Teamwork is always the underlying element for business success, now more than ever, considering today’s remote working environment. The remote work revolution has caused companies to increasingly let their employees work from home, requiring geographically diverse team members to work in unison to attain corporate goals. 

So, why is remote collaboration important? 

74% of Fortune 500 CEOs expect to reduce their office space, thanks to anywhere working. Remote work calls for seamless collaboration among teams, and the digitalization of business processes endows companies with remote work capabilities. Remote collaboration is essential because it can:

1. Increase productivity, 
2. Optimize workflow processes,
3. Strengthen team relationships,
4. Help manage projects better, and
5. Improve communication.

A robust virtual collaboration environment must be in place for remote work to be productive. Your business needs the support of a smart digital workplace solution integrated with efficient collaboration tools to enable its dispersed team members to seamlessly share data to meet goals faster. 

What are collaboration tools?

Remote collaboration tools are the different kinds of software and services that allow your geographically diverse teams to work together to meet business goals. They eliminate the limitations of geographical locations as impediments to teamwork and equip your team members with the right capabilities to work in conjunction with each other to complete projects. You need a suite of various collaboration tools integrated into your digital workplace platform because they bring diverse benefits to the table.  

Read more: How A Collaboration Software Can Improve Productivity

A Few Benefits of Remote Collaboration  

1) Increases productivity   

Productivity is vital to increasing profits and efficiency. A productive workforce is a key to sustained business growth. Your remote employees have more time saved by eliminating unnecessary commutes, which can be effectively used to complete tasks faster. Likewise, virtual meetings consume less time than face-to-face meetings. In short, remote work helps your employees save a lot of time which they can productively use to complete their work faster and smarter.

2) Eases problem-solving

Collaboration enables diverse skill sets to come together to carry out tasks and address any challenges. Seamless sharing of knowledge can help resolve problems with more efficiency and address the blind spots, if any, with more ease, thus optimizing workflow processes. 

3) Allows freedom and flexibility at work     

One of the biggest boons of remote work is enabling your employees to enjoy more freedom and flexibility at work. The employees have ample time to accommodate their personal and professional lives while clocking the required work hours and completing tasks on time. This serves to ease work pressure and foster trust while leaving your employees more satisfied. 

4) Saves cost for both employers and employees  

Remote work relieves employers of the need to pay huge rentals for their office premises. Even in a hybrid environment, the physical premises of the office need to be retained only on a limited scale, thus saving huge costs which are otherwise incurred in the form of rents payable to huge commercial spaces. Remote work eliminates the costs of transportation, childcare, and work wear for employees, thus adding up to their savings. 

Thus, it is imperative for businesses to foster smart and effective collaboration among their employees to help the latter thrive in an increasingly digital working environment. Remote collaboration requires your teams to leverage technology to nurture communication among their members to work collaboratively to complete projects.    

Here are 5 Tips to Improve Remote Collaboration 

1. Set clear-cut goals and allocate tasks effectively

Your employees must be given a clear idea of the goals set. Removing uncertainty around the goals would help improve remote communication, increase productivity, and track the progress of projects. Set periodic milestones in well-defined terms, the progress of which can be tracked and displayed on custom dashboards to be viewed by the relevant persons.

2. Plan and schedule regular meetings  

Meetings should be set in a recurring pattern such that your employees get to know beforehand about it and plan their home and work life around it. Video calls and meetings, single and group chats can be done in real-time on digital platforms and made more fruitful by the data sharing feature of digital workplace solutions.

3. Set boundaries for communication 

Timelines should be set for communication which the teams should strictly follow to avoid false assumptions and misconceptions that could adversely affect team relationships and dynamics. Respecting the timeline for communication is important because the line between personal and professional lives blurs when working remotely and because diverse teams would be working in different time zones. The importance of the matter to be conveyed merits the type of communication that needs to be used, like email, instant messaging, phone calls, etc.

4. Create a collaborative environment by setting up multiple communication channels 

A torrential flow of data through a single channel of communication can cause the information to get lost and people to disconnect. Your teams need a digital platform that streamlines communication by dedicating separate discussion channels for separate tasks such that the right set of data reaches only the relevant personnel. Smart digital workplace platforms offer a multitude of avenues for effective communication among teams, like email, audio calls, one-on-one, and group video calls, individual and group chats, etc. 

