How to Evaluate and Choose the Right Intranet Software for Your Business

A business intranet is a portal that gives your employees all the relevant data and tools to perform their jobs. Your intranet software can go a long way in keeping your employees engaged, improving their experience, boosting their productivity, and achieving better business volume. Your intranet solution helps keep your teams updated with the latest company information and provide them a platform to share their ideas for the company’s collective good.

Why Do You Need a Business Intranet Solution?

There are several reasons why you should choose a business intranet system. From improved workflows to seamless communications, investing in an all-in-one team collaboration solution can be a great way to ensure optimum organizational growth. Here are a few reasons why you need to implement an intranet solution.

Enhanced Internal Communication

For a long time, organizations have been using intranet portals for improving internal communications. With advanced features like video conferencing and instant messaging, modern team collaboration software can facilitate superior one-on-one and group communications. You can integrate video, audio, emails, social connections, and more to your intranet solution to get your teams to communicate and collaborate in a much better way.

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

Greater Document Control

With a company intranet solution, you can also connect different people working on the same documents and avoid any confusion that could arise in the process. It also helps to ensure that your remote staff can access and update the records on their end to complete the assigned tasks on time. Advanced all-in-one business collaboration software comes with cloud storage features as well to make things further simpler.

Simplified Information Sharing

Business intranets can make information sharing more comfortable, ensuring that your teams are aligned with the organizational goals always and do their part to achieve those objectives. Easy access to company data and tools, alongside improved communications and better document control, also makes it simpler to provide new employees training through different channels and content management systems.

Evaluating and Choosing the Best Intranet Software

Implementing an intranet solution in your company can have manifold benefits, but it would not serve the purpose if your employees do not make the most of it. Therefore, you need to make the right choice when selecting an intranet platform so that it can make your digital workplace effective and successful. 

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

Here are five tips that will help you make an informed decision while buying an intranet solution.

1. Understand Your Requirements 

It would be best if you were clear about what you are seeking to achieve with the intranet solution and how the change will help to facilitate your plans. This way, you can define your goals with the move and make sure that everyone on your team can get on board without hesitation. Likewise, it would help if you also educated your team members about the intranet platform’s potential.

2. Evaluate Intranet Capabilities

While improved communication and seamless collaboration should be your priorities when choosing an intranet solution, you should also assess the other features you can use after its implementation. This way, you can prioritize the elements that would help to make your business collaboration better and lead to improved employee and customer experience, and eventually, profitable business growth.

3. Assess Different Intranet Solutions

Once you are clear about your needs and the features you want to make your existing business processes better, look for different intranet solutions that can effectively fulfill your demands. Compare the features included in the pricing plans, understand the pros and cons of each solution, and see how they suit your organizational needs as well as budgetary requirements. 

4. Align it With Your Business Strategy

There should be a connection between your business strategy and the digital workplace. The intranet solution and plan you choose should strengthen your business case and empower your employees to make their jobs easier. So you also need to assess how your intranet platform aligns with your key business metrics like short-term and long-term targets, flexible working requirements, product developments, and more.

5. Check Resource Requirements

The cost will always come into play whenever you look to upgrade your business infrastructure, and buying an intranet solution is no exception. Yet you should also check if you have all the adequate resources and technology to support your intranet platform. That is why you need to figure out a realistic estimate to implement the intranet system and ensure that it will cover your long-term goals with the solution.

Wrapping Up

A business intranet solution will provide your workforce with all the tools and information they need to boost communication, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing capabilities. It will, in turn, make your digital workplace more efficient and lead to improved business processes. An intranet software enables you to mitigate the common risks associated with digital transformation and deliver a far better employee and customer experience.

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

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

The Role of Business Communication Tools in the Growth of a Business

Effective communication is the backbone of every successful business. This is even more applicable for modern businesses because of the massive shifts in the workplace culture of late. Technology advancements and the impact of COVID-19 have made robust business communication tools more than a necessity in every industry today. Fortunately, there are many impressive business communication apps, which make it easier for leaders and managers to collaborate with their teams, connect the missing dots, and drive improved performance and productivity.

