5 Ways Small Businesses Can Promote Collaboration Among Teams

For every small business today, the key to success lies in empowering their workforce to work together in the best possible way to deliver value to customers. This is true irrespective of the industry that your business focuses. Studies show that nearly 39% of employees feel that people in their organization do not value the importance of collaboration. Team collaboration is all about bringing everyone on the same page. But it is easier said than done. For small businesses, you have the benefit of having to bring fewer people into the same wavelength, but the core challenges of collaboration like communication, transparency, and accountability need to be addressed as much as what bigger players do. So how can small businesses improve team collaboration and promote a culture of continuous employee engagement in their work environment? Here are some tips:

1.Create a Unified Vision

To foster a culture of collaboration, it is important to ensure that all your employees work to achieve a common goal. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to create a powerful vision for the organization and then seamlessly connect the end objective of every project or work your company undertakes, to this vision statement. This will ensure that irrespective of the team or project an employee is a part of, they will work towards achieving the common goal as defined in the vision. For example, if the vision is total customer satisfaction, then every effort your workforce puts in can be seamlessly translated into steps taken in achieving maximum customer satisfaction. This vision statement or concept can be used in the awareness sessions to help team members bond with each other, understand their responsibilities and realize the need to be accountable for one’s own actions so that the collective effort of the team is successful in the end.

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2. Smarter On-Boarding

It is often found that new joiners in a company or in a team face difficulty in getting acquainted with the culture and nature of work in the first few weeks or months in the company. This is predominantly due to weak onboarding policies at small companies which pretty much focuses on sharing a couple of PowerPoint slides about the company and expecting new joiners to automatically align themselves with the goals and culture prevalent. Instead, companies should cultivate a smarter onboarding experience by getting rid of boring presentation sessions and documents. They should instead, pair newcomers with an existing team member who can guide them into the company’s routine and help them adapt faster to the culture prevalent in the workplace.

3.Ensure Effective Task Management

There are many instances where employees need to collaborate and work together on projects. In today’s highly competitive talent market, some of these employees may be remotely located as well. Small businesses need to invest in empowering your resources to collaborate efficiently over tasks irrespective of where they are geographically located. Using a powerful platform like InfinCE, your business can ensure there is a virtual space for employees to work together and with accountability for each action. Such platforms allow you to monitor task progress, enable smooth interaction between colleagues, facilitate the exchange of files and documents related to work and much more. Managers can efficiently manage their team with improved transparency and unbiased decision, thanks to insights from such employee management solutions. The end result is better team collaboration and improved productivity levels in the organization. When tasks and people are brought under a common technology framework, it keeps employees organized, managers aware of their team’s progress and clients happy about fulfilled commitments on delivery.

Related Read: InfinCE – A One-Stop Technology Solution for Small Business

4.Encourage Transparent Communication

A key driver of team collaboration in any business environment is open and transparent communication. Only when people strike a comfortable level of conversation with each other, do they develop mutual respect, trust, and understanding for their colleagues. For organizations, there are several ways to encourage a culture of open communication. A big part of the exercise involves mentoring managers to promote a healthy atmosphere for open communication and not a culture that works by just giving and obeying orders. 

It is important to bring technology into the picture here to work as an enabler for open communication. Most of the organizations typically use just an email system for employees to communicate. However, employees need more than just a simple email system. Bring on-board a powerful intranet system with social media-inspired virtual news spaces for sharing news and information about the company, activities, and events planned and much more. Employees can express their responses for such intranet posts similar to what they do on social media like Facebook. Another option would be to have a good instant messenger system where employees can converse with each other in real-time for a better understanding of problems and scenarios.

5.Promote Socializing Outside of Work

Every employee in your small business has a side of talent, skill or ability that can help them create healthier conversations and relationships with others. As an organization, you need to create avenues for employees to socialize and celebrate their individual and personal skills. Team building exercises, lunches, dinners, and sponsored team vacations or holidays where employees can get to know their colleagues better are just a few ideas to use. This will enable them to build better working relationships in parallel and stand up for each other in collaborative tasks with more responsibility and trust.

Team collaboration is vital to ensuring the continuous growth and success of every small business. Having the right vision, the most relevant business processes and the best technology is the way forward to achieving excellence in team collaboration. Get in touch with us to see how InfinCE can be the game-changer in enabling a collaborative and productive work culture within your organization.  

Top Must Watch Trends in Enterprise Video Conferencing

In an office environment, a meeting is scheduled often to not just communicate information, but as a means to establish, nurture and prosper relationships- both new and existing- between all involved stakeholders. This calls for a better solution for conferencing than conventional telephone and audio conferencing solutions. Videoconferencing has become a mainstay in today’s dynamic workspaces where technology facilitates remote working from anywhere in the world. The added benefit of sourcing talent from across the globe for your unique needs and not having to spend on physical infrastructure to accommodate them is a boon, especially for small and medium enterprises. Video conferencing offers far higher levels of engagement and collaboration opportunities when compared to other employee communication channels. So what will video conferencing enable for your workforce today?