5. Create custom dashboards for smarter data analysis 

Creating a custom dashboard on your digital workplace platform is the smartest way to track the progress of your projects. A smart, personalized dashboard simplifies data analysis and displays the right sets of metrics to the relevant people, thus giving transparency to the progress of tasks. Your employees get to stay on top of company updates and seamlessly share data through standard and custom tiles on custom dashboards designed exclusively to meet your unique business needs. 

Read more: How Can Organizations Profit More from Collaboration Software?

Effective remote collaboration thus improves productivity and builds healthy relationships among your employees while keeping them engaged at work. Businesses must embrace smart digital workplace solutions to make them future-ready and create a smart digital working environment for their remote employees. The challenges of cloud technologies are ever-evolving, and so are your business needs. A smart digital workplace solution like InfinCE would be your best buddy to promote smarter collaboration among your dispersed teams because:  

1. Its feature-packed collaboration apps affect smarter and streamlined communication among your teams. 
2. The employee directory on the platform lists all details of your internal and external contacts, allowing you to initiate a call, chat, or email directly from the directory.
3.  You can choose the right collaboration application from our extensive collaboration suite to help your employees connect better with remote team members and work together to meet goals.  
4. Individual and group chats can be made more meaningful through seamless and secure sharing of files.
5. Build trusted relationships through the multiple communication apps integrated with the platform.
6. Leverage centralized data using custom tiles on multiple dashboards.

InfinCE is the one-stop digital workplace solution that can make your business future-ready with infinite scaling-up capabilities to meet the ever-evolving challenges of the digital ecosystem. Get in touch with our experts to know more. 

Employee engagement is critical for businesses to retain their talent and improve their employee experiences. Engaged employees tend to believe that their employers have their well-being in mind which motivates them to put in their best efforts towards the realization of corporate goals. Disengaged employees are more likely to lose commitment towards the company or start distrusting employers. Such employees fail to see the vision and the objectives of the organization they work for. 

In today’s digital world, employees prefer to be highly involved in what they do and be active contributors to their company’s success. Aligning personal goals with corporate goals would inculcate a sense of belongingness in the minds of the employees which is very important for boosting loyalty, a fact substantiated by Microsoft’s employee survey 2021. The report says 90% of the Microsoft employees surveyed globally have responded that they feel included in their work. 

It has long been established that good employee experiences beget good customer experiences, a fact which was proved time and again during the pandemic. 

Forrester’s study report “Predictions 2022: The Future of Work,” says that 48% of large companies in the US have dedicated programs to improve employee experiences, a number which is expected to rise to 65% in the year to curtail their attrition levels. 

Read more: How An Integrated Digital Workplace Solution Helps Mitigate Remote Work Hurdles

Employee Engagement vs. Employee Experience

“Gallop defines employee engagement as the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.” Employee experience, on the other hand, refers to an employee’s entire journey with respect to his association with the company and is greatly influenced by his engagement at work. 

Why Is Employee Engagement Important?

Employee engagement is vital to companies to help assess employee perspectives on the existing workplace culture which could serve as terms of reference for making future policy changes. Employee engagement catalyzes team engagement, which in turn promotes business growth. 

Employee engagement demands your attention more in today’s business scenario for 3 reasons:

• Companies operate from diverse geographies
• Work is becoming increasingly remote
• There is an overload of information on business systems.  

As work switched from on-site to remote and workplaces transitioned from physical to virtual during the pandemic, with the added bonus of flexibility thrown into the mix, employees increasingly quit jobs that didn’t meet their needs.  “Gartner’s 9 Future of Work Trends Post Covid -19” says 16% of employers surveyed are using technologies to monitor employee activities including employee engagement and their well being to have a better understanding of employee experiences. 

The report advocates responsible use of employee information and analytics to improve employee engagement and enrich employee experiences while working remote, and create a culture of inclusiveness to help employees grow in team culture. 

