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.

There is no arguing the fact that digital transformation is the need of the hour for businesses to drive success. So once you have made that crucial decision to embark on the digital transformation journey, the next step would be to choose the right digital workplace software that would make the transition smoother. Read on to learn about the core competencies that you need to look out for when adopting a digital workplace solution for your company.

Read more: Why InfinCE is The Only True Digital Workplace Orchestration Platform Ever Created

The Essential Features of Digital Workplace Software

Selecting a digital workplace platform can be much more overwhelming than it may sound. There are a lot of digital workplace tools available out there, and most of them look quite the same at a glance. Nonetheless, you need to ensure that the digital workplace solution you choose fits your organizational requirements in the best way. Otherwise, it will not serve the purpose, not to mention lead to unnecessary costs for the company in training and learning features that you would never use.

At the same time, you should realize that using multiple workplace tools to manage different aspects of the company is not a worthy option either. That is because it will require you to spend more hours training your employees as well as buy multiple subscriptions to meet different needs. That is why choosing all-in-one digital workplace software like InfinCE is a more practical approach to fulfilling the varied demands of digital transformation. For one, it comes with all the essential features to meet day-to-day communication needs in an organization. Plus, you get advanced tools for project management, time tracking, task allocation, file sharing, data storage, and more.

Read more: 5 Common Remote Work Challenges Solved by InfinCE Digital Workplace Solution

Here is a look at some of the most important features that you must have in the digital workplace software that would help to get you started with your digital transformation strategy.

1. Modules to Facilitate Multiple Tasks

Studies have found that more than 60% of employees end up wasting around an hour toggling between different applications to perform their jobs. With an all-in-one digital workplace solution like InfinCE, your employees will not have to juggle between different software to, say, share documents and have a video conference. A platform that comes with modules for automating simple tasks, building project boards, and handling collaboration needs from a unified dashboard is the right remedy.

2. Seamless Integration

Shifting to a digital workplace culture means you will need to move the existing processes and operations to a digital environment. Therefore, you need to choose a digital solution that allows for a seamless integration with the CRM, accounting, and other essential systems you are using. This will ensure that all the tools you require for the day-to-day running of your business are strategically connected to help you achieve higher productivity.

3. Simplified Project Management

One of the most striking benefits of adopting an ultra-modern digital workplace solution like InfinCE is that it allows you to jump right into managing your workflows with its no-code environment. In other words, the learning curve is never steep with InfinCE and you can get started in no time to create as many workflows as you need for your company. There is also 24/7 concierge support available to help you deploy the right solutions you need.

Read more: 5 Ways InfinCE Custom Dashboards Can Boost Your Workplace Productivity

4. Pre-Built Application Suite

Reports say that a reliable and intuitive digital workplace software solution can boost employee satisfaction and retention rates significantly. This is also because of the vast pool of pre-built apps in all-in-one workplace platforms, which helps you to save time in finding the right tools to automate the running and planned workflows. With InfinCE, you can start from scratch, upgrade the existing apps, or integrate the current systems through a unified platform, no matter what the type of your business is.

5. Communication Solutions

Contextual conversations are the backbone of a successful business in a digital workplace environment. Ineffective communication can severely affect the ability of your employees to perform their jobs, which can, in turn, lead to poor collaboration and lost productivity. InfinCE bridges this gap by providing multiple types of communication tools to meet your organizational requirements. Be it a quick audio call, instant messaging, or a group video conference, you can do it all using the unified platform.

6. Smart Reporting

Building a successful digital transformation strategy relies on generating a variety of reports. This helps to track performance and focus on areas that need to be improved to deal with the issues that affect process efficiency. An all-in-one digital workplace platform gives you multiple reporting options with pivot tables, aging metrics, audit logs, and even custom reports to meet your varied requirements, which would help to identify problems and take the necessary action to address them in time.

Read more: How InfinCE Online Collaboration Tool Helps Achieve Your Business Goals

7. Security and Access

You should also look for a digital workplace solution that provides you flexible access control options. This is vital to ensure that your confidential business data does not fall into the wrong hands. InfinCE comes with improved data security features to ensure absolute privacy so that you can keep sensitive conversations under wraps. It allows you to make the most of secure virtual private servers, advanced firewalls, as well as encryption and password-based access controls to simplify enterprise-wide collaboration and communication.

