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. 

Is your KPI Tracking Software pursuing these 5 metrics?

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

Here are our top 5 picks:

1. Cash To Revenue Position

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

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

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

2. Customer Acquisition Costs

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

3. Outbound Marketing Performance

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

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

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

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

4. Operational Efficiency

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

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

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

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

5. Employee Engagement

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

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

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

The Role of Business Communication Tools in the Growth of a Business

Effective communication is the backbone of every successful business. This is even more applicable for modern businesses because of the massive shifts in the workplace culture of late. Technology advancements and the impact of COVID-19 have made robust business communication tools more than a necessity in every industry today. Fortunately, there are many impressive business communication apps, which make it easier for leaders and managers to collaborate with their teams, connect the missing dots, and drive improved performance and productivity.

Why Business Communication Tools are Inevitable in Today’s Workplace

It has become a norm for employees to use business communication tools for efficient collaboration. A recent Facebook Messaging Survey found that more than 63% of people across generations prefer messaging apps for communication instead of emails or calls. The impact can be seen in the business world as well with around 60% of businesses of all sizes using collaborative chat apps today. That is because business communication apps perfectly suit the evolving workplace culture while opening up ways to ensure improved employee productivity.

How Business Communication Apps Contribute to Business Growth

Business communication tools offer a flexible platform to furnish the varying demands of interaction within the company. Below are some of the fundamental advantages of using business communication tools that help in business growth.

1. Unmatched Adaptability

The nature of the modern workplace is changing rapidly and businesses across industries are promoting remote work. With a reliable communication app, leaders can collaborate with remote workers as needed, while allowing them to work as per their schedules. As more than 70% of millennial employees prefer working in a flexible environment, it is high time for businesses to adapt to the change and ensure proper communication channels to boost productivity.

Read more: 5 Tips To Effectively Manage Remote Teams During Challenging Times 

2. Easy Data Sharing

Modern communication tools come with simple features to share all the data and information needed for any task. Team leaders and employees can share files, upload links, or even directly stream content to make sure that everyone is on the same page. Business communication apps like InfinCE allow you to save files and data on the integrated cloud system. This makes collaborating on a project further easier, as anyone can access the required files later.

3. Effortless Task Management

Leaders can have a very difficult time managing a project if the team communicated through multiple channels. A business communication tool is much more than an everyday messaging app. It brings everything in one place so that managers and leaders can have a quick overview of the processes and stay updated with the progress of the project. It also makes planning tasks, assigning duties, setting deadlines, etc., simpler while improving accountability amongst the team members.

4. Real-Time Communication

Team collaboration apps keep employees posted on what is going on and make it easier to focus on their job roles. Messages can be sent to individual employees or in a group to make sure that everyone stays on track and performs their duties on time. Business messaging apps like InfinCE come with video conferencing capabilities to make meetings more interactive and engaging.

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

5. Less Unproductive Meetings

Physical team meetings can waste a lot of productive time. As per the Harvard Business Review, around 65% of employees believe that “meetings keep them from completing their own work, while 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient.” This serious problem needs to be fixed as quickly as possible to ensure better employee efficiency. As team collaboration apps allow you to access relevant information anytime and from anywhere, they help avoid the need for any physical meetings.

6. Improved Employee Engagement

Business communication apps are much different from mundane emails. They can act as a platform to share inspiring stories, exciting news, motivational messages, and have some fun too. Team messaging apps are not necessarily limited to sharing business-related data; many of them also come with emojis and stickers to add a personal touch to the messages and make it a bit lighthearted.

Read more: 5 Ways To Improve Business Growth Through Employee Engagement

7. Integrated Modern Technologies

An enterprise collaboration app can also be customized to accommodate various modern technologies, such as Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation, Natural Language Processing, Predictive Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence. These technologies can help streamline business communication by sorting information, analyzing data, generating reports, creating policies, and much more. This will, in turn, help to ease the stress of performing routine tasks from the employees and they can focus on other productive duties.

8. Performance Tracking

A business communication app can also allow leaders to track the performance of their teams effectively. Team collaboration tools allow managers to create jobs and determine goals before handing over those to the team members. They can then track the progress toward the specific goals and see how each employee is collaborating to achieve them. This brings more transparency to the team, boosts accountability among the employees, and motivates them to perform better.

Read more: 11 Online Collaboration Tools That Facilitate Remote Work In 2020

9. Mobile Apps

Everyone prefers to use mobile apps these days to read emails, track work, share information, and more. Forrester reports that around “66% of employees now use two or more devices every day.” With an integrated mobile app for business communication, employees will not have to manage multiple channels to communicate with each other. Instead, it will make it easier to access all the data and information across devices.