This is where an efficient digital workplace solution comes to your aid. Backed up by cloud technologies, digital workplace platforms have the capabilities to keep your employees at all levels stay connected and engaged through a multitude of communication and collaboration tools built into them.

Read more: The Definitive Guide to Perfect Digital Workplace Solution

3 Ways Digital Platforms Can Improve Your Employee Engagement

1) Internal communication is rendered seamless through a suite of collaboration apps

A digital workplace facilitates engagement across multiple departments of your business with the help of an array of communication tools and collaboration applications integrated into the platform. These tools can be accessed across geographies, enabling your diversely spread employees to have the right data on their fingertips. Effective internal communication and collaboration are critical to improving employee engagement. Digital workplace solutions ensure that your employees remain connected from anywhere in the world. 

The feature-packed collaboration apps on digital workplace platforms will let your employees at all levels communicate with each other and also with external contacts. Digital platforms ease collaboration from a central hub connecting your employees dispersed across multiple time zones and geographies. 

2) Enable smarter data analysis by creating custom dashboards and tiles

A custom dashboard is a data visualization cum business intelligence tool that showcases a specific set of metrics and KPIs on a single page. A smart digital workplace solution brings to the table the right capabilities to build multiple custom dashboards and tiles for analysis varied purposes. 

Multiple dashboards powered by a variety of tiles can be created on digital workplace platforms for enhanced visibility and productivity. Dashboards serve to track your employee activities and the progress of projects which can be accessed by all team members, thus increasing employee engagement at all levels. Personalized dashboards offer intelligent analytics of data to ensure that the relevant data is visible and accessible only to the right persons. 

You don’t have to go for a ‘one size fits all’ kind of dashboard meant for your industry or your line of business in general, when you have the advantage of creating custom dashboards that uniquely suit your business. Pre-built tiles extract information from business apps and display it on custom dashboards to help track projects, campaigns, and other key metrics in one view, thus motivating your employees to strive more toward goals set, thus keeping them engaged. 

3) Seamlessly integrate multiple apps that cater to the business needs of varied industries  

The successful day-to-day operations of your business demand access to a series of business apps from multiple vendors. Switching between apps will incur huge amounts of time loss which can be prevented by adopting a smart digital workplace solution. A smart digital workplace platform integrates a wide range of apps that find uses in diverse industries. These apps can be managed from a central hub, thus saving time, and serving to improve productivity, communication, and collaboration among your teams.  Your diversely spread employees can access data through these apps from anywhere to get their work done. 

Read more: How Digital Workplaces Improve Employee Experience

In Conclusion!

Good employee experiences stem from good digital experiences, no matter whether companies embrace a fully remote working environment or a hybrid one. This calls for the adoption of a smart, highly interactive digital workplace solution like InfinCE to improve your employee engagement, enhance your employee experiences, and shore up your digitization endeavors in more ways than one. 

The platform enables smarter, effective, and streamlined communication among all departments and teams. You can seamlessly share information and organizational updates on the custom dashboards created on InfinCE. The platform has an array of tools and apps to facilitate live chats, video calls, and meetings among your employees, keeping them engaged. The collaboration features of InfinCE include secure file sharing and live editing of documents, thus catering to employee engagement. With InfinCE, collaborative project planning is possible and project calendars can be managed, shared, and synced with personal calendars. The platform draws on data from various sources such as external APIs and apps to offer insights in the form of graphs and charts. 

InfinCE offers a curated application marketplace to meet your varied business needs. A few of those apps even come free of cost. And what is more, all business apps available on InfinCE, be it commercial or open-source, can be easily accessed through a single login. A few of these apps are WordPress Blog and WordPress portal for content management; Odoo and Rise for CRM; OpenProject and Kanboard for project management; MyBB to manage and moderate discussions among teams; and Vanilla Forums for interactions with customers and potential clients.   

Organizations are increasingly incorporating aspects of engagement into all elements of their employee experience to make it a fruitful journey for both the employers and the employees.  And InfinCE is your one-stop technology solution to digitize your business operations and keep your employees engaged such that personal goals are aligned with company goals and employees develop a holistic view of the company and their roles in its operations. 

To know more on how InfinCE can help enhance employee engagement connect with our experts today!

