Everything You Need to Know About Digital Workplace

The term “digital workplace” has seen too many interpretations over the past decade. As companies worldwide started looking for proactive ways to move ahead with their digital transformation strategies, one thing that gained the most attention is managing a digital workforce. However, adopting a digital workplace approach is much more than having a remote team. While that is a part of the digital workforce, it is not limited to the generic definition of managing employees digitally.

In the modern era, a workplace has evolved beyond physical spaces. It has become an always-connected environment where your team can instantly access everything they need to get their job done. A digital workplace makes this more practical by being a virtual workplace setting.

Read More: Key Predictions on How Workplace Technology and Culture Will Evolve in 2020 & Beyond

What is a digital workplace?

According to Deloitte, “The digital workplace comprises all the technologies people use to get work done in today’s workplace – both the ones in operation and the ones yet to be implemented. It ranges from your HR applications and core business applications to email, instant messaging, and enterprise social media tools and virtual meeting tools.”

Gartner observes that the “digital workplace facilitates new and effective ways of working; increases employee engagement and agility; and exploits consumer-oriented styles and technologies.” 

A digital workplace is a connecting hub where your employees get all the tools needed to deliver their best output. 

Different explanations tag a digital workplace to using specific software applications. It is more about employing digital transformation at work that drives superior employee productivity and operational efficiency. Upgrading traditional business processes and workflows with modern digital technology is a crucial part of a digital workplace.

What are the key elements of a digital workplace?

The recent developments in technology have simplified communication and collaboration between teams, irrespective of their physical locations. With cutting-edge all-in-one team management platforms like InfinCE, it has become much easier for businesses to tap into the entire ecosystem of digital applications to connect and collaborate on a project. Here are some of the crucial elements that make up a digital workplace.

A reliable communication and collaboration platform

A reliable communication and collaboration platform is a must in your digital workplace. 

Instant messaging solutions help your team to communicate in real-time. But you need an instant messaging platform that offers add-on features like file sharing and document management. InfinCE has it all!

We ensure that everyone in your team has easy access to everything they need in one place to perform their job roles. Our digital workplace orchestration platform also includes video meetings, one-on-one audio/video calls, multiple screen-sharing, file sharing, etc., to ensure effective communication.

Read More: A Guide to Improving Workplace Collaboration for the Modern Enterprise

Data sharing

Data sharing is another important aspect of having an efficient digital workplace. While many communication platforms these days allow file sharing, it is vital to check the privacy features and ensure optimal security of the data shared over the channel. InfinCE comes with end-to-end data encryption and added security features like single sign-on, versatile storage management controls, secure file sharing, and more. We help you safely manage your sensitive business data. InfinCE seamlessly integrates with your existing applications so that you can rest assured that your projects run without any glitches or downtime.

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

What a digital workplace is not

While using different digital tools and technologies is a core part of a digital workplace, it is not limited to that alone. For instance, a team collaboration platform will only be efficient if the employees using it are well-versed in making the most of it. InfinCE digital workplace focuses on building a work culture that employs different applications and solutions to work hand-in-hand with the digital transformation strategy of your company. InfinCE is user-friendly, intuitive, and requires minimum training for enterprise-wide adaptability. 

A digital workplace is not merely the following:

1. Digital workplace is not just an intranet 

Even though enterprises rely on intranets to share company information, they have limited scope and do not allow any room for active project discussions. Building a successful digital workplace will not need an intranet if all the information can be stored in the integrated database of the all-in-one collaboration platform. Besides, moving the internal data from the intranet to the digital communication channel to handle remote teams can also be very time-consuming and expensive.

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

2. Digital workplace is not an amalgamation of applications

Using multiple applications for managing different things like communication, file and data sharing, web conferencing, document processing and management, employee performance tracking, and the like can be pretty hectic. It will also increase your third-party license and subscription costs. Having multiple applications can create a fragmented and disoriented work environment, affecting the company’s overall productivity.

