Seven Reasons Why an Employee App Will Solve (Almost) All of Your Internal Communications Challenges

By Dana Haase, Director of Project Management - Communications Strategy and Editorial
August 7, 2019

As a communicator, you’re charged with disseminating information critical to your company’s success to everyone from the C-suite to the retail floor. And you need to help build a cohesive employee experience across stakeholders from HR to IT, all of which are hitting employees with near-constant information.

Couple that with an increasingly dispersed employee population, cluttered inboxes in which only one-third of emails are opened, and daily logins to company intranet sites maxing out at less than 50%, what’s a communicator to do?

The answer: an employee app.

Mobile is quickly becoming the dominant communication channel. Estimates are that about 97% of 18- to 34-year-olds and 94% of 35- to 49-year-olds have access to smartphones.  A survey conducted by Asurion, a global tech support company, shows just how integral smartphones are to our daily lives:

An employee app like Staffbase, SocialChorus or Dynamic Signal connects employees to their organizations in a way that seamlessly fits into their existing communication habits. And it allows stakeholders like HR and IT to join in, uniformly targeting employees in one place. But that’s not all.

Here are seven pressing internal communications challenges an employee app will solve:

1. Remote employees are hard to reach. All employees – remote workers, field staff, manufacturing employees, contractors – can use their mobile devices to receive targeted company information. Employees see only what’s relevant to them, when and where they want.
2. Content can’t be tailored to employee needs. Through an app, team members are kept up to date on company happenings and can indicate what content is of interest and relevant, empowering them to curate the content they see in their feed. Plus, as a communicator, you can target audiences with precision.
3. Metrics are nearly impossible. Metrics – and more metrics – are a given in employee apps, with the ability to see what’s working and what’s not in real time. Finally, prove the ROI of your internal communications efforts and react quickly to what you find.
4. Employees have no way to connect or be heard. Internal communications can finally become a conversation. Giving employees the ability to comment, like and share content from anywhere, in the moment, gives them a voice. Surveys and polling features provide avenues for direct, upward feedback.
5. Emails are ignored. Above all else, employees want less email. Communicators can trade mass emails for targeted push notifications. According to employee app provider Staffbase, employee apps using push notifications are shown to quadruple message cut-through and increase reach by over 800%.
6. Demographics are changing. Millennials are now the largest generation in the workforce, with post-millennials now joining the fun. Their expectations for a company that communicates with digital savvy are only growing. An employee app helps you meet those demands with ease, and meet your employees where they are.
7. Long-form content is dying. People want snack-sized information. Images and captions. Snappy headlines. Your longer company emails and feature articles on the intranet won’t cut it. But an employee app lets you deliver digital content so it’s approachable and digestible. And most importantly, bite-sized.

If you’re interested in making an employee app part of your communications strategy, we can help. You’ll be delivering targeted, bite-sized, mobile-ready information to your colleagues before you know it.