Why Business Communication Tools are Inevitable in Today’s Workplace

It has become a norm for employees to use business communication tools for efficient collaboration. A recent Facebook Messaging Survey found that more than 63% of people across generations prefer messaging apps for communication instead of emails or calls. The impact can be seen in the business world as well with around 60% of businesses of all sizes using collaborative chat apps today. That is because business communication apps perfectly suit the evolving workplace culture while opening up ways to ensure improved employee productivity.

How Business Communication Apps Contribute to Business Growth

Business communication tools offer a flexible platform to furnish the varying demands of interaction within the company. Below are some of the fundamental advantages of using business communication tools that help in business growth.

1. Unmatched Adaptability

The nature of the modern workplace is changing rapidly and businesses across industries are promoting remote work. With a reliable communication app, leaders can collaborate with remote workers as needed, while allowing them to work as per their schedules. As more than 70% of millennial employees prefer working in a flexible environment, it is high time for businesses to adapt to the change and ensure proper communication channels to boost productivity.

Read more: 5 Tips To Effectively Manage Remote Teams During Challenging Times 

2. Easy Data Sharing

Modern communication tools come with simple features to share all the data and information needed for any task. Team leaders and employees can share files, upload links, or even directly stream content to make sure that everyone is on the same page. Business communication apps like InfinCE allow you to save files and data on the integrated cloud system. This makes collaborating on a project further easier, as anyone can access the required files later.

3. Effortless Task Management

Leaders can have a very difficult time managing a project if the team communicated through multiple channels. A business communication tool is much more than an everyday messaging app. It brings everything in one place so that managers and leaders can have a quick overview of the processes and stay updated with the progress of the project. It also makes planning tasks, assigning duties, setting deadlines, etc., simpler while improving accountability amongst the team members.

4. Real-Time Communication

Team collaboration apps keep employees posted on what is going on and make it easier to focus on their job roles. Messages can be sent to individual employees or in a group to make sure that everyone stays on track and performs their duties on time. Business messaging apps like InfinCE come with video conferencing capabilities to make meetings more interactive and engaging.

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

5. Less Unproductive Meetings

Physical team meetings can waste a lot of productive time. As per the Harvard Business Review, around 65% of employees believe that “meetings keep them from completing their own work, while 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient.” This serious problem needs to be fixed as quickly as possible to ensure better employee efficiency. As team collaboration apps allow you to access relevant information anytime and from anywhere, they help avoid the need for any physical meetings.

6. Improved Employee Engagement

Business communication apps are much different from mundane emails. They can act as a platform to share inspiring stories, exciting news, motivational messages, and have some fun too. Team messaging apps are not necessarily limited to sharing business-related data; many of them also come with emojis and stickers to add a personal touch to the messages and make it a bit lighthearted.

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

7. Integrated Modern Technologies

An enterprise collaboration app can also be customized to accommodate various modern technologies, such as Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation, Natural Language Processing, Predictive Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence. These technologies can help streamline business communication by sorting information, analyzing data, generating reports, creating policies, and much more. This will, in turn, help to ease the stress of performing routine tasks from the employees and they can focus on other productive duties.

8. Performance Tracking

A business communication app can also allow leaders to track the performance of their teams effectively. Team collaboration tools allow managers to create jobs and determine goals before handing over those to the team members. They can then track the progress toward the specific goals and see how each employee is collaborating to achieve them. This brings more transparency to the team, boosts accountability among the employees, and motivates them to perform better.

Read more: 11 Online Collaboration Tools That Facilitate Remote Work In 2020

9. Mobile Apps

Everyone prefers to use mobile apps these days to read emails, track work, share information, and more. Forrester reports that around “66% of employees now use two or more devices every day.” With an integrated mobile app for business communication, employees will not have to manage multiple channels to communicate with each other. Instead, it will make it easier to access all the data and information across devices.

10. Improved Productivity

The most obvious benefit of workplace apps is that it improves employee productivity. As business communication tools make it easier to set goals, assign jobs, track progress, generate reports, and interact with the team members in real-time, they help boost employee morale and efficiency. Having a single channel for all business communication also avoids the need for multitasking, which further helps to improve time management.