Since the beginning of 2020, digital transformation has come knocking at the doors of businesses across every primary industry. 

Over the past two years, we have transcended traditional work models and embraced remote-capable ecosystems powered by collaboration and productivity technologies. These have caused a tremendous shift in how people are collaborating and getting their work done. And this has been very beneficial.

Through this article, we’ll explore the many benefits of better systems of collaboration and how they can impact productivity and the workflows within projects. 

But let’s begin by understanding the pain points – why we need collaboration tools and the negative impacts on productivity due to a lack of effective collaboration among teams.

Read more: Moving to Hybrid Work Culture? Here’s What You Need to Consider!

How Lack of Collaboration Can Affect Projects

1. Stunted results

If you don’t have effective collaboration systems or communication tools across the organization, you may not achieve much. To build game-changing solutions in a highly competitive market, you need to leverage the skills and capabilities of your entire team. This is not possible if the digital systems in place don’t allow you to collaborate effectively.

2. Inability to plan properly

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”, Benjamin Franklin said. The success of any project rests heavily on how effectively it gets planned. Whether your organization follows AGILE, Waterfall, or any other project management model, none of their capabilities are enough to overcome improper planning. And proper planning is not possible without effective collaboration across teams.

3. Organizational silos

This is a significant challenge, especially for projects that require a lot of knowledge sharing. If the teams are not consistently aligned with each other, one side will always have incomplete information about the project or the process. This extends even beyond just information. It also holds for goals, objectives, and priorities. Unless the entire team is singing from the same sheet, nothing is going to sound good.

4. Lack of trust among people

This is a people issue than a project issue. But people are vital to any process. If there aren’t enough systems for people to easily collaborate, organizations risk fostering unnecessary competitiveness. People can become disengaged and won’t be able to develop close professional relationships or build trust.

Read more: How Can Organizations Profit More from Collaboration Software?

So, what is the solution?

The simplest answer would be to facilitate better collaboration among their teams. And how do we do that? 

The solution lies in the digital ecosystem that the organization operates within. The right digital workplace orchestration could be the difference between a successful, collaborative project and one that’s struggling to take off.

This leads us to our next point of discussion – 

How better technologies can improve collaboration and productivity

1. Breaking Down Silos

Better collaboration means better communication, which leads to better transfer of knowledge among teams. An effective digital workplace solution can empower knowledge workers to access information or educate themselves on best practices in real-time. This enables them to continue and complete their tasks. They need not wait for the information to arrive from the source or mail it back to them.

2. Transparency and Visibility

A robust digital ecosystem is beneficial not only to the people who are involved in the project but also to those who manage it. For example, collaboration tools can allow managers to maintain oversight on the project and remain in constant communication with the people involved. It will enable them to interfere appropriately and resolve crises in real-team as they arise.

3. Enhanced Workflows

Workflows benefit in multiple ways from incorporating organization-wide collaboration systems. Firstly, it speeds up the processes by reducing the time between ideation to implementation. It can also help avoid version control issues by offering easy real-time file-sharing capabilities. This removes inefficiencies like having to pass documents through emails. 

4. Engagement and Morale

A study conducted at Stanford University claimed that “when people treated as partners work together with others – even when physically apart – their motivation increases.” The simple act of connecting people can help bridge gaps between teams and build engagement and morale. When people are working in silos, they remain unaware of how their work impacts the overall project. Connecting people not only improve organizational cohesion it gives them the motivation and perspective to deliver better. 

Read more: 5 Ways InfinCE Can Save On Your Enterprise IT Budget

InfinCE- A Perfect Collaboration Platform for Businesses

Now that we know how a great collaboration platform can improve productivity let’s look at a good option for your business.

InfinCE is the only true digital workplace orchestration platform ever built. It is a one-of-a-kind solution that offers all the collaboration and productivity tools and the technical infrastructure an organization needs. 

Leveraged effectively, organizations can use InfinCE to turbocharge their workflows, deliver better, and achieve improved innovation within the organization.

Let’s check out how.

