The Key Benefits of Using a Unified Workplace App for Modern Businesses

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed every aspect of how businesses used to operate. It has also led to the need for accelerating digital transformation and using corporate technology productively and efficiently. As more and more organizations adapt to working remotely, workplace apps have emerged as a reliable solution to meet their varied needs.

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

These apps for the workplace help employees maintain efficient communication, stay on top of their productivity, and collaborate with team members, clients, and customers to deliver the desired outcome. However, this has also spotlighted finding a reliable workplace app that can optimize their business operations.

Read more: 6 Ways Online Collaboration Software Helps Manage Your Virtual Team 

How Workplace Apps Enable Seamless Collaboration

A recent Gartner poll revealed that around “48% of employees would likely work at least part of the time remotely after COVID-19”. That means companies need to find the best platforms to help their workforce collaborate digitally and tweak their employee experience strategies for the best results. Using different workplace apps for various processes such as video conferencing, project management, or team collaboration is possible. However, a unified workplace app that combines all these features under a single dashboard makes things easy.

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

An all-in-one collaboration platform will also give businesses advanced employee monitoring tools to ensure maximum productivity. As organizations are looking to adopt nontraditional employee monitoring tools, an integrated workplace app with remote worker monitoring features can considerably reduce the operating costs. Moreover, advanced all-in-one collaboration apps also allow administrators to use employee information and analytics for ensuring their health and safety data, which will be vital in the post-COVID era.

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

How to Maintain Company Culture in the Post-COVID Era

Choosing the right workplace apps will also have a significant impact on company culture in the post-COVID period. According to USA Today, “When employees do start to return to the office – and those dates keep getting pushed further and further back for many organizations – some companies plan to implement rotating schedules to reduce the number of people in a given space.”

That has made it quite difficult for companies to maintain the business culture and support their employee communities. As per Mark Caskey, EMEA CEO for Corporate Solutions at JLL, “The current COVID-19 restrictions have accelerated demand for digital solutions that enable companies to provide a safe working environment for their employees, so they feel comfortable going back to the office.” This is where a unified workplace collaboration app can come in handy.

An advanced all-in-one collaboration platform will not only facilitate the “working” side of an employee, but it can also support to address the personal needs of employees. For instance, administrators can easily define and describe the new job roles to the employees, making the onboarding process simpler and more efficient. 

Here, we have listed three ways a unified workplace app can help companies successfully operate beyond the Coronavirus pandemic.

1. Using Video Conferencing Apps for Workplace

Video conferencing tools have become an essential component of modern-day business operations in the wake of the global crisis. It allows businesses to innovate and use technology to make communication and collaboration simpler. Reports by Reuters say that there has been a surge of around 400% in the demands for specific video conferencing tools that incorporated Augmented Reality for making the team meetings more interactive.

Workplace app developers are looking for better solutions to address their users’ growing needs, allowing more participants in a meeting, screen sharing features, and excellent administrative tools. Simultaneously, video conferencing apps for the workplace also incorporate better security and privacy features to let businesses take advantage of the collaboration suite.

Read more: 5 Ways to Secure Your Meetings When Using Video Conferencing Software  

2. Incorporating a Comprehensive Workplace Chat App

Communication platforms for instant messaging are another vital aspect to have in today’s business scenario. Besides video calls and virtual meetings, team members need to have an all-inclusive workplace chat app to communicate project details throughout the workday. It will ensure that employees can cooperate and work efficiently.

Modern all-in-one collaboration apps combine instant messaging options with other productivity features that eliminate the need to switch between different workplace apps, say, to start a video or audio call when needed. Employees can use the workplace chat app for file storage, file transfer, and video meetings on the go.

3. Finding the Best Project Management Solutions

Businesses need to find the best ways to assign tasks to their employees, coordinate workloads, map out the tasks, schedule virtual meetings, and streamline collaborations. All of that can be made simpler with the right project management solution. However, when project management is included in the collaboration app, it is more convenient for the administrators to oversee everything.

Many free-to-use project management solutions come with integrations for other workplace apps and collaboration platforms for streamlining the process. However, choosing such an option will come with certain restrictions and may not offer a complete solution for some organizational needs. That is why an all-in-one workplace app with all the features included is always a wiser choice.

