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

How Technology Is Changing Workplace Culture for the Better

The workplace as we know of is continually evolving and there is no denying the fact that technology is playing a key role in that. Over the past decade, businesses across industries have seen numerous iterations of what their ideal workplace could look like and have taken strategic steps to achieve that. With the recent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are now more focused on transforming their workplace and make it safer and efficient for their employees.

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

The development of workplace apps and integrated solutions has allowed businesses to focus on company culture and find ways to enhance productivity. It is widely accepted that happy employees work better, perform consistently, and even motivate others to give their best. With access to robust workplace technology solutions, employees will be more engaged, efficient, and loyal to the company.

How Workplace Technology and Culture is Evolving

Studies say that companies with a highly-engaged workforce see around 41% less absenteeism, 17% more productivity, and 20% more sales. These numbers perfectly justify the need of adopting top-notch workplace apps and streamline company culture and business operations. For the employers, using such rapidly-changing technologies opens up numerous ways to hire from a global pool of candidates for different job roles. 

Below are some ways in which workplace technology can help you to transform your company culture for the better.

1. AI and Automation will increasingly streamline business processes

Workplace technology is becoming increasingly intelligent with the incorporation of AI tools and automation. This can help reduce the load of many routine business processes and everyday tasks from your employees. Virtual assistants and automation solutions are already being employed by organizations to streamline their day-to-day repeated tasks such as sorting emails, handling data entry, sharing files, etc. As your employees do not have to spend their productive time on such routine and tedious tasks, they can focus on other important business processes.

Read more: Automation In Small Business: 4 Areas To Get Started

You can also employ automation software to monitor and manage various business systems so that your employees can seamlessly conduct audits and quickly generate reports. AI tools allow you to create different scenarios and estimate the practicality of your marketing and sales campaigns. Smart workplace apps can also help to apply different tweaks and see which one would be the most beneficial to realize your goals.

2. Workplace technology will improve usability and experience

According to an IDC report, more than 50% of user interface interactions will be performed using AI-powered technologies by 2024. Businesses are even adopting technologies like AR and VR to deliver a more intuitive work experience for everyone. When coupled with an all-in-one collaboration platform, your employees can access business apps and data from any preferred device that is connected to their workspace, even using VR/AR headsets. 

This can provide greater usability for employees, helping them to analyze critical data quickly, attend business meetings virtually, and collaborate with team members efficiently. It is seen that employees spend almost 20% of their weekly work time searching for information to do their job effectively. With reliable all-in-one workplace apps like InfinCE, teams can share documents and files quickly and even edit or annotate the documents with other team members in real-time. 

Read more: Top 10 Apps That Facilitate Secure File Sharing For Businesses In 2020

3. Remote work will be made more flexible with smart solutions

As the unemployment rate in the US is hovering around 3.6% alongside the high demand for skilled staff, you need to find out every possible way to engage and retain your employees. Remote work has been at the center stage for some time now due to the COVID-19 crisis and workplace apps hope to make it better. Aside from allowing employees to work on flexible hours, smart office and collaboration tools allow you to bring your workforce together from different locations.

This also helps you plan the right remote work model for your company. You can adopt workplace solutions that provide your employees with a secure and unified channel to access the required business data and collaborate with others to deliver the results you are looking for. It also allows your employees to choose the best work environments and tools for their work, while you can manage access and information security centrally.

4. Remote workplace technologies will reduce overhead expenses

Another prime advantage of remote work is reduced overhead costs for your company. All it requires is an all-in-one collaboration platform with all the latest features that you need for improving your employee productivity and efficiency. As your employees can work from home using their devices, it helps to significantly decrease the operating costs. Modern workplace culture with BYOD policies further helps you save on the space, materials, and utility costs.

The impact of using workplace technology is growing strong in every industry. Powerful workplace apps like InfinCE empowers businesses to make the most of digital transformation. Remote work software will not just ensure higher employee productivity and satisfaction, but also lead to better customer experience and help in superior revenue generation. Get in touch with us to understand how InfinCE can be the game-changing workplace application for your enterprise. 

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

The rise of flexible, remote work culture and the need to address a large population of mobile-savvy millennial workforce is creating an unprecedented demand for enterprise mobility. 