10. Improved Productivity

The most obvious benefit of workplace apps is that it improves employee productivity. As business communication tools make it easier to set goals, assign jobs, track progress, generate reports, and interact with the team members in real-time, they help boost employee morale and efficiency. Having a single channel for all business communication also avoids the need for multitasking, which further helps to improve time management.

There are countless ways for team members to interact with each other, but business communication apps give a more dedicated platform for building a productive work environment. While it cannot be predicted how the future will shape workplace culture, it can be said that advanced and feature-rich business communication tools will certainly be integral in the coming days.InfinCE brings you a pool of effective collaboration software to help you connect with your teams faster and work together better, for greater business achievements. Get in touch with us to learn more.

10 Leading Apps for Secure Enterprise File Transfer in 2020

From being one of the world’s most severe pandemics, the COVID-19 disease has devastated economies of almost all countries worldwide by forcing them to go into lockdown situations that were unprecedented in the past. There are several businesses that have been forced to operate with their staff working remotely and their business moving to predominantly digital channels. From retail to finance, there was a rapid shift in consumer appetite from an in-person store or branch visit to availing of goods and services from the comfort of their homes. To sustain operations of their digital customer channels, businesses had to ensure that their workforce too was able to work seamlessly and productively from their homes. However, conducting daily business operations from home rather than an office environment had its fair share of challenges. One of the most dominant challenges that existed was facilitating seamless and secure file sharing between employees. 

Confidential files that involved sensitive information are often shared between employees of the same department or between departments for various operational reasons. While at the office, the securely monitored local network serves as the best medium to share files irrespective of a file’s size. Being locally hosted and monitored, there wasn’t any threat from erroneous or malicious access being made of the files. For employees who now have to work from home, businesses have to rely on internet-based file-sharing platforms to enable continuity of their operations through successful employee collaboration.

Read more: 6 Ways to Build a Secure File Sharing Practice Within Your Organization

Keeping this need of facilitating secure file transfer between employees, let us explore the top 10 apps that help businesses achieve this feat seamlessly:

1. InfinCE

If you are looking for a one-stop-shop to enable your business to transition into a digital-friendly one, then InfinCE is the solution you have been searching for. InfinCE offers unparalleled cloud file storage and sharing options as well as becomes a comprehensive enterprise digital platform for collaboration, customer relationship management, HRM, and all core operational areas. InfinCE offers a branded cloud platform and a custom website builder with personalized options to match your brand’s identity. 

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

2. Dropbox Business

One of the early birds in the cloud storage market, Dropbox made its name from being the preferred destination for storing and sharing files online. For businesses, they have a dedicated enterprise version offering seamless file sharing, collaboration, and synchronization while ensuring secure information exchange between stakeholders.

3. G Suite Google Drive

Google is the undisputed leader for personal communication and collaboration with its range of services like Gmail and G Suite web productivity and storage apps. For businesses, Google offers an even more superlative file sharing and collaborative experience with its dedicated business focused G Suite Google Drive services. With highly affordable subscription plans and splendid support, it offers a great value proposition for businesses of all sizes.

4. One Drive for Business

Microsoft did not want to be left out of the enterprise file sharing market when its key rivals were all offering highly competitive products to entice customers. The One Drive for Business platform offers a highly scalable cloud-based storage and file sharing service that allows employees to securely share large files with their peers effortlessly and also get access to Microsoft’s leading enterprise collaboration tools like MS Word, PowerPoint, etc. as integrated subscription options for very attractive prices.

Read more: Top 10 Alternatives to Microsoft Teams that Aid Remote Work in 2020 

5. Citrix ShareFile

Citrix is a darling of the enterprise world where thousands of companies rely on their virtualization and secure remote access platforms to conduct business. The file-sharing app offered by Citrix offers an equally efficient job of helping businesses facilitate better and more secure file sharing to sustain their operations.

6. Firefox Send

The world’s most popular open-source web browser offers a free and secure file sharing feature via the Firefox Send option. It allows users to share files securely by simply dragging and dropping the file into the browser and share access links to relevant stakeholders. You even have options to set expiry for the files after a certain number of downloads or even set password protection for added security.

7. WeTransfer

WeTransfer provides business users with a simple drag and drop interface to host files on the cloud and share it with privileged access to any stakeholder. With free and paid versions available, the platform offers one of the quickest free sharing experiences for any collaborative file.

