A darling of technology service companies, Basecamp brings together a very useful set of capabilities for communication and collaboration under one roof. With a highly affordable fee for unlimited teams, it finds tremendous use in companies with more staff.

Read more: 4 ways to bolster your IT team’s efficiency to support remote operations during COVID-19

With COVID-19 showing minimal signs of weakening, your business will be in dire need of an online collaboration platform to help employees stay connected. Get in touch with us to explore why InfinCE will be your best choice among the 11 we have covered in this blog.

4 ways to bolster your IT team’s efficiency to support remote operations during COVID-19

It’s only the second week of June 2020 and the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide has come close to 7.15 million. Governments, businesses, and people have started to realize that we may need to learn to live with the coronavirus for an unexpected period of time, at least until vaccines are found that can neutralize or eliminate its threat for good. Businesses and universities have transitioned their core operations to adopt a remote work culture. Except for some critical work operations that require a physical presence in the workplace, almost all companies now operate with employees working out of their homes.

Read More: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

What does this mean for the IT department across businesses who have moved into a remote work operation mode? 

IT teams need to quickly support the transition of the entire IT work infrastructure into a near 100% remote mode. From productivity tools to instant peer communication platforms, everything needs to be available for employees irrespective of where they are located. 

Here are some best practices you can utilize to get your IT team prepared for keeping your employees connected to their workplace virtually during such uncertain times.

1. Set Communication Policies

While remote working employees need access to multiple communication channels to effectively work on their tasks, it is important for companies to define the clear scope of each channel. One example would be an optimal usage of paid communication channels like VOIP facilities with limited licenses or shared licenses between departments. 

There should be a minimum availability of each such resource and policies must be laid out to ensure optimal utilization. 

Read More: How can businesses manage their remote workforce through efficient communication?

For example, if teleconferencing between team members of a project requires more time and more users to be connected to a single conference call, it can be moved to an online meeting platform that offers unlimited conferencing options rather than using limited license telephone-based VOIP conferences. This offers your IT team the flexibility to allot VOIP facilities to more demanding teams like customer-facing employees who may find it difficult to ask customers to get into online meetings rather than just a conversation over the telephone.

2. Secure Information Access

When employees work from their office, confidential information regarding customer projects may be distributed in local networks which could only be accessed from office computers. 

When there is a shift to remote working, this information should go into a more distributed storage facility that can be accessed over the internet. Hence a proper security policy and protocol must be defined for flexible information access over the internet. This allows IT teams to implement monitoring systems, maintain access logs, set privileged access options, and much more. 

Moreover, all employees need to be strictly made aware of these policies through regular communication from leaders, managers, and HR. Security should not be the sole responsibility of your IT team but an extended oversight of the entire workforce.

Read More: Why Is InfinCE A Better Choice For Safe Video Calling Than Zoom

3. Provisioning of Digital Platforms and Tools

There is a huge demand for collaboration and communication platforms when employees work together on projects. The demand escalates to unprecedented levels when your stakeholders shift to a remote mode. 

From meetings to file sharing to project management, there is a multitude of managerial overhead for facilitating seamless operations while employees are working from home. 

This calls for the implementation of a powerful digital enterprise platform like InfinCE which can offer different departments within your organization the necessary digital tools and platforms for communication and collaboration. Such platforms make it easy for your IT team to manage overall digital infrastructure availability for remote workers and make support readily available for their needs at any time.

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

4. Measure, Analyze and Improve

For many businesses, this is probably the first instance where such a massive remote working policy came into force and that too in a very short notice. Glitches and delays are expected, but the key focus here should be to learn from each event and ensure a better experience the next time. 

It is important to regularly measure productivity levels of staff and align it with IT objectives such as availability, file management, security and data policies, software and license management, etc. 

Set out clear KPIs for measuring employee productivity during the timeline of remote work. The measured values should be analyzed to arrive at trends that occur in work patterns frequently. Feedback from employees should be collected with regards to infrastructural availability, network, or communication channel flexibility, etc. Learnings from all these should be factored in while your IT department optimizes your digital infrastructure to meet rising demands from your workforce.

