Every workplace has its ecosystem. As a result, all of its aspects are constantly evolving. Employers today understandably want to establish a safe digital sanctuary for employees who have returned from the pandemic.

Because of the expanding technological adaptations, the digital workplace has limitless options. It contributes to a highly coordinated and running facility solely focused on providing a safe ecosystem and giving new experiences. Disruptive science, high-tech gear, and machine learning with AI are guiding workplaces toward a powerful digitalization that revolutionizes the way organizations operate.

A quick glance at the top digital workplace trends to expect in 2022.

Read more: Transform your Data Sharing Practices to Win Customer Trust?

1. Hybrid or Remote Work

Flexibility in how, where, and when individuals work is no longer a differentiator; it’s standard practice. Employers who do not provide flexibility will continue to see higher turnover, as employees seek roles in organizations that provide a value proposition more aligned with their objectives.

Organizations can benefit from data privacy with virtual private servers, robust firewalls, encryption/password-based access controls, concierge service, easy scalability, and reduced costs with InfinCE’s cloud architecture. Organizations may rapidly set up a business domain, website, mail server, and business apps without coding. Employees can gain access from anywhere using any device and continue from where they left off, presenting the organization with enhanced flexibility.

2. Four-Day Work Week is on the Way

According to LinkedIn’s Annual Big Ideas Report, industries will embrace the four-day workweek in 2022. This practice has already gained traction on a global scale, with organizations making the switch. (According to LinkedIn News, trial results reveal better employee well-being, work-life balance, and productivity.)

3. Employee Well-Being Prioritization

Organizations are increasingly concentrating on work-life balance, and employee mental health. This is likely to continue until 2022 especially as the epidemic causes more stress and burnout. Prioritizing employee well-being can also imply giving additional employee benefits, increased flexibility, and sign-on bonuses.

With InfinCE’s Collaboration Apps, employees can engage and connect, forming a professional bond that promotes teamwork and a sense of belonging, making way to a happier workplace experience.

Read more: How A Collaboration Software Can Improve Productivity

4. Focus on Centralized Communication

With teams dispersed across geographies and time zones, centralized communication will continue to surge to the top of the priority list to combat communication overload and miscommunication among team members. As a result, many large corporations are increasingly pursuing centralized communication platforms and improved work management.

With InfinCE, you can centrally oversee your complete IT infrastructure – server, storage, and staff. As well as create access controls for your files and apps using a single login, giving your organization superior insight over your authorized resources. In addition, you get to enable seamless business operations with InfinCE by accessing contacts with a click, live chats, one-on-one video calls, and frictionless video meetings.

5. Automation

Technological options include automated visitor management, capturing guest contact information, tracking and scanning visitors for COVID symptoms, recordkeeping, and even notifying hosts of visitors’ arrivals. According to a report published on fortunly.com, the total work hour completed by humans will decrease by 13% as they will be done by robots, or in simple terms, automated. As a result, automation will stay and govern the sectors in the future decade.

With InfinCE’s productivity tools, you can provide your employees with a plethora of ready-to-use productivity tools – documents, spreadsheets, and presentations – to manage business data in a variety of formats, securely share your documents with any person, team, department, or collaborators outside your organization via a simple link, and elevate your organization’s credibility and maintain a favorable brand image among your customers with personalized business email. Additionally, InfinCE provides custom dashboards driven by a selection of tiles. All this and more results in automating your workplace to a large extent.

Read more: All You Need to Know About Dashboards and Data Security

6. Shifting the emphasis from Roles to Skills

According to Gartner, in the post-pandemic era, the attention of employers will move from job roles that require a collection of “unconnected and disparate talents” to “specialized skills” catering to specific business demands and difficulties. This is mainly due to companies realizing that roles are more closely linked to a post in an organization’s hierarchical system. In contrast, talents are tailored directly to business goals and difficulties.

7. Geography and Location will be irrelevant

The sole benefit that the pandemic brought was the acceptability of remote jobs. The propagation of the virus led the globe to believe otherwise. As a result, even when businesses reopen, remote working is thriving and adopted by many organizations.

InfinCE allows your organization to benefit from hassle-free remote working, making distance unimportant. Get real-time insights into the CPU, memory, and storage utilization of your office and application servers’ OS, Files, and DB with Server and Storage Monitoring.  InfinCE allows you to automatically update these boundaries when they exceed their present capacity, ensuring optimal resource use at all times.

8. Employee Monitoring, Productivity, and Behavioral Analytics

Employers are increasingly investing in technologies geared to monitor and track their employees’ activity to increase productivity and efficiency. For example, platforms now enable firms to monitor employee behavior across email and technologies like Slack to gauge productivity.