There are countless ways for team members to interact with each other, but business communication apps give a more dedicated platform for building a productive work environment. While it cannot be predicted how the future will shape workplace culture, it can be said that advanced and feature-rich business communication tools will certainly be integral in the coming days.InfinCE brings you a pool of effective collaboration software to help you connect with your teams faster and work together better, for greater business achievements. Get in touch with us to learn more.

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. 

Why is a custom web domain important for your business branding needs?

Having a website is considered a standard pre-requisite for today’s businesses as it is likely the first place where people will enquire about the business and its offerings. While creating and hosting a website is no big deal today with the tons of ready to deploy template website builder services available, there is one element that you must focus from a branding perspective for an enterprise website. It is none other than a custom domain name. For example, if your business name is “John’s Giant Ice Cream”, then a website with URL as www.johnsgianticecream.com will be more appealing from a branding perspective than having one such as www.johnsgianticecream.wordpress or www.johnsgianticecream.blogger.com. The same logic applies to your enterprise email id as well. If you have an official email account that reflects your business name as the email domain rather than Gmail or Hotmail, it is better from a branding perspective.

Let us examine 5 benefits of branding that your business will experience if you have a custom website domain and email:

1. Brand Recognition

Having a co-branded domain such as wordpress.com/mybusiness would be harder to remember for customers than one such as www.mybusiness.com. This would make it easier for customers to pass information about your business to their friends verbally or via telephone calls. The element of simplicity in having a custom website and email URL will ensure that your customers, both existing and prospective, can reach out to you at the earliest, in case there is a need for them to avail of your services or buy your products.

2. Risk-Free Personalized Identity

From a business point of view, having a unique website and email domain would ensure that they have a unique existence. When you have a 3^rd party sponsored co-domain as your business’s web address, then there are chances that you may have to change them in the future depending on policies made by the service provider. The service provider could cease to exist due to other issues and your domain goes down with them thereby impacting the large presence you would have built over the years with that website. Considering the risks involved in such a scenario, a custom domain for your website and email makes sense for a secure and seamless future for your business with a personalized identity.

3. Search Engine Friendly

Building a simple website for your business’s online reach is not a very tough thing to do. But making it visible in search engine results with a high ranking takes a lot of effort. By having a custom website URL, it helps your website to rank better in search engine ranking algorithms that focus on uniqueness more than generic names and 3^rd party hosting service providers who append their names to your domain for free hosting. As such a unique URL is more likely to be shared on social media, they get better ranking credits on that front as well.

Read more: 5 Ways Virtual Private Server Make a Difference to Your Business’s Digital Future

4. Subdomain Flexibility

Very often you might face the need to create subdomains within your website to have separate showcase pages for a particular service or marquee product. When you do not have a custom domain for your business, the concept of subdomains becomes even more complex. In most 3^rd party hosted domain services, you do not even get that option to include further subdomain on your website. This further reduces your organic SEO efforts and also makes it harder for customers to trust your unique offerings and learn more information about them from the subpage.

Read more: 5 Tips to Select the Ideal Web Hosting Partner

5. Email Credibility

One of the biggest advantages of having a custom business domain for your web landscape is the ability to have a unique email domain. When contacting customers or prospects, having a genuine business name domain as the extension of your email address will add more credibility. From a receiver’s point of view, they will feel more genuineness in your business for the effort you took in creating a unique domain name for your website and email communication address rather than opting for a free service like Gmail or Hotmail. A professional email address is also a unique credential for your business to avail of multiple digital services available online today that helps in boosting your internet-based business services. Examples include payment gateways, information forms, cloud storage options, and much more.

Read more: How to choose an email service provider for your small business?

Set up your professional custom domain and private email with InfinCE

If you are a business owner wanting to have a unique identity on the internet with a website and email, then you should definitely explore the option of a custom domain rather than opting for free hosting service providers. 

The several benefits in branding and customer experience you stand to enjoy as outlined above will be instrumental in growing your business in the coming years as more customers rely on internet-powered digital channels for their daily needs. 

Having a powerful digital ecosystem with credible domain and secure hosting infrastructure is the need of the hour especially for small and medium businesses. This is where InfinCE can be the ideal companion for your success. Get in touch with us to see how you can build and deploy a comprehensive web-based business online with custom URL and professional email service with InfinCE in a matter of days.

How can businesses gain a competitive advantage with Virtual Private Servers?