Read More: How InfinCE helps you quickly transit to remote working

The remote work culture is expected to remain a norm for months to come as the COVID-19 pandemic is not showing a dramatic rate of containment of spread. Your IT teams need the most resilient enterprise IT platforms to help manage complex requirements of the entire workforce who are working remotely. This is where enterprise platforms like InfinCE can be their best friend. Get in touch with us to know how some of the world’s best businesses manage their digital workforce infrastructure seamlessly with InfinCE. 

How can businesses manage their remote workforce through efficient communication?

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

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

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

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

1. Set Guidelines for Communication

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

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

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

Read More: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

2. Ensure a Seamless Communication Platform

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

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

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

3. Proactive Work Communication

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

4. Encourage Video Calls

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

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

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

5. Transparent Leadership Communication

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

Read More: InfinCE Helps You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

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

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

With the ever-changing market scenario, working effectively from anywhere is merely turning into a necessity more than a luxury. 

Thanks to technology!

Now businesses are able to counter strike even this challenge by switching to remote working environments with the help of remote collaboration tools. Statistics reveal that the number of people working from home has increased by 400% in the last decade. 

But a question remains: 

Although technology and remote team communication tools are making work from home or remote team collaborations possible, how efficient and productive can this work culture be?

For instance:

With the assistance of a remote work tool, your workforce remotely working on a critical project seems absolutely fine, until you encounter a problem that needs an immediate fix, like: 

• You end up struggling between multiple apps to reach the concerned resource
• Raise necessary tickets
• Share important info
• Monitor the task progress

This is crazy:

Multiple work collaboration tools might be enabling you to successfully complete the task, but compromising on time and efficiency is not viable, especially when the market is rough.

So what is it that you need to ensure an efficient remote working environment?

You need the right technology or the apt remote workforce management software!

While working remotely, what’s essential is to ensure enhanced team collaboration and efficient time management. That is where you have to find the right tools for remote teams.

Here’s the deal:

With a remote work tool like InfinCE, you can achieve this by enabling your workforce to get up and get running remotely, within the shortest time and without the need for any special equipment. Eliminating the complexities of using multiple technologies, InfinCE, an integrated infinite cloud facility, makes the best collaboration tool for remote teams.

So, What makes InfinCE the best remote work tool in the market now? 

1. Reduce Technology Complexities with the Right Remote Work Tool

When initiating a remotely functioning workforce, it is obvious to first prepare a list of the must-have work-collaboration tools like Skype, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Google Drive, Spreadsheets and such. 

But it gets worse:

Let’s not ignore that switching between multiple apps has its own difficulties. And it’s a common task you will find in every remote collaboration tools

Check how InfinCE is reducing the complexities of engaging with multiple technologies for better remote team collaboration

• Brings the ease of swift chats
• Efficient video conferencing
• Collaborated worksheets
• Online task managers
• Schedulers
• Secured cloud file sharings

But here’s the kicker: 

InfinCE is providing all of them under one roof. Enabling a much more streamlined and efficient workflow under remote working conditions, thus InfinCE provides the best work collaboration software solution for small businesses.

2. Effective Communication Through an Efficient Remote Work Software

Smooth and effective communication is always the key to better remote team collaboration and a successful business. When it comes to remote working environments, streamlined communication becomes a necessity. Connecting effectively with your team and ensuring that every member is on the same page, might take more than just a few standard emails in most of the remote team communication tools. 

What must be done? 

Before selecting tools for remote teams, companies must ensure it onboard a variety of conversational channels like group chats and video conferencing, to facilitate a smooth and timely flow of information. 

And, here is the best part:

An online cloud platform and a remote team communication tool like InfinCE is dedicated to streamlining work collaborations by: 

•  Providing seamless chat options
•  Enabling your team to join active online meeting rooms through shared links
•  Takes remote work collaboration to a whole new level. 

In addition to it, this remote work tool facilitates efficient screen sharing and makes it possible to create an impact with intuitive and interactive presentations, even while working remotely. The inbuilt calendar feature makes scheduling meetings, updating events and checking member availability a whole lot easier, reducing planning time and enhancing coordination.