With capabilities such as productivity tracking, reports, and behavior analytics, our platform, InfinCE offers you insights into your employees’ activities. Using this data, the organization can schedule further training for individuals who require it, boost productivity, and identify and control bottlenecks.

9. HR Transformation Using Technology and Data 

By 2022, more firms will have transformed their human resources departments by leveraging indirect sourcing and talent acquisition data analytics. HR professionals can also use data to determine why employees leave their companies and reduce turnover. In addition, people analytics or insights drawn from data related to worker talent are assisting companies in uncovering critical information about organizational performance and individual employee requirements. 

Custom Dashboards help increase business efficiency. InfinCE provides custom organization, department, team, and personal dashboards for increased visibility and efficiency.

InfinCE presents your organization with a growing library of tried-and-true business software solutions, some of which are free to use. In addition, this carefully curated InfinCE Marketplace offers your company a wide range of open-source and commercial business software alternatives from several software suppliers.

Read more: 5 Ways Today’s Workplace Has Transitioned Digitally

10. The Great Resignation will pursue

Employees are resigning in unprecedented numbers, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. As a result, many teams and organizations have made employee retention a primary goal. As a result, the “Great Resignation” will be present until 2022.  

How will these trends impact the workplace culture?

The realities of these trends will get piled on top of longer-term technology transformations, continuous DE&I journeys, and persistent disruptions and uncertainties. We believe these trends can hugely impact the workplace culture in the following ways: 

• Leaders will be proponents of conflict resolution. Their jobs will focus more on bringing things together than just being functional champions. 
• New-age technologies and breakthroughs that come faster than expected will emphasize the importance of having a digital mindset and transformation. We will need to be flexible and troubleshoot our current and future needs. Organizations will be made or broken by their ability to innovate. 
• Building new processes and practices to support the Hybrid workplace will be necessary. We will require a shift in both people’s and leaders’ mindsets. Managers who believe in one-on-one physical connections will need to adapt quickly because professional interactions will now be in virtual mode. 
• Organizations will have more feet on the ground and thinner central resources. The skills hired for locations will be sharper because they will need to establish their support systems. 
• Well-defined career prospects and progress will be a source of attraction and retention. People will start prioritizing training and upskilling to define their market value and existence. Every organization will need to prioritize workplace competence and performance. 
• Managing the new style of working and living puts strain on individuals. Managers must be more alert and respect this transition. As a result, engaging on a deeper level will benefit both.

InfinCE is capable of meeting your diverse needs in the best way possible. InfinCE provides everything you need to assist various digital office operations, from corporate chat tools to data management software. With InfinCE, your organization gets to enhance the workplace by offering a streamlined experience, cheaper costs, and effective deployment and change management.

Take an InfinCE Demo to explore the business gripping features for effective workplace management.

Today’s workplace is a sharp deviation from what it was a decade ago. The pandemic has significantly contributed to accelerating the need for change, almost setting a blueprint for the future of work in the long haul.

While the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be dominating headlines all over again now, with new variants posing newer threats to everyday life, regular workplace functioning has taken a beating. Considering the vagaries of this scenario, the much-awaited return to the office in physical work environments seems like a far cry.

Amidst this continuously evolving workplace landscape, organizations worldwide are adopting innovative tools and technologies to keep pace with the dynamic challenges that are characteristic of today’s remote working model.

As we debate how a hybrid model will dictate the post-pandemic workplace, one thing is for sure – the current day workplace is highly digital, offers more flexibility than in the past, and is in a constant state of flux.

Let’s take a look at the many facets of the workplace that have undergone a significant transformation over the past few years and how they have had an impact on overall workplace productivity.   

1. Employee-oriented workplace policies

Human resource managers have their tasks cut out with today’s digitally empowered workforce. Both employers and employees today value transparency and frequent communication and are looking forward to embracing an open culture that shuns hierarchy. A recent McKinsey report states that organizations that have clear open policies and approaches, and streamlined communications have employee well-being and productivity rise.

An interesting observation is that organizations with a clear mandate about post-COVID-19 work arrangements have a significant uptick regarding employee-reported feelings of support. There is a three-fold increase in terms of a feeling of inclusion and an almost five-fold increase in individual productivity. 

From this, it is clear that a cookie-cutter approach to workplace policies is no longer a sustainable solution. 

2. Increased agility in work environments

The traditional on-premises work model would typically include a standard set of tools such as Microsoft Office suite, a company-wide email network, and an internal communicator application. Today, all of this has undergone an interesting makeover. With the advent of the cloud, we are heading towards an entirely cloud-based system that is equipped with smart tools for better collaboration, increased accessibility, enhanced openness, and embracing agility on the whole. 