Download White Paper: How A Digital Workplace Streamlines Business Performance 

3. Digital workplace is not only meant for large enterprises

Having a digital workplace is all about figuring out the needs of a business and adopting the right tools and technologies to ensure smooth execution of operations. Companies can build an efficient digital workplace regardless of their size and industry type. Finding the right solution matters the most in a digital workplace that can facilitate automation and execution of business processes and manage teams and projects.

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

The necessity of a digital workplace

The digital transformation wave is sweeping every industry today. It is the right time to adopt digital systems and build a sustainable digital workplace that aligns with your company’s vision. A dynamic digital workplace contributes to business strategy development. It helps manage your company’s operations as your business grows and expands. It is a significant decision that covers choosing the right digital solutions to ensure that no communication lags or information gaps affect work management.

Using a standalone collaboration tool may not effectively create an efficient digital workplace environment, as it can be limited to communication purposes or data sharing only. 

Read More: 5 Ways to Ensure that Digital Workplace Complexity Doesn’t Bog Down Workforce Productivity

InfinCE digital workplace orchestration platform avoids the need for switching between apps to perform a task. Your team can rapidly make informed decisions through InfinCE’s unified digital work environment. Our goal is to help you build a robust work culture where everyone thrives to their best potential.

Get in touch with us to learn more about InfinCE. 

Best Practices to Optimize Project Management Communication

Agile project management is highly crucial in today’s remote-first, digital-first workplace. The remote work culture has emerged as a potential solution for handling various operational aspects across companies. Remote work management brings several benefits to the table, but it is not devoid of challenges. One of the biggest concerns in managing remote teams is effective communication.

Without consistent and effective project communication between the teams, it can be challenging for the managers to execute actions as planned. Likewise, lack of proper communication will make it impossible to ensure that everyone is on the same page about the project’s status and what changes have been made to it. Ineffective project communication can lead to transparency issues between the teams, affecting their productivity and overall results.

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

Common Challenges in Project Management Communication

Most managers fail to drive the optimum outcome when managing remote teams. It is because they do not start with a well-planned communication strategy. Remote work and project management should always have a robust communication strategy so that no unwanted scenario pops up. It prevents project teams from using ineffective channels at inappropriate times.

For instance, while dealing with an urgent customer request, email communication alone may not be effective. You may have to use telecommunication, video conferencing, or instant messaging platforms to solve the customer challenge immediately. At the same time, an everyday instant messenger may not support screen sharing or file sharing. Hence, it is crucial to adopt Digital Workplace Orchestration platforms like InfinCE to manage your projects. 

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

Communication gaps in project management can also arise when some team members are not updated with the project’s progress. For example, suppose someone is handling the design aspect of the project and fails to update the design status to other members. In that case, the production team will have to wait until they receive notification regarding design completion. This can lead to trust and transparency issues and minimize employee productivity. 

Another challenge in project management communication is that managers often do not have the means to fine-tune their strategies as per the project’s progress. Even though the project communication management approach fits the implementation needs, companies may need to accommodate frequent change requests from the customer. It’s crucial to refine the communication and collaboration strategy to match the changing project management demands.

Read more: Business Process Management Strategy for your Small Business 

How to Ensure Project Management Communication Success

When developing the project communication plan, you need to determine how you can pass on the relevant information to the team members in due time. It’s also important to decide how you can share the necessary files and documents with the appropriate parties for carrying out their jobs. InfinCE’s project collaboration software can simplify all these processes.

How to Choose a Project Management Platform

An all-in-one project collaboration platform like InfinCE can come in very handy in team management, as it gives you an effective communication channel for different purposes. InfinCE’s project management software helps you handle knowledge management and data sharing functions. It allows you to oversee the progress and status of various project aspects on a unified dashboard.