As more businesses take the digital route to beating competition, there is an increasing demand for Virtual Private Server (VPS) technology. It is becoming the number one hosting choice for businesses that experience very dynamic digital operations that peak and subside in a matter of hours or days.

For those who are new to the concept, a VPS is a virtual server dedicated to your business, but hosted on the cloud and managed by an underlying hypervisor that facilitates a portion of a physical server and associated computing resources to be allocated exclusively for a tenant. A VPS may be hosted and managed in a physical machine that also hosts other VPS and the entire ecosystem is made available on cloud by a cloud service provider or a hosting service provider.

Read more: 3 Strong Reasons for Your Business to Embrace Cloud-based IT Services

This VPS can be used by businesses to host a variety of digital platforms. So why has this technology of VPS having so many takers today? Here are 5 benefits of VPS that make it a formidable choice for businesses of all kinds:

1. Cost-Effective

Investing in a dedicated (private) server infrastructure would take costs through the roof. For small and medium businesses, this is not a luxury they can focus on since IT budgets would have to be optimized. With virtual private servers, SMBs get access to all the benefits of a private server on an on-demand pricing model where they only pay for the resources utilized. This helps them keep costs down and save on capital and salary expenses that would have to be borne had they decided to build a dedicated server infrastructure on their own and hire staff to maintain it.

2. Instant Scalability

Just as with cost, a Virtual Private Server based service offers businesses the desired flexibility in scaling their server performance and resources on demand. For example, a peak shopping season would require an e-commerce business to increase their computing and storage bandwidth on their servers to accommodate large spikes in traffic. The traffic may subside within a few weeks or months and then there would only be a normal flow of traffic to their website. Hence, it is not advisable to buy expensive server power to meet the demand for just a short period of time. With VPS, you can keep aside the tension of having to scale your server infrastructure due to demand without worrying about yearly costs. 

VPS service providers offer intuitive on-demand scalable packages for servers that allow you to subscribe for additional resources like bandwidth, storage, and computing power for limited periods to accommodate spikes in demand.

3. Reliability and Performance

The other option that has been popular with businesses for hosting their digital infrastructure was shared hosting. But this came with heavy reliability and performance issues. When the same infrastructure is shared by multiple businesses, spikes in traffic to other businesses can impact the availability of server resources to your business. 

With VPS, this problem is solved easily as your dedicated virtual space and computing space in the physical machine is abstracted and made available to you exclusively and is independent of the workload other businesses may exert on the same hardware. Hence businesses relying on VPS to run their critical digital infrastructure can be assured of reliability, high performance, and continuous availability all through the year.

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

4. Customizable Configuration and Control

A shared hosting service does not offer businesses the flexibility to choose operational software on their server infrastructure. The configurations, operations control, software stack, etc. are all decided by the hosting service provider as they need to leverage the same machine for multiple businesses without any abstraction. This limits the freedom of hosting or operational technology for businesses in their digital platforms. 

With VPS, businesses are given full freedom to choose from a variety of operational software, hosting environments, and other added software installation support capability to build an environment best fit for their digital systems.

5. Managed Services

We have mentioned earlier that VPS does not require you to hire dedicated technical specialists to handle your IT infrastructure. Service providers like InfinCE offer a managed service wherein their specialists and consultants will continuously monitor the machinery and computing resources and network traffic to enable a seamless experience for your digital ecosystem. 

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

You can continue to focus on improving your business via digital rather than worrying about keeping the backbone of your digital platforms stable and available. You are also relieved from having to invest continuously in upgrading infrastructure and software required to manage a private server for your digital platforms. The service provider will continuously monitor emerging market trends, evaluate their feasibility and ROI and make investments to ensure that your business gets access to the most competent server resources available in the market at no extra capital cost.

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

As the world is continuously moving into a digital-first approach in every sector, SMBs need to have a firm grip on the digital ecosystem to keep their customers happy and satisfied. Having a fully integrated virtual digital backbone for your business with capabilities such as VPS is essential to ensure sustained growth. This is where InfinCE can be a game-changer. Get in touch with us to explore how your business can excel in the digital era with an all-in-one digital collaboration platform for all your needs.