Ensuring Health and Safety Measures With Unified Workplace Apps

Modern all-in-one workplace apps are also evolving with features to focus on the health and safety measures incorporated in the organization. For instance, you can use the workplace app to book meeting rooms and follow COVID-19 regulations when hosting a team conference. Some apps also allow businesses to calculate occupancy plans as per the office layout to follow all the social distancing norms.

Abiding by the new restrictions and ensuring safety compliance are crucial in the post-COVID workplace. So, businesses must choose the right workplace app that empowers them with all the necessary tools to resume their operations successfully.

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

As your business operations often face disruptions, there is an urgent 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.

Building an ideal digital workplace today: What you need to know!

The modern-day workplace is evolving rapidly with remote working culture, distributed teams, innovative business models, and more. This has led to the rise of many digital workplace software solutions that empower organizations to make the most of their digital transformation. Yet the availability of multiple features in online collaboration tools also makes it a bit difficult to choose the right one for your needs. That is why it is important to understand how online collaboration software can help to unlock your business potential for the better.

The need for robust digital workplace software solutions has never been more important to tackle the new challenges. Traditional content management systems and remote work tools do not make the cut anymore. You need to equip your business with the right solutions to ensure high-end productivity and improve the efficiency of your digital workplace. Here is a checklist that will help you in that regard.

1. Define the Strategy and Roadmap

You need a dependable digital workplace strategy and roadmap before you start investing in any kind of online collaboration tools. It is imperative to determine your goals and technology priorities and understand how the remote work platform can provide more value to your business, your employees, and your consumers. This way, you can find the best solutions for meeting your specific requirements and ensure that your business processes support your objectives.

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

2. Focus on Project Management

Once you have identified the need for online collaboration software for boosting your digital workplace culture, you need to see how they can help with project management. Your ultimate goal should be to make sure that your team members stay aligned with the company objectives and perform their roles on time to meet the targets. Similarly, your remote work software should also allow you to analyze the market trends so that you can figure out the right approaches to stay ahead of the competition.

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

3. Ensure Seamless Communication

The most practical benefit of remote work software is that they allow easy communication. Yet this should not be limited to instant messaging alone; you should also make sure that your team can seamlessly share relevant files and information to make it more effective. Therefore, you need to invest in all-in-one digital workplace software that allows you to make the most of both top-down and bottom-up communication channels through different features like polls, feedback forms, news bulletins, etc.

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

4. Include Video Conferencing Features

While you are looking for seamless communication, also see if your remote work platform comes with video conferencing capabilities. This is one of the most popular modes of communication these days and helps to ensure that your remote team can have face-to-face interactions with each other. Likewise, it should also have simple collaboration tools to let your employees convey their ideas across easily. This way, you can maintain good relationships within the company and ensure superior productivity and business efficiency.

Read more: Why is InfinCE the safest choice for your company’s video conferencing requirements? 

5. Leverage the Power of Chatbots

Chatbots powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) can perform many of the day-to-day rule-based business tasks to ease the stress on your employees. That makes automation and chatbots an integral part of any digital workplace, allowing your team to focus on other important aspects of the business. Besides, chatbots can also help to streamline employee access to essential data and information across the business network. Chatbots also enhance customer experience by facilitating quick responses to their queries.

Read more: Automation In Small Business: 4 Areas To Get Started

6. Look for Personalization

Your online collaboration software should also come with personalization features and allow you to customize the digital workplace solution as per your needs. Many of the modern all-in-one workplace collaboration platforms come with AI-driven personalization capabilities, which give you superior results in terms of delivering relevant information as per the user roles, location, preferences, interests, and other activities. This can help to boost employee engagement and ensure improved productivity and experience.

Read more: Personalize your digital workplace with InfinCE’s enterprise collaboration features 

7. Opt for Flexible Integrations

Your business may already be using many different digital systems such as ERP solutions, CRM systems, content management infrastructure, etc. Therefore, you should make sure that your digital workplace platform allows flexible integrations with these systems as well. That way, you can continue using the existing digital platforms for your intended purposes and make them even more efficient by integration with the remote work software. Remember that your goal should be to unify these systems with technology and not create disruptions in the business processes.