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

By adopting a reliable project management platform like InfinCE, you can rest assured that a proper communications workflow is in place. InfinCE helps deliver the data that your team members require to perform their job roles at every stage of the project. Moreover, it can also serve as a channel to collect feedback and improve the project management communication system to guarantee optimal results. InfinCE helps build trust among the team members by making your process more transparent.

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

Best Practices to Handle Project Management Communication

Along with an all-in-one project management platform, you also need to implement the best project management communication strategy. The next step is to confirm if the strategy works as intended. As a business owner, you should regularly monitor the strategy. It includes conveying insights generated at each point of the project management process, how and where the data is processed, and how the team members apply insights to improve their work. 

Analyze the efficiency of your project communication strategy at regular intervals to identify any communication gaps and take steps to address them. Keep an eye on how your team members use the project communication platform. Review how project managers use the digital workplace platform to share team and project updates and dashboards. Project management software like InfinCE also helps encourage virtual socialization among team members. You can also use it to assess the performance of your project communication strategy and make changes if needed. 

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

Tips to Manage External Communications

An agile project management tool allows you to communicate with all the parties involved in a project to ensure that you can reach your target outcomes on time. For instance, InfinCE OpenProject enables you to grant access to external users like your clients and other stakeholders. This improves the stakeholders’ visibility over the project’s status. They can recommend insights relevant to the execution of a specific project process. 

You can also manage access to the communication funnel for document sharing internally and for other purposes externally. This will help the team members find the required information instantly, which leads to improved transparency and productivity. On the other end, having a unified communications channel will make collaboration with clients and suppliers much easier for your team members.

Read more: 5 Must-have Features In A Project Management Tool For Small Businesses 

The Closing Note

Besides a robust communication strategy, you also need to ensure appropriate communication at the end of a project. Project management communication will help you confirm that the results meet the intended quality. You can also refine the approach and the process in due course.  

Communication should continue even after completing the project. Employee recognition, social conversations, and casual interactions go a long way in boosting remote team morale, which will eventually lead to high-end productivity and performance.InfinCE is a digital workplace orchestration platform that offers a vast array of collaboration apps, productivity tools, custom dashboards, centralized and private IT infrastructure, custom branding elements, a curated app marketplace, and a host of other features. Talk to us and find out how InfinCE can be your best project management companion.

Demystifying Digital Workplace Complexity for a More Productive Workforce

The concept of a digital workplace has picked up steam ever since the COVID-19 pandemic forced thousands of companies worldwide to shift to a completely remote mode of working for their employees. The scale at which this transition happened and with no preparation time meant that enterprises needed to be at their killer best in enabling seamless adaption of the new normal of work. A Gartner survey points out that over 68% of C-Level executives have agreed that they have active involvement in enabling a digital workplace within the organization.

Read more: 10 Tips for First-time Remote Managers to Handle Their Teams Effectively

On the business front, the enterprise world is witnessing a massive shift to digital that was unprecedented and driven mainly by the need from customers who are now more digital-savvy and demand more digital-friendly services for all their needs. The COVID-19 pandemic was an accelerator to this phenomenon as now people rely on digital for pretty much all needs ranging from shopping to education, banking, and entertainment. Nevertheless, the pace and scale of growth in the digital ecosystem have also put enterprises in a tough spot requiring them to accelerate their operations into the digital realm. In other words, they need to adopt digital workplace solutions to remain competitive.

From customer interactions to internal celebrations, nearly all events have now transitioned into a virtual model. These add up the digital complexity levels in the organization that already had a long list of digital workplace solutions to help them out even before the pandemic made its impact felt. Simply adding newer tech into the digital enterprise ecosystem can negatively impact workforce productivity. A business needs to execute an effective digital workplace strategy that can help employees leverage the right software tools and work more efficiently in their daily routine.