How InfinCE Transforms the Way Your Workforce Operates Today

As vaccine trials show promising results, the world is in high hopes of recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic slowly. But the scale at which vaccination needs to happen, conquering challenges in production, logistics, demographic, political, and societal scenarios, is huge and hence it may take time for the total eradication of the virus. This means, the new norm of working for most companies wherein a good majority of their employees work from home, is likely to continue for the long term. However, 2020 witnessed the massive change of modern workplace software being increasingly brought to the traditional workforce wherein it only took a matter of days for millions of employees to work at the same pace from their home as they would from their office.

One of the most celebrated enterprise collaboration and digital platform for small and medium businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic was InfinCE. Some of the most demanding businesses managed to successfully keep their staff engaged and productive through seamless collaboration courtesy of InfinCE. 

Read More: Top 10 Alternatives to Microsoft Teams that Aid Remote Work in 2020

Today, let us take a look at the 5 key features of InfinCE that make it an undisputed leader in enabling better employee collaboration and transforming the way employees work remotely.

1. Easy Information Access

When employees work remotely, the biggest hurdle they face is getting information about their job activities at the earliest. With InfinCE’s cloud-based platform, companies can create a centralized virtual repository of all company information that employees can access based on their job roles. InfinCE allows privileged access control options to ensure that confidential or sensitive files and data are made available only to the right stakeholders and with proper logging of access to ensure transparency. 

The best part is that employees can access this information on the go right from the comfort of their smartphones thereby providing more flexibility. This allows them to plan better responses for customer-facing job objectives.

2. Improved Collaboration

With InfinCE, enterprises can create virtual workspace platforms wherein teams working on a project can converge and collaborate digitally. Be it brainstorming for solutions and ideas, daily standup meetings, project progress meetings, the platform allows all team members to digitally meet in one place.  You can securely share files, work together on documents, communicate via instant messaging, manage dependencies in work together, and create custom dashboards- both at the individual level or at the team/ department level to visually track and analyze what’s happening in your business. 

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

Collaboration is propelled to the next level as employees can carry out almost all sorts of work activities together just as how they would do so when they were at the office. This is facilitated irrespective of where your employee may be based out, anywhere on the globe.

3. Budget Friendliness

When a pandemic rips through economies worldwide, it is important for companies to preserve operational cash flow to the maximum possible limit. For this to happen, they need to enable a digital-first environment for employees that don’t burn a hole in their pockets. InfinCE has always been built for the cloud-centric enterprise of tomorrow. With a range of subscription pricing plans, the digital enterprise platform offers more value for every single dollar spent as a subscription charge. 

InfinCE offers small and medium businesses the flexibility to save on costs since they only pay for the features and scale they consume from the platform. This helps them significantly boost their operating margins as expenditure comes down drastically. The additional savings can go a long way in helping businesses preserve cash and sustain profitable operations in challenging times.

4. Secure Digital Infrastructure

Today’s businesses deal with a large volume of sensitive customer data that needs to be accessed and shared between multiple employees across different departments. When your entire work environment turns into a remote one due to a global pandemic, the concerns regarding data security heightens to new levels. This is where InfinCE assures peace of mind with its state-of-the-art security credentials. The platform offers you the choice to run your digital enterprise infrastructure on a secure private cloud location which can be monitored and managed effectively by your technology team without worrying about security threats.

From building your website to offering a secure intranet, InfinCE offers all the IT set up needed to run your business under one roof! InfinCE provides you a dedicated and secured cloud-hosted IT infrastructure comprising a private email server, dedicated virtual servers, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), intranet for internal communication, and custom website builder. 

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

5. Long List of Applications

Over the years, InfinCE has grown a large community of applications under its ecosystem that enables businesses to streamline productivity and improve engagement levels of their employees. Additionally, the platform also allows small and medium businesses to experience the digital transformation of their key growth activities like human resource management, marketing, and sales by introducing applications for CRM, marketing automation, HCM, and much more. 

The list of supporting apps for the InfinCE ecosystem has been steadily growing which makes it a complete digital package for today’s businesses. InfinCE helps you build a branded cloud platform with customization options to match your brand identity.

