Uncover 8 important steps for improving engagement within your organization’s employee communication app.
Employee communication apps and mobile intranets play a vital role in revolutionizing comms within dispersed and global organizations. Yet motivating staff – particularly frontline employees – to embrace and utilize these platforms can be a daunting task. Read on to discover tips and strategies for boosting engagement in your organization’s digital home.
Understanding the employee engagement challenge
Engaging frontline workers with employee mobile apps or mobile intranets can feel like solving a complex puzzle.
There can be many reasons why people just don’t want to use the app you’ve created. These include:
- Limited access to corporate devices
- Reluctance to download work apps onto personal devices
- Unfamiliarity with technology platforms
- Finding the app difficult to use or navigate
- Lack of features or content relevant to individual roles and interests
- Concerns around security of personal data
- Lack of awareness/promotion around the app and its benefits
- Lack of integration with digital tools, especially for frontline workers who often require seamless integrations and fast, intuitive workflows
To conquer these barriers, you need strategies that speak their language and cater to their unique needs.
Multichannel communications: How to plan and execute a strategy
Removing employee communication app barriers
Launch or relaunch your employee app with a bang
There’s no greater barrier to engagement on your employee communication app than a lack of awareness around the app’s existence.
A well-planned intranet launch campaign can solve the communication gap and help to ensure high adoption and usage rates from day one.
If it’s executed well, a launch campaign can encourage employees to start using the platform and engaging with the content right away. Don’t worry if your intranet app or mobile intranet has already been available for some time, a timely relaunch can work wonders for adoption too.
A launch or relaunch that drives employee communication app engagement requires some fanfare. Effective activities include:
- A teaser campaign to build up buzz
- A launch event when the app goes live
- Virtual tours of the app to help users find their way around
- A ‘treasure hunt’ that challenges employees to find images hidden within the intranet. This enables people to familiarize themselves with the menus, sections, and content areas
Simplify your user experience and interface
If you want to supercharge employee communication app engagement, simplicity is the name of the game.
Give your people an intuitive and user-friendly interface right from the start by enabling log-in with touch and facial recognition. In doing so, you will improve the speed and ease for employees to access what they need, and this can cause another uptick in engagement.
You can also simplify onboarding for new recruits with straightforward registration, crystal-clear instructions, and easy navigation. Remember to keep the design streamlined and avoid overwhelming them with unnecessary features or complicated workflows. The more the app feels like a daily companion, the more likely they’ll embrace it with open arms.
Using an employee app provider that integrates intelligent search into their product will help employees find what they need more easily. For example, Interact’s enterprise search functionality gives instant access to vital content and directs users to pages ranked most likely to help, called ‘Best Bets’.
Users can also favorite key pages to ensure instant access to information when they need it quickly.
Multichannel communications: How to plan and execute a strategy
Highlight the value and benefits
Make sure people understand the value and benefits of using the employee app by showing them how it can streamline their tasks, enhance communication, and provide convenient access to critical information.
Paint vivid scenarios of daily tasks where the app saves time, boosts efficiency, and fosters collaboration among team members. Explainer videos or animations can be an impactful way to achieve this. An even simpler way is to ask someone to create “a day in the life of” blog or vlog and share it on your intranet or enterprise social network.
When communicating the benefits though, it’s important not just to just focus on communication and productivity.
Think about additional ways your app can provide value for employees that will make them want to use it. Providing tools and resources for practicing mindfulness is one way of adding meaningful value in order to boost employee communication app engagement, while social intranet features help to boost the bond between employees and foster a stronger sense of community.
By demonstrating tangible benefits, you’ll ignite the spark that motivates employees to actively engage with the platform.
Customization and personalization
Enabling app users to personalize their experience and prioritize information that matters most to them can be invaluable.
For example, frontline workers may want notifications about schedule changes, safety updates, or company-wide announcements. By tailoring to meet their specific requirements, you can secure healthy and sustained levels of employee communication app engagement.
You can also customize the content displayed on your mobile app for different employee groups. This allows you to personalize the user experience and ensure that employees are only seeing the information that is relevant to them. For example, you could create different feeds for sales and marketing, effectively using one platform to create both a sales and marketing intranet and an intranet relevant to all employees.
Training and support
According to PwC, 61% of employees believe that training would help them feel more comfortable using new technologies. That may seem obvious, but understanding how to execute that training effectively may not.
Consider offering in-person or virtual training sessions, engaging workshops, or helpful pre-recorded video tutorials to familiarize them with the app’s features and functionality. By making this support accessible every step of the way, you can ease any concerns and ensure a smooth transition to regular engagement with your employee app or mobile intranet.
Multichannel communications: How to plan and execute a strategy
Gamification and incentives
Who doesn’t love a little friendly competition? You can inject some excitement and motivation by introducing gamification elements and incentives to improve employee communication app engagement.
Why not create challenges, leaderboards, or rewards tied to app usage or specific features? Also consider encouraging employees to embrace healthy competition and offer them recognition, prizes, or additional perks.
Gamification not only makes the employee mobile app experience more enjoyable but also nurtures those all-important engagement habits.
Continuous communication and feedback loop
Maintaining open lines of communication with employees is crucial for maintaining an app that they actually want to engage with, so don’t forget to gather their feedback, address their concerns, and use their insights to improve the content you serve via your employee communication app.
Encourage them to share their ideas, suggestions, and opportunities for improvement, and make it clear how they can do this.
It’s also important to communicate back to them that the organization is actively listening to their input and incorporating their valuable feedback into what content will appear via the app in the future.
Conclusion: A logical app-roach to generating engagement
By simplifying the user experience, highlighting benefits, offering customization options, providing training and support, implementing gamification elements, and nurturing a continuous feedback loop, your organization can elevate employee communication app engagement to new heights.
And remember, increasing employee communication app engagement is an ongoing journey that requires constant evaluation and optimization. By consistently putting employee needs first, understanding what different personas want, and adapting to their feedback and changing requirements, you can keep your workforce better engaged and connected from corporate and personal devices, wherever your people are.