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

Here are some tips for building a digital workplace strategy to ensure that digital workplace complexity does not reach extreme levels and negatively impact workforce productivity:

1. Create awareness

The first step in ensuring that your employees have a firm grip on the digital ecosystem within your organization is to build awareness about the ecosystem. Employees need to be trained and made aware of the need for each tool or the digital workplace solutions that the company invests in and how they can perform their roles better with their aid. Awareness building should be a continuous activity wherein different teams can be segregated based on the applications they need access to and regular sessions on new features, updated functionality, and usage instructions to be followed during different phases. The process should start from the employee on-boarding stage itself, and companies need to keep a tab of their activities that promote awareness.

Download White Paper: How A Digital Workplace Streamlines Business Performance

2. Focus on employees instead of tech focus

While enterprises love to boast about having the latest tech on board in their digital landscape, the practical use of the solution should empower employees to do better in their jobs. Just because a new platform has the latest tech stack, it does not really need to be in your organization. Evaluate software based on the usability it has for your employees, the scope it covers for your unique digital workplace needs, and the business purposes or challenges it can address.

3. Define business goals and metrics for digital workplace solutions

A critical issue that leads to digital workplace complexity is the lack of understanding of the enterprise’s goals. Most organizations do not know why they need to adopt a digital solution or integrate it into their present ecosystem. They also fail to understand how the new digital workplace solution can help them measure progress with the right metrics to evaluate their competence. By defining quantifiable goals for the business and creating relevant metrics to measure progress, the organization focuses on utilizing digital solutions for their intended purpose or outcomes. For example, one key goal for bringing in a digital collaboration tool is to minimize the number of physical meetings or utilization of meeting rooms. For this goal, the metric evaluated could be the number of meetings that have been done online instead of utilizing a meeting room.

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

4. Establish communication guidelines

When communication between folks in different hierarchical and organizational structures happens, there will be situations where these could be confusing and ultimately create trouble for the organization. One such challenge for employees is that they need to pay attention to multiple channels when communication happens virtually and through different media like email, intranet, organizational VOIP. 

You can overcome this challenge by including proper guidelines in your digital workplace strategy. Set the policies on which medium to use for a relevant topic or context of communication. The policy should also include which information is to be communicated through which medium. For instance, an organization-wide policy update information should be circulated throughout the company and hence would be wise to publish it via email or the company-wide intranet.

5. Fostering decentralization

In the traditional enterprise ecosystem, decisions were mainly made at the C-Suite or leadership level with very little autonomy for staff in lower hierarchies. But today, the scenario is different as successful organizations focus on empowering staff at all levels to reduce dependencies and make their own decisions for tasks that impact their operations. When digital workforce solutions are incorporated to help employees, this principle of decentralized decision-making needs to be considered. By enabling employees to have a fairer share of participation in an enterprise’s decision-making, they can innovate faster and scale up efficiency without delays. Your digital workplace strategy should focus on incorporating tech that empowers employees to take ownership rather than be plain users.

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

From enabling better collaboration to fostering an engaging environment for employees, a digital workplace is a crucial pillar for a sustainable future in the business world. Reports show that over 77% of organizations have prioritized digital workplace as one of their key goals for growth. As the workplace embraces a host of digital solutions, businesses need to ensure that their productivity and efficiency aren’t affected due to overly complex digital environments. Creating the perfect digital workplace strategy combined with a world-class digital workplace orchestration platform like InfinCE can bring out the best in your people. Chat with an expert to learn more about 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.

Why should small businesses invest in a cloud business phone system

In the past, a business phone system was not a small business priority. But did you know that nearly 65% of consumers prefer to interact with a business over a phone call rather than utilizing a web contact form? As companies rush to find more ways to engage their loyal customers, keeping their contact options flexible and open to customer demands is a critical area that they cannot ignore. In this context, having a business phone number is essential as customers may want to get in touch with you directly for various reasons. Traditional telephonic communication systems have transitioned into their digital avatars. Today VOIP based telecommunication is the backbone of every small business phone system out there.

