Employee Engagement Apps - More Than a Trend?

10 years ago, company wikis and difficult to maintain SharePoint sites did little to increase employee engagement. It’s only in the last few years that technology, particularly mobile, has evolved to support the use cases and feature set needed to connect, empower and facilitate knowledge sharing among employees.

With more and more companies supporting a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy that enable employees to use their personal smartphones to accomplish work tasks, HR and CSR departments are rolling out apps to support their employee engagement initiatives.

Because tracking, reporting, and measuring the impact of employee engagement programs and activities are critical for gaining and maintaining executive sponsorship, apps provide the perfect medium for engagement and analytics. Here are five reasons why continue to be used across businesses of all sizes and industry:

1. Management Has Big Data Visibility

Make big data meaningful by consolidating the interactions that once happened across websites, social media, and microsites in one app.

You will not need a data warehouse or data scientist to spot trends or comb through disparate data sources - but can easily spot areas of opportunity to improve your organization.  In particular, progressive web apps can be used to push live surveys to employees that they can fill out at their leisure without downloading an additional application.

Surveys are a great way to collect information regarding engagement in the workforce, but not everyone wants to download some third party survey application. Progressive web apps remove that barrier and make this a more accessible option to all employees.

Collecting data through real-time feedback and surveys provides employers with a huge advantage. Far greater than what comes from once-a-year meetings, these engagement apps allow for agile, data-driven changes that improve the workplace and drive employee efficiency.

2. Significant Cost Reduction

How many different applications, software solutions, or subscriptions are you paying to jerry rig your employee feedback and engagement process? Chances are, you’re paying too much for too little.

Engagement apps are a remarkably affordable replacement for your current model of management/employee communication. In addition, white label apps like the IHUBApp allow you to customize the application’s interface so it bears your organization’s logo, branding, and tone of voice.

Instead of using a variety  of standalone solutions that either require manual data pulls or complex API integrations to share data, employee engagement apps integrate all of these uses into one central location, reducing redundancies in data, labor-intensive data transfer, and expensive niche software subscriptions.

3. Socialization of Professional Growth and Education

Your employees of today will be your managers and executives of the future. Promotion of technical education and professional growth for employees who will be leading teams, departments, and entire businesses in the future is crucial to organization scalability.

Employee engagement apps are a great way to share knowledge, best practices, and professional efficiency methods among employees and managers alike. Employees can also track the development of their careers and build pathways to promotion. When leaders are not only discovered, but nurtured and coached within an organization, the entire organization benefits.

4. Inciting Engagement with Company-wide Recognition

Engagement apps can be used to reward employees for viewing, sharing, and posting certain content on internals networks. How they are rewarded is entirely up to you - and how your organization wants to promote continued engagement on your employee engagement app. Either way, the connectivity and tracking of engagement apps make it possible for your organization to amplify employee recognition programs and initiatives. This is one area where progressive web apps really shine - they easily integrate with existing tools and networks that have already been instituted for employee recognition to make the experience more streamlined.

5. Streamline Feedback and Suggestions

It’s true - employees have the best pulse on the trajectory of your organization. They’re on the ground, engaging with your customers or volunteers and implementing the work management has assigned them. If anyone has an idea on improving processes, eliminating redundancies, and increasing end-customer value, isn’t it them?

Employee engagement apps like IHUBApp allow management and executive teams to streamline this feedback in a way that produces meaningful change. If you’ve struggled to find a solution for handling feedback and suggestions (and the “suggestion box” in the employee cafeteria doesn’t seem to be working), an employee engagement app can meet your employees where they are most - on their devices.

Integrating this crucial organizational feedback loop into your employee’s existing lifestyle gives you the best chance to receive the most quantitative and qualitative feedback - and it might be just what your organization needs to take it to the next level. What feature would you find the most valuable in an employee engagement app?