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

How Can CIOs Contribute Toward Sustainable Work From Home Experience

As the world tries to wipe out the pandemic, businesses are looking to adopt a more flexible work culture that can accommodate various working requirements. We are in a remote working era that undoubtedly increases the significance of CIOs and IT teams. CIOs now have the responsibility to create a work environment that caters to the agile work models of their employees while ensuring the best work from home experience.

Gartner recently released a report on how CIOs should “embrace radical flexibility” to deliver great remote work experience in the post-COVID world. According to the report, “CIOs need to create a post-COVID-19 work environment that supports radical flexibility for the evolving IT workforce. CIOs must now consider and plan for the purpose and structure of the emerging work environment for the IT organization and workforce.” 

Here is a quick look at the actionable steps CIOs can take to meet the varying employee and employer needs and expectations.

1. Building a robust remote work culture

Most leaders are used to managing people at the office or primary work location, but they often feel uncomfortable when it comes to managing remote teams. More trouble arises when legacy systems and remote work policies cannot address the changing needs for working from a different location or not being scalable to meet the evolving demands. Therefore, to create a sustainable work from home experience, CIOs need to adopt flexible work patterns and the right tools to manage remote teams.

Read more: 3 Ways a Workplace App Helps Manage Your Business During COVID-19 

Gartner recommends that it is important to survey managers and workers about workplace expectations, preferences, requirements, and limitations. It will help employers determine their employees’ work location preferences to create a flexible post-COVID-19 work environment. At the same time, it is also essential to communicate all the changes, work expectations, and deadlines to the relevant team members using a unified platform. This is where an all-in-one work management solution like InfinCE can be of great help.

InfinCE is a modern, innovative digital workplace orchestration platform that helps you manage every aspect of your business, including:

• workplace collaboration
• project management
• communication (video, audio, chat, email, video meetings, etc.)
• ERP, CRM, finance, accounting, and a host of day-to-day workplace activities 

When you have InfinCE adapted to your workplace, you can easily integrate it into your existing applications. You can also choose to adopt a wide range of leading, open-source third-party applications supported by the InfinCE app marketplace. InfinCE has everything to support your business – Office online tools, productivity apps (calendar, task manager, chat, email, video, and audio meetings, etc.), and a plethora of enterprise applications to manage your business from anywhere. 

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

2. Adopting a flexible work pattern

According to a 2020 survey about the post-COVID-19 work experience by Gartner, most employees have a “clear preference and expectation of having flexibility in selecting their primary work location and in arranging their schedule.” The report also suggests that “around 80% of workers expect to continue to work from home at least three days per week”. What’s more, around 50% of employees even indicated that they would quit their jobs if they do not get a work from home option from their employers.

These stats clearly show the importance of building a work culture that embraces and delivers the right remote work experience. However, as adopting a flexible work environment can mean including new variables that were not part of the usual work culture earlier, CIOs should clearly understand the emerging work patterns before defining workforce policies.

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

A study from Owl Labs and Global Workplace Analytics highlighted that following a hybrid work culture that combines remote work with office work can be a potential solution for most companies. “The majority of the workforce expect to work from a home office two or three days per week, with the option to attend the employer office the other days. Although this hybrid combination is emerging as the dominant pattern for the majority of workers, it only accounts for 50% to 60% of the workforce,” the report said.

This means that CIOs should understand employee needs and work patterns across different variations and make adjustments to create the right work policy for the company. Collaborating with the HR team and surveying the staff, managers, and executives can be pretty helpful here. That data can determine the different expectations of the company and employees and help CIOs develop the most flexible work policy guidelines that accommodate everything.

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

3. Communicating the expectations

Another crucial role of the CIOs in building a robust and flexible work culture is to communicate the relevant staff’s expectations appropriately. The Gartner report says that remote work has increased from around 29% before the Coronavirus pandemic to more than 75% by April 2020. The report further states that “On average, clients expect that 57% of their workforces could work entirely remotely, and 63% could work remotely at least sometimes.”

This indicates that leaders should plan for around half of their staff working from home in the post-COVID-19 era. It could either be working from home every day or a couple of days every week. No matter what, CIOs need to develop remote work policies that go beyond the traditional pre-COVID criteria and definitions. As legacy remote work policies do not have room for scheduling flexibility and guiding decisions, CIOs must adopt new work policies that address the expectations from everyone across the organization.

Nonetheless, developing a flexible work policy should not be limited to sending a signal to the staff and management about how new patterns and expectations are incorporated into the work environment. Instead, it should also focus on delivering consistency across the different functional areas of the company, especially when there is no enterprise policy in effect.

