The pandemic caused remote and hybrid work cultures to become the new modes of work. When workplaces shifted to homes, it compelled many companies to adopt digital workplace solutions to enable their employees across diverse geographies and time zones to stay connected. But why are connected workplaces increasingly becoming the need of the hour for businesses today? Why are companies striving to prepare for the future direction of the workplace?
Connectivity offers flexibility to workplaces, and employees tend to be more engaged at work when they can choose how they spend time at work. Remote work allows employees to work from the comfort of their rooms, thus letting them save the time required for daily commutes to the office.
Read more: How a Unified Environment Promotes a Successful Digital Workplace
So, what is a connected workplace?
A connected place is essentially an integrated, secure network of tools and systems that brings together personnel, information assets, and business services on a single, centralized platform to improve efficiency and productivity. Powered by cloud technologies, a connected workplace is equipped with all the aspects you require to manage the services of your business to the employees and customers alike. Connecting with employees at the workplace is vital for sustained business growth.
Benefits of connected workplaces
Connected workplaces bring a host of benefits to the table, a few of which are:
- Inculcate a sense of belongingness among employees, which gives rise to good employee experiences, leading to good customer experiences.
- Carrying out all tasks on a single platform gives transparency to employee activities, easing collaboration across all departments.
- The progress of every task can be tracked, which would help in their timely completion.
- Enable seamless internal communication among all departments.
Connected workplaces help increase cooperation among employees. Your employees can connect with team members, their work, company goals, and work culture. Thanks to the smart tools on a connected digital workplace platform. Hence, keeping your geographically dispersed teams connected at work is important to meet organizational objectives and attain sustained business growth.
Here are 12 ways to keep your workplace more connected,
- Make sure you know your employees personally
- Allow a free flow of information to one and all
- Focus on employee engagement
- Integrate collaborative software suites with the digital platforms
- Ensure your onboarding process is hassle-free
- Conduct online surveys and opinion polls among employees
- Set up a peer mentoring program
- Recognize the voice of your employees
- Nurture communities of practice
- Encourage employees to connect on an intranet
- Set up an employee directory
- Plan virtual social events to build a rapport among team members
1. Make sure you know your employees personally
The managers and HR executives must make sure that they connect well with the employees to create a sense of belongingness in their minds. Several companies make it a point to send a gift to their employees on their birthdays. Such gestures would give the message that employees are important to the company.
2. Allow a free flow of information to one and all
The information must freely flow from top-down, bottom-up, and peer-to-peer while working from home. The multi-directional flow of information required for your day-to-day business operations calls for connecting to digital workplace platforms. Content should be well documented and made accessible to one and all through intranet and other tools for communication available on your digital platform. Employees must have the liberty to ask questions and offer feedback to their superiors as and when required. The free flow of information is an important factor in determining how to stay connected with teams while working remotely.
3. Focus on employee engagement
To increase productivity, your employees need to feel enthusiastic and involved in what they do. Lack of enthusiasm might lead to lesser productivity. Being connected on digital workplace platforms renders transparency to work. Tracking and reporting tools like custom dashboards display the progress of tasks and motivate people to work hard.
4. Integrate collaborative software suites with the digital platforms
A digital platform integrated with collaborative suites like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and other collaborative tools helps employees stay connected and join hands with team members to realize organizational goals.
5. Ensure your onboarding process is hassle-free
Your new recruits deserve a suitable environment virtually to familiarize themselves with the tasks they would be entrusted with. Conducting well-designed virtual induction programs will help the new recruits connect with their colleagues while familiarizing themselves with your digital platform. Existing employees will get to hone their skill sets by attending virtual orientation programs designed to introduce new software updates.
Read more: Modernize and Simplify Your HR processes with a Digital Workplace Platform
6. Conduct online surveys and opinion polls among employees
A connected environment would give all your geographically dispersed employees an equal opportunity to engage in conversation with each other. Online surveys and opinion polls would help keep your employees stay connected and engaged while giving insights into employee conceptions and work culture.
7. Set up a peer mentoring program
Workplace mentoring enhances the employee experience and well-being. Peer mentorship helps build unbiased relationships among employees wherein participants encourage and support each other by sharing knowledge on digital workplace platforms. Peer mentoring programs testify that employees stand to gain knowledge and personal growth through social connections via the Internet.
8. Recognize the voice of your employees
Your employees must be encouraged to drop their suggestions and opinions on your company’s performance in virtual suggestion boxes. Managers must appreciate these ideas on their merit and act on them. Internal communication channels on your digital platform can also be used to voice employee opinions on business performance. Your employees’ voices deserve to be heard!
9. Nurture communities of practice
Harvard Business Review defines communities of practice as “groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise”. These groups allow your employees to freely share their experiences and knowledge in novel ways to develop new methods to resolve issues. Communities of practice focus on taking advantage of the expertise within the company by letting your employees across multiple locations connect, brainstorm, and collaborate on your digital workplace platform.
10. Encourage employees to connect on an intranet
Post good content on the intranet that focuses on specific activities of employees and teams. The special events and campaigns held in the company also must find mention in the content shared on the intranet. Excellent performances must be duly appreciated, thus making the intranet an employee recognition center. This gives people a chance to recognize the good work done by their peers, thus improving your company’s culture.
11. Set up an employee directory
Having an employee directory on your digital platform would mean having the contact details of all your employees at your fingertips. This would help an employee to communicate with the right person to resolve a crisis. The valuable opinion of the expert can be initiated through an audio or video call or even an email, all of which would be available on the digital workplace platform.
12. Plan virtual social events to build rapport among team members
Your geographically dispersed teams can be brought together at virtual social events. Online games and campaigns are other events that help employees connect with peers.
Your employees deserve to be heard, and their opinions merit appreciation. They need the support of a smart digital workplace solution like InfinCE to help them stay connected with their peers and company goals. InfinCE offers many features to help your employees stay connected at work.
How does InfinCE help in keeping workplaces connected?
“Employees who feel their voice is heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work”, says Forbes. InfinCE is a smart digital workplace solution with many features to help your employees stay connected to voice their opinions and share their knowledge.
InfinCE offers a pool of effective collaboration tools to help you connect with your teams faster and work together better for greater business achievements.
- You can create custom dashboards with InfinCE that offer deep insights into your business operations and track the progress of projects to ensure they are on schedule.
- The platform offers a wide range of productivity tools to help you manage tasks, organize data, and share files seamlessly in a secure environment.
- The curated app marketplace of InfinCE provides your organization with many open-source and commercial business software options from multiple vendors that cater to varied industries.
- The extensive list of apps available on InfinCE includes Vanilla Forums to manage interactive community forums for customers and potential clients; LimeSurvey to conduct surveys and gather feedback; MediaWiki to build, track and share a hub of knowledge internally and externally; Mautic to manage campaigns, track metrics and generate reports; and many more! Besides, you can seek the help of our experts to integrate custom apps into the platform.
- The platform helps you streamline communication through live chats, video calls, and meetings.
- InfinCE has an extensive employee directory that fetches important details of your company staff and other external contacts, including their designations, email ids, and contact numbers, with a few clicks. You can view their online presence status and initiate a chat, call, or email directly from the directory!
Get in touch with our consultants for more information about our smart digital workplace platform, or just Sign Up for Free!
