The concept of working remotely was once a perk offered by a small percentage of businesses. But, it’s now almost the norm coupled with variations of hybrid and Work From Home (WFH) options. In fact, it’s something that more and more employees want from their employers – to have flexibility in where they work from and to have a better work-life balance.

There are certain industries where working remotely can be more of a challenge, such as those in the legal field, but it’s certainly not impossible. With these tips, legal teams can find winning ways to work effectively from remote locations without compromising on the standard of their work, staff flexibility and overall productivity. 

Communicate changes regularly

Shifting from a traditional law firm process to a remote one can take some getting used to, but communication is at the heart of your success. Any changes in policies or updates with clients need to be communicated clearly and quickly, so that everyone is on board and working to the same information and deadlines. 

But, it’s also important that you communicate to your clients that you’re working remotely for a better client experience, as this will help to manage expectations and identify the best channels for clients to reach you on. Video conferencing can be ideal for hosting meetings remotely and also enables invitees to add notifications to the calendar for convenience. Clear communication makes the transition to remote working smoother and benefits employees and clients alike so they can adapt to the new way of working accordingly. 

Use the right technology

Technology is essential to remote working, so legal teams need to have the right software and tools available to them to do their job successfully. Not having technology set up for flexible working can be incredibly demotivating to staff and can slow productivity. Make sure that documents are stored securely on the cloud for quick and easy access from any location, and utilise software to manage cases flexibly, which will keep all files in place and streamline operations. Any paper documents you may need should be digitised and stored in the cloud for safety, but also so that your colleagues can access them, as paper files aren’t conducive to successful remote working. 

Remain in touch by phone and socially

Regardless of whether you have an office or not, your clients are still going to want or need to reach you by phone. So whether you’re working remotely on a temporary basis or it’s your permanent set-up, you will need to have a way for clients to get in touch. Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services enable you to make phone calls from your computer, which can be a convenient way for legal professionals to stay in contact with colleagues and clients from any location. There are also virtual reception services your team can use to take messages and field calls for a professional service that’s both efficient and flexible. A headset can also ensure your calls are clear for greater sound quality. When you’re working remotely, however, make sure that you’re keeping your colleagues and clients updated on your working hours so that you’re still delivering a good customer experience and a professional service. 

With remote working, there might be a tendency to overlook the social benefits that a physical office provides. To maintain and even improve a healthy workplace culture for your employees, organise regular meet-ups, team events and incentive programmes for your legal firm. 

Set up a VPN

Remote-access Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, enable employees to connect to private networks securely from any location. Legal professionals need access to sensitive data and client information, so a VPN is an essential tool to make sure that the information and files they’re accessing are protected. 

A VPN means that whether your legal team is working from their home office, a collaborative workspace or a public space, data is kept secure yet accessible. Data protection and cybersecurity is a critical issue, for all businesses but especially in the legal sector where there are so many threats present, which a VPN can help to alleviate. 

Legal professionals can make remote working work for them, with the right tools and systems in place. Today’s digital age makes it easier than ever to work flexibly, regardless of the industry you work in, and with the likes of case management software, VPNs and VOIPs, you don’t have to compromise on security or the service you provide to your clients. Providing your team is trained on how to use these tools properly, and clients are aware of how your team is carrying out tasks, remote working can be just as efficient and professional as working from an office. 

Learning management systems (LMS) aid in the delivery of training materials and the organization of skill development inside your company. Learning Management Systems is excessively beneficial for the learners however, it has been seen that many LMS’ can also be complex to use. It’s difficult to know which LMS features will assist and which will be a hindrance because there are so many.

A learning management system (LMS) is a software tool that helps businesses organize and offer opportunities to learn. The greatest learning management systems should assist drive an organization’s training modules by streamlining the requirements, similar to the various pieces of software we all use every day, such as Google Docs for writing content or QuickBooks for accounting.

While there are numerous advantages to employing a learning management system, such as cost savings and reliability, the primary goal of a learning management system is to administer and manage learning and eLearning efforts in one space.