Over 86 % of email users worldwide use their smartphones to access emails, reports Adobe. By enterprise mobility, we do not just focus on accessing emails on smartphones. It is a cultural and business transition that involves technology, people, and processes spanning departments. Hence every step a small business takes in the direction of implementing enterprise-wide mobility involves challenges that they need to mitigate. 

Here are five challenges that SMBs should overcome to ensure sustainable mobility adoption in enterprises. 

1. Cultural Resistance

When your organization comprises resources from different generations, there is friction that is bound to happen in several areas and your technology infrastructure is no exception. Most of your staff will be accustomed to their desktops or laptops and prefer working from the office. For them, the idea of transitioning to a highly decentralized and mobile workforce where remote working is a norm and smartphones become the mainstay device could be overwhelming. 

Related Reading: InfinCE Can Help You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

As a business owner, you need to step in to resolve this cultural challenge by creating awareness among your staff on the benefits of mobility. Having a well-planned migration into mobile-friendly collaboration channels is highly appreciable. It can help soften the transition and give space and time for employees to gradually accept the new norm rather than forcing them to accommodate a new way of working one fine day.

2. Business Process Alignment

Even if you are a small business enterprise, there are certain standard and well-defined business processes and workflows your employees follow to help serve customers efficiently. While incorporating mobility, a considerable effort must be put into re-aligning your key business processes. This will boost the adaptability of mobility best practices.

Polices like BYOD which are critical in enabling enterprise mobility make it necessary for business processes to be re-defined. These may include information-sharing protocols, work management policies, timeline management, security policies, and much more.

3. Seamless Collaboration and Communication

When employees begin to opt for a culture of remote and mobile-first work experience, there is a huge demand for interactive and real-time collaboration capability. Through digital channels like InfinCE, SMBs can facilitate employees to stay connected with their peers, share information, work on tasks together, manage responsibilities and dependent activities, conduct virtual meetings or video conferences, and so on. 

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

For customer-facing roles, it is important to deliver insights and information on the go on handheld devices. Knowledge archival and sharing via cloud platforms need to be highly encouraged. This is vital for field employees to deliver value during client interactions. 

4. Flexible Application Support

As more enterprise functions and capabilities get mapped to mobility mode, small businesses need to ensure that your workforce gets dedicated applications to leverage these functions completely from their smartphones or remote devices. Hence your technology ecosystem needs to support the development of custom enterprise mobility apps for various business functions. It could be CRM, HRM, ERP, CMS, document management, collaboration, and project management, and much more.

For instance, The InfinCE mobile app gives you access to most of the features of your virtual desktop, formatted for the smaller screen of your smartphone. You can view all your Dashboards, contact everyone in your organization, Chat or Video call with colleagues, access your Business Applications, and attend the Online Meetings.

5. Security and Device Management

With the advent of digital channels, there is a large volume of customer data that passes through different enterprise systems daily. When your business incorporates mobility deeper into its operations, then a lot of devices come into the network like personal laptops, smartphones, and even smart IoT devices. Confidential data and information get exchanged through these devices regularly. Hence security and data privacy becomes a huge challenge. 

SMBs must ensure that standard encryption protocols, data protection policies and access control are implemented to prevent any untoward incident. There should be intelligent monitoring of data logs and employees must be transparently held accountable for their responsibilities to ensure that no modification or manipulation of data happens without approvals from concerned departments. Compliance laws like GDPR make it necessary for enterprises to enable secure experiences for customer data across all channels through which it is shared.

Related Reading: Why Is InfinCE A Better Choice For Safe Video Calling Than Zoom

Enterprise Mobility is rapidly being adopted by small businesses across the globe. From ensuring business continuity at times of crisis to empowering employees to sustain a perfect work-life balance, the advantages are numerous. With an enterprise platform like InfinCE powering your digital backend, the transition can happen seamlessly. InfinCE allows small businesses to unify their digital infrastructure and empower employees with the flexibility to rapidly increase mobility. Secure cloud-based infrastructure, an extensive app ecosystem and a 24 X 7 support team guarantees that your mobility transformation happens seamlessly and without disruption. Get in touch with our experts to know more about InfinCE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Smart Workflows

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

2. Budgeting

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

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

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

3. KPI Indicators

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

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

4. Team Management and Collaboration

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

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

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

Related Reading: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

5. Reporting

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

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

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

Simple Ways to Perfect Your Work From Home Routines

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

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

How A CRM Helps Drive More Sales For Your Small Business?

