Not all mobile apps are created and intended for increasing mass consumption on the app stores. Building a mobile app to connect your employees either with the management or with each other can be useful. Be it small businesses and large enterprises, both can get benefits from creating an employee mobile app.
An employee mobile app is a great way to cover any inefficiencies in your human resource (HR) department, and for future-proofing your operations. This app will work as an internal business app, and can help you solve many common problems, including:
- Corporate communication
- Management self-service
- Employee self-service
With this in mind, you can build an app via AppMySite free online app maker, that can further help you improve the way in which information is sent to your employees.
An employee mobile app can also give your managers access to crucial information, such as company finances, and more.
Moreover, if your employees are working remotely, the employee self-service functionality gives your staff access to everything they would need.
Depending on your business, there are many other tasks that can be solved with an employee mobile app. You can add many more specific features that will make this app successful.
For those of you who are thinking about creating an app from website for your employees, find out the many benefits of using an employee app for your business.
Overview
- Increase productivity and engagement
- Reduce human error
- Instant feedback
- Improve communication
- Real-Time information
- How to make your employee app a success
- Solve a problem
- Define your work culture
- Establishing a central information hub
- Create modules for employee training and learning
- Encourage friendly competition
- Enable push notifications
- Do not forget about your deskless workforce
- Set up instant messaging
- Test the usability
- Uphold the high performance
#1- Increase productivity and engagement
An employee mobile app makes it easier for your employees to complete basic tasks, which further improves HR efficiencies.
With this mobile app, your staff can access and make changes to their personal profiles. They are no more required to visit the HR office or call someone from the HR department to get help.
If, for example, any of your employee wants to request vacation offs or needs to call out sick, they won’t need to make a call. All of this can be managed on a mobile app.
According to a survey, 60% of employees said that they use multiple apps for work-related tasks. And, 71% of people spend at least two hours per week accessing company’s information from their phones.
While your staff is already using their phones on the job, it will be easier for them to use an employee mobile app. In turn, it improves daily employee productivity and engagement.
On the whole, this will make your staff happier. Moreover, happier employees are more creative, more productive, and generate more sales for the business.
Therefore, build an app for your employees to improve workflow-related tasks.
#2- Reduce human error
If you are running a business, mistakes happen, and often happen unintentionally.
While some mistakes are more crucial than others, you will surely need to reduce faulty actions as much as possible.
Simply put, if the majority of your business processes are handled manually by your staff, your business becomes more vulnerable to making internal mistakes.
Let’s take the example of your HR department, as it connects more with your employees.
What is your current process if your staff request time off for any reason? Some businesses require staff to email the HR department, while others accept hand-written requests dropped off at the office.
Adopting these types of procedures leave room for human error.
Say, for example, an email can get overlooked, misunderstood, or accidentally deleted by the authorities. In another case, paper requests are difficult to keep track of and can get easily lost.
However, building a mobile app can eliminate all these types of errors. Your staff can easily request time off and schedule their vacation holidays directly from the app. Moreover, this information in the app will automatically get synced with your HR system.
#3- Instant feedback
How often do you see your employees and review their performance? What is your process of listening to their feedback and suggestions?
Your employees are the driving force behind your business operations. They should always know what is working and what can be improved. And, if they have a suggestion for improvement, it should not have to wait until their annual review meeting.
Add a functionality in your app that is specifically designed for employee feedback. With this feature of the app, your employees will have many channels to give their feedback or suggestions.
This app feature, for example, can also be used for placing requests to fix a broken microwave in the lunch room or an oversized pothole in the parking lot. Moreover, you can send out surveys to your employees regularly to encourage their feedback.
In general, it will keep your employees happy knowing that you care about their input.
#4- Improve communication
Communication is the key to getting success in the workplace.
80% of employees say that communication helps in improving the performance of their work. Another 60% of employees want their employers to keep them informed with the latest company news. And, approximately 30% of the staff believes that their company’s existing methods for internal communication is not working. This can become a major problem for businesses today.
Besides, about 86% of business executives and employees say that ineffective communication is the ultimate reason for failures at the workplace.
