Employee engagement and motivation is essential for the successful growth of your business. Many businesses follow fast-growth strategies, adopting remote working and driving cultural changes. It’s here that employee engagement apps and mobile strategy become vital to the future of your company.
Internal engagement strategies aren’t new. But the rise of ‘employee engagement apps’ is proving to be much more effective than traditional web-based portals or intranet systems. The main reason is simple. An employee app meets your employees where they already are – on their mobile devices.
We already spend an average of 127 minutes on mobile apps every day. It’s something we’re used to doing. And presents organisations with a huge opportunity to integrate into use our handsets to improve internal engagement.
Employee engagement apps become the natural next step for your businesses. Employee engagement is difficult to measure on its own. Because there are numerous factors that contribute to overall work satisfaction. We can use technology to measure individual engagement metrics to gain a clearer picture of your employees’ satisfaction. However, with a rise in remote working, reduced personal interactions and the differing career needs between generations, it’s not only important to understand how to connect with your employees but also what motivates them in the first place.
What motivates your employees?
Recent studies on workplace preferences between generations prove that companies need to do more than ever. Particularly to keep millennials, Gen X and Baby Boomers engaged and keep a high employee retention rate. Your millennial employees seek constant skill building and personal development to help achieve their goals. They want to be challenged and to make a difference. Whereas Baby Boomers want to work for a company that represents a good cause. Where they’re given clear and concise job expectations and expect to stay within that company for a long period of time.
By building a staff retention strategy around the key factors that drive and motivate your employees you’ll be able to create an app that answers your employee’s needs. Encourages regular use and ultimately improves employee satisfaction. Pinpointing key motivations will also give you the metrics you need to measure and the basics to build your app on.
Integrating your strategy into an app
A mobile app does more than simply put your business in front of your employees. It allows you to bring together multiple functions in a way that many other systems don’t.
This means you can specify the exact requirements of your employee app. This will guarantee it will be used all your staff. By understanding what they need, you can ensure all the information they want to access is on their mobile, at their fingertips. It’s where an employee engagement app becomes most effective.
An app gives your staff the information when they need it. And due to their task-driven nature, they become a natural choice for many work-specific tasks. We go to them to complete specific tasks which will save time and effort. A key feature of any business software. Successful features can include training and e-learning, communications, administration, career development management and reporting.
So when staff are on-the-go they can rely on your business app to keep on top of work. For example; millennials can access training programmes and personal development plans on the train to work. And baby boomers can see the latest updates from the company and complete administrative tasks on their lunch breaks.
Measuring employee satisfaction
An algorithm can be implemented with varying weightings against each task that give indications of staff engagement and satisfaction. By collecting data on every engagement your employees have with your app, you’ll be able to benchmark individuals against a set of criteria that indicate their satisfaction. It will also be able to flag up when there is a change in activity. Or indications that they are becoming less engaged, allowing management to step in before it’s too late.
Whilst this type of application can be implemented in any industry, they are quickly being adopted in a few key sectors. Including construction, hospitality and retail. Within all of these industries, staff are often working on-the-go or away from a desk. With little communication or interaction with colleagues or management. An employee app allows your employees to stay connected wherever they are. As well as being able to complete business-related tasks via their mobiles.
With more workers predicted to complete business-related tasks via their mobile devices in the future, you have the opportunity to use mobile technology to not only simplify your administrative tasks but boost engagement and drive organisational satisfaction.
Recomended reading: Tech is Retaining Millennials in the Workplace
Suggested webinar: When Digital Meets Employee Engagement: Remote Workforces