8. Workflow Flexibility and Automation

Another great feature that all-in-one collaboration software gives you is the ability to switch from different boards and layouts to meet your workflow needs. You can also assign tasks to different team members using custom parameters and set the expectations and deadlines clearly upfront to make project management simpler. Setting up rules for recurring tasks for different categories and generating them automatically at regular intervals will save a lot of time in task distribution.

Apart from these, you should also make certain that the digital workplace software you choose allows you to connect with remote teams globally and supports portability. InfinCE is a cloud-based workplace solution, which not only gives you unmatched versatility but also expands your reach to acquire talent from around the world. It can be accessed from any device, while you can also scale the server capacity and storage space needs as your business grows.

Read more: 8 Ways Cloud Automation Significantly Improves Your Legacy IT Operations

Make the Move Now!

Once deemed as an ambitious goal for large enterprises, having a digital transformation strategy has become essential for every business to stay competitive in the market. As the world is moving hurriedly toward a digital-first culture, it is high time to adopt the best digital workplace software and equip your organization for the future. So wait no more!

Sign Up with InfinCE today or connect with our experts for more details.

The Core Benefits Of Using A Cloud Orchestration Tool Like InfinCE

How does InfinCE Cloud Orchestration Platform change the game for businesses in today’s remote working era? Learn more about cloud orchestration and InfinCE in this post. 

Significance Of Cloud Computing Today

Cloud computing is one of the most efficient and disruptive business technologies that is helping enterprises across the globe to drive success in their respective industries. It has been assisting businesses to push forward innovative approaches, improve operational efficiency, and reduce downtime. By leveraging the power of a vast network of managed remote servers over the internet, you can manage, store, and process important business data much more proficiently. With cloud orchestration in the picture, exploring the benefits of enterprise cloud can be further simplified.

Read more: 5 Ways an Integrated Cloud Platform is Beneficial for Your Small Business

What Is Cloud Orchestration?

Cloud orchestration refers to a comprehensive solution that supports and fortifies cloud computing services and operations. This is done with the help of a set of cloud orchestration tools, which ease managing interconnections and interactions over the network. Moreover, a cloud orchestration platform can also facilitate end-to-end automation of the multiple services that are used or are in the process of being deployed in the cloud architecture.

Understanding The Basics Of Cloud Orchestration

Experts in the cloud computing industry have highlighted the uncertainty around adopting the technology by businesses for a long time. However, enterprises that have embraced the cloud have found it quite promising in dealing with the changing customer behaviors and trends and the evolving market dynamics. With cloud orchestration tools like InfinCE, businesses can coordinate and arrange automated tasks, which will help consolidate the existing operations and workflow.

InfinCE cloud orchestration platform allows you to automate the processes required to manage connections and various public and private cloud workloads. With the help of the InfinCE cloud orchestration tool, you can also integrate different automated processes and tasks to create a unified workflow to address a specific business function.

Read more: Why InfinCE is The Only True Digital Workplace Orchestration Platform Ever Created 

Cloud orchestration also involves enforcing policies and ensuring that all the processes have the required permission to execute as needed or connect to the applicable workload. In that, the core tasks of a cloud orchestration platform are to start server workloads or provide for them, provision applicable data storage capacity, as well as manage Virtual Machines (VMs) by arranging the required resources, services, and workloads in the cloud.

What Makes Cloud Orchestration Essential For Businesses

Enterprises around the world are adopting microservices-based applications to ensure the smooth functioning of their day-to-day operations. These containerized applications are designed to communicate using APIs to perform their tasks. This has led to the rising demand for automating such applications across the cloud, whether deploying or managing them. However, this can be daunting without a proper approach to address the varied requirements across multiple clouds.

This is where cloud orchestration tools like InfinCE come to the rescue of enterprises. Using the InfinCE cloud orchestration platform, you can easily manage countless dependencies on the cloud environment with the help of policy-driven security as well as well-defined management capabilities. As more companies embrace hybrid cloud architecture these days, the InfinCE cloud orchestration tool helps enterprises fulfill the demands of both public and hybrid clouds.