Here are some amazing features that will help your enterprise software development companies to empower sales and team building. 

Course Creation Features

Although it appears that every LMS software would have this, the most essential idea of an LMS does not include a course authoring module. Some features need you to supply your native content, which indicates you’ll have to create films and material in a different system and then import it into the software. Finding an LMS with course design options can assist you in streamlining your procedures. 

Skills & Certifications

For practically every type of user, skill and certification tracks are amongst the most significant LMS elements. It’s great to retrain your personnel, but if you’re not documenting skills growth and accreditations, at the absolute least, course completion—you’ll have no foundation for gauging performance and development. These capabilities can help you comply with government regulations by combining all of your accomplished and ongoing accreditations into one extractable spreadsheet. You can also evaluate employee success by monitoring skills taught and certifications completed, demonstrating an instantaneous return on your investment.

Effective Personalization

An effective LMS should give content depending on a learner’s past within the software, as well as their position, to stimulate wider acceptance. If we talk about an example, if you are working in a sales team, you should be able to quickly access the overall sales-related training content in the LMS. This is the perfect example of personalization. Users will be able to prioritize improvement areas using customizable assessments and quizzes that evaluate a learner’s progress all throughout the course. Individuals become more invested in the activity if an LMS is more tailored to their learning preferences and/or job functionality.

For both students and teachers, a tailored learning experience can improve engagement and effective educational objectives. Each training program might deliver a customized educational experience for your learners depending on their educational pursuit and schedule with the correct personalization elements. It’s critical to assist them in progressing more quickly through the lessons and, as a result, increasing the chances of success of your educational modules. As a result, you’ll see an increase in student applications and profits over time.

Video Conferencing Feature

Students who require one-on-one attention or who have complex inquiries can benefit from an LMS with video conferencing capabilities. While correspondence and message threads may handle the majority of your interaction goals, video conferencing allows you to have challenging talks. Your firm will embrace the fact that you won’t have to pay for an external contract to speak with your pupils face-to-face.

eCommerce Subscription

Many LMS modules allow you to share your content with a larger audience, allowing you to monetize what you’ve previously created. Look for an LMS that allows you to gate learning content in this instance. Users must submit their email addresses, make a one-time purchase, or commit to a monthly subscription in order to finish a course or learning module. Using your pooled expertise to create a subscription course and add it to your website is a terrific method to generate passive income. We must say, ecommerce software solutions are the new trend!

M-Learning Features

It’s shocking to hear that some people don’t have access to a computer at home, but mobile-ready learning can help them avoid this stumbling block. Learners can engage in courses from any place using whichever smartphone they own if your LMS has mobile capabilities, such as responsive design or integrated mobile apps. This is particularly useful for qualifications that demand learning beyond working hours, or for distant teams where learning can take place in between calls or visits.

Social And Community Learning Formats

Another significant feature of an online learning platform for educational organizations is social learning. Peer-to-peer learning has the potential to help people remember what they’ve learned. It can potentially help students to acquire faster, especially those who are younger. They might ask peers’ ideas and engage their accomplishments to gain social acknowledgment. It’s a fantastic method to tap into support from the public and improve student learning outcomes.

Knowledge is social, like so much of what we are already doing, and your LMS should contain tools that allow your learners to learn from each other as well. This not only improves the learning experience but also relieves stress on your coaches. Your students can ask each other questions in a discussion format by incorporating messaging rooms and social learning tools. Allowing your pupils to instruct each other is the finest method to demonstrate your understanding of the subject.

Test-Out Options

Even for seasoned L&D experts, determining what your learners already know can be difficult. Simultaneously, bringing new employees up to accelerate as quickly as feasible allows them to contribute benefits to the organization sooner. As a result, allowing learners to ‘test out’ of a training module can cut down on training time while also providing learning practitioners with a better knowledge of where individual learners are in their learning path.