The majority of businesses are still using email as a communication tool for interacting with their staff. However, the average employee receives 120 to 150 emails per day. And, sorting through those to find the important internal announcements is useless. This in turn, relates back to employee productivity.
The matter of the fact is, a mobile app can become the focal point for all your important announcements. Your employees can check on this information anytime they want to. You can also publish push notifications to send important notices, so that everyone will see it immediately.
#5- Real-Time information
One of the main benefits of an employee mobile app is access to real-time information. Many businesses lack this major element in the workflow process, especially in the case of deskless employees.
For example, you have an employee who is on the roads, completing a job remotely. When the task is complete, that employee can easily update the progress directly in the app instead of coming back to the office. This will improve your scheduling procedures and workflow status immensely.
Another example is from a completely different angle that will show you how versatile this employee app can be.
Your company might have hired a shuttle bus that takes your employees from the company’s parking lot, public transportation, or central location in a nearby city. With this app, your employees can access the scheduled shuttle and track its actual location in real-time with GPS monitoring.
If your IT department runs last-minute repairs that will impact technology in the office or you are shutting down early someday due to foul weather, all of this can be communicated and seen in real-time with an employee mobile app.
How to make your employee app a success
Now that you know the benefits of an employee app, it’s time to understand how to make your app successful.
Here are some specific features and elements that you should take into consideration when you are building an app:
1. Solve a problem
The first thing you need to do is to identify challenges in your current business operation. Else, your mobile app will have no purpose and sense of direction.
Do not limit yourself.
Building an app via AppMySite online app creator helps you solve more than one inefficiency in the workplace. You only need to make a list of everything and then figure out what all can be improved with a mobile app.
For example:
- Poor internal communication
- Low employee productivity
- Limited resources for remote employees
- Too many manual tasks in the HR department
- No access to real-time workflow processes
Once you recognize the actual problems in the workplace, it will be much easier for you to implement specific features and functionalities in your employee app to address those concerns.
2. Define your work culture
You must know about your company and its culture, and make your employees aware of the same. For this reason, you need to put ‘About Us’, and other important aspects of your company in your app.
A mobile app allows you to set the standard for how your staff communicates, behaves, and works in the workplace. If you can imitate the same work culture in the app, it will increase the chances that your employees will follow the same.
Let’s say: you have added a feature of instant messaging for internal communication in your app. If you are not using this feature of the app, you cannot expect your employees to use it.
Your employee app will be recognized by your company name and ethos. However, if it is boring, colourless, and uses formal language, it will simply project a dull perception of your company’s culture.
If, on the contrary, your app looks bright, colourful, labelled with your logos and you include company tag lines while communicating information that is both fun and engaging, your employees will behave in the same way. This in turn, increases employee engagement and happiness.
3. Establishing a central information hub
Your employee app should have all the useful employee resources. It is because you cannot expect your employees to keep a physical copy of their handbook with them at all times. However, with an app, they’ll have access to any type of information from anywhere.
Putting a dashboard feature in the app can help your staff to get access to everything and anything they would possibly need to know about your company.
For example: if they need to sort through the 100+ emails each day to find company’s important news and announcements, there will be no use of having an app.
Get news and announcements section within the app. Your employees can simply check if there are any updates about the company, in their own time.
Most importantly, your mobile app should have a company directory listing all employees’ names, phone numbers, email addresses, and other helpful information.
You should also integrate event calendar into the app to inform everyone if there is any event coming up in the office. It is much more effective than passing out physical flyers around the office for upcoming events.
For example: if your employees want to access payroll information, health plans, and other benefits, they can simply use the app as a resource instead of contacting the HR department.
4. Create modules for employee training and learning
An app can also be used as an effective training tool for your employees.
Depending on the type of business you have, your staff, sometimes, need to go through certain training programs to remain eligible or upgrade their position in the company.
You can integrate learning materials, guides, and videos to the app. This way, you can train your staff on how to do things, which is extremely helpful for new hires as well.
You can even set up tests and quizzes in the app that can be used as practice examples for your staff who need to go through a certification program.
Besides educating your staff, this feature of the app will also offer valuable information about your employees.
For example, if you are under the assumption that your staff is highly trained and fully knowledgeable about specific topics, results of tests may tell you that.