The latest and most trending internet-enabled telephonic communication infrastructure for today’s digital-savvy small businesses is a cloud business phone system. The trend is attributed to the ROI that cloud business phone systems can provide to small businesses. Cloud business phone systems help companies deliver a seamless experience for customers to get in touch with them. 

Let us explore the top 7 benefits that a small business can enjoy if they switch over to a cloud business phone system:

1. Global access

A telephone system managed in a cloud environment enables businesses to globalize their communication infrastructure. It allows the staff to utilize the business phone for communication from anywhere in the world in just a few clicks. All it takes is a few configuration steps to be done on your cloud phone system. In a matter of minutes, your business phone system will be ready for use in any country you may shift your operating base to or open up new offices. All data related to your contacts, workflow mappings of different departments, or executives can be seamlessly moved to your new work location without any effort.

Read more: 5 Ways an Integrated Cloud Platform is Beneficial for Your Small Business

2. Cost-efficient

As we all know, cloud business phone systems rely on VOIP technology to make phone calls from the internet. Voice is transferred as data packets and not as analog signals found in traditional line-based telephonic infrastructure. Voice services over the internet are relatively inexpensive irrespective of the geographies connected through the line for customer interactions. Availing a cloud business phone system also allows small businesses to avoid hefty license fees as they can opt for economic subscription plans that best suit their needs.

3. Simplified infrastructure

A cloud business phone system doesn’t require enterprises to have physical telecommunication infrastructure components like a PBX box, telephones, and operational lines. Also, they do not require office premises to be modified to lay cables and wires to support a large user base of executives accessing different official phone numbers. The cloud system offers all employees a simple one-click call from their smartphones, and the cloud service provider handles all call routing, network optimization, and traffic management.

Read more: 8 Ways Cloud Automation Significantly Improves Your Legacy IT Operations

4. Flexibility of scale

Small businesses always need technology that can flexibly align with their growth prospects. Cloud telephone systems allow enterprises to seamlessly scale up the number of people who can access the business phone system with just a few clicks and no physical infrastructure additions. They can increase the number of subscribers in their monthly or yearly billing contract signed with a service provider. The same applies if they want to scale down operations as well.

5. Device independence

With a cloud-based business phone system, employees can make calls from any of their devices such as smartphones or laptops or any other work gear and have the recipient receive the call from the official business correspondence number. All call features such as recording, analytics, reporting, etc., can be done on the cloud. Companies can even route incoming calls to an employee’s number to another employee easily in the event of leave or absence.

6. Limitless geographical extension

One of the highlights of using a cloud-based VOIP business phone system is that it gives businesses the freedom to establish a local presence in a country with a business phone system tagged to a local number. They can do it remotely from anywhere globally, thereby empowering businesses to expand their reach to international customers seamlessly.

7. Recovery and security

With a cloud-based business phone system, your business’s entire telephone system has a virtual infrastructure hosted and secured in a cloud environment. In the wake of a natural calamity or a sudden migration of office space to a new city or locality, your business phone system can be up and running from the new area in a matter of seconds.

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

As the world is increasingly transitioning to digital-first interactions, keeping your telecommunication system agile and flexible is vital for sustainable business growth. This is where investing in a cloud business phone system can make a tangible return on your investment. Get in touch with us to see how InfinCE can help create the perfect digital backbone for your small business by bringing all your enterprise applications, telecommunication, and collaboration capabilities under one roof on a SaaS model. 

How to Improve Your Intranet for Better Employee Experience

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

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

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

1. Focus on your usability

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

2. Keep it aligned with your business objectives

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

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

3. Bring mobile devices into play

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

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

4. Promote two-way communication

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

5. Build a strong company culture

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

6. Think beyond decentralized communication

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

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

7. Manage the content wisely

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

8. Improve the search capabilities

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

9. Publish personalized and targeted content

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

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

10. Add a workforce collaboration platform

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

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

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

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

Guide to building a digital-first small business in 2021

2020 was a year of realizations for businesses around the world. When health scares like the COVID-19 pandemic hits without warning, life’s normalcy gets disrupted beyond imagination. Companies need to adapt to new ways of working in a matter of days. For smaller businesses with little or no contingency plans in place, the pandemic was an eye-opener. Studies earlier have shown that nearly 80% of small businesses in the US did not take full advantage of the capabilities of digital and productivity tools available in the market for their use. 