Here are 5 trends in the workplace that find seamless adaptability with the aid of video conferencing.

1.Accountable Remote Workforce

As mentioned initially, today the large millennial population in the workforce has made the demand for remote work options quite high. Employees want to work out of their own comfort with more freedom than a typical office environment. As for employers, they are left with no option but to allow this flexibility for hiring the best talent to enable their growth. This is precisely the area where video conferencing can bring in the most impact. Today, successful organizations manage their remote workforce efficiently through video conferencing.

Team meetings and presentations involve live video streams from every employee location to ensure that all team members are present and aware of their roles and responsibilities. This is the next best thing to having everyone in a single room and sharing their responsibilities in front of the large group. So the video collaboration platform that is deployed across your enterprise requires a transparent login and access control policy that will ensure participant interactions are tracked and logged for future reference.

2.Smaller and Smarter Meeting Rooms

When you have fewer employees in the office and more on a remote basis, the need for physical meeting spaces diminishes inside the office. However, meeting rooms need to have, smarter equipment to ensure that team meetings conducted over video conferencing can be efficiently executed. Proper projection screens or televisions, audio, lighting and camera infrastructure that is able to vividly capture and present video streams for everyone involved in the meeting are an absolute necessity.

For remote working staff, they need a simpler solution like a mobile app which allows them to easily join the video conferencing stream and share information with their peers. While choosing your video collaboration platform, ensure that it offers all these levels of flexibility that will enable all stakeholders to seamlessly engage in video conversations.

Related Read: Why should a small business opt for INFINCE?

3.Content Sharing Platforms

In addition to enabling every team member to see each other, video conferencing platforms need to provide the ability to share files and other content in accordance with better compression and security policies to ensure lower bandwidth consumption and safer data transmission. This is vital for remotely working employees as they often have to collaborate with their peers in office for reviews and clarifications on their work in progress which may be files, documents, etc.

Your video conferencing solution needs to take into account the desired storage and streaming requirements for file sharing as well as the capability of doing so from even a mobile app. With flexible content sharing ability, employees will be empowered to work better from anywhere as they already have an efficient video communication channel which is also a powerful collaboration system as well.

4.Cloud-Enabled Video Conferencing

For small and medium businesses to remain competitive and cost-efficient in the market, they need to have flexible spending and management ability for their IT infrastructure. Video conferencing being a part of this infrastructure needs to follow a similar trend as well. This is why enterprises need to focus on cloud-based video conferencing solutions like INFINCE that offer easy scalability and better cost efficiency when they need to dynamically scale up or down their usage patterns over time. Additionally, adding new capabilities to your video communication and collaboration infrastructure is easier when it is cloud-based and depending on your needs, the most appropriate pricing plan can be easily configured.

5.Unified Communications

If your core business is not technology, then having to manage a host of solutions for team management and communication like video conferencing, audio conferencing and other intra-organizational collaboration will be a difficult activity requiring considerable workforce effort. This is where unified communication platforms make a difference.

They allow employees to easily switch between communication and collaboration channels on the go depending on their convenience. This will certainly improve productivity as employees are not forced to shuttle between various apps during a conversation. Enhanced collaboration would also enable teams to quickly arrive at decisions and enable work to be done collectively and within stipulated timelines.

Video conferencing is an irreplaceable communication channel for today’s organizations if they aim to build a robust and reliable work culture both in-house and with their extended remote peers. It will be best to have a scalable and cost-efficient technology backbone in your organization that will offer solutions for management, video conferencing and integrated employee collaboration all the same place.

By seamlessly, enabling businesses to build their technology infrastructure on the cloud, INFINCE is the right choice for a better workplace in your business. From providing powerful collaboration and IT deployment options in the cloud to facilitating highly engaging video-enabled collaboration, INFINCE can be your businesses best bet for digital transformation. Talk to our experts to know how your business can utilize the power of INFINCE.

The 5 small business digital trends that cannot be ignored in 2019

The digital transformation wave is gripping all industrial sectors as we speak. But is it really only meant for the big names in the market? Can financial muscle determine the progress a business can make in the digital space? The answer is simply NO! The best thing about the new age digital paradigm is that it opens up possibilities in digital innovation for industries of any size be it small, medium or large enterprises. A lot of thought has come up from revolutionary leaders in the market that focus on empowering small businesses to achieve high levels of success in their business operations. These thoughts have now transformed into the most happening trends in the small business sector and key players are constantly looking at ways to realize value by following and implementing these trends.

Now comes the crucial question. How can small businesses gain knowledge about the right or in fact the best digital trends that suit their operational model? Well, we have it covered in this blog. It’s barely past the first quarter of 2019, and if you are a small business entrepreneur, then we have compiled a list of the top 5 digital trends that your small business needs to onboard in 2019, to achieve success and remain competitive in the highly crowded market.