8. Keep an Eye on Data Security

Data security forms the backbone of any company in today’s digitally-advanced era. As your employees will be accessing critical business data from different locations using the remote work tools, you need to make certain that the online collaboration tools you use are equipped with high-end data security features. This should go beyond standard user authentication and limited access; instead, you should bring additional safety features like firewall protection and data encryption to the mix.

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

The modern-day workplace can be complex, but it is not too difficult to navigate. You just need the right digital workplace software solution to strengthen your systems and ensure improved efficiency, productivity, and revenue.

The impact of using workplace technology is growing strong in every industry. Powerful workplace apps like InfinCE empowers businesses to make the most of digital transformation. Remote work software will not just ensure higher employee productivity and satisfaction, but also lead to better customer experience and help in superior revenue generation. Get in touch with us to understand how InfinCE can be the game-changing workplace application for your enterprise. 

How Technology Is Changing Workplace Culture for the Better

The workplace as we know of is continually evolving and there is no denying the fact that technology is playing a key role in that. Over the past decade, businesses across industries have seen numerous iterations of what their ideal workplace could look like and have taken strategic steps to achieve that. With the recent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are now more focused on transforming their workplace and make it safer and efficient for their employees.

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

The development of workplace apps and integrated solutions has allowed businesses to focus on company culture and find ways to enhance productivity. It is widely accepted that happy employees work better, perform consistently, and even motivate others to give their best. With access to robust workplace technology solutions, employees will be more engaged, efficient, and loyal to the company.

How Workplace Technology and Culture is Evolving

Studies say that companies with a highly-engaged workforce see around 41% less absenteeism, 17% more productivity, and 20% more sales. These numbers perfectly justify the need of adopting top-notch workplace apps and streamline company culture and business operations. For the employers, using such rapidly-changing technologies opens up numerous ways to hire from a global pool of candidates for different job roles. 

Below are some ways in which workplace technology can help you to transform your company culture for the better.

1. AI and Automation will increasingly streamline business processes

Workplace technology is becoming increasingly intelligent with the incorporation of AI tools and automation. This can help reduce the load of many routine business processes and everyday tasks from your employees. Virtual assistants and automation solutions are already being employed by organizations to streamline their day-to-day repeated tasks such as sorting emails, handling data entry, sharing files, etc. As your employees do not have to spend their productive time on such routine and tedious tasks, they can focus on other important business processes.

Read more: Automation In Small Business: 4 Areas To Get Started

You can also employ automation software to monitor and manage various business systems so that your employees can seamlessly conduct audits and quickly generate reports. AI tools allow you to create different scenarios and estimate the practicality of your marketing and sales campaigns. Smart workplace apps can also help to apply different tweaks and see which one would be the most beneficial to realize your goals.

2. Workplace technology will improve usability and experience

According to an IDC report, more than 50% of user interface interactions will be performed using AI-powered technologies by 2024. Businesses are even adopting technologies like AR and VR to deliver a more intuitive work experience for everyone. When coupled with an all-in-one collaboration platform, your employees can access business apps and data from any preferred device that is connected to their workspace, even using VR/AR headsets. 

This can provide greater usability for employees, helping them to analyze critical data quickly, attend business meetings virtually, and collaborate with team members efficiently. It is seen that employees spend almost 20% of their weekly work time searching for information to do their job effectively. With reliable all-in-one workplace apps like InfinCE, teams can share documents and files quickly and even edit or annotate the documents with other team members in real-time. 

Read more: Top 10 Apps That Facilitate Secure File Sharing For Businesses In 2020

3. Remote work will be made more flexible with smart solutions

As the unemployment rate in the US is hovering around 3.6% alongside the high demand for skilled staff, you need to find out every possible way to engage and retain your employees. Remote work has been at the center stage for some time now due to the COVID-19 crisis and workplace apps hope to make it better. Aside from allowing employees to work on flexible hours, smart office and collaboration tools allow you to bring your workforce together from different locations.

This also helps you plan the right remote work model for your company. You can adopt workplace solutions that provide your employees with a secure and unified channel to access the required business data and collaborate with others to deliver the results you are looking for. It also allows your employees to choose the best work environments and tools for their work, while you can manage access and information security centrally.