1. Cloud-based infrastructure

InfinCE offers a fully cloud-based ecosystem for its extensive list of productivity and collaboration tools. It allows employees to access these tools anytime and from anywhere in the world, on a device of their choice. Further, the model also supports real-time file sharing, allowing teams and individuals to share documents through secure access systems. This avoids delays that can arise by relying on the manual transfer of files.

2. Easy tracking and analysis

InfinCE enables business leaders to efficiently monitor and review business metrics through personalized dashboards and data visualization tiles. In addition to a whole host of pre-built standard tiles for monitoring information, it allows for customized tiles for specific requirements like monitoring servers, apps, and even employees. These insights can help leaders make faster decisions and resolve problems faster. 

3. Security

Digital security is a significant point in today’s work environment, especially when talking about a digital workplace model. InfinCE takes this into special consideration by protecting all data stored within its infrastructure with the latest cybersecurity protocols. Everything is stored securely on virtual private servers with advanced firewalls. In addition, smart access control systems permit only the right people to access or edit files. 

4. Comprehensive and Extendable 

If the digital workplace system is not capable enough or extendable for everyone’s use, an organization-wide adaptation may be impossible. This means that you risk going from individual silos to department-based silos. This is where InfinCE stands out. It comes packed with a whole host of productivity and collaboration tools. It ranges from the software to edit documents and spreadsheets to email clients and servers and much more. Further, the platform’s unique infrastructure makes it highly extendable – businesses can remove old applications and add in new software or SaaS options from other vendors.

Through this discussion, it’s easy to see how greater collaboration is directly proportional to better productivity and project management.

A powerful and effective digital workplace orchestration platform like InfinCE with its suite of productivity and collaboration tools can do wonders for your project workflows. There’s no better way to empower your teams.

Chat with our expert to learn more about InfinCE. 

How Online Collaboration Tool Like InfinCE Help Define Your Business Success

Online collaboration tools are a vital business asset today. The sudden shift to remote work has mandated the use of virtual collaboration tools across several business sectors. From defining a successful business strategy to helping employees connect with teams, online collaboration tools play an integral role in solving business challenges. The core benefit of using virtual collaboration tools is facilitating decision-making, enhancing productivity, and efficiently realizing the business goals.

Why do you need an online collaboration tool? What makes InfinCE the best fit?

To make the most of your business collaboration tool, you should first know why you need it and what pain points it can help you mitigate. Like other business aspects, proper planning should come before selecting the best online collaboration tool. Adequate planning coupled with the right tool selection can help you attain effective online collaboration. 

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

Following are the benefits offered by InfinCE online collaboration tool.

1. Saves time and costs for businesses

One of the key perks of deploying the InfinCE online collaboration tool is that it helps you save time. When your teams collaborate and work without lags or disruptions, they can achieve the targets much quicker. It translates to cost savings in the long run and ensures optimal employee performance.

2. Strengthens employee relationships 

The lack of face-to-face meetings in today’s remote work culture can take a toll on the relationships of your teams. InfinCE virtual collaboration tool helps you schedule audio or video meetings and one-to-one calls. The platform helps ensure robust team communication and work collaboration and boosts employee engagement and morale, no matter where your employees are.

3. Simplifies project management 

InfinCE online collaboration tool is designed to simplify your project management. With all the essential productivity apps in hand, you can keep track of your team’s performance, monitor the progress of different projects, improve communication, and ensure that you get the most out of everyone involved. InfinCE also offers a unified, custom dashboard to help you access every data required to manage your teams in a single place.

4. Streamlines information exchange 

InfinCE virtual collaboration software also makes data and file sharing more manageable, which means that your employees can access the information as and when needed to perform their tasks. Moreover, it helps organize your task management so that you do not have to run into any trouble due to missed deadlines. 

Read more: 7 Ways to Improve Team Collaboration in 2021 

5. Integrates with a multitude of third-party applications

You can integrate your preferred productivity apps with InfinCE to make the most of the collaboration software. By introducing social interactions into the existing business systems, you can see significant improvements in your teams’ overall efficiency and productivity. At the same time, InfinCE helps overcome the challenges of aggregating valuable files and folders to make business management easier for the leaders.