The physical work environment has slowly yet steadily pivoted from a fixed location model to a co-working or collaborative workspace. It is supported by the superior technological prowess of IoT and other smart capabilities. In addition, immersive technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) show increasing readiness for mainstream business adoption, particularly for conferencing and multi-hosting events. Leveraging the power of IoT and other immersive technologies with their limitations is an important step in determining how successful a remote workplace can guide employee productivity. It remains to be seen, although it offers the scope for immense potential at face value. 

Read more: How A Collaboration Software Can Improve Productivity

3. Rapid skill enhancement/ upskilling via virtual learning

The pandemic has taught us enough lessons on how it is important to be well-equipped to handle change when things come to a grinding halt. Drastic changes in workload allocation with resource crunches have led to an acceleration in the creation of new roles. In such a scenario, it’s essential for today’s workforce to reskill themselves to fit themselves better and contribute effectively to overall organizational changes. In a Feb 2020 McKinsey Global Survey, 87 percent of executives reported going through skill gaps in the workforce or expected them within a few years. Reskilling and upskilling can be path-breaking because they help employees acquire cross-functional acumen, making it seamless for them to work across different business functions. In the same vein, it is seen that the remote working environment is ripe to facilitate on-the-job learning and self-learning activities.

4. Embracing holistic development with a focus on health and safety

COVID-19 has sounded alarm bells concerning employee health and safety. Therefore, dialogue and discussion in that direction have been on the rise, rightly so. Health and legal experts have mandated the need for on-the-job medical screening as a prerequisite to working in offices in the future. To that end, several global organizations are willing to extend support to employees during the pandemic and in the long run with perks such as providing access to mental health resources and childcare coverage. 

5. Sustainability and carbon footprint will assume prime focus

Largely touted as the practice run for the next crisis, climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic has set the stage for organizations to factor in environmental sustainability as a crucial goal. At the same time, they draw up their business objectives. Companies such as Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc., and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have pledged to become carbon neutral by 2050. Building an environmentally sustainable workplace model must go beyond achieving individual goals such as minimizing carbon emissions. It should be a collective mindset that addresses a mosaic of related issues in tandem and fundamentally becomes the core facet of organizations’ business models.

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

How does a comprehensive digital orchestration platform like InfinCE come into play while we build a future-ready workplace?

As the hybrid workplace model comes under the spotlight and is here to stay, we can confidently say that technology will play a crucial role in its success. So every organization looking to make a mark at the global level can set itself up for success if they consider digital disruptions the first step toward thriving in their respective industries. Digital tools for friction-free business management can make employee interactions and customer interactions seamless across all types of environments, thus enhancing productivity several notches higher.  

An all-under-one-hood enterprise platform such as InfinCE can arm you with the competitive edge you need to have in today’s dynamic work environment. Replete with a wide array of features such as Calendar and Task Management, Intranet and File Exchange channels, Collaborative Document and File management, etc. InfinCE allows you to up your game with digital transformation, reimagined!

Get in touch with us to know more about InfinCE.

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed enterprises to adopt different work from home policies to keep their business operational. Yet after a prolonged remote working routine, organizations are now facing new challenges to reopen their offices. Most of it is due to the mixed emotions of employees returning to the office. It brings rise to the concept of a hybrid workplace – an approach that combines remote work policies with the usual office work culture.

In a hybrid workplace, employees have the flexibility to choose from working remotely or from the office in line with their job requirements and preferences. Many big enterprises have already started planning the best model for their hybrid workforce and determining how it would benefit their business and the employees. In fact, a strategic approach is crucial when adopting a hybrid work culture as reports from Boston Business Journals highlight that employees would rather turn down their raise (up to $30,000) in favor of working remotely.

Read more: Shifting to a Digital Workplace? Here’s What You Need To Know!

Enterprises Need to Embrace the Change

Companies need to realize that employee expectations have drastically changed over the past 18 months of working remotely. If they look ahead to attract and retain employees moving forward, they need to carefully draft their hybrid work model to fit the needs of their employees as well as the business. It requires redesigning the work policies, culture, and offices for the hybrid workforce.

A recent survey from the shared workspaces provider, WeWork, says  “75% of employees would give up at least one workplace perk for the freedom to choose their work environment.” Also,  around 50% of employees would “prefer to spend three days a week or fewer in the office, and when they do go in, they want to be there 5 hours a day or less.”

According to Quendrida Whitmore, SVP and head of community at WeWork, “The pandemic spurred a seismic shift in how we think about work. Employees prefer the flexibility to work where they want — at least a few days a week — and most companies of all sizes embrace hybrid work models.” However, adopting the hybrid workplace culture goes way beyond just providing flexible work options to the employees. It involves a tactical approach to ensure optimal employee engagement and overall productivity.