4. Remote workplace technologies will reduce overhead expenses

Another prime advantage of remote work is reduced overhead costs for your company. All it requires is an all-in-one collaboration platform with all the latest features that you need for improving your employee productivity and efficiency. As your employees can work from home using their devices, it helps to significantly decrease the operating costs. Modern workplace culture with BYOD policies further helps you save on the space, materials, and utility costs.

The impact of using workplace technology is growing strong in every industry. Powerful workplace apps like InfinCE empowers businesses to make the most of digital transformation. Remote work software will not just ensure higher employee productivity and satisfaction, but also lead to better customer experience and help in superior revenue generation. Get in touch with us to understand how InfinCE can be the game-changing workplace application for your enterprise. 

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.

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 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. 

Here is a list of the leading remote collaboration tools of 2020

We’re nearing the halfway mark of 2020, and most of the world’s working population has shifted to remote working. This transition would not have been possible if powerful digital collaboration tools for employees to stay connected were not available. From schools to IT companies, every organization has integrated an online communication and collaboration platform to help their workforce carry out daily operations smoothly and interact with their peers, customers, or any relevant stakeholders in their work. 

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

Here is a look at the top 11 online collaboration tools that made a difference for businesses in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic:

1. InfinCE

While collaboration and communication are the key elements to look forward while choosing a digital platform for your business, InfinCE offers enterprises with a host of other features in addition to the key elements like an integrated CRM, Rich management dashboards, cloud-based secure web hosting, virtual desktops and much more. It is one of the best online collaboration tools for small and medium businesses.

2. Microsoft Office 365 and Teams

One of the most popular players in the global software industry, Microsoft has helped numerous organizations manage their remote work operations smoothly with their pool of collaboration tools and platforms. From productivity tools like MS Word, Excel, etc. to video and conferencing solutions like MS Teams, they offer a large set of options for businesses to choose from.

3.  Slack

Slack definitely needs no introduction to several global companies as it has helped millions to collaborate efficiently even before the COVID-19 pandemic took things in a different direction. Offering personalized experiences, video and team conferencing, mobile app support, and seamless integration with popular cloud storage services, Slack offers a solution for all your remote work needs.

4. Zoho Cliq

From simplifying team communication to managing real-time messaging, task schedules, and automation, Zoho Cliq offers enterprises of all sizes with a comprehensive suite of collaboration tools. It also offers easy integration with other 3^rd party platforms for storage, calendar management and even offers easy management of customer relationships by integrating seamlessly with Zoho’s own established CRM solution.

5. Trello

Trello has a massive fan base across the globe, be it amongst organizations or individual freelancers and consultants. The primary reason for this fan following is undoubtedly the simplicity of the platform to help organize multiple tasks that require collaboration from a number of employees. The simple interface and easy navigation within individual Trello cards help managers and employees to handle even complex projects efficiently with Trello and it integrates well with other platforms such as Slack, Google Drive, GitHub, etc. to make the experience even more rewarding for teams.

6. Asana

From organizing workflows, tracking work progress, and facilitating seamless communication, Asana is still one of the veterans in the online collaboration space and has been around since 2008. Companies like Intel and Uber rely on Asana as their core communication platform to stay organized, enable better conversations between staff, and manage diverse projects and their individual task progress.

7.  Google G-Suite

Undoubtedly one of the world’s most well-known tech brands, Google doesn’t want to be left behind in the race for online collaboration tools. Its G-Suite platform offers a host of capabilities with a collection of apps for various enterprise collaboration activities. You have everything from emails to video conferencing to productivity apps all rolled into different subscription plans that you may feel free to choose depending on your organization’s size. With top-notch security, support, and scalability, G-Suite is a trusted platform for thousands of businesses worldwide to help run their operations smoothly.

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

8. Ryver

Ryver offers a simple and easy to use interface for employees to connect and converse within an enterprise. From the ease of setting up teams to offering privileged features to different groups and the ability to manage private virtual spaces for individual project discussions, Ryver has grown into a strategic internal tool for several modern-day businesses. A major highlight of Ryver is the Facebook inspired intranet feed where employees can converse together/with each other on updates shared by the organization.

9. Facebook for Work

How amazing it would be if virtual office collaboration tools work similarly to Facebook with the same theme and inspired layouts? Well, this is exactly what Facebook themselves tried to offer when they launched the Facebook for Work platform. From productivity apps to seamless communication channels, the social media giant has brought several inspiring features into the product aimed at making internal enterprise communication interesting.

