BUT DO EMPLOYEES REALLY WANT TO ENGAGE WITH WORK THROUGH AN APP?
Surely an App is just another excuse for companies to reach employees anytime, anywhere and extend their “always-on” culture?
The key lies in the word ENGAGE. If you choose and use an Employee App wisely, it will actually enhance employee engagement not crush it.
What is an Employee App?
An Employee App is a platform for internal communication that can empower and enable employees to access important and relevant company communications, tools and information anytime, anywhere.
The key words being to empower and enable employees with important and relevant content. To do this, an Employee App needs to be very conscious about an employee’s time and deliberate about how they engage it.
The solution isn’t more communication, it’s better communication.
Employee Apps add value to employees by enabling:
- Easy Access to important information and workplace tools.
- Connection between remote and dispersed employees.
- Two-way dialogue that supports all voices and employee feedback.
- An enhanced employee experience.
6 WAYS THE RIGHT EMPLOYEE APP CAN TURN INTERNAL COMMUNICATION INTO EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT:
1. By offering a single source of relevant, streamlined content
Employees are busy. Their inboxes are overflowing. Collaborative tools such as Slack and community groups like Yammer can be anti-productive if not managed correctly because of the constant interruptions and lack of targeted push notifications and streamlined news feeds. Employee Apps can have the ability to send certain content to some employees and not others. You can create user specific news channels to keep your news as relevant as possible. So, rather than sending enterprise-wide messages, use your App to send personalised and relevant information to the employees who need them.
2. By contributing to a positive workplace culture
Employee Apps can enable multidirectional communication and encourage employees to take part in the conversation. Employee Apps allow employees to comment, like, share, giving valuable feedback in an instant. It can also allow employees to submit their stories to an editor for publishing. It’s this kind of consistent, ongoing and multidirectional communication that ultimately supports and enables a positive workplace culture.
3. By meeting the needs of the new mobile workforce
Millennials and Gen Z now make up the biggest part of the workforce. And they demand mobile communication, transparency, feedback, and an employee experience that lets them work in new and flexible ways. And Employee App can help them do this.
4. By making email communications redundant
Emails often create more clutter than clarity. They also lack immediacy and don’t effectively reach a non-desk workforce. In contrast, an App allows companies to share meaningful, critical information as and when it happens and offers the ability to send alerts. Some Apps even require employees to acknowledge that they’ve read a message, so the company knows it’s been received.
5. By helping companies measure communications
You know the old saying – you can’t manage what you can’t measure. The analytics features that can be built into an employee App can allow companies to understand how the App is being used. It can also be set up to conduct pulse surveys to test, among other things, what content resonates best with which audience or location, via stats for the most viewed, most commented, and most liked articles. This allows companies to make focused changes, enhancements and provide feedback to employees based on their engagement with the App.
6. By creating an end-to-end employee experience
From induction packs to onboarding videos and refresher training to HR tools like payslip integration, Employee Apps have the ability to create an end-to-end employee experience by making an in-App ‘employee suite’ accessible to all employees, no matter the format (video, manuals, etc) they come in. The App can also track completion of courses through built-in forms and even request feedback. Even getting induction packs to new employees is as simple as uploading the company handbooks and policies to the App and letting new employees know it’s available and always accessible.
EMPLOYEE APPS ARE THE WAY OF THE FUTURE.
How that future reaches your employees will depend on your ability to plan and enable your App to engage your employees in a way that embraces your unique company culture and values. If you get it right, you can change the way your employees not only engage with your business, but each other.