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

Cloud orchestration can be a vital asset for businesses today as it helps avoid the need for a dedicated IT team to manage the automation tasks. That translates to savings in terms of productivity as your workforce will be free to focus on more value-adding tasks or core business activities. Besides, cloud orchestration takes the chances of manual errors out of the picture while providing fast and reliable output. Orchestrating cloud operations also allows you to invest more time and resources in innovation, which can help you gain a competitive edge in the industry.

Differences Between Cloud Orchestration And Cloud Automation 

Both cloud automation and cloud orchestration tools allow you to address common challenges in managing enterprise cloud by automating various processes across domains and systems. In addition, both help you eliminate the roadblocks in automation by facilitating a cohesive and cloud-first strategy, which entails both private and public cloud components. The result is improved employee and customer experience. However, there is a subtle difference between cloud automation and cloud orchestration.

Read more: 8 Ways Cloud Automation Significantly Improves Your Legacy IT Operations 

Cloud orchestration is more like a superset of automation. It goes beyond the usual automation processes to further ease the coordination between the automated tasks in the cloud. On the contrary, cloud automation focuses on enabling the tasks at hand, such as initiating workloads or web servers, and ensuring that the same task can be repeated without manual intervention. In other words, a cloud orchestration platform allows you to manage the entire IT process automation through a single dashboard.

Nonetheless, it is crucial to understand that cloud automation and cloud orchestration work collaboratively. This way, they ensure that the applications and services deployed in the cloud are managed in a unified and functional environment that functions efficiently and adds to the cloud’s cost-efficiency. Even so, cloud orchestration is crucial to ensure the effective scaling of applications across public and private clouds.

Key Business Benefits of Cloud Orchestration

Cloud orchestration allows businesses to add enterprise-wide functions to their existing models, such as scalability, redundancy, and failover and fail-back. At the same time, it will enable you to manage dependencies and couple everything into a single package, which helps to reduce the overall IT burden. Moreover, cloud orchestration tools like InfinCE offer improved visibility into the resources and processes in your organization. This can help you prevent VM sprawl and track resource usage based on business units, departments, or even individual users.

With the help of a robust cloud orchestration platform like InfinCE, you can also enable automatic scaling for your distributed applications while ensuring that reliable disaster recovery measures are in effect. This will ensure business continuity and drive superior inter-service configuration. On top of that, the InfinCE cloud orchestration platform helps simplify automation across hybrid cloud environments while ensuring that the security protocols and enterprise policies are maintained in a dynamic environment.

White Paper: InfinCE digital workplace orchestration platform helps organizations implement an entirely new working environment and accurately replicate their employees’ changing work experience. How does InfinCE transform the workplace and add value to business owners and employees? Download our free white paper.

There is no doubt that cloud orchestration can reduce your overall operational costs. Meanwhile, it also helps accelerate the delivery of various services while automating coordination between workloads and the management of complex IT architectures. As it also eliminates provisioning errors and facilitates instant provisioning of the required services, cloud orchestration is the need of the hour for enterprises that want to ensure high-end configuration for superior business growth. Experience the potential of cloud orchestration with InfinCE, the only authentic and holistic digital workplace orchestration platform. 

Please chat with our expert to understand why InfinCE is the best fit for your business. 

How to Ensure Optimal Workforce Productivity in Uncertain Times

The COVID-19 outbreak may have forced many businesses to adopt remote work policies that they were unfamiliar with earlier. However, with the right productivity apps and collaboration tools at their disposal, such organizations found managing their remote teams much easier than they initially thought. As the world embraced work-from-home practices, a lot of new productivity tools also entered the marketplace. Nonetheless, where this made managing the remote workforce simpler for some, it created further confusion for others when it came to choosing the right remote work tool for their business.

For instance, InfinCE team management software offers all the essential remote work applications and productivity tools you need to make remote work seamless. In addition, InfinCE allows you to pick additional productivity apps and third-party tools from its curated app marketplace and integrate them quickly. All these features of InfinCE simplify team management. With InfinCE, you can improve operational efficiency and employee engagement by ensuring that your teams have all the tools needed to perform their jobs.