6. Prevents juggling multiple business apps

You can save time and resources by adopting a unified virtual collaboration platform like InfinCE. For instance, having all the required functions in a single place, such as data sharing, information broadcasting, project tracking, attendance monitoring, and more, you do not have to switch apps to manage your business. At the same time, you will not have to subscribe to multiple applications when you employ an all-in-one collaboration platform like InfinCE, which makes forecasting the monthly expenses much more effortless.

7. Helps stay on top with enterprise cloud innovations

InfinCE online collaboration tool allows you to interact with your colleagues, partners, customers, and stakeholders from anywhere in the world. 

Being an enterprise cloud application, InfinCE allows you to share the required information with your team and helps them work toward reaching a common goal. This way, you can streamline the workflow of your remote employees, ensure improved efficiency, drive superior productivity, and facilitate innovation.

With regular feature updates and modern technology provisions, InfinCE is helping businesses define their path to success through effective enterprise collaboration. It allows you to work on ideas that will come to fruition, avoid potential issues as they crop up, and create a stress-free and more enjoyable work environment. 

Case Study: How Fingent Achieved Breakthroughs in Collaboration with InfinCE 

3 tips for deploying your online collaboration tool successfully

Implementing a virtual collaboration tool like InfinCE can be done without disrupting your existing business processes. Yet again, it is always better to keep an adjustment period in mind when you deploy the concept of online collaboration into your business, as some of your employees may be new to it. Here are some tips to help you get started with InfinCE with minimal disruption to your current business systems.

1. Transition slowly

While starting right away and transitioning every business process into the new system is essential, you need to plan it well and move gradually. For example, shifting to an entirely different work environment can be challenging for team members who have never used an online collaboration tool earlier. A phase-by-phase transition will help ensure that everyone is on the same page and avoid any productivity loss.

2. Work with an expert

Although you may feel like using an online collaboration platform does not take much learning, and you can master it within a few days, it is always better to work with an expert initially to fully understand the scope of the platform. With InfinCE, you get 24/7 support from a well-informed team of experts who can guide you through making the most of the collaboration platform. This way, you can introduce the new concept more adeptly to your team and avoid potential issues.

3. Evaluate and select the right software

There is no arguing that you can easily get confused with the availability of so many different options out there. Nonetheless, as mentioned, you need to assess your requirements well to make the right choice. Consider the features offered by the online collaboration software, how you plan to use those features, and how these features will ease the challenges your business is facing. Meanwhile, also determine whether the cost of the platform is reasonable in terms of the solutions it provides.

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

While online collaboration can seem like a complex concept at first, the availability of powerful tools like InfinCE has simplified it to a great extent. 

Boost your virtual collaboration with InfinCE

If your business supports a socially collaborative work culture, you can make it even more engaging by employing the InfinCE all-in-one collaboration platform. With features like real-time messaging, voice and video calling, activity streams, and collaboration workspaces, InfinCE can enhance the efficiency of your business systems already in place. Get in touch with us to learn more about InfinCE. 

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. 

Is your KPI Tracking Software pursuing these 5 metrics?

Achieving sustainable growth is vital for businesses of all sizes today. With pandemics like COVID-19 showing how unexpected events have the potential of wrecking global economies in the blink of an eye, it is important for today’s businesses to have a well established Key Performance Index driven metrics to track for their business growth. By following these metrics closely, a business can be better prepared to combat threats from competition, changing market trends, disruptive market forces like pandemics, and ensure that there is steady cash flow even in the most challenging of times. These KPI metrics should be on the organization’s business dashboard software which will be reviewed and closely monitored by the leadership and will form the foundation of all strategic initiatives and decisions taken by the board or top management. So now the question is what are those KPI metrics that need to be tracked on an organization’s business dashboard software to ensure sustainable growth? 

Here are our top 5 picks:

1. Cash To Revenue Position

In the initial days of the COVID-19 pandemic, China was one of the worst affected economies. Studies showed that nearly 85% of small and medium enterprises (SME) were projected to run out of cash in a timeframe as low as 2 months due to severe lockdowns leading to restrictive economic activity. 

