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Feeling marginalised is not a good way to go through life. In the workplace, companies with large numbers of non-desk based staff will inevitably suffer from a significant pool of employees who are hard to reach. Unless conscious efforts are made to include them, they will end up feeling missed out and feel they are at the bottom of the organisation's priority list. Not receiving timely company news is just the tip of a potential displaced-employee iceberg.
Whether the employees are the staff in the warehouse, stacking shelves, serving customers at the checkout, or people in distant regional depots, or field workers and logistics and delivery drivers always on the road, these are the people keeping a company’s cogs turning and they need to be included in all internal communications.
Everyone needs regular, real-time interactions, because employee engagement doesn’t happen on its own and the ‘costs’ of leaving part of the workforce out of internal communications can end up damaging morale, productivity and, eventually, staff retention.
Email & cascade is not the answer
Hard to reach employees often have no company email address, with many larger organisations restricting corporate email those above a certain level. As a result, emailed internal communications memos end up reaching only so far down the chain of command and often rely on line managers to disseminate internal communications like details of recent company wins with ‘thank yous’ to all staff from the CEO. Unfortunately not all line managers are great communicators and often the message doesn't get through as intended, or at all. Something needs to change.
An employee app is a game changer
We have discovered that our clients who use their own mobile app made on our platform can reach and engage with every employee, even those with no email, disseminating news and internal communications to the farthest reaches of the company so that even the remotest, workers feel relevant and important. We’ve found many of our customers have 60-80% of staff without email and this makes our mobile employee engagement app an incredibly powerful tool for helping include all those being missed by traditional internal communications. In fact, using our app on their own smartphones and providing a familiar mobile-app experience to employees is now replacing traditional, costly, internal communications channels and tools, as well as making many elements of corporate intranets redundant.
Our UK gas distribution client, SGN, for example, has 3,800 employees of whom 80% are field based across 30 locations. SGN’s HR team had such confidence in the employee engagement app that at launch they simultaneously stopped posting news items to the company intranet. Within one week 32% of employees had downloaded the app, with 84% downloading in the first 28 days. An SGN employee survey revealed 92% who said ‘they like it’, 64% who confirmed they access the app at least once a day and 26% who access it two to three times a day. And on an on-going basis, push notifications are issued on average three times per week to draw attention to new app content.
The mobile employee engagement app is a real internal communications game changer, particularly in its ability to reach 100% of employees in a company. Click here to read other success stories and our team would be delighted to discuss a similar app as part of your internal communications strategy – click here to contact us!