10. Podio

Podio makes for a great mobile-friendly workforce communication and collaboration platform. It offers flexible configuration options and easy integration with several functional and productivity apps like Evernote, Google Drive, Dropbox, and much more.

11.  Basecamp

A darling of technology service companies, Basecamp brings together a very useful set of capabilities for communication and collaboration under one roof. With a highly affordable fee for unlimited teams, it finds tremendous use in companies with more staff.

Read more: 4 ways to bolster your IT team’s efficiency to support remote operations during COVID-19

With COVID-19 showing minimal signs of weakening, your business will be in dire need of an online collaboration platform to help employees stay connected. Get in touch with us to explore why InfinCE will be your best choice among the 11 we have covered in this blog.

4 ways to bolster your IT team’s efficiency to support remote operations during COVID-19

It’s only the second week of June 2020 and the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide has come close to 7.15 million. Governments, businesses, and people have started to realize that we may need to learn to live with the coronavirus for an unexpected period of time, at least until vaccines are found that can neutralize or eliminate its threat for good. Businesses and universities have transitioned their core operations to adopt a remote work culture. Except for some critical work operations that require a physical presence in the workplace, almost all companies now operate with employees working out of their homes.

Read More: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

What does this mean for the IT department across businesses who have moved into a remote work operation mode? 

IT teams need to quickly support the transition of the entire IT work infrastructure into a near 100% remote mode. From productivity tools to instant peer communication platforms, everything needs to be available for employees irrespective of where they are located. 

Here are some best practices you can utilize to get your IT team prepared for keeping your employees connected to their workplace virtually during such uncertain times.

1. Set Communication Policies

While remote working employees need access to multiple communication channels to effectively work on their tasks, it is important for companies to define the clear scope of each channel. One example would be an optimal usage of paid communication channels like VOIP facilities with limited licenses or shared licenses between departments. 

There should be a minimum availability of each such resource and policies must be laid out to ensure optimal utilization. 

Read More: How can businesses manage their remote workforce through efficient communication?

For example, if teleconferencing between team members of a project requires more time and more users to be connected to a single conference call, it can be moved to an online meeting platform that offers unlimited conferencing options rather than using limited license telephone-based VOIP conferences. This offers your IT team the flexibility to allot VOIP facilities to more demanding teams like customer-facing employees who may find it difficult to ask customers to get into online meetings rather than just a conversation over the telephone.

2. Secure Information Access

When employees work from their office, confidential information regarding customer projects may be distributed in local networks which could only be accessed from office computers. 

When there is a shift to remote working, this information should go into a more distributed storage facility that can be accessed over the internet. Hence a proper security policy and protocol must be defined for flexible information access over the internet. This allows IT teams to implement monitoring systems, maintain access logs, set privileged access options, and much more. 

Moreover, all employees need to be strictly made aware of these policies through regular communication from leaders, managers, and HR. Security should not be the sole responsibility of your IT team but an extended oversight of the entire workforce.

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

3. Provisioning of Digital Platforms and Tools

There is a huge demand for collaboration and communication platforms when employees work together on projects. The demand escalates to unprecedented levels when your stakeholders shift to a remote mode. 

From meetings to file sharing to project management, there is a multitude of managerial overhead for facilitating seamless operations while employees are working from home. 

This calls for the implementation of a powerful digital enterprise platform like InfinCE which can offer different departments within your organization the necessary digital tools and platforms for communication and collaboration. Such platforms make it easy for your IT team to manage overall digital infrastructure availability for remote workers and make support readily available for their needs at any time.

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

4. Measure, Analyze and Improve

For many businesses, this is probably the first instance where such a massive remote working policy came into force and that too in a very short notice. Glitches and delays are expected, but the key focus here should be to learn from each event and ensure a better experience the next time. 

It is important to regularly measure productivity levels of staff and align it with IT objectives such as availability, file management, security and data policies, software and license management, etc. 

Set out clear KPIs for measuring employee productivity during the timeline of remote work. The measured values should be analyzed to arrive at trends that occur in work patterns frequently. Feedback from employees should be collected with regards to infrastructural availability, network, or communication channel flexibility, etc. Learnings from all these should be factored in while your IT department optimizes your digital infrastructure to meet rising demands from your workforce.