Download White Paper: How a Digital Workplace Streamlines Business Performance 

In today’s digital economy, consumer behavior is directly influenced by the rapid proliferation of digital services and connected devices. There is no escaping the digital transformation realm for small businesses as the pandemic proved that digital supremacy is an inevitable need for survival and not an operational luxury for them. On this note, let us examine the top 4 crucial technology trends that a small business cannot afford to ignore in 2021.

Read more: Top 10 Ways to Set up an Effective Business Strategy in 2021 

1. Autonomous Customer Service

Once relied heavily on by customers, traditional services are moving into self-service portals wherein customers can configure and transact independently. There is a rising demand for instant and autonomous customer service. Nearly 62% of US consumers prefer talking to a chatbot while interacting with a business. AI-enabled chatbots offer instant and more data-driven support decisions to consumers when they interact. In a traditional setting, customers are forced to wait long to connect with a human support associate and explain their whole problem. Often, customers will be diverted to another department and the story of waiting and explaining repeats. With autonomous chatbot and voice assistants, most queries receive replies instantly. Also, precise data is collected and transferred to a desk executive when connecting with a human support agent.

2. Integrating Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

It is hard to find businesses without a dedicated website today. Considering that a good majority of your potential customers find out about you from the internet, building a website is necessary for any business. But today, nearly 50.8% of global internet traffic comes through mobile phones. People browsing your website on their mobile phones expect information pages to load as quickly as possible. For this, small businesses must deploy AMP principles in their web development to ensure that every web page offers a seamless loading and viewing experience in mobile browsers. Any delays in page loads can create unsatisfactory experiences for visitors, and your bounce rates will go up if AMP is not incorporated in your web experiences.

3. Marketing Personalization

Do you know that 80% of consumers are likely to do business with a brand that offers them personalized experiences? Personalization begins from the first step that businesses take to reach out to their customers, which is marketing. Rather than shooting out mass email campaigns, sticking flyers and billboards across the city, small businesses can utilize the vast plethora of modern marketing platforms to roll out customized and highly personal campaigns to attract the right audience to their stores or websites. Customers want only the right content to be delivered to their mailboxes to make more informed decisions. Small businesses need to use AI-driven personalized marketing platforms that can quickly identify interest patterns and deploy relevant messaging and recommendations to the correct customer to convince them of a purchasing decision quickly.

Read more: Key Predictions on How Workplace Technology and Culture Will Evolve in 2020 & Beyond 

4. Seamless Omni-channel experience

Irrespective of the digital channel that consumers use to reach out, small businesses must deliver an omnichannel experience across their digital landscape. From seamless transactions to better and intelligent recommendations and improved agility in back-office administration, small businesses need to have powerful digital platforms deployed across their operations’ length and breadth. Companies cannot leave their customers lurking in the dark, waiting for information as the competition might take advantage and lure them away with better experiences.

With the rising demand for faster and more digital-friendly experiences by consumers, small businesses should streamline their business process automation and management exercise. They need to efficiently coordinate workflows in different departments, such as finance, supply chain, logistics, HR, marketing, and sales. Additionally, they need to ensure a responsive digital infrastructure for their front-facing internet assets as well. 

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

Using intelligent business management platforms like InfinCE is necessary for small businesses to compete in the new digital era. From building a robust digital backend for your business to setting up a roadmap for continuous success on the digital front, InfinCE can reshape your digital ambitions in the most cost-effective way possible. Get in touch with us to know more about how your small business can conquer 2021 with InfinCE Digital Workplace.

