Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Successful intranets display intentional design choices that reflect their organizational identity. The 2026 Simpplr Employee Experience Excellence Award winners illustrate how distinctive design, thoughtful naming, and unexpected features turn standard digital workplaces into memorable brand experiences.

Nobody schedules a meeting to talk about the eleven seconds an app takes to load, or the four minutes someone spends digging through a cluttered desktop for a file they saved “somewhere obvious.” Those moments never make it into a retro or a performance review. They’re too small to complain about and too frequent to ignore. That’s why technology challenges that quietly reduce team productivity are so hard to catch.

Work from home has shifted from a temporary pandemic-era arrangement into a permanent fixture of the modern labor market, with millions of professionals now choosing remote or hybrid roles over traditional office work.

What if you could wrap up your weekly resource planning much faster and enjoy more of that well-deserved rest in the sunshine this summer? With the updates we’re releasing this July, it’s 100% possible! Use ELI’s new booking management capabilities to sort out your team’s bookings for this month and next, run instant project health audits with a single click, keep track of active time tracker straight from the project task list, and more.

Your team is working hard. But you don't actually know how hard until the hours are logged. I've seen this pattern repeat throughout remote and hybrid teams. The schedule looks reasonable on paper. But the real hours tell a different story. Someone is absorbing more than their share, and nobody flags it until their mental health is already exhausted. That’s why I'll share with you the ways time tracking and work-life balance connect.

Most employees have no idea what their time tracking app records. They clock in, the timer runs, and somewhere on a server, data builds up. Depending on the tool, that data goes well beyond working hours. Some apps log URLs visited. Others capture screenshots every few minutes. In fact, a few tracks of the GPS location. To clear things up, let’s understand what data is collected in time tracking apps, what employers do with it, and what you have the right to know.

The hidden costs of building your own employee monitoring software.

The advice says trust your team and delegate more. Here's why that rarely sticks on its own, and what tends to work better. If you've ever promised yourself you'd give someone room to run with a project, then found yourself messaging them for an update by the end of the same day, you already know the loop. You hand over the work with the best intentions. A day goes quiet, you start wondering whether it's on track or quietly going sideways, and before long you've asked for a status.

Managing time off in distributed teams can be a nightmare for agencies. Holiday calendars, PTO rules, approval paths, and work schedules become increasingly difficult to manage as teams add employees in different countries. This guide shows how to centralize time-off management across distributed teams, so HR and People Ops can manage requests, balances, approvals, and availability without relying on separate spreadsheets for each region.

The best ideas often come from false starts, conflicting opinions, and rapid iteration. Teamwork is messy, and AI might make it even messier. But the Chief Design Officers of Atlassian and Figma are designing for that reality to turn friction into a creative edge.