You can still give participants the course resources they need to finish their education, but a test-out feature allows them to perform a final verdict instead of taking an entire eLearning session. There’s no need to take or retake, in the case of some annual compliance training at the coaching if they pass the exam.

Final Words

For a company with respectable educational activities, a learning management system is a must-have tool. It’s a one-stop shop for creating courses, organizing and delivering training, tracking student progress, and overseeing the entire learning process.

In short, if you’ve been individually monitoring your learning activities, an LMS can completely revolutionize your learning system. It has the potential to increase learner engagement by leaps and bounds while also providing amazing efficiency for your educators. Furthermore, an efficient LMS might provide improved administration over your operations, greater adaptability to meet your organization’s objectives and long-term cost savings.

The advantages of a learning management system (LMS) are not restricted to conventional instructional institutions such as schools and colleges. Businesses, governmental organizations, non-profit organizations, e-course providers, and entrepreneurial instructors can all benefit equally from it. We have mentioned the must-have features for you before you go and pick the right LMS for your organization!

The global COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the importance of establishing flexibility through cloud computing. As companies were forced to move their employees to work-from-home set-ups due to lockdowns, those with cloud computing capabilities have had an easier time weathering the disruption.

A report by the Institute of International Finance (IIF) concluded that cloud computing was essential in enabling remote data access and storage, which, in turn, ensures:

• The continued provision of services
• The ability to provide new services in a cost-efficient manner
• The smooth transition to new work models, such as moving from co-located to remote work environments.

Unsurprisingly, the aftermath of the pandemic has led to a surge in interest in cloud services. According to a Gartner forecast, global end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 18.4% in 2021, reaching $304.9 billion.

If you’re like many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), you’re probably considering migrating some of your applications, data and workloads to the cloud. Statista data shows that as of 2020, 35% of global SMEs spend up to $1.2 million on public cloud services each year.

But this doesn’t mean these transitions to cloud computing environments are successful. 

What Are the Challenges of a Cloud Migration?

Despite the availability of cloud hosting providers, platforms, tools and resources that make a cloud migration more accessible than ever, the actual migration process is still fraught with risks caused by four factors:

1. Lack of Training

Not all IT departments have expertise in cloud security, virtualisation, and software architectures — essential skills for successful cloud migration. Many SMEs don’t even have a dedicated IT team, relying instead on a single person to oversee the company’s network of computers and software systems.

Gartner’s 2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap shows that the lack of talent with cloud skills is the greatest barrier to deploying cloud-based technologies for strategic use in their organisation. This is consistent with a McAfee report, which found that 40% of organisations reporting a cloud skills shortage have had to slow their cloud adoption. 

2. Issues between Legacy Infrastructure and Cloud Services

Organisations with legacy IT systems typically experience problems adopting new technologies such as cloud-based software. This is particularly true for legacy infrastructure no longer supported by its original vendor — a common problem in banking and the government sector. 

Gartner forecasts that through 2024, almost all legacy applications migrated to the cloud will require some form of optimisation to be cost-effective. Local applications can be migrated to a hybrid cloud environment — an amalgam of on-premise and cloud-based services. Although not completely efficient, this solution can work for organisations that wish to keep their critical applications on-premises and move less critical workloads to the cloud.

3. Cybersecurity Concerns

A cloud migration not guided by a concrete strategy puts you at risk of leaving your data and systems exposed to a gamut of security risks, ranging from compliance violations and data breaches to insecure APIs and misconfigured servers. 

While SME owners may think they’re too insignificant to be the victim of a cybersecurity attack, this relaxed view can make them susceptible to fraud and data breaches. McAfee reports that as many as one in four organisations keeping data in the public cloud have experienced data theft there.

4. Unexpected Downtime 

Depending on your organisation’s size and the types of applications involved, your cloud migration may require taking your servers offline temporarily. You can avoid long downtimes by implementing an offline copy migration. This involves bringing down your on-premises application, migrating that application database to the cloud and bringing the application back online in the cloud. If you have small datasets, any necessary downtime shouldn’t take too long. 