Let’s begin the exploration:

1. Subscribe to intelligence

Yes, we are talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) here but in a more suitable way for small businesses. Today, nearly all top AI-powered technology services are available on a subscription basis for businesses of all sizes to pick and choose based on their needs and preferences. The same AI technology that powers tech giants like Google and Facebook could be used to boost autonomous offerings in your small business as well. This is a big boost for your business sales prospects as well. Studies have shown that the presence of an AI element can boost sales of companies as< 49%< of consumers will be confident in spending money more frequently in business with AI enablement.

All departments of a small business from customer service to human resources, operations and logistics can embrace the power of AI and ML to enable sustainable growth. When insights about customers are made available through tools, small businesses can use them to make business decisions faster and with more accuracy. On the operations side, AI can help small companies hire smarter with faster candidate resume profiling for relevant skill matching through machine learning. The possibilities when AI is enabled are many for small businesses.

1. Personalized marketing

Gone are the days, when fancy advertising and celebrity endorsements formed the crux of marketing for businesses. Today, a small business can creatively outperform a larger brand in the same industry for marketing excellence. By marketing, we do not simply imply great visual representations and ads, but how technology can be a crucial component in bolstering marketing efforts for small businesses. With marketing automation, it has been proven that there is a 12.2 % reduction in marketing overhead and this will positively impact lead generation as well.

In fact, four out of five users of marketing automation witnessed an overwhelmingly positive increase in leads generated. In addition to the numbers, the quality of leads that are generated through targeted and highly personalized marketing tools available today, are significantly higher as well. By diving deep into insights derived from AI enabled marketing tools, small businesses can create high impact campaigns that have more chances of conversion. As for target user segmentation, today’s marketing automation tools help to identify leads that have higher chances of conversion based on past preferences and behavior. It also saves time and money of marketers who would have otherwise spend hours or even days to send thousands of emails to folks who have very minimal chances of doing business with the organization.

Related Reading: Simple Ways to Create a Small Business Website in 2019

1. Workforce Management

A small business often has restrictions on the physical work infrastructure they can offer for employees. But today, the lack of dedicated physical office space is never a constraint on measuring the success of your business. Thanks to advancements in digital tools, it is possible to have a workforce managing your business operations from literally anywhere in the world. You only need to provide a working space for employees that must absolutely be located in an office environment to run your office. Others can simply connect to your business remotely and there are tons of collaborative and management tools available to ensure that a remote workforce operates as efficiently as an in-house team.

Additionally, if your business requires executives to be deployed at filed locations or at customer premises to carry out tasks, then there are tools that assist them to deliver more valuable services. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2020,75% of field service organizations with more than 50 users will utilize the capabilities of a mobile app to deliver customer delight. Thus, managing a workforce becomes quite seamless with a host of digital tools available for small businesses to help them empower their workforce to work better and more productively.

1. Digital Payments

You may argue that almost all businesses small or large offer convenient payment modes for customers, it is a known fact that this convenience is limited to cash or card in most cases. The customer of today, however, expects more than just a card swiping option to pay for his or her purchases. This is where small businesses need to invest in building or incorporating world-class payment infrastructure to help serve customer needs better. This includes digital wallets, NFC enabled smart payments on smartphones and wearable devices and much more.

While the physical infrastructure and complexity for such smart payment solutions are less, there is a considerably high level of technical prowess involved in facilitating the solution seamlessly. Sensitive financial data of customers has to be managed securely as any event of a breach will likely result in lawsuits and tarnished reputation which may be difficult to recover. Moreover, this sensitive financial data may at times be shared with your businesses vendors as well for settlement of invoices, etc. More the number of stakeholders, greater is the security assurance needed for the digital payment infrastructure. This trend will be crucial when a small business starts to grow global ambitions as today’s technology allows you to scale rapidly with virtual platforms like e-commerce sites and partners.

Related Reading: INFINCE – A One Stop Technology Solution for Small Business

1. Data Privacy

We already covered a portion of this in the payment trends section but considering the rapid scale in which consumer data is generated and consumed by businesses, data privacy is a trend and force to reckon with. Today, every single piece of information be it past interactions of a customer with your business or their preferences in investing or their personal and social media interests are all acquired and analyzed for arriving at business decisions. While this is a good thing for business, several users have repeatedly voiced their concerns on the growing trend of sensitive customer data becoming exposed to fraudulent and inappropriate proceedings. Increasing compliance requirements like GDPR and other international privacy laws will impact the way in which small businesses operate using consumer data.

As a business owner, you need to ensure that the digital systems and business processes that handle sensitive customer information have strict guidelines for privacy preservation as fines for any mishaps could literally throw your business out of operations. Data privacy policies and tools needed to safeguard customer data are an important asset for all businesses irrespective of their business domain and geography.

If you are a small business owner, then the 5 trends that we covered in this blog are of prime importance. They can very well define the future of how your business will perform in a highly competitive market. With the vast array of digital tools available to support various facets of your business, it is quite natural to get confused about where to start investing and exploring. This is where INFINCE comes to the rescue. With cloud-based integrated solutions, INFINCE can bring together the robustness of suite solution for enhanced productivity and efficiency.

INFINCE – Build Your Team & Collaborate