5. Encourage friendly competition
Offering prizes or rewards to employees each month increases their productivity. You can opt the same by setting up a leader board in your app to track everyone’s progress real-time. This app feature will encourage your staff to work harder to get the top ranks.
For example, you can reward your employees based on their attendance or punctuality. Also, may be your staff has an in-house competition for who takes the most steps in a day.
These friendly competitions boost morale around the office and create trust in the workplace.
Your employee mobile app is the perfect place to track and facilitate this.
6. Enable push notifications
Emails become inefficient when it comes to communicating with your staff as they need to search through hundreds of emails each day.
According to recent study, an employee spends about 2 hours each day searching for and gathering information through emails. It means their time is getting wasted, and moreover, costing you tons of money.
The best way is to use push notifications, which is an added feature, if you convert your website to a mobile app via AppMySite. It is much more effective to communicate with your employees. However, do not get carried away and send them tons of useless notifications throughout the day. It will simply defeat the purpose of your notifications. Additionally, your push notifications can also be disabled by the employees.
Therefore, do not bombard your staff with too many messages. Else, it will cause them to turn notifications off, and then you’re back to square one.
Send push notifications to your staff only when it is something urgent and of great importance.
7. Do not forget about your deskless workforce
About 80% of the employees are considered to be deskless. While these employees make up the vast percentage of employees in any workplace, just 1% of enterprise software funding goes towards them.
Design your employee mobile app by keeping your deskless employees in mind. These employees work remotely, on the road, on-site, or hop around between multiple locations. Therefore, you cannot treat them the same way as your in-house employees.
With that being said, a mobile app will eventually benefit your entire workforce and change the way you manage them, depending on the type of business you have.
A mobile app keeps these employees up-to-date, in the loop, and eliminates friction in the communication process. This also makes sure that they will always be considered as a part of the team and have access to a clear set of instructions, no matter where they are.
By creating an app, you will be able to increase employee engagement by 300%.
8. Set up instant messaging
Communication is the key.
The primary benefit of building a successful employee mobile app is to put every employee and authorities on the same page.
Do not limit the communication between management and the staff only. You can also add a feature of ‘instant messaging’ to your employee mobile app. This makes sure that your employees can communicate with each other, from anywhere, in real-time.
Majority of companies use instant messaging software for this. However, in order to access it, your staff needs to be logged into their desktops.
By adding this feature to your app, your employees can communicate wherever they are and don’t need to be on their desk simply to have conversation with each other.
Employees can text and send messages from their smartphones all day long. It will be easy for them to adapt to, and may even prefer using your app over emails or phone calls.
It is a great way to make them feel they are still connected to the office when they are on the move. For example, if they have a question, need some assistance, or want to give an update, they can simply send an instant message within the app.
9. Test the usability
As of now, when you have built an app, with the above-listed features, you need to make sure that your app is user-friendly.
If, for example, your app doesn’t load quickly, often crashes, and unable to perform basic functions, your employees are not going to use it, and you do not want to be in this situation.
A mobile app is for not making things difficult, but it is supposed to improve your employee efficiency within the company. If your staff is using the app for something, they are unable to do so, they will be back to using their old ways. It will make your process even less efficient than it was before.
By keeping this in mind, do not rush to launch your app in the hands of your staff until it’s been thoroughly tested. You must test the usability of your app beforehand. Alternatively, you can release a beta version to a select few employees to get their feedback before you launch it.
10. Uphold the high performance
Your employee mobile app may be not perfect. Even the best mobile apps have room for improvement.
While it is important to test the usability of the app before launching it, you also need to understand that the app development does not end here.
You always need to come up with updates to ensure that the app is always performing at its best. This is something that your employees will be using daily, you cannot cut corners when it comes to your app performance.
Take your employees feedback seriously. If your staff is experiencing problems or difficulties using the app, encourage them to share that information with you and then you can make the necessary adjustments.
The ending notes
An employee mobile app is not something you need to build just for the sake of creating it.
You need to understand the benefits of building an internal business app.
Moreover, keep these benefits in mind while you are designing your app. This will ensure that all of the app features are implemented with a clear purpose.
Nearly any company