If you’re migrating a mission-critical application that can’t tolerate downtime, consider looking into data virtualisation. Some providers offer multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure, in which application databases can reside in a combination of cloud-based and on-premises systems. This allows you to migrate datasets gradually.

Communication is key to every company’s success. Corresponding with colleagues and clients quickly and clearly is an essential element of any business strategy. While traditional business phone systems have been a popular option for many years, the use of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems is experiencing a resurgence.

Driven by technological advances in VoIP and internet connectivity and a new and more flexible approach to operating, more firms are identifying the benefits VoIP can bring. This innovative option empowers enterprise users, giving them the ability to communicate and collaborate from business mobiles and landlines, remotely or in the office while using a single company telephone number.

Read on as we explore some of the multiple advantages businesses are gaining from selecting a VoIP phone system for their operation.

How can VoIP save a business money?

In the modern business world, enterprises are aware they must be agile and adaptable to keep competitive. For firms to operate effectively or efficiently, a standard telephone system no longer satisfies requirements. A unified communication platform and video conferencing capability are no longer luxuries but essential options every business needs regardless of company size.

Fortunately, the speed of innovation that the VoIP industry has experienced in recent years allows enterprises with varying budgets to access the services they require. VoIP allows conference calls to be scheduled on an ad-hoc basis, allowing participants to join in virtual meetings from anywhere in the world, whether they are using a landline in their office or remotely via a mobile phone.

VoIP phone systems can now integrate all these features at an exceptionally low cost, instead of the high prices legacy carriers charge.

The ability to deploy these innovative features no longer requires an organisation to make a significant capital investment in brand-new equipment or sign up to multi-year agreements with established phone carriers.

VoIP service vendors typically don’t require contracts. As a result, companies can simply switch if they discover a more financially viable alternative. Additionally, if an enterprise finds that they no longer require a feature they are paying for, it can easily be removed from their subscription plan. Such a move can ultimately save businesses thousands of pounds over time.

How does VoIP boost collaboration?

VoIP phone systems are designed to be exceptionally user-friendly and are designed to streamline the way businesses operate. Multi-functional, they offer a wide range of communication tools in a single interface allowing users to interact with others while they work for seamless productivity.

VoIP systems allow calls to be initiated from online chats and colleagues and customers can be easily added to both video and audio meetings. Screens can be shared, and new contacts quickly added with simple to use tools promoting enhanced collaboration for companies.

What extra features does VoIP come with?

VoIP systems offer all the options that conventional business phone systems offer, from switchboard options like call queues, forwarding, holding and transfer, as well as useful solutions like caller ID, voice mail and emergency calls. However, there are numerous other options companies can pick from, such as call analytics that offer fresh insights by recording behavioural trends and session metrics, ideal for measuring agent performance and customer interactions.

Among the most powerful options of VoIP is how it enables firms to use a single business telephone number whether staff are in the office or on the move. This can reassure customers and clients, building trust and presenting a professional image at all times.

Why do VoIP systems have higher audio quality?

In most instances, VoIP phone systems have exceptional sound quality. Part of how VoIP offers such high-quality audio experiences is due to how much control users possess. The key factor impacting the quality of VoIP calls is internet connectivity, and the power to pick the best solution possible is firmly in the user’s hands.

Options like bonded broadband or a leased line give enterprises sole use of their connection, giving them reliable and rapid connectivity. By selecting these enhanced options, businesses can enjoy high-quality call experiences and so can their customers.

As you can see, there are numerous business benefits to adopting a VoIP phone system. From enhancing collaboration and cutting down on costs, this solution offers firms a way to work professionally and flexibly, making it a powerful asset for companies competing today.

Building a website from scratch is the priciest approach. It is also the most time-consuming one! Discover effective ways to build a custom website faster and at a lower cost without sacrificing quality. Step away from the upsell and learn to make the most of your budget with our tips.