8. FileCloud

If you need a file-sharing platform that can be customized with your own intuitive corporate branding guidelines, then FileCloud is the perfect option for your business. It offers a highly personalized dashboard that can be modified according to your branding guidelines to give a unique user experience for all your employees while they use it to share files seamlessly with peers.

9. Box Business

Box is also one of the earliest cloud storage companies that revolutionized online file sharing. With seamless integration capabilities for G-suite, Office 365, and other popular collaboration platforms, Box makes for an attractive enterprise data-sharing platform with secure credentials thanks to its focus on encryption using data protection policies of high standards.

10. SendAnywhere

This is one platform that sticks to its name more rigorously to carry out its operations. It simply lets users send files from one location to anywhere using its secure data transfer channel. A paid subscription offers higher data caps and more control over transfer permissions making it a worthy contender for today’s business users.

Read more: 11 Online Collaboration Tools That Facilitate Remote Work In 2020

We hope you get to make an informed choice for your business’s digital future from our recommendations above and enable your staff to seamlessly share information and collaborate on work. Besides secure file transfer, InfinCE offers a basket of features that enable hassle-free and seamless remote work for enterprises of all sizes. 

Get in touch with us to know more about how InfinCE can be the best remote cloud platform for your business. 

Why is a custom web domain important for your business branding needs?

Having a website is considered a standard pre-requisite for today’s businesses as it is likely the first place where people will enquire about the business and its offerings. While creating and hosting a website is no big deal today with the tons of ready to deploy template website builder services available, there is one element that you must focus from a branding perspective for an enterprise website. It is none other than a custom domain name. For example, if your business name is “John’s Giant Ice Cream”, then a website with URL as www.johnsgianticecream.com will be more appealing from a branding perspective than having one such as www.johnsgianticecream.wordpress or www.johnsgianticecream.blogger.com. The same logic applies to your enterprise email id as well. If you have an official email account that reflects your business name as the email domain rather than Gmail or Hotmail, it is better from a branding perspective.

Let us examine 5 benefits of branding that your business will experience if you have a custom website domain and email:

1. Brand Recognition

Having a co-branded domain such as wordpress.com/mybusiness would be harder to remember for customers than one such as www.mybusiness.com. This would make it easier for customers to pass information about your business to their friends verbally or via telephone calls. The element of simplicity in having a custom website and email URL will ensure that your customers, both existing and prospective, can reach out to you at the earliest, in case there is a need for them to avail of your services or buy your products.

2. Risk-Free Personalized Identity

From a business point of view, having a unique website and email domain would ensure that they have a unique existence. When you have a 3^rd party sponsored co-domain as your business’s web address, then there are chances that you may have to change them in the future depending on policies made by the service provider. The service provider could cease to exist due to other issues and your domain goes down with them thereby impacting the large presence you would have built over the years with that website. Considering the risks involved in such a scenario, a custom domain for your website and email makes sense for a secure and seamless future for your business with a personalized identity.

3. Search Engine Friendly

Building a simple website for your business’s online reach is not a very tough thing to do. But making it visible in search engine results with a high ranking takes a lot of effort. By having a custom website URL, it helps your website to rank better in search engine ranking algorithms that focus on uniqueness more than generic names and 3^rd party hosting service providers who append their names to your domain for free hosting. As such a unique URL is more likely to be shared on social media, they get better ranking credits on that front as well.

Read more: 5 Ways Virtual Private Server Make a Difference to Your Business’s Digital Future

4. Subdomain Flexibility

Very often you might face the need to create subdomains within your website to have separate showcase pages for a particular service or marquee product. When you do not have a custom domain for your business, the concept of subdomains becomes even more complex. In most 3^rd party hosted domain services, you do not even get that option to include further subdomain on your website. This further reduces your organic SEO efforts and also makes it harder for customers to trust your unique offerings and learn more information about them from the subpage.

Read more: 5 Tips to Select the Ideal Web Hosting Partner

5. Email Credibility

One of the biggest advantages of having a custom business domain for your web landscape is the ability to have a unique email domain. When contacting customers or prospects, having a genuine business name domain as the extension of your email address will add more credibility. From a receiver’s point of view, they will feel more genuineness in your business for the effort you took in creating a unique domain name for your website and email communication address rather than opting for a free service like Gmail or Hotmail. A professional email address is also a unique credential for your business to avail of multiple digital services available online today that helps in boosting your internet-based business services. Examples include payment gateways, information forms, cloud storage options, and much more.

Read more: How to choose an email service provider for your small business?

