The App-Powered Employee

Part One: Employee Apps a new category of HR-System is born.

In many industries??from retail to manufacturing, access to digital devices is a privilege of management and administrative staff. So, In an increasingly digitized work environment, how do you connect and engage your employees without company provided digital devices?

In today’s organizations the digital transformation is progressing at a breath taking pace. As?traditional paper based processes are being digitized, data repositories are being moved to the cloud and access to information is becoming dependent on access to the corporate intranet, one large group is at risk of being left out and that’s employees without a device capable of accessing those corporate networks, where not just all the information and process management but also the decision making is moving to.

The Digital Divide

A dangerous gap is opening up between the digital haves and have-nots, making it hard?for those without to make their voices heard or to even find the resources necessary to advance, as?they are unable to communicate in the digital world or reach out beyond their direct work environment, can’t access e-learning and career development sites or even internal job boards, HR – portals or corporate intranet. For those employees, the much praised empowerment of workers in the digital age through self-service portals and?engaging collaboration tools is de facto non-existent.

A fatal chain of developments

The result is an increasing disconnect from their company’s mission and vision with a danger of employees becoming disengaged to the degree that they are beginning to set off a fatal chain of developments. As the feel less valued, they become less motivated, less productive and in the end start to?look for opportunities elsewhere. This is a worst case scenario as the people affected by the digital divide are often highly skilled, experienced and productive workers who are difficult to replace in our current era of skills shortages - especially in the area of highly qualified manual labour.

Similar experiences are being made by?retail employees, who are rarely being equipped with online access to shift planning tools, Health and Safety advice or updates on promotional articles or campaigns. This way retailers are missing a huge opportunity of creating a more skilled, engaged an motivated staff base which in turn is known to lead to a more engaging customer experience.

A new tool category is born

As companies shy away from the cost of equipping all their workers with digital devices and corresponding O365 licenses and?also do not like to entertain the idea of completely opening up their corporate networks to a Bring Your Own Device strategy, the idea of an Employee App is becoming ever more popular.

What is an Employee App?

The core idea is to provide employees without a company provided digital workplace with just enough information and data access to allow them to participate in the digital discourse of the enterprise through a single secure native App installed on their personal mobile devices.

Out-of-the-Box Solutions

This gap in the coverage of traditional Infrastructure solutions has been spotted and exploited by a number of start-ups like SpeakAp, Haiilo or Staffbase

who are now expanding into the realm of the traditional workspace and HR solution providers.

An increasing range of vendors are active in the market of Out of Off the Box Employee Apps that come with preconfigured features such as:?

-???????messaging, (usually simple one to one or one to many chat)?

-???????mobile community and social intranet features?

-???????rudimentary employee services such as calling in sick or launching vacation requests.

-???????Onboarding information

-???????Internal Job boards

What they have in common is their focus on the need of Blue Collar workers or retail staff who typically are left without individual access to the company’s digital workplace features or even basic tools such as email accounts.

These tool vendors are increasingly successful but from a corporate IT Strategy perspective have a few significant flaws.

Where do they get stuck?

Whilst these pre-configured apps are usually very easy to implement and??deploy as a user just has to download their standard app from an App Store and log in, they are also relatively??inflexible when it comes to adapting them to specific company needs or connecting to the wide range of data points available in today’ corporate IT landscape.?

As a result these solutions tend to squeeze your employee experience into a tightly preconfigured set of templates that often misses the essentials of what your employees really need, want and identify with.

Another??problem is that these tools now open up a separate digital realm which is often not fully connected to the existing systems and structures thereby often duplicating functionality and information that is already available in other systems.??

Some apps now visibly??trying to expand into the domain of traditional communication, collaboration and??HR??Tools in a struggle for becoming the Leading system when it comes to the single point of truth for collaboration and Knowledge Sharing.?

Why not build your own Employee App?

There are many good reasons for building an Employee App that is truly reflects your??information and collaboration needs.

Super Apps integrating multiple individual feature domains are becoming ever more prominent whilst??Low Code and Multi Experience Development Platforms like?HCL Volt MX?are available to create powerful mobile apps with much lower effort than before.

The benefits of such an approach are diverse:

1.?????Engage team members from in the development process to make your app more relevant to them

2.?????Build an experience that uniquely reflects the needs of your employee base

3.?????Control the development cycle and roadmap of your app

4.?????Build on existing components already available in your infrastructure??rather than creating a duplicate layer

5.?????Connect to selected real time??data points from your business systems??and expose them in a secure and restricted way to enrich curated content???

6.?????Use an employee Super App??as launch point for more role based productivity apps leveraging a single login and authentication module

In the next part of this new series we will look at what it takes to build such an app and how to actually build one??in a way that rapidly leads to tangible results.

Click here or Part 2 "Designing the App that really meets your needs"