The Business Case for an Employee Communications App

From streamlining internal communication to improving employee engagement—and even boosting the bottom line—the benefits of an employee communications app are numerous. Here’s how to present your case for an app, and how to build consensus among the key stakeholders in your organisation.

With the emergence of remote work, and an increasingly dispersed workforce around the globe, internal communication has never been more important—or more challenging. Just consider the existing options for sharing information internally:

• Remember paper? It’s hard to believe we used to share important (and, at times, highly sensitive) information this way. But gone are the days of posting notices in the break rooms or handing out private communications on physical print-outs, as fewer employees are turning up to the office regularly.
• Company newsletters offer a slightly more direct alternative for sharing information, as they can reach even remote employees in real time. But these, too, are flawed as they provide only one-way communication—speaking to employees but never with them.
• Intranets can bridge some of these interaction gaps, allowing for two-way sharing. But they tend to be technical and overly complex, often requiring IT or development resources just to post simple updates. They are also generally expensive to implement.
  
  

With these ageing alternatives in mind, it’s easy to see why employee apps are the clear preference today. They allow business managers to share important information with their teams easily, and in an instant. And at the same time, they enable employees to self-manage their questions and interact with each other across distances and time zones. They’re easy to use, informative, engaging, and best of all, they can save your company money. 

Ready to talk to your leadership about implementing Thrive.App in your organisation? Here’s the most actionable information you’ll need to start the conversation.

6 Key Benefits of an Employee App

There are many ways an employee communication app can help your organisation to succeed in today’s evolving business landscape. Consider these stats from Harvard Business Review:

Clear, Streamlined Communication

All communication between individuals, among teams, and across the organisation as a whole should be clear and streamlined. Not only can effective communication reduce the incidence of workplace accidents and injuries by around 31%, but by better equipping frontline workers, it can also improve end customer satisfaction by at least 10%.

Improved Employee Engagement

Linked to overall employee satisfaction, this is more than just a touchy-feely aspiration. In fact, it’s estimated that 35% of a disengaged employee’s salary is wasted each year. Compare this to companies with top-quartile engagement, which report 21% higher productivity—and 22% higher profitability as a result.

Reduced Turnover

Improved communications and engagement provides tangible benefits to your recruiting, onboarding, and employee retention expenditures each year. Companies with a disengaged workforce have a turnover rate of 34% on average, according to HBR. On the other hand, increasing employee engagement can reduce turnover by 25% on the low end, up to an astounding 65%. 

Reduced Waste

Scaling back on the technical resources needed to share company-wide updates and enabling your workforce to find and share information easily and efficiently is more feasible than you might think. Employees spend 20% of working hours searching for information needed to do their jobs. Employee apps simplify this, which can convert those wasted hours into productive, revenue-generating hours instead.

Improved Change Management

Communication in every direction is clear and easy. According to Gartner research, as reported by HBR, employees who are experiencing change-related stress perform 5% worse than average — but improving communication and providing better feedback tools could reduce this stress by 2% or more. Sounds small? This actually translates to reducing associated revenue loss by 41.2% 

Tangible Bottom Line Savings

Make cost-efficiencies across departments and throughout the business. Your organisation will save time and money at every stage, from initial implementation of the app, to reducing the time it takes to share updates. And with its user-friendly interface, employees will have instant “day 1” access with essentially no training required at all.

Cost Savings of Implementing & Operating an Employee App

The key benefits of using an employee communication app are clear. But beyond improving efficiencies and reducing expenditures, this solution also costs far less to set up and manage.

Check out our free eGuide on the Future of Work and the Employee App for more on how the employee app is the communications tool best equipped to support employers as we move into a new way of working.

If your organisation is still using an Intranet, we’d love to have a chat with you and see how a Thrive App could support your employee communication and engagement goals. Get in touch with the Thrive team today for a free demo or watch the Thrive App in action here and see how we can help you transform your workplace communication!