“Customer is King” holds true for any business, in spite of what you offer to the market for revenue; be it products or services. But with the immense growth of technology and its salient propagation among businesses, there has been a huge reduction in the gap that existed between large and small businesses when it comes to satisfying customer expectations. 

Through innovation and digital transformation, small businesses have been able to penetrate markets that were controlled by heavyweights by disrupting the entire product or service lifecycles. A major factor in enabling this disruption was customer data and this is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software makes the difference in building a great experience for customers. From managing sensitive information about customers to help sales folks close deals faster, CRM is a vital tool for today’s growing small businesses. 

Related Reading:6 Benefits of Using a Cloud CRM

Here are 5 convincing reasons why small businesses need to invest in a CRM solution today:

1. Identify your Most Suitable Customer

Did you know that 79% of all marketing-generated leads never convert into a sale without a CRM behind the entire operation? This happens when you do not identify and nurture the right prospect. In the absence of a CRM, your sales team will not have access to insights garnered by your marketing team about potential areas of interest of the prospect. This will result in the sales team preparing the best pitch for a wrong target and the entire effort goes down in vain without any result. With a CRM in place, the sales team can get accurate insights about customers who are the best suitable for each sales pitch they have created from the business offerings available.

2. Plan on Building Customer Relationships

It is natural for your sales force to run out of ideas or time while meeting, convincing, and converting prospective leads into rewarding deals. With a CRM application, they can build a relationship with the customer meticulously so that every discussion they have is productive and conversion happens faster. By documenting every interaction in a CRM, the salesperson can use insights from the CRM to approach prospects at the right time with the right context and with the right offering to quickly close the discussion. 

Insights derived from previous customer interactions can be utilized by all members of the sales team as best practices to follow when they meet a new prospect or when taking over the next stage of discussions with a customer who was brought into the nurturing phase by another salesperson.

3. Drive Better Campaigns

Today’s massively popular digital marketing landscape is one way small businesses can catapult their sales considerably. With a CRM platform, it becomes easier to build a data-driven marketing engine around the platform and make better and smarter campaigns to win customer interest. 

A simple example would be using insights from the CRM in an email campaign to boost holiday sales for a small online retail business. The system would give insights such as preferred email reading time, interest and buying patterns of prospects (derived from their past interactions and shopping history also stored in the CRM) and choices in product varieties. These insights can help in closing the sales deal faster with more convincing sales messages and the right timing of email. It may also include targeted promotions such as discounts on special occasions like birthdays or anniversaries.  The small analytical input from the CRM can make a big difference in winning the sales conversion.

4. Improve Up-selling and Cross-selling Capabilities

Once a customer’s journey has been recorded in the CRM, it becomes easy for a small business to use the data to run targeted up-selling and cross-selling promotions. This will also help you to build sustainable long term relationships with valued customers by engaging with them periodically. A committed customer is your biggest marketing asset and by creating a culture of continuous sales engagement with intelligent CRM inputs, this commitment is easily achieved.

5. Better Employee Productivity

With the help of CRM, your sales and marketing teams can make better and smarter decisions with regard to their daily operational schedules. CRM brings in a great deal of automation and frees up time and effort which your employees can utilize for creating better experiences for customers. By empowering them with real-time and intelligent insights about customer behavior, it enables them to achieve their goals and targets seamlessly. It reduced paperwork and research time involved in every customer interaction, thereby paving the way for a smoother customer relationship management experience in every interaction.

Related Reading: Top 5 Productivity Tools Every Small Business Needs Today

A CRM is a small business’s best buddy for its marketing and customer outreach initiatives. From building a healthy sales pipeline to helping build fabulous experiences through customer feedback about your products and services, it is a one-stop destination to bring more sales revenue for your business. Successful businesses utilize the CRM capabilities of platforms like INFINCE to drive more value from their customer relationships. Get in touch with us to know how INFINCE’s CRM capabilities can be the right choice for your customer relationship management.