As your business operations are increasingly being disrupted, it is becoming clear that there is a need to rapidly transition your operational model to accommodate a highly digital-friendly workforce that can work from anywhere. InfinCE takes you closer to this goal by creating the most secure and cost-efficient yet feature-rich experience for your business’s digital infrastructure. Get in touch with us to know more.

How can businesses succeed with employees working completely remotely?

One of the major implications of the COVID-19 lockdowns is the shift from an office-based work environment to the remote work mode. Even sectors that had previously taken a cold approach to let their employees work from home have suddenly become flag bearers of the work from anywhere culture. Dynata’s Global Consumer Trends: COVID-19 survey series reveal that the lines between work and home life are getting significantly blurred. The report also says that most people prefer the work from home culture to stay around, at least for some more time. 

In the US alone, nearly half of the working population has transitioned into a completely remote work mode since the outbreak began in early 2020. However, as the pandemic is showing mild signs of receding and vaccine developments are moving into promising trials, the question of whether the remote work culture will prevail for the long term has risen in the corporate boardrooms.

Changing Work Lives in the New Normal

When employees started to work continuously from home, some of the key challenges that concerned senior leadership were productivity, security, and client timeline commitments. However, the trends witnessed across the globe were largely positive in these 3 areas with several organizations reporting that their staff productivity levels were in fact much higher when they worked from home rather than in the office. In Dynata’s survey, 75% of respondents report that their productivity levels are high while at home than they were in office, with considerable travel time saved. 

Read more: How To Build A Highly Productive Remote Workforce

So the question that should really concern the senior leadership is how to succeed in this new normal of working remotely if it is the future of work?

To remain successful while adapting to a long term remote working culture, companies need to make strategic changes in their policies, technology infrastructure, and their cultural approach to ensure that all employees stay united in their objectives while working apart. 

Here are 4 tips that we suggest to accelerate successful operations with a remote workforce:

1. Set up a transparent communication policy

One of the major elements of unifying diverse team members working remotely is through regular communication. Employees need to have a source to continuously engage with their peers, seniors, managers, or even the leadership in the company to address the challenges they face daily as well as gain insights into their work objectives. 

Companies need to break down their legacy hierarchy of communication and create an open environment where even the top leadership executives are available at the touch of a button on an employee’s phone. Leaders need to take their employees into confidence by regularly communicating updates about the company’s growth, business and service performance metrics, initiatives to keep employees motivated, and much more.

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

2. Create a specialized procurement team

The challenges in enabling a remote working environment can be solved to a great extent when setting up an effective procurement team to assess, identify and procure relevant technical, managerial, and operational assets required for specific work contexts. When this team gets things done faster, employees gain quicker access to their work assets irrespective of their location. 

For empowering your procurement team, you need to provide them with the right tools for strategic sourcing, managing contracts with vendors for various assets, intelligent reporting, and purchase management.

3. Create a collaboration platform

Enabling a transparent communication policy is only one side of the coin. Investing in a powerful digital platform to enable this communication is the other side. Employees who work remotely need to collaborate with their peers on different work tasks daily. They also need a place to get insights, reviews, and feedback on their work, company objectives, business, and other relevant aspects related to their career. 

This is where a powerful and collaborative intranet portal like InfinCE makes sense for your business. Remote work collaboration platforms like InfinCE enable better collaboration, reduce friction on dependent tasks, and support unified goal fulfilment for distributed team members. The platform will also serve as a place where employees can feel reminiscent of their office virtually.

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

4. Seamless Project Management

When remote teams are involved in client projects, there should be a smooth mechanism for managers to oversee projects, give instructions and guidelines, set expectations, and track progress. Only then will the organization as a whole be able to meet commitments made to clients and improve trust in the process. 

For distributed teams, there should be a seamless project management capability via a digital platform that can be used to assign, monitor and track progress of tasks at different levels ranging from individual to teams working on modular components of a project to the entire organization or service delivery unit as a whole. When project management is streamlined, it will facilitate transparent client reporting and improved credibility for your brand.

COVID-19 was a catalyst for a change that is well poised to remain a stronghold of tomorrow’s workforce. The future of work may be changed forever as we know it and to remain successful, companies must rethink their strategies of work from a cultural and practical perspective. 