Read more: What is Hybrid Cloud Identity and Why It Matters for Your Business

5 Tips to Ensure Hybrid Workplace Success

To restart, companies need to think about using technology to facilitate employee management and drive expected operational efficiency. The hybrid workplace is expected to stay, so you need to ensure that your organization is ready to adopt it right and navigate the challenges effectively. Here are five tips that will get your hybrid work environment going.

1. Create Proper Channels for Communication

One of the most common challenges in remote work is to ensure good communication lines for employees. A hybrid workplace will not be devoid of this problem either, so you need to make sure that you have well-defined channels for communication between different departments as well as remote and on-premise employees. A robust team management suite like InfinCE can be a godsend in this scenario.

InfinCE ensures that your employees can easily interact with the relevant people with multiple options for one-on-one and group communication. What’s more, InfinCE also makes it much simpler for your employees to access the required information and business data to perform their jobs more effectively.

2. Set the Company Expectations and Goals Upfront

When managing a hybrid workforce, you need to ensure that your teams are on the same page and moving forward as expected. In a flexible work environment, it can be challenging to make sure that everyone on the team knows the metrics and team goals they need to achieve. This can, in turn, affect the overall productivity of the company and lead to an exhausted workforce.

InfinCE provides a unified dashboard to announce company news and pass the information to all the teams in real-time to resolve such challenges. It ensures to keep your remote and in-office teams aligned with the company goals and timelines to deliver their best performance.

Read more: All You Need to Know About Dashboards and Data Security

3. Collect Feedback to Make the System Better

Managers and supervisors give regular feedback to their teams to ensure they address specific pain points and improve their performance. Similarly, collect feedback from employees on the hybrid work culture. It is important to ask how your employees feel about the hybrid work environment to improve the system and tweak the processes as required.

An all-in-one team collaboration platform like InfinCE helps everyone in the team stay on the same page with constant communication, feedback, performance transparency, and goal tracking abilities.

4. Provide the Required Training to Your Employees

You will need to reimagine what skills your employees need to ensure optimal output in a hybrid workplace. The success of your hybrid workplace approach will heavily rely on how familiar your employees are with using digital technologies for work management. It can range from the ability to make decisions to collaborating virtually within different departments.

You have to reassess the skills of your team and create training programs to address the gaps effectively. InfinCE facilitates collaborative and democratic training and development through easy access to top LMS platforms. Allowing seamless integration, InfinCE lets take advantage of effective tools that help drive a skillful workforce and productive workplace.

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

5. Integrate the Hybrid Work Culture into Recruiting

A major advantage of having a hybrid workplace is that you get the flexibility to hire candidates from anywhere across the world. The flip side of it also implies that employees can consider job offers from anywhere and join companies that best fit their needs. However, it creates a challenge when recruiting in-demand skills. Hence, you need to define employee engagement and support thoughtfully to attract new employees.

It goes true for retaining current employees as well. If you fail to integrate the brand value in your hybrid workplace culture, employees may start to look out for other opportunities. InfinCE helps integrate top CRM systems to help ease the onboarding process as well as keep staff motivated and engaged.

Do Not Rush It

You need to accept whether you are ready for a hybrid workplace or not. It is essential to have open interactions with your employees to determine whether they are willing to return to the office or prefer remote work. Likewise, you also need to evaluate the workforce capacity and rank your decisions on that. If only a few employees want to return to the office, it would be wiser to rethink reopening and draft the right working plan to suit your business needs.

InfinCE is a promising digital workplace collaboration platform that can easily bridge the gap between work from home and work from the office. InfinCE can easily transform your IT infrastructure into a digital friendy ecosystem at minimal budgets, establishing a convenient hybrid workplace model. To know more about how to get started with InfinCE, reach out to our experts or sign up here.

Utilizing Technology Effectively for Optimal Employee Engagement

Adapting to the situation is the mandate in the post-pandemic world, renewed to its core, especially in the business sector. Organizations failing to embrace the workplace trends and culture will eventually suffer productivity loss and see a decline in the overall operational efficiency. Businesses that offer workplace flexibility get to taste success even in uncertain times. The best way to increase adaptability and flexibility is to use the right workplace technology to ensure optimal employee engagement.

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

Workplace collaboration technology improves employee engagement

People engagement has always been a vital element of the workplace. Employers that are new to the remote work culture often find it difficult to ensure effective employee engagement. Forward-looking enterprises find their solution in all-in-one collaboration platforms, like InfinCE, to improve employee satisfaction, retention, engagement, and productivity rates. 

With the InfinCE digital workplace orchestration platform on your side, you can assign tasks and manage multiple projects from a single dashboard. You can also use various collaboration features like instant messaging, video conferencing, audio calls, and productivity apps to keep everyone aligned with the common goal.