Read more: 7 Ways to Improve Team Collaboration in 2021

Discussing the work policy changes with the HR manager and various department leaders can help CIOs identify how the planned approach can work out to support the needs of the staff while keeping up with the management decisions. Meanwhile, CIOs should also determine how they can replace legacy practices and applications with modern solutions to benefit remote work experience. The new remote work solution should also support the growing needs of the company. Likewise, CIOs should figure out the contractual obligations and regulatory requirements before implementing the remote work policy.

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

Looking forward

CIOs also need to realize what types of interactions or meetings are common in the remote workplace and find the right digital workplace solution to address all their needs. You need an all-in-one team management platform that can furnish all kinds of communication needs, be it video conferences, audio calls, file sharing, and instant messaging. The platform should also help you track time and attendance, assign tasks, monitor the progress of a project, etc. CIOs need to take the appropriate actions now to support the purpose and structure of their evolving work environment.

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

InfinCE is the preferred choice of many CIOs in managing virtual teams. Interested to know why? Drop us a message, and let’s help you realize a seamless workplace collaboration and project management with InfinCE. 

Everything You Need to Know About Digital Workplace

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

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

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

What is a digital workplace?

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

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

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

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

What are the key elements of a digital workplace?

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

A reliable communication and collaboration platform

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

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

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

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

Data sharing

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

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

What a digital workplace is not

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

A digital workplace is not merely the following:

1. Digital workplace is not just an intranet 

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

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

2. Digital workplace is not an amalgamation of applications

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

Download White Paper: How A Digital Workplace Streamlines Business Performance 

3. Digital workplace is not only meant for large enterprises

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

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

The necessity of a digital workplace

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

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

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

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

Get in touch with us to learn more about InfinCE. 

Managing a Remote Team Successfully During COVID-19

The remote work culture has become more than a trend today and evolved into the mainstream practice for many companies across the world. While remote working does have many advantages, it comes with quite a few challenges, especially when you have to start managing a completely remote team all of a sudden.

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

To effectively navigate the challenges of remote team management, you need to be aware of the significant factors that can affect job performance and level of engagement. You also need to prepare a robust strategy to ensure that everyone in your team delivers their best capability along those lines. This post covers a few tips to manage remote teams efficiently and drive success for your organization.

1. Get the right project management software

This is the most critical aspect of managing a remote team. When working across different time zones, you need to invest in a reliable digital workplace orchestration platform with excellent online communication and work management features. This will help to add more value to your remote working culture while ensuring that you have the right tools to plan tasks, manage projects, track employee performance, and do much more, all under one roof.

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

2. Schedule every day check-ins

Daily check-ins may seem tricky in a work from home scenario, but it is a vital ingredient for managers and teams new to remote work culture. An email, call, or text message is enough to check with your team and know how they are doing. However, it would be even more effective to use video conferencing to bridge the gap of face-to-face interaction. You can get all these features in an all-in-one team collaboration software, which makes daily communication so much easier for you.

3. Set your expectations right

Your company will have certain expectations for each of the employees in your team. You need to communicate those expectations clearly to your team and get their feedback on whether they align with the same. It is even more critical to reassign your team members to new tasks. Having clear targets for the work hours, availability, team meetings, and project deadlines will help ensure that everyone delivers their best performance to meet the expectations.

4. (Re)Work on your communication skills

You are going to use an online communication platform for managing your remote team. This means that you need to understand how the team management software works, its features, and how you can use it to bring value to your team. You may be familiar with using some online communication channels, but the stakes are higher when it comes to remote team collaboration. So you need to develop your writing skills and virtual meeting strategies to ensure that your team is on the same page when you work on a project.

Read more: 7 Ways to Improve Team Collaboration in 2021

5. Use video conferencing often

While telephonic and written conversations should be a part of your day-to-day team management regime, it is also necessary that you incorporate video conferencing to build rapport. This way, you can assess the body language of your employees and see how they react to a change in plans or a new assignment. It will also help you identify some non-verbal clues that indicate if something is wrong with your team members. That will, in turn, allow you to address the situation proactively before it becomes a significant problem.

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

6. Have regular team meetings

Apart from daily check-ins, you should also schedule regular team meetings to discuss the current project and its status. It will help you assess the progress of the job at hand to meet the deadlines as expected. Moreover, regular team meetings can help brainstorm different ideas for new projects while imparting a sense of involvement to everyone in your team. You can also ensure that everyone is up-to-date and works towards realizing the company’s common goal.

7. Focus on the outcomes

It is imperative to focus on the result rather than the process to ensure the optimal engagement of your team members. At the same time, you should also evaluate the process constantly and find ways to improve it to drive better efficiency from your employees. Therefore, you need to define the goals upfront and focus on reaching the target by letting your team members develop the plan of action they feel more comfortable with and execute well.