Read more:  5 Tips To Effectively Manage Remote Teams During Challenging Times

It has been proven beyond doubt that with the right culture, adequate digital infrastructure, and transparent communication, you can run your business remotely with unified management. The main asset you need is a digital backbone that will connect various units within your business to enable seamless workforce operations and support sustainable growth. This is where InfinCE can make a difference. Get in touch with us to learn how InfinCE can help you accomplish success in the new normal of “work from anywhere!”

How can businesses pick the right enterprise collaboration platform?

Recently, we wrote about the leading online collaboration tools that facilitate remote work in 2020 and which are the best alternatives to Microsoft Teams your business can consider. We know how important it must be for you to facilitate remote work collaboration among your teams positioned far and wide, at their homes or co-working spaces. That’s why this time we decided to share a few tips on what all you need to consider while choosing the best enterprise collaboration software for your business. 

Half the year down, COVID-19 is still doing its rounds worldwide, pushing the economy to a slow reopening after months of lockdown. While some countries are experiencing drastic spikes in the number of cases, others are witnessing a gradual decline of cases. Irrespective of their geographical positions, a huge section of the global workforce is poised to continue working remotely for a long time to come in the interest of safety.

Read more: 5 Tips To Effectively Manage Remote Teams During Challenging Times

So, here are 5 things you need to keep in mind while choosing an enterprise collaboration platform for your business:

1. Evaluate your needs

All modern-day enterprise collaboration platforms have tons of features and each of these features may sound exciting when you hear or explore them initially. However, not all businesses need all these features to be present in their collaboration software. You need to go back to the drawing board, run a campaign internally within your workforce to identify the challenges they face in collaboration, the tools, and support they need through a collaboration platform, and then have a look at features offered by leading vendors. This will help to keep your digital infrastructure optimized and personalized according to the needs of your workforce. 

Rather than the management implementing a platform that is most appealing to them, the focus here is to garner requirements from the actual workforce who would be using this platform for collaboration and then pick a vendor that offers these features on demand.

2. Scalability

It is likely that every collaboration software you came across in your search will be a cloud-based one. Thus, you assume that they will be scalable. But scalability is not restricted to just storage on the cloud. By scalability, we mean the ability of the platform to grow across all dimensions as more departments and processes in your business go into the platform. It includes support for feature additions, easy development of new features, accommodating multiple processes and new policies over time, and above all, handles more complex computing needs in the future based on your business’s growth. 

A digital collaboration platform is not something that you invest and implement for the short term. It will be a crucial digital platform that will grow with your business and adapt to changing work trends in the future.

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

3. Cost Efficiency

As described in one of the previous points, your business may not need all features as advertised by vendors. By subscribing to more features, you will end up paying more on the subscription fee if the platform offers a “pay for what you use” model of subscription. Some features may be needed only in the future when your business grows and more employees use these features. Hence a platform that allows you to configure your subscription is the most desired option from a cost perspective. Once you identify the features you really need as described earlier, you can pick a vendor that offers you the freedom to pay for only those features on demand.

4. Security

When almost all of your employees work remotely, it is likely that confidential and sensitive customer information will be handled through the enterprise collaboration platform you deploy. Hence there needs to be an adequate security protocol in place within the software that lets you make governing policies on data and information exchange within the digital environment. Permissioned access, transparent work and project management, logged activities, etc. will be required to ensure that there is no compromise in security.

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

5. Usability

When employees are suddenly moved into a new paradigm of working, there will be disruptive impacts on their daily routine. On top of that, if they are allotted a new collaboration platform without adequate onboarding time and awareness, the chaos will multiply many folds. To make a smoother transition into a new enterprise collaboration software, companies must pick a digital platform that has a high focus on usability and provides a comprehensive support and training exercise to help make the transition seamless. 

These tips could be video demonstrations, how to use manuals, a comprehensive FAQ section, dedicated support associates available all time, and much more. Platforms with intuitive interfaces and a shorter learning curve can be given preference for quicker adoption in your workforce.

The remote work culture is here to stay for a long time. We did not mean to say that there will not be a return to the office, but even when work resumes from office, employees would certainly feel much more comfortable to avail of Work from Home options occasionally. 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. 

Read more: How InfinCE Helps You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

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. 

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.