Website development is a complex field that requires special expertise and access to the latest technologies. If you feel tempted to handle everything on your own, remember that a poorly designed website will deter your potential customers. Professional custom web development services are in high demand for a reason. Managing everything in-house comes with the highest costs and requires resources you may not have. 

1. Choose a Content Management System

A CMS is a foundation for websites. It lets you (as the term suggests) add, edit and remove content with ease. Some systems incorporate drag and drop features, which makes editing a piece of cake. 

You could set up a blog, start a media gallery, including spam protection, SEO and more. For example, WordPress and Drupal come with a plethora of plugins, or modules that can add all kinds of functionality. These days, most websites are built on one of the popular CMS. 

Choosing the right system is not easy, as you need to look beyond the hype. The newest systems are surrounded by a lot of passionate claims and promotions. Do not be gullible and do your research to prevent expensive mistakes. Look at your competitors to see which CMS they pick and how successful their websites are. Then, list all the features you need and compare CMS based on these requirements. 

What makes these platforms so popular is that they do not require any coding experience. You can add or remove blocks of content without an in-depth knowledge of complicated technologies. On WordPress, you can manage content right after logging in to your dashboard. It lets you give permissions to other users with different levels of access.

2. Discover Page Builders 

Page builders make development accessible to anyone, even non-tech-savvy users. The layout construction is similar to using Lego blocks. You can add, remove, drag, drop and rearrange the elements without any coding changes. Any components can be modified. 

You do not have to hire a developer just to move some bits of content around. Page builders are great time savers. They also let you save money, as you do not have to build everything from scratch.

3. Analytics & Automation

After picking a CMS and a page builder, you are almost ready to get down to work. Now, it is time to streamline automation and analytics. The latter will enable you to track the behaviour of website visitors and find patterns in this data. This concerns the time they spend on specific pages, the proportion of users clicking particular links, page load times, etc. Such staff may seem trivial, but you can draw important conclusions from it. 

Based on this data, companies make informed decisions. For example, if you know which pages are visited the most often and what kind of content engages users the most, you can prioritize efforts to make the most of your budget. These tools include Google Ads, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, and software and services from other companies. 

Now, what about automation? This term describes tools that can do different jobs for you. These days, they can be found in any industry, including website development and SEO. 

For example, using tools like Later, you can create and schedule your posts across social media. If your users are most active at 2:00 a.m., you will not have to stay up at night to post at the best moment. The same works for blogs. However, you must choose your tools carefully to avoid counterproductive services. 

4. Sometimes, Less Is More

It is not the amount, but the quality of content and its layout that truly matter. If just three words can express what you used to say in ten, brevity is golden. The same applies to the aesthetics of a website or blog.

You may be able to convey all the necessary information on a single page broken into sections. One image could express the same point as a paragraph of text. Your navigation bar could look better with fewer colours. It is easy to feel attachment to your own creations, but you must learn to let go of everything redundant. Condense your message into the most concise forms.

This way, you will achieve several goals at the same time. First, it will be easier for your website visitor to find the content they need. Secondly, less content translates into last work, time, and investment required. Of course, brevity has its limits. Make sure you do not end up sounding like Kevin from The Office, a character famous for his lack of communication skills.

5. Understand Your Customers’ Point of View

Finally, design your website with your customer in mind. Try walking in their shoes to understand what content and visual features to prioritize. This will give you a new perspective and priceless insights for your development strategy. Pay attention to the following questions:

• Do they browse the internet using desktop or mobile devices?
• What would motivate a potential customer to visit your site?
• In what areas would they have to scroll or click to view the necessary content?
• And what order should you arrange the pages and many buttons to ensure convenient navigation?
• Where will they search for contact details, and would they feel most comfortable calling you, sending an email, using live chat, or some other tool? 

To answer these and related questions, you need to research your target audience. Determine your demographics, they are lifestyle, preferences, behavioural patterns, etc. This research will help you determine essential features and avoid overloading your site with features that hinder conversions. All content must bring value to users and resonate with their values or goals.