Cash to revenue position is an indication of how well endowed is an enterprise to deal with emergencies and how much liquid cash they have at their disposal to invest in measures to counter low revenue scenarios such as pandemics or weak consumer spending. When the position is better, business owners or management has breathing space to make amendments in their operational style when revenue channels are disrupted and without having to take drastic measures such as cutting jobs or delaying bills. This is definitely an important metric that needs to be on every business KPI dashboard software and monitored regularly.

Read more: Creating Organizational, Department, Team and Personal Dashboards using InfinCE

2. Customer Acquisition Costs

For any business to survive, there is a need for customers to spend money on their products or services. In the business world, it has been proven through studies that acquiring a new customer would incur more than 5 times the cost it takes to retain an existing one. As such, customer acquisition costs have the potential to consume the budgets of several departments like sales, marketing, and IT. So, leaders need to keep a tab on spending in this section and this is precisely the reason why customer acquisition costs are an important metric that needs to be tracked via an organization’s KPI dashboard software.

3. Outbound Marketing Performance

Marketing is the engine that fuels sales. The better a business is able to market its offerings to the right audience, the greater will be the business returns in terms of sales revenue. However, marketing needs to be a highly disciplined and well-tracked activity, especially for small and medium businesses. 

Conversion rates from marketing activities are important in ensuring that a business always has a healthy leads pipeline that the sales department can focus on and convert into deals in due course of time. Using intelligent marketing analytics and automation platforms, businesses need to track their ROI on every single dollar spend and correlate to the leads or business opportunity, or social influence that a marketing campaign was able to generate. 

While sales are in itself a large activity that can be tracked through a separate KPI in an organization’s KPI tracking software, it can also be clubbed with the marketing KPI in small businesses. The reason is that in smaller organizations, it is quite common for marketing and sales to be functioning as a single entity sharing a lot of human and technology resources and well synchronized towards a common goal.

Read more: Focus on these 5 KPIs to improve small business growth

4. Operational Efficiency

Improving the quality of labor is vital for businesses to survive in the long run. Studies show that 52% of SMB owners find it hard to hire a quality workforce. So, the next biggest challenge here is to maintain productivity. Every business organization will have its unique list of business processes, policies, and frameworks on which they operate daily. As the competition tightens, it is important to work as a lean business organization with more agility to ensure that customer needs are understood and fulfilled at the earliest. For this to happen, there is a need for seamless operational efficiency. 

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

It is important to keep track of the time it takes for a sales process to be completed, the number of sub-processes involved, the amount of productive time an employee or team spends in a project or sales transaction, and other similar elements that need to be measured. Once these are known, it becomes easier for decision-makers to re-engineer processes and work frameworks regularly to cope with changing trends in the market and help employees adopt new additions to the business easily, such as new software or new machinery in a manufacturing unit. 

The training process can be tweaked in line with new learning norms prevalent in the market and made easy and highly accessible for employees so that they can speed up the learning activity. Both the employee performance as well as the operational efficiency of the business thus need to be tracked efficiently in an organizational KPI tracking software.

5. Employee Engagement

Employees are just as important as customers to a business. Ensuring that they are well-taken care of is a key milestone that every business must strive to achieve. Studies show that 71% of executives believe that employee engagement is key to ensuring successful business growth. While measuring it as a KPI, employee engagement will include a vast majority of key indicators of employee wellbeing. Some examples of items to be evaluated for this KPI include employee turnover, attrition rates, revenue per employee, hiring budgets, etc. Insights from this metric are important to plan the future expansion of the business as you always need employees to drive your business forward in all circumstances.

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

The above 5 metrics give a clear picture of whether your business is progressing in the right direction. Having a regular watch on these will ensure that you are prepared well for any emergencies or disruptive situations that may occur in the future like the COVID-19 pandemic. To drive maximum results, it is important to have a digital backbone that will enable all units in your business to seamlessly measure KPIs and perform according to expectations in their respective tasks. This is what InfinCE can help you achieve with its range of business applications available on a secure cloud platform. Get in touch with us for more details.

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. 