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

8. Provide help whenever needed

To build a successful remote team, you should be able to address the requirements of all your employees whenever needed. For instance, if your team comes across an unexpected problem related to the project at hand, you should be there to clarify whatever doubts they have to minimize downtime. Here too, video calls can help you identify if your team members feel low or unmotivated to complete a task. At that point, you can pitch in and give them a helping hand to finish the job as required.

9. Encourage social interactions

Social isolation is a significant challenge in remote working. Therefore, you need to build a remote work culture that integrates informal social interactions in a traditional office setting into your online communications. From virtual weekend meet-ups to after-office casual talks, encouraging social interactions within your team will boost employee morale and engagement. You can even plan virtual pizza parties, happy hours, or employee recognition sessions for non-work-related conversations.

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

10. Mentor more, manage well

The best remote team managers prefer to be mentors who guide their teams on different aspects of their job roles rather than “managing” them. Leading by example always works, be it in a traditional office scenario or remote work culture. Make sure that you are more of a mentor and coach to your team. It may require taking new initiatives to address the challenges your team is facing, but it will be worth the effort to develop a successful remote workforce.

These are a few ways, which will help you ensure effective remote team management. As every industry is going global and digital, it is high time to adopt the right approaches and tools that make your team more efficient and gain a competitive advantage in the market.InfinCE is a digital workplace orchestration platform that allows businesses to manage their employees, projects, and operations seamlessly in a remote-first world. Request a demo to see InfinCE in action.

Can centralized dashboards improve workplace productivity?

Dashboards are often an intrinsic part of today’s business world. From helping executives and leaders make decisions to enable seamless forecasting of business opportunities, they play a key role in the corporate world. But this curated information repository is not just meant for reporting and senior leadership alone. In today’s highly decentralized workforce environment that is increasingly being pushed to a remote future with a pandemic like COVID-19, employee dashboards are becoming a vital part of the workforce as well.

There is a huge demand for easy access to information within an organization at all levels. Several teams require access to different kinds of information like for example, project management dashboards where different project activities and tasks are managed, CRM dashboards that give a holistic view of marketing and sales activities, attendance and leave management dashboards for depicting employee activities and much more. 

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

With remote working becoming a norm, here are 5 ways in which having a centralized dashboard can improve your businesses efficiency and work productivity:

1. Overview in a snapshot

A workforce dashboard for any department offers a comprehensive yet highly precise snapshot of the team’s or company’s performance. From getting inputs about a project task to viewing the progress of service requests, the employee dashboard enables the workforce to transparently seek information on demand. 

By customizing the nature of information available across departments, job levels, and roles, it is possible for organizations to roll out tailored initiatives for each individual and enable them to track their progress at each stage. It also gives a single source of truth for all employees to be able to stay updated with what’s happening across their operational units, departments, or job roles within the company.

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

2. Setting up organization goals

With a customizable company dashboard, it is easy for the senior leadership to create a new objective, break it down into achievable components and keep track of each of these components which have been assigned to different teams. This whole activity can be easily represented as a goal on the company dashboard with defined metrics. It can be seen by all employees who can also track its growth, view achievement milestones, calculate their own effort needed to help in progressing each component, and much more. 

In short, a dashboard helps companies take up smaller initiatives that add value to long term company goals and keep track of how every individual effort within the company contributes to this value.

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

3. Learning and Development

A centralized employee dashboard can be the sole information source employees can access to advance their career aspirations within the company. Learning paths can be defined with help from senior leaders, progress in learning initiatives can be tracked and achievements can be recognized and rewarded across job levels with the help of a transparent dashboard. 

It is also possible to set up company-wide learning initiatives with specific instructions, standardized learning curriculum, and certifications and this information can be used for future performance and other metric calculations as well.

4. Improve Visibility

When the management evaluates performance, productivity, and other vital business parameters, it is often presumed that employees are left in the dark about the progress made. With centralized dashboards, it is now possible for senior leaders to easily communicate the information down to the lowest levels of job roles within the organization. 

Employees can see visual reports of the company’s growth, performance assessment steps, and percentages of teams, intuitive breakdown of career goals and how they are aligned to performance benchmarks, and so on. This helps to create transparency within the workplace. Employees feel that they are treated and rewarded fairly when it comes to matters such as performance ratings, payment revisions, etc. It also sets a clear path for employees to identify their weaknesses and improve on areas that need focus.

Read more: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment

5. Staying Connected

An employee dashboard is not just about reports and charts that give a view of the daily operations of the company. It is more like an intranet portal where employees get together virtually for sharing information, staying connected with their friends at the workplace, exchange conversations, and much more. Organizations on the other hand have a medium to channel content directly to employees transparently. 

