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After another turbulent year, the world of employee engagement was again seated at the top table, rightly taking its place at the forefront of how businesses would continue to combat the fallout from the pandemic.
Against the backdrop of questionable rule changes, enforced employee isolation, rising labour and inflation costs, alongside a general staff shortage. Simply retaining employees, let alone building and nurturing a healthy internal culture, has become even more demanding.
"The number of job vacancies in September to November 2021 continued to rise to a new record of 1,219,000, an increase of 434,500 from the pre-coronavirus January to March 2020 level, with 13 of the 18 industry sectors showing record highs."
ONS Report: 'Labour Market Overview, UK: December 2021.
Over the past 12 to 24 months, this change has meant that companies who perhaps undervalued and underestimated the importance of their communication strategies are suffering the consequences. More than ever, everything from employee retention, recruitment, and employee satisfaction is under the spotlight. These factors are now amplified by the stuttering and ongoing problems with the labour supply making for a challenging year ahead.
How Our Thrive Employee App Will Help Clients in 2022
Here at Thrive.App, we continue to see a sharper focus on what tools organisations need to have in their arsenal to battle these effects, and we feel an insatiable appetite for creating, nurturing and understanding the employee-employer relationship quicker than ever. With the current state of the labour market, there is no time to waste; organisations need to act decisively and quickly.
What does this mean for the Thrive platform from a product perspective, and how will we help our customers navigate 2022?
There are three primary areas that I would like to cover:
- Speed - a renewed focus on our Editors and content management.
- Streamlining - the creation of flexible operational features to organise teams.
- Support - all-new platform and employee measurements to help understand employee behaviour.
#1 Improving Efficiency For Editors
Firstly, 2022 will be a year to focus on improving how content editors interact and manage content libraries within their workspace(s). Our roadmap thematically echoes this outlook by highlighting new functionality and mechanics for better archiving oversight, visibility of workspace activity, and an all-new navigation structure. We've continually evolved the platform with ease of use and simplicity at the heart of the features; however, in 2022, everything we design and build for our Editors will have a refreshed and underlined focus on execution speed.
We aim to achieve this by fundamentally changing how Editors can manage content by implementing more explicit content and system navigation, surfacing more up-front content details and access to functionality through fewer steps. Alongside new auditing, tracing and content maintenance features, our objective is to cut down the time spent managing content to help Editors focus on their strategies and engagement goals.
#2 Streamlined and Flexible Planning
Capitalising on the two-way connection that the platform creates for every on-site, remote and front-line employee, another focus is the streamlining aspect that we know Thrive possesses. The Product team is actively investigating various solutions to help plan the management of dispersed teams. Sometimes the need to install and run dedicated systems is not necessary. We know that adding additional platforms is taxing for employees, and the implementation of such systems can cause disruption across the business.
Therefore, one of the key features we are validating is the creation of an entirely new, flexible and streamlined planning tool. This tool will introduce new roles and permissions to empower managers to create and manage lightweight calendar-based activities for everything from shifts, training days, on-site/off-site meetups, social events, office working slots and so on. The use of feedback forms within the calendar will also give teams the ability to capture information from the employee to digitise existing manual processes that were forcibly invoked during the disruption to 'regular' working routines.
#3 Combined Metrics for Greater Insights
Finally, we have been working through an entirely new metrics plan to introduce better workforce analysis. The use of baseline metrics such as app usage and content views gives organisations a glimpse into the world of employee engagement, but we feel we can do better. So, we envisage a new technique that focuses on an overall north star metric we call 'actively engaged employees'.
This metric will fuse baseline metrics for an employee, combining measurements in such a way to generate an overall rating of how an employee reacts to your content, how social features are resonating, what functionality they use and how long/regularly they use the app (to name a few). If we build out from the anonymised individual measures, we can start to aggregate this to analyse user group behaviour and, ultimately, your entire workforce. This will give Editorial teams an entirely new view on what is working with their strategies, what could be improved, and which groups could be better targeted.
Have Your Say in Our Product Development
The Product team will be looking out for customers to help validate and test out ideas throughout 2022, so please email product@thrive.app if you wish to be included in the Thrive Labs process. Being part of our Thrive Labs scheme will give you first access to a range of feature validation steps. In addition, you'll see prototypes and concept designs, have more regular sessions with the Product team and get the opportunity to get your feedback to the front of the queue.
To find out more about Thrive App updates, including current features and future plans on our roadmap, check out our feature updates blog.