Read more: Why InfinCE Digital Workplace Should be Your Remote Work Companion 

The growing usage of collaboration platforms

Studies say that the adoption of communication and collaboration tools has gone significantly high in the past couple of years.

Fingent, our parent company, successfully switched to 100% remote working in March 2020 with InfinCE digital workplace platform. With InfinCE, Fingent’s team can meet virtually any time of the day and discuss work on the fly.

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

Spiceworks Ziff Davis reports that “in June 2020, 81% of businesses were using business chat apps, a big jump from 67% in 2019. Additionally, three months into the COVID-19 crisis, more than one-third (37%) of IT decision-makers reported employees in their organization preferring to use business chat apps over email for internal communications — up from 31% in 2019.” These stats denote that businesses now see such communication and collaboration tools as essential components in their day-to-day operations.

However, the challenge is that you still need to be agile and flexible while using such communication tools in a hybrid workplace to enhance employee engagement. Most often, enterprises rely on multiple software applications for communication and collaboration subscribed from different vendors. It creates confusion as it is challenging for IT managers to keep track of numerous renewal messages and license expiry dates. The subscription costs will also add up. This is where InfinCE’s marketplace brings the difference. You can subscribe and readily access all your essential enterprise applications with a single sign-on through the marketplace. With this, you can easily integrate all your business processes, reduce expenses, manage resources optimally, and engage with clients better to stimulate growth. 

White Paper: Business Value of InfinCE Enterprise Cloud for Business Owners and Employees. Download Now! 

InfinCE drives superior productivity in your enterprise and enhances your outcomes. Here are the key drivers that will play a vital role in people’s engagement moving forward.

1. Agile and flexible approach

As mentioned, using the right technology matters the most in the hybrid workplace. Therefore, you need to find the perfect communication and collaboration fit for your company that allows you to stay on top of your goals. Likewise, you should be ready to make the change when required to ensure that your employees have access to the best solutions they need to perform to their best ability. With InfinCE, you can integrate as many productivity apps as you want with the system and scale the collaboration platform features to suit your specific requirements.

2. Get the basics right

It is said that technology is only as good as the person using it. Therefore, you should ensure that the platform you choose is easy to incorporate into your existing business structure and can be easily managed by your employees without needing any technical know-how. InfinCE gives you the best of both worlds – onboarding and using the platform is a breeze, while switching to the communication and collaboration tool will not break the current flow of your business operations either. Besides, there is also round-the-clock support available to help you with any needs, be it getting started with the video calls and conferences or upgrading the apps from the dashboard.

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

3. Break departmental silos

Removing the silos between remote teams is an essential factor to derive maximum productivity. It is very important to have well-defined workflows, processes, and systems in a hybrid work culture to ensure effective collaboration. InfinCE helps you get the message across the board clearly and allows you to review the daily work practices to make the best use of online conferences and virtual collaboration for knowledge sharing. All of that can be managed from a single dashboard, which also helps keep the costs in check and avoid technology chaos.

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

InfinCE dashboards can be restricted to, and contain just the information appropriate for the expected viewers. However, those viewers may be classified: Organization, Department, or Team. An individual can create private-use personal dashboards as well. Dashboards are perfect for sharing project and company updates or other information with co-workers. 

4. Use the right channel to communicate

Most of the popular communication solutions offer just a single channel for collaboration like video conferencing or file sharing. However, overusing the same approach for communication can actually hurt employee engagement and lead to “online fatigue” and loss of productivity. Sometimes, a call may not even be required to get the message across, and a simple text could do. With InfinCE, you can use different channels like audio calls, instant messaging, email, and video conferencing to prevent burnout related to overusing the same virtual communication style. When coupled with features like data sharing, task management, time tracking, reporting, etc., you get a complete tool in InfinCE to improve people engagement.

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

InfinCE makes life simpler for your employees as they do not have to juggle between different apps to find the information needed to perform their jobs. Business communication works well when done through the channel best suited for that purpose. You can always find a way in InfinCE to keep everything moving. The rapidly changing business landscape needs adaptability to remain productive and see results. With InfinCE on your side, you can have all the resources you need from a communication and collaboration platform to ensure improved productivity and employee engagement in your hybrid workplace. Sign up for free and see InfinCE in action. 

Demystifying Digital Workplace Complexity for a More Productive Workforce

The concept of a digital workplace has picked up steam ever since the COVID-19 pandemic forced thousands of companies worldwide to shift to a completely remote mode of working for their employees. The scale at which this transition happened and with no preparation time meant that enterprises needed to be at their killer best in enabling seamless adaption of the new normal of work. A Gartner survey points out that over 68% of C-Level executives have agreed that they have active involvement in enabling a digital workplace within the organization.