Related Reading:5 Workplace Innovations You Can Welcome with Video Conferencing

3. Empower Your Workforce with Right Technology and Remote Collaboration Tool

Let’s face it! 

In today’s rapidly changing environment, it takes a whole set of advanced remote work tools and technologies for small businesses to gain competitive advantage, and survive in the market. When working from home, it often becomes difficult to access many of these required tools, compromising the quality and productivity of work. 

You might be wondering now:

InfinCE is a simple tool for remote teams and a platform built to improve employee efficiency and productivity. With a pool of online apps and remote collaboration tools, InfinCE facilitates seamless creation of online spreadsheets, presentations, and documents, letting multiple collaborators work together in the same document for better remote team collaboration.

The best part is: 

InfinCE enables members to place comments and suggestions in real-time, helps reduce errors and meets deadlines more easily even in remote working conditions. 

Moreover, InfinCE file storage facilitates secured file sharing, guaranteeing complete file security and enabling controlled access and monitoring of how your data is shared. Making InfinCE the best tool for remote workers.

4. Secured Cloud-based File Sharing: Crucial for any Remote Work Tool

Most small companies practice transferring files and data through USB drives or other hardware. Although such practices may feel comfortable and simple to use when working under remote environments, this may turn inconvenient, and in some cases, a huge loss and threat to the company if misplaced, damaged or gotten under the wrong hands.

To avoid such mishaps, it is always safe and effective to rely on the cloud when it comes to transferring and storing files.

Want to know the best part?

InfinCE, the infinite cloud platform, provides effective cloud-based file sharing, allowing employees to seamlessly access and transfer organizational data from anywhere while enabling proper monitoring and activity logins. Thus making it a very secured remote collaboration tool. 

Related Reading: 6 Ways to Build a Secure File Sharing Practice Within Your Organization

5. Complete Access and Control: A Must Feature for Any Best Remote Working Tools

While running a small business with multiple technologies, it takes immense time and effort to manage and administer the effective functioning of each tool. Such management and administration become even more complex and difficult when shifted to a remote working environment. So, any remote work tool has to address this problem. 

We make things simpler for you: 

• InfinCE makes administration simple with centralized intuitive dashboards enabling seamless user management, department creations, and usage tracking, across the organization through our remote work tool. 
• With a single sign-on remote collaboration tool, InfinCE allows employees of a company to access all their business and productivity tools under secured firewalls. 
• With one single remote work platform, a company can gain complete access and control, while least worrying about infrastructure management, storage, backups, security, and updates.

6. Enhanced Productivity & Efficiency: Important for Remote Team Collaboration

In a remote working environment, what’s most important is to have effective resource management. 

Having remote work tools that do not cater to your specific business workflows might leave you spending more time and effort in managing the tool itself, rather than enabling you to achieve an effective workforce or smart servicing environment. 

An integrated remote employee management software like InfinCE gives your company the flexibility to choose only those tools and apps that fit your exact business needs, facilitating easy performance monitoring, and project coordination. 

With advanced tools to assign tasks to remote workers and monitor progress in real-time, InfinCE helps organizations drive remote working efficiency and overall business excellency while contracting the efforts and time utilized for resources management.

A fully remote and flexible “work from home” environment, demands technology to replicate the smooth coordination and functioning of an office work culture. Implementing an integrated remote work tool like InfinCE, makes effective project management, resource monitoring, group collaboration, cloud storage, and other business solutions possible, within the comfort of homes or remote. Along with boosted productivity, InfinCE also ensures a safe, secure and hassle-free IT infrastructure management for the complete organization. In rough market situations, it is critical for small businesses to rely on technologies that are simple to use, cost-saving and initiates enhanced business growth.

To learn more about how InfinCE can help your business work from home effectively, get in touch with our experts today!

Also, check out our infographic to unveil 8 easy tips to effectively work from home!

Simple Ways to Perfect Your Work From Home Routines

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

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