Important announcements, events, virtual meet-ups, etc. can all be facilitated smoothly through an interactive and intuitive employee dashboard. When most of your employees work from their homes in times such as the COVID-19 pandemic era, this will greatly enhance their work morale and also create a relaxed working environment that does not allow physical meetups for a long tenure.

A centralized dashboard creates a better working experience for all employees and is vital in creating a highly engaged and motivated workforce. When most employees work remotely, this is a key factor that is hard to ignore for enterprises. Now the question arises as to how to set up this dashboard. This is where InfinCE can be your solution. 

The comprehensive enterprise digital platform of InfinCE allows you to create powerful employee management and an operational dashboard that serves all purposes outlined above. Get in touch with us to explore how InfinCE can be the game changer in your workforce operations.

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. 

How SMBs can attain positive business outcomes from remote working

It’s barely 6 months into 2020 and COVID-19 has pushed more than half of the world into some form of lockdown. Businesses are losing revenue either due to shutdown or lack of customers. Travel restrictions and social distancing norms are forcing small and medium businesses to limit their operating hours and ask their staff to work remotely most of the time.

However, the remote work culture isn’t that bad as many companies have found it to be a savior in this pandemic. In fact, a good majority of small and medium businesses are now of the opinion that they can continue this mode of remote work even post the pandemic as it will reduce operational costs significantly. 

Related Reading: How InfinCE Helps You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

So, the question on everyone’s mind now is “How can we manage the business efficiently during and after the COVID-19 pandemic with a remote workforce?” Here are 4 tips to help you out:

1. Improve Communication

The most important aspect of maintaining relationships with your employees when they work remotely is communication. As employers, you need to facilitate a seamless communication experience for employees to interact with each other, share information, and foster a culture of continuous engagement. 

Remote work collaboration platforms like InfinCE facilitate this by offering a seamless communication platform that allows employees to interact over a variety of channels such as instant messaging, video calls, video meeting conferences, and much more. By ensuring that employees have the means to communicate efficiently, you can assure consistent productivity levels while they are working remotely.

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

2. Empower Collaboration

Most of the daily work done by your employees influence end customer service quality. It also requires the contributions from multiple teams working on different facets of a project or customer engagement. There needs to be a seamless collaboration mechanism that has to be in place to help employees easily connect with their peers, exchange information and files securely, set up meetings and discussions, manage projects virtually with diligence, and so on. To facilitate these activities, SMBs require a powerful virtual collaboration and enterprise management platform. 

Related Reading: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment

Security is a prime essential when you choose a collaboration platform for your remote workforce since your employees need to handle sensitive customer information like financial data or social security credentials.

3. Promote Work-Life Balance

It is true that remote working was one of the most preferred ways to guarantee a healthy work-life balance for employees. But such a scenario wasn’t meant to be for such a long period of time and that too with almost everyone in the family also at home due to the pandemic induced lockdowns. 

As employers, you need to understand that an employee may not be always capable of putting in their 100% concentration on their computers while at home. They may have to attend to their kids or spouse or parents periodically and engage in some quality family time. As such, you need to instruct managers to be strict on time commitments just for the sake of making it an 8- or 9-hour working day. Let employees take breaks in between and work in their comfort zones keeping in mind only the quality of the work they are engaged in. You will be amazed to find that employee engagement and productivity levels would improve under such a relaxed schedule.

4. Team Bonding

While it might take a while before everyone gets back to their old office regime and talk to friends and colleagues over a sip of coffee in the pantry, there are a lot of activities that companies can initiate over digital platforms to help improve team bonding when everyone works remotely. There could be weekly fun activities where teams can participate over video calls and they can even involve their families who might be around at home. There are several competitions that the HR team can run online, and employees can participate to remind themselves of the fun they had while at the office. In times like these, such positive motivational activities would be much appreciated by employees.

Related Reading: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

Managing your business successfully during the COVID-19 pandemic with a remote workforce requires more than just interpersonal skills. A digital backbone is essential to ensure seamless communication and collaboration between your employees to ensure disruption-free customer service. This is where InfinCE can be your one-stop solution to managing your entire business operations remotely. Our cloud-based enterprise platform offers a host of features ranging from communication to collaboration to help enterprises build a sustainable workforce culture during the pandemic situation. Talk to our experts to learn more. 

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

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

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

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

1. Cultural Resistance

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

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

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

2. Business Process Alignment

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

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

3. Seamless Collaboration and Communication

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

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

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

4. Flexible Application Support

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

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

5. Security and Device Management

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

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

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

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

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.