Read more: 5 Common Remote Work Challenges Solved by InfinCE Digital Workplace Solution 

Remote work challenges

Remote workplace culture brings many benefits to the company in the form of cost savings, while it benefits employees by letting them work from the comfort of their homes. But, yet again, the work-from-home approach is not devoid of challenges either. For example, managers find it very difficult to establish a personal connection with their employees and build trust without direct contact. Likewise, they do not have much insight into the daily work of their teams and are required to experiment with different practices to keep the processes going.

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

1. No face-to-face supervision

The lack of in-person interaction between managers and employees makes leaders presume that their teams are not working efficiently, especially when they do not achieve the expected results. Though the deficit could be because of many other metrics, managers are likely to think that employees did not meet their targets and failed to perform to their potential due to no face-to-face supervision.

2. Limited access to information

Often, remote teams have to put extra effort into finding the information they need to perform their jobs. Getting even simple answers from their colleagues can take an entire day if they are located in different time zones. At the same time, interpersonal issues and low motivation to collaborate can also create a significant obstacle to keep the teams functional.

3. Lack of office culture

Social isolation, loneliness, and remote working can be stressful and lead to operational inefficiencies in many different ways. For example, without the usual interactions in office settings, employees can feel disconnected and lose their sense of belonging. On the contrary, home distractions and personal responsibilities can also affect remote working practices and impact overall productivity.

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

Five practical ways to manage remote workforce better

Different enterprises have come up with distinct methods to manage their remote teams and overcome the related challenges. While that is a great way to explore the potential of remote working for your company, there are a few ways to simplify the approach. Here are some tips that will help you to manage your remote workforce in these uncertain times.

1. Set out with a proper plan

Everything should start with a proper plan when it comes to business management. It is significant for creating a healthy remote work culture as well. Therefore, you need to determine the best approach for running the day-to-day operations and communicate effectively with your team.

2. Define the expectations

Clearly define the expectations to your teams, set the targets, and communicate the respective timelines for each target with your employees before the start of the project. This will avoid confusion and allow you to track the performance of your teams.

3. Monitor project progress

Tracking the project’s progress periodically will help you update your teams about what they need to do next. This will also help you ensure that everyone is playing their part as they are supposed to.

4. Keep your team motivated

Do not let social isolation or lack of face-to-face interaction sneak in to affect your team’s productivity and the company’s overall operational efficiency. Instead, use different communication channels to interact with your teams and keep them motivated to ensure that they work to their best potential.

5. Ensure seamless access to data 

You should make sure that your teams have all the data and information accessible at all times to perform their duties efficiently. This will ensure that all employees can complete the tasks without waiting for someone to share the files.

Employ the right productivity apps

This is the golden ticket to seeing success with remote working policies. From planning the process using project management software to providing access to files via cloud-sharing tools, you can tackle all the challenges in adopting a remote workplace culture with the right productivity solutions. With an all-in-one platform like InfinCE, you can combine all the productivity tools for effective communication, collaboration, and performance tracking in a single suite.

Read more: How InfinCE Simplifies Multi-app Management for IT Managers 

Here are some of the most critical productivity apps that you should have to manage remote teams efficiently.

• Project management software helps you plan and sync the different tasks assigned to your remote workforce.
• Instant messenger app ensures that you can communicate important information to your teams in real-time.
• Documents sharing tool facilitates seamless information exchange among your employees so that they can work anytime.
• Video conferencing solution resolves the gap of face-to-face meetings to some extent while allowing effective communication.
• Time tracking app allows you to monitor the performance of your teams and keep everyone motivated to get the job done.

InfinCE gives you all these productivity apps and collaboration tools in a single platform to make remote team management much simpler. Besides, when you have multiple remote desktop tools for different purposes, it can quickly become chaotic to stay on top of everything, not to mention having to bear considerable subscription costs. With all the productivity tools in one platform, InfinCE also helps you avoid juggling different apps to manage your remote teams. Contact us to learn more about InfinCE.