Read more: 10 Tips for First-time Remote Managers to Handle Their Teams Effectively

On the business front, the enterprise world is witnessing a massive shift to digital that was unprecedented and driven mainly by the need from customers who are now more digital-savvy and demand more digital-friendly services for all their needs. The COVID-19 pandemic was an accelerator to this phenomenon as now people rely on digital for pretty much all needs ranging from shopping to education, banking, and entertainment. Nevertheless, the pace and scale of growth in the digital ecosystem have also put enterprises in a tough spot requiring them to accelerate their operations into the digital realm. In other words, they need to adopt digital workplace solutions to remain competitive.

From customer interactions to internal celebrations, nearly all events have now transitioned into a virtual model. These add up the digital complexity levels in the organization that already had a long list of digital workplace solutions to help them out even before the pandemic made its impact felt. Simply adding newer tech into the digital enterprise ecosystem can negatively impact workforce productivity. A business needs to execute an effective digital workplace strategy that can help employees leverage the right software tools and work more efficiently in their daily routine.

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

Here are some tips for building a digital workplace strategy to ensure that digital workplace complexity does not reach extreme levels and negatively impact workforce productivity:

1. Create awareness

The first step in ensuring that your employees have a firm grip on the digital ecosystem within your organization is to build awareness about the ecosystem. Employees need to be trained and made aware of the need for each tool or the digital workplace solutions that the company invests in and how they can perform their roles better with their aid. Awareness building should be a continuous activity wherein different teams can be segregated based on the applications they need access to and regular sessions on new features, updated functionality, and usage instructions to be followed during different phases. The process should start from the employee on-boarding stage itself, and companies need to keep a tab of their activities that promote awareness.

Download White Paper: How A Digital Workplace Streamlines Business Performance

2. Focus on employees instead of tech focus

While enterprises love to boast about having the latest tech on board in their digital landscape, the practical use of the solution should empower employees to do better in their jobs. Just because a new platform has the latest tech stack, it does not really need to be in your organization. Evaluate software based on the usability it has for your employees, the scope it covers for your unique digital workplace needs, and the business purposes or challenges it can address.

3. Define business goals and metrics for digital workplace solutions

A critical issue that leads to digital workplace complexity is the lack of understanding of the enterprise’s goals. Most organizations do not know why they need to adopt a digital solution or integrate it into their present ecosystem. They also fail to understand how the new digital workplace solution can help them measure progress with the right metrics to evaluate their competence. By defining quantifiable goals for the business and creating relevant metrics to measure progress, the organization focuses on utilizing digital solutions for their intended purpose or outcomes. For example, one key goal for bringing in a digital collaboration tool is to minimize the number of physical meetings or utilization of meeting rooms. For this goal, the metric evaluated could be the number of meetings that have been done online instead of utilizing a meeting room.

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

4. Establish communication guidelines

When communication between folks in different hierarchical and organizational structures happens, there will be situations where these could be confusing and ultimately create trouble for the organization. One such challenge for employees is that they need to pay attention to multiple channels when communication happens virtually and through different media like email, intranet, organizational VOIP. 

You can overcome this challenge by including proper guidelines in your digital workplace strategy. Set the policies on which medium to use for a relevant topic or context of communication. The policy should also include which information is to be communicated through which medium. For instance, an organization-wide policy update information should be circulated throughout the company and hence would be wise to publish it via email or the company-wide intranet.

5. Fostering decentralization

In the traditional enterprise ecosystem, decisions were mainly made at the C-Suite or leadership level with very little autonomy for staff in lower hierarchies. But today, the scenario is different as successful organizations focus on empowering staff at all levels to reduce dependencies and make their own decisions for tasks that impact their operations. When digital workforce solutions are incorporated to help employees, this principle of decentralized decision-making needs to be considered. By enabling employees to have a fairer share of participation in an enterprise’s decision-making, they can innovate faster and scale up efficiency without delays. Your digital workplace strategy should focus on incorporating tech that empowers employees to take ownership rather than be plain users.

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

From enabling better collaboration to fostering an engaging environment for employees, a digital workplace is a crucial pillar for a sustainable future in the business world. Reports show that over 77% of organizations have prioritized digital workplace as one of their key goals for growth. As the workplace embraces a host of digital solutions, businesses need to ensure that their productivity and efficiency aren’t affected due to overly complex digital environments. Creating the perfect digital workplace strategy combined with a world-class digital workplace orchestration platform like InfinCE can bring out the best in your people. Chat with an expert to learn more about InfinCE. 

How can businesses enhance workplace collaboration in the digital era?

