Companies that communicate effectively with their employees are far more likely than companies that don’t to report high levels of “employee engagement” and lower levels of turnover.
A recent Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report that surveyed more than 550 executives on the topic of employee engagement concluded that effective communication (73 percent) and employee engagement (71 percent) were the top factors in company success.
Although companies seem to understand that communicating effectively with employees and company growth are intertwined, workplace communication is rarely adequate. Communications often come through corporate email and information is housed in intranets that are often hard to navigate.
Add to that the fact that the workforce is becoming increasingly mobile, and you have a paradigm shift in corporate communications. Jeff Corbin, CEO and founder of theEMPLOYEEapp, has worked in PR and Communications for 20 years so he understands the role that effective communications plays in employee engagement.
He and his team say they are disrupting the decades-old, multi-billion dollar intranet industry and are helping those charged with communicating and getting information into employees’ hands. theEMPLOYEEapp, the latest product by APPrise Mobile, is an app platform that allows any organization to have its own native app on Apple’s App Store and Google Play, and is also available as a Web App. It allows for the instantaneous push of messages and content (documents, multi-media and live events) directly to their employees’ mobile devices.
While the company’s customers include large organizations like Caesars Entertainment and Northwell Health (New York State’s largest private employer), Corbin says that no organization is too big or small to subscribe to theEMPLOYEEapp. In fact, the system is designed to be simple enough for non-IT people to use since a lot of SMBs don’t have devoted IT staff. The company’s Application Administrator can convert Excel files to CSV files and then upload them to the system. And subscription packages for theEMPLOYEEapp are flexible, depending on the budget and needs of your company.
According to Corbin, the templated solution (available for both Apple and Android platforms) offers three important aspects:
- Mobile intranet: This part of the app lets companies offer general corporate news, broadcast live events so all employees can participate, and even house HR information in a content folder structure much like many current intranets do. Corbin says employing this aspect of the app platform helps those responsible for information dissemination think about their strategy.
- Dynamic newsfeed: This is a newsfeed of any corporate news that employees can scroll through.
- Broadcast alerts: Push notifications and broadcast alerts appear instantaneously on the home screen of every employee’s mobile device.
Privacy
The system integrates with a company’s employee directory. This means that only active employees can access the information.
For companies that don’t use Active Directory, theEMPLOYEEapp enables a company’s application administrator to set the parameters on what information is shared with whom. Some content might be relevant to all employees, some might be relevant to employees with a particular classification, and some may be proprietary for just few.
Social benefits
Sometimes a company will want employees to share information on social media. For example, they may want an event announced to the general public. Many times, of course, they don’t want the information to be shared.
Corbin explained that the person uploading the content to the app has several options:
- no sharing at all
- email sharing only, or
- “All sharing.” If “all sharing” is selected, the content is shareable via email and any third-party app that allows for sharing like Facebook and Twitter, but also Evernote, WhatsApp, iMessage or any other app on a user’s device.
Good employee communication helps employees be more engaged, and more engaged employees can mean more success for a company. theEMPLOYEEapp helps companies deliver information in an active way rather than depending upon a passively accessed intranet.