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Benefits of Implementing IT Assets and Inventory Management Software

During 2020-2024, the IT Management software is predicted to grow at a value of over USD 353 Million, with a 7% CAGR year over year. These estimates were from the pre-COVID era, which means that the growth rates could be accelerated now. In the new normal, workforce worldwide is undergoing a seamless transition from desk-based jobs in the office to work from anywhere culture. Fueled by the pandemic’s necessity, remote working from home became a mainstay for professionals in almost every country that bore the pandemic’s brunt. With this culture becoming mainstream, there is an essential requirement for two major components for succeeding:

1. Flexible Enterprise IT Policies

2. Flexible IT Asset Management Software

Flexible enterprise IT policies are needed to ensure that employees are readily connected to the organization’s technology ecosystem from their home networks without facing any issues.

Flexible IT asset management software is needed to accommodate and manage the entire spectrum of IT assets that are now distributed between employees’ offices and homes.

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

Once a strategic enterprise IT policy is in place, the next important thing a business needs for enabling a seamless remote working culture is efficient IT management software. Such a platform would allow easy control and management of an organization’s IT assets. Companies often rely on outdated IT inventory management software or manual spreadsheet-based mechanisms to organize their crucial assets. These will increase overhead and lead to utter chaos when the business faces disruptions on scales as massive as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Benefits of having a Modern IT Inventory Management Software

With more companies expected to have a hybrid model of work in the future, employees may get the privilege to decide whether they want to work from the office or home. In such a mode of operation, having powerful IT management software can empower organizations to achieve agility in their operations. Let us examine the top 4 benefits that can be realized when an organization deploys a modern IT inventory management software:

Read more: Top 5 Productivity Tools Every Small Business Needs Today  

1. Manage IT Hardware

An organization’s IT hardware includes components ranging from small network hardware to servers, data centers, and intelligent sensors that are used to aid work. It is vital to enable secure and seamless access to each of these assets when authorized employees need them. Also, there is a need to manage every hardware’s lifecycle from procurement to installation, deployment, maintenance, and retirement at correct intervals of time to maintain a sustainable IT environment for your staff.

2. Manage Devices

With digital being of paramount importance, every business will require employees to have some form of a computing device to be with them for official purposes. In most cases, it will be a desktop PC or laptop, or it could be smartphones with dedicated company apps for work management. Additionally, there will be a host of supporting devices such as printers, webcams, projection devices, etc. It is essential to keep a record of who has access to what to ensure that costly IT assets are not lost or misplaced.

3. Manage Software Licenses

Irrespective of the business sector that a company operates, there will be a range of software products that their employees would use to work better. It could be productivity apps, HR software, digital storage, enterprise work support apps, etc. The IT team will have a hard time administering licenses to employees who need access to different software at different times to progress in their work schedules. With robust IT Assets management software, they get the required dashboards to view, control, and administer licenses to cloud-based or on-premise software used within the workplace.

4. Manage Data

In the digital economy, data is the King, and this notion works in the operational side of businesses. When organizations deploy more software or platforms to empower their employees to work better and serve clients faster, these applications will generate a vast gamut of data daily. This data fuels in-depth analytics and yields insights on improving productivity, better allocation of IT and human resources, optimizing costs, etc. A modern IT management software can handle enterprise data as an IT asset and help companies build internal data workflows and processes to ensure that the data is put to fair use and ROI is derived faster.

Read more: How IT Teams Can Prepare to Support Remote Workforce During COVID-19  

A modern IT management software can help businesses realize untapped potential and value from their IT infrastructure. As we have broadly covered in this blog, enterprises of all sizes have an opportunity to make their entire business’s digital backend more flexible to support employees when they want to work from anywhere. This will significantly improve the organization’s preparedness for future disruptions similar to the COVID-19 pandemic. If your organization is on the lookout for a comprehensive enterprise management software to manage your digital landscape, get in touch with us to see why InfinCE can be the ideal solution.

“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.

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.