The COVID-19 pandemic is a crucial driver of change in recent human history. One of the most prominent disruptions it brought about was the closure of offices and workplaces worldwide, pushing millions of employees to work remotely from their homes as much as possible. Organizations that have long followed conservative policies and restricted employees from availing work from home options were forced to transition into an utterly remote mode of working in a matter of days. A year passed and what leading research and survey reports are pointing out is that the remote work culture that pushed its way into the spotlight in 2020 is likely to remain at large in the new normal. A Gartner survey of top CFOs revealed that 74% of respondents were planning to permanently shift a section of their employees to a complete remote mode of working even after the pandemic.

Firms opting for a majority remote work policy can leverage several benefits such as:

• Improved work-life balance for employees
• More productive work hours
• Lower operations cost with very little physical office space utilization required
• Better talent sourcing as remote work allows a global hiring scale. 

However, as firms move into remote work operations, the question of building a team culture arises. Many firms are wondering how to improve collaboration among their employees when most of the staff work remotely.

The answer to this problem lies predominantly in two parts. 

• The first part lies in creating a cultural shift to make your employees more accommodative of remote work demands and act responsibly with the freedom of flexibility granted. 
• The second part is empowering employees with the right digital workplace tools to help them succeed with their daily routine when working from anywhere. 

On this note, let us explore the top five ways to help employees improve workplace collaboration.

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

1. Streamline communication

The most critical aspect of achieving collaboration efficiency in the workplace is establishing a seamless communication framework. Should leaders address employees from time to time, peer-to-peer communication, or external client or vendor communication, there should be a robust communication ecosystem. It should comprise a powerful email system, instant messaging capability, intranet facility for employee engagement, feedback surveys and corporate announcements, business phone systems functioning over VOIP technology, and so on. 

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

Organizations need to define and implement an effective communication policy that outlines a framework that guides staff to find the right personnel for a query and the right medium to reach out to them. This will enable better and more productive communication, especially when employees are not working together in a physical space.

Download White Paper: How a Digital Workplace Streamlines Business Performance

2. Enable productive meetings

In almost all workplaces, tasks are often driven to completion through effective teamwork. For team members to remain in sync with each other and other dependent teams in a larger project exercise, there is a need to facilitate effective meetings or discussion sessions periodically. Daily stand-up meetings and monthly or weekly review meetings are a few examples of sessions that team managers can plan to foster a unified work approach. When remote work mode comes into the picture, enterprises must on-board digital workplace platforms like InfinCE that allow seamless audio and video conferencing capabilities. These would enable online meetings and discussions to happen more engagingly and interactively. Besides, colleagues can also get a chance to see each other once in a while which is an excellent social culture that promotes healthy collaboration in the absence of physical office activities like teatime chats and team lunch breaks.

Read more: 10 Ways to Deal with Modern Workplace Distractions and Chaos

3. Seamless information access

Once communication policies are set in place, the next important aspect in facilitating an improved collaboration experience in the workplace is seamless information access. Employees may require access to critical organizational information such as contacts of other employees or customer information, access to marketing or technical collateral for work tasks and customer engagement, information such as policies or IT guidelines, and much more. To promote seamless information access, organizations must ensure that they have a centralized information repository on their internal workforce collaboration platform. It should promote secure file access, exchange, and privileged access provisioning to ensure that confidential information is guarded against unauthorized access. Information access needs to be ensured from multiple devices such as laptops, smartphones, and from anywhere.

4. Empower employees with productivity tools

In the digital era, employees need access to multiple productivity tools to manage their workloads. These may include document tools, spreadsheets, presentation tools, and report generation tools to ease their daily task effort. Enterprises must provide seamless access for employees to such productivity tools and ensure that these tools offer instant virtual collaboration so that different employees can work together using these tools and collectively drive tasks to completion. It will be vital in a scenario where a majority of the workforce is engaged in remote work.

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

5. Enable efficient project and task management

Another helpful feature or productivity tool to have in a workplace is an efficient task manager, which will enable seamless coordination between different dependent teams or individuals and help manage responsibility while transparently improving collaboration efficiency. Team members need to be aware of how their task progress impacts the work of others. They also need to know the dependencies that should be managed transparently. 

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

As businesses continue to navigate new norms in the digital era, workplace collaboration becomes a significant pillar for overall business success. This is where InfinCE can be the one-stop enterprise management solution that helps manage people and serves as a robust digital backbone for your business. 

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

InfinCE covers all aspects from operations to customer relationship management and employee management with its wide range of enterprise apps available for each function. Get in touch with us to explore how your business can improve workplace collaboration by on-boarding InfinCE into your digital ecosystem. If you are excited to get on-board and try the powerful work collaboration software, we would like to invite you for a 30-day free trial here.