4 Reasons to Use InfinCE for Remote Workforce Collaboration

COVID-19 pandemic has pushed more than half of the world population into staying confined within their homes. As social distancing is the only solution available today to prevent the pandemic spread, travel and physical social interactions are at near-zero levels worldwide. For the business world, however, this posed yet another humongous challenge. They had to enable their workforce to shift to a culture of remote working on a massive scale. While several companies have offered flexible work from home options for their staff in the past, this is the first time that such a mandatory remote work culture had to be enforced for almost every single staff.

While the cultural shift was immense, one of the best ways for businesses to keep their staff connected virtually and enable seamless collaboration among them was to use digital enterprise collaboration tools. Video calling became the de-facto mode of employee interactions. But a few weeks into the new culture, there have been serious issues that plagued the digital infrastructure that several businesses relied on.

The widely popular Zoom video conferencing app was used by businesses, educational institutes, government authorities and a whole plethora of other organizations to help their employees and communities stay connected and continue service delivery through remote video conferencing. However, security experts soon revealed that Zoom’s privacy and data integrity claims for its services were not trustworthy. It was found that the app dangerously leaked private confidential and business data of millions of people to other parties such as Facebook as well as being exploited by cybercriminals. Within days, several governments, schools, and thousands of private companies banned the usage of Zoom for their video conferencing needs due to the privacy concerns and dubious data handling policies of Zoom.

So, the challenge for businesses now is to find a replacement for Zoom to manage their remote work collaboration needs. Well, they don’t have to look further than InfinCE, the most trusted digital enterprise platform for small and medium businesses. It facilitates remote work management and safe video conferencing to help businesses continue their operations with remote staff without compromising on security, efficiency, and productivity.

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

Four reasons why you should try InfinCE for a safe video conferencing and efficient collaboration experience:

1. Secure Video Conferencing

InfinCE offers an integrated enterprise digital video conferencing solution that delivers video calling facilities to employees only on access-controlled shared links. It is exclusively aimed at business organizations and hence prevents leakage of any data or information about callers as in the case of Zoom. Only employees with authorized enterprise credentials can join a virtual video meeting using a meeting URL shared by the host of the meeting or via a secure “peer to peer calling link” between two employees. All video conferencing accesses and permissions are securely logged to prevent misuse or unauthorized access.

2. Interactive Collaboration

When enterprises use multiple apps to maintain a remote work culture like Zoom for video conferencing, G-Suite for communication and productivity tools, Dropbox, or other cloud storage apps for storing files, it creates a huge overhead for employees to manage their work and meetings by switching between these. 

InfinCE offers a unified cloud-based platform that brings together the best of digital conferencing tools like Email, Chats, and secured virtual video meeting rooms for uninterrupted communications. It also combines enterprise management tools like document editors, project management, CRM, etc. for collaboration. All information and data exchange processes and interfaces are secured with information security policies and encryption algorithms for privacy compliance. It enables real-time collaboration between employees seamlessly and in one place.

Related Reading: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

3. Safety Firewalls

InfinCE is an enterprise-grade cloud-based platform that has been designed ground up with strict adherence to global standards in security and data encryption. With advanced firewalls, intelligent threat analysis, and multi-level access control permissions, InfinCE ensures that your business data remains confidential during internal transactions and collaboration environments.

4. Smarter Sharing

One of the biggest demands in virtual meeting platforms is the sharing of information, files, and even remote screens for issue fixes and configurations by your IT team. Using less secure tools like Zoom can result in such access controls being exploited by cybercriminals since communication occurs via the internet. With InfinCE, every virtual meeting is encrypted end-to-end and occurs via a secure enterprise calling URL. This prevents external parties from gaining unauthorized access into remote meetings, which was one of the key security threats pointed out with Zoom. Employees can securely share files or even hand over control of their remote screen to concerned departments for configurations and issue management.

As the COVID-19 inflicted lockdown is likely to continue, it is sure that remote working will be a mainstay culture for a long time to come. You need to empower your employees to seamlessly carry out their daily routine from anywhere in the world without having to worry about collaboration problems. This is where InfinCE can be the game-changer. With uninterrupted video calling, real-time collaboration, and cloud-based subscription, it is the perfect and most cost-effective remote workforce management tool for any business organization. Talk to us to explore the possibilities of InfinCE in your business today.