Read More: How InfinCE helps you quickly transit to remote working

The remote work culture is expected to remain a norm for months to come as the COVID-19 pandemic is not showing a dramatic rate of containment of spread. Your IT teams need the most resilient enterprise IT platforms to help manage complex requirements of the entire workforce who are working remotely. This is where enterprise platforms like InfinCE can be their best friend. Get in touch with us to know how some of the world’s best businesses manage their digital workforce infrastructure seamlessly with InfinCE. 

How can businesses manage their remote workforce through efficient communication?

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage global health and economy, most businesses are beginning to accept the fact that they need to change their work culture to help sustain operations during such difficult times. One of the most successful ways that businesses small and large have followed to remain operational during the pandemic was by implementing remote workforce management at a larger scale.

Almost all staff of several organizations except those in critical roles that demanded physical presence at the office were asked to work from their homes. Several companies expect this form of work from home culture to last throughout the rest of 2020 or even extend beyond into the next year. With remote work culture becoming a mainstream norm, employers need to understand the importance of communication when a majority of their workforce is working independently out of their homes.

Here are 5 best practices that you need to incorporate to effectively communicate with your remote workforce:

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

1. Set Guidelines for Communication

When almost everyone works remotely to deliver business services, it is important for employers to set standard communication policies and protocols to prevent any disconnects or inconvenience from occurring due to lack of physical proximity. 

Your staff needs to be made aware of the different communication channels that are available, which to use for different scenarios, and how to approach others by respecting their privacy while working from homes. 

There needs to be a proper understanding of business hours and the need to complete any official communication cycles within stipulated working hours to ensure that employees get to spend quality time with their families as well.

Read More: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

2. Ensure a Seamless Communication Platform

The first step to empower your remote workforce to stay connected with their peer groups or the larger organization as a whole is to ensure the availability of world-class communication platforms. 

Having an email tool alone will not be enough to facilitate seamless communication. 

From instant messaging to social media-inspired intranet feeds, your business must set up a comprehensive platform that allows employees to stay connected, informed, and engaged throughout their work schedules. A digital platform can unify communication efforts, help co-ordinate multiple tasks simultaneously, and help employees to easily gain access to support from their peers or management.

3. Proactive Work Communication

It is important to ensure that employees are not left out of communications related to work updates or new service requirements. You cannot expect employees to put in their best effort if you reach out to them at the last moment with requirements which may even include direct customer interactions. Managers need to plan work schedules in advance and communicate the same to employees for them to plan and manage workloads efficiently.

4. Encourage Video Calls

When employees stay away from the office for months together and work remotely, it is natural that they feel a sense of incompleteness in their work schedules. The frequent tea break chats, lunch and dinner outings, workplace fun activities will all be missed terribly and this can add up stress levels. As the situation doesn’t permit employees to catch up with their peers directly, the best solution could be to encourage meetings and discussions to happen over video conferencing. 

It will be much easier for employees to work together or maintain their relationships when they frequently see each other and interact with video conferencing. Video calls bring in a sense of togetherness virtually for teams who are distributed at different locations.

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

5. Transparent Leadership Communication

As you work on strategies to remain sustainable in your business operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is equally important to keep your employees updated on the progress of the same. You need to assure them on aspects such as their job security, business performance updates, and other important strategic initiatives that you plan to take to combat the scenario. It is important to keep your employee communications transparent and ensure that they can freely reach out to the highest management level should a need arise for support. 

Read More: InfinCE Helps You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

Your employees are your biggest asset and it is important to establish a clear communication channel for them to alleviate their fears. This communication could be established through newsletters, video broadcasting of leaderships, Q&A surveys, feedback collection, etc. which could all happen on a weekly or monthly basis.

The new workforce management culture induced by COVID-19 is sure to pave the way for a future of open work policies wherein employees can work from anywhere they want and only ensure that quality work is delivered on time. As businesses, you need to have in place the proper communication and collaboration channel for your workforce to operate seamlessly during remote operations. This is where InfinCE can be a game-changer in your business. Get in touch with us to explore how Infince can create the best remote working digital infrastructure for your business to tide over a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.