Want to Tame the Chaos of the Modern Workplace? Here’s How!

Technology makes our lives better and simpler. Still, there’s no denying billions of hours are wasted each day staring at smartphones, surfing the internet for no reason, or merely browsing social media channels. This phenomenon is, indeed, widely visible at workplaces, too. Today, the modern digital workplace is facing a universal challenge- how to deal with workplace chaos.

What is a modern workplace? It is, ideally, an amalgamation of a digital and physical space combined in such a way to meet the requirements of the end-users and your business. 

A modern workplace ensures that it eliminates obstacles such as:

• Poor communication
• Packed office spaces
• Clunky processes
• Beleaguered IT departments
• Inflexible contracts and software licenses
• Frustrated user-base
• Outdated service offerings
• Lack of cross-platform services

To boldly move forward into the future, you must handle the above chaos effectively.

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

10 ways to deal with modern workplace distractions and chaos

Even highly-qualified and skilled employees, regardless of good intentions, struggle with workday overload – competing deadlines, attending meetings, bombarded by emails, constant phone calls, digital distractions, and never-ending office drama. Contemplating these – would you call it an ideal modern workplace? Is it the best environment to work and be productive?

Let’s dive deep and unearth the secrets to tune out the modern workplace distractions constructively.

1. Focus on creating a positive, harmonious, and professional work environment

Wouldn’t you agree – conflict and disgruntled employees are the significant reasons behind the modern workplace chaos? Creating a positive work environment is the need of the hour. To set up a professional environment, appreciate your employees when they accomplish good work and have an outlet for employees to share and address their concerns.

2. Ensure transparent and clear communication

“Communication is the real work of leadership,” and it is vital to understand what’s going on with your employees and what measures should be taken to tackle their concerns and the chaos.

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

3. Unchain yourself from email compulsion

A constant watch on your emails is undoubtedly going to make you less productive. Monitoring personal emails excessively during office hours will kill remote workplace productivity. An alternate method to check your emails would be checking them at scheduled times. Or, concentrate on customizing your email to show only the urgent stuff.

4. Maintain a work journal

Having a work journal at your desk would come in handy organizing your daily routine – how much time you spend on long-term projects, how much time you dedicate to administrative tasks, and so on. This way, you will know when you are most productive and when you are engrossed in trivial stuff.

5. Focus on long-term goals or end goals

Not only will you have to maintain an open-door to your employees, but you must also remind them to focus on the long-term goals. This will minimize the confusion, doubts, and speculations during the short-term.

6. Define business hierarchy

It’s pertinent to have a clearly defined business hierarchy to tame the modern workplace chaos. For example, keep a deft employee in the middle, just like a meat shield, to answer your employees on your behalf. This will, to a great extent, reduce the chaos, thus boosting productivity.

7. Formulate a realistic business plan

In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Having a business with ambiguous plans and outlines will only add more pathos, leading to your business’s chaos and failure. 

Read more: Top 10 Ways to Set up an Effective Business Strategy in 2021 

8. Adopt proactive mindset and ponder over productivity

Having a proactive mindset and taking proactive steps will help you overcome the chaos and get the most out of your day. Instead of turning away from the common workday concerns like numerous emails and meetings, increasing workloads, immediate resignation of a supervisor, and changing priorities, you can focus on the following measures with a proactive mindset:

• Set up an uninterrupted work time
• Accomplish important tasks first
• Don’t overwork yourself
• Take breaks at regular intervals to keep your mind fresh and active

9. Recognize seductive office drama and stop it from creeping your peace of mind

You have to recognize and become aware of the office drama (or even the slightest distraction from work, such as gossiping, eavesdropping, spreading rumors, or sharing opinions without verifying the facts). You must assess your dedication to the drama and let your colleague tell you if it hurts work quality.

10. Improved self-awareness will tune out chaos from work

You must be aware of your positive mindset, mood, emotional level, and physical energy and pay attention to your zest, enthusiasm, reactions, beliefs, feelings, and thoughts while gearing up for your workday. Also, keep the challenges, priorities, and bright spots in the loop as these would help you reduce the chaos of the modern digital workplace.

Do you flaunt an integral urge to be distracted easily? If yes, it will be an arduous task to concentrate on when you are mentally exhausted. You have to reduce the number of decisions you make every day by letting industry-trained and adroit professionals take good care of you and your enterprise platforms. So, what’s the solution?

With InfinCE, you get to simplify decision-making and re-imagine your business with robust business management software. InfinCE is your go-to digital workplace platform for all your business needs.

Download White Paper: The Business Value of InfinCE for Business Owners and Employees If you are excited to get on-board and try the powerful business management software, we would like to invite you for a 30-day free trial here.

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.

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.