Designing the App that really meets your employees' needs

In part one of the "The App-Powered Employee" series we have looked at what an employee app is and why more and more organisations with large blue collar populations are embracing the concept.

We have also seen that an employee app is all the more effective the better it connects your workers not just with each other but also with the critical real time data of the enterprise to allow them to make informed decisions at any one time and to feel part of what is going on.?

To effectively meet those needs, an out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all solution usually is not the best approach.

Low Code technology has recently removed many of the entry hurdles and complexities of developing highly engaging mobile Apps inhouse.

So embarking on a bespoke development project may be much less risky, time consuming and budget hungry than you might think.

Of course you will not start with a blank sheet.

Make sure you have a set Building blocks lined up and available in your enterprise API Bus.

(don’t have one? Then check out HCL Volt MX Foundry)

These building blocks may come from an HR Management or Talent Management System, your onboarding Toolset, or from a??diverse range of other business systems, but your?gold standard would be if you already have an Social Intranet or a Social enterprise network such as HCL Connections in place. This will give you for free many of the building blocks that will make your Employee App.

For this example let us consider a medium sized engineering company with a strong technical focus innovation but also with advanced??production site in multiple countries around the world.

Let’s also assume the employee app??the company wants so introduce will mostly focus on production worker,s as these do not have any??access to the company’s digital universe.

We have spoken to a diverse sample of workers from different age, seniority, skillset and job roles to get as much insight into their true information and participation needs:

What they have given us is the below list?of their priorities:

1.?????Communicate with their team and direct manager

2.?????Overview of Tasks their team has to compete (daily, weekly view)

3.?????Success, how much have we achieved this week against our target

4.?????Local Company news

5.?????Global Company news

6.?????Reporting Sick

7.?????Planning vacation, and short notice shift changing?

What else to do you need?

1.?????It would be helpful if you already had an Community platform or enterprise social network implemented in your organization that offers a full set??APIs from which to control content input and??output.??If you do not have one yet it’s time to implement one??as this will form the backbone of your employee app. Make sure that the solution can be fully integrated with your (in most cases Microsoft based Collaboration) infrastructure to avoid creating another silo rather than opening up access to essential information.?HCL Connections?is a trusted and proven platform that meets those needs. However if you do not have such a solution you may also find an open source groupware or collaboration framework that will provide the core elements like messaging, threaded conversations and a community structure.

2.?????Decide which additional??essential data points from your organisation’s data landscape you wish to share with your??employees. Is it current store sale figures or progress against targets, or current factory output, quality levels or order backlog.

3.?????What are the things your teams need to know (who is on leave, how well is the next shift staffed, is there opportunity or requirement to do overtime??

Now it’s just a question of a few Design Thinking workshops with representatives of different roles in your target audience to design a UI that truly reflects what they need.

Always start with the end in mind and ask the question what is the desired outcome in terms of people behaviour, emotional response, and business metrics.

Equipped with this plan, you can now start to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to check how your design works for the people it is addressed to. Your best to chances of getting the actual app built quickly and cost efficiently is to use a Multi Experience Development Platform (MXDP) like?HCL Volt MX?which will make it easy to create an engaging user interface whilst being able to link to all the data points you have lined up in your backend.?

What pitfalls to avoid and which approach to take to get to your first app will be the subject of my next article. Watch out for it.