Set up your professional custom domain and private email with InfinCE

If you are a business owner wanting to have a unique identity on the internet with a website and email, then you should definitely explore the option of a custom domain rather than opting for free hosting service providers. 

The several benefits in branding and customer experience you stand to enjoy as outlined above will be instrumental in growing your business in the coming years as more customers rely on internet-powered digital channels for their daily needs. 

Having a powerful digital ecosystem with credible domain and secure hosting infrastructure is the need of the hour especially for small and medium businesses. This is where InfinCE can be the ideal companion for your success. Get in touch with us to see how you can build and deploy a comprehensive web-based business online with custom URL and professional email service with InfinCE in a matter of days.

Why Businesses Should Make Cloud their Number One Priority

In the initial days of business technology adoption, many companies were using technology only as a supporting tool for their operations. But today, these companies are turning their technology ecosystem into a mainstream revenue source. 

If you were to enquire about the most influential tech that spurred such a digital innovation for businesses of all sizes in the past decade, the answer will be cloud computing. The world of digital was thrown open for SMBs primarily with the growth of cloud computing over the last 10 years. Experts say that on a global scale, cloud-hosted workloads have grown from 45% in 2018 to 60% in 2019.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have started realizing more about the advantages of cloud-hosted digital channels. 57% of businesses that were surveyed recently report that their cloud adoption has increased anywhere between 26-31% after the pandemic’s strike. 

Besides, the growing digital-savvy consumer base is more than happy to welcome cloud-powered digital channels launched by their favorite brands. So businesses cannot turn away from the cloud-enabled customer and employee engagement channels.  

There are several factors that make cloud-based IT services the need of the hour. This post explores the top 3 reasons that accelerate cloud adoption among businesses:

1. Cost advantage

With cloud computing, an enterprise has the option to pay for only what they use from a technology perspective (pay per use). It could be anything from the number of users, storage capacity, computing power, bandwidth, or any combination of these. 

Unlike the traditional model of building an on-premise technology ecosystem that serves a large workforce to run critical business applications within a business premise, companies can tap into the power of modern-day digital platforms powered by Cloud, with just a web browser or through a mobile app or mobile site. This brings in a huge reduction in the IT operational costs and is one of the key reasons for the growth of cloud computing over the years.

2. Freedom to scale at will

For most businesses today, the rate of growth of their business will be highly dynamic in nature. There may be sudden spikes of consumer demand according to seasonal events like for example, retailers facing increased consumer spending during the holiday season. As with the spike, there may be periods of very low sales or growth volumes depending on various factors like for example the reduced spending by consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The traditional model of having a dedicated in-house digital platform to handle operations would thus require you to invest in installing high power machines and processing power at all times to meet surges in demand even though the surge will only be witnessed occasionally. With cloud-based digital platforms, businesses have the freedom to scale up or down depending on demand from their end consumers. They do not have to maintain any dedicated infrastructure, pay for full performance all through the year, or waste computing power without purpose. 

For instance, InfinCE’s cloud-based remote work collaboration platform offers you a dedicated IT infrastructure that’s well supported, maintained, and upgraded by us from time to time. This saves you from making any additional investments to spruce up your infrastructure forced by your public cloud service provider. 

3. Access to Continuous Innovation

One of the major disadvantages of on-premise software is that they turn obsolete in very short time frames. Newmarket innovations happen almost yearly or at even shorter time frames. This will force businesses to continuously invest in buying newer systems every year to keep up with competitors in terms of features. Cloud-based software on the other hand guarantees you access to a digital platform that will be constantly upgraded by the service provider based on market trends. 

As a business owner, you do not have to focus on R&D for identifying trends, incorporating newer features, and expanding the scope of the platform. All of these would be done by the service provider and offered to you instantly when the new feature is rolled out by them to the market. Be it AI or ML, big data analytics based insight generation or implementing blockchain, IoT, etc. your business will enjoy access to all emerging technological capabilities without having to worry about integrating the same to your digital channels.

Cloud-based technology infrastructure and applications will reshape the business world in more ways than one. As a business owner, your aim should be to pick the best cloud platform to manage and grow sustainably. Here is where InfinCE can be the game-changer. Some of the world’s growing SMBs trust InfinCE to handle their online work collaboration seamlessly. With capabilities such as CRM, ERP, private email, virtual private servers, custom website builder, marketing automation, etc. all available in one place, InfinCE is your one-stop destination to transition fast into a cloud-first business. 

Get in touch with us to know how you can leverage this all-in-one collaboration platform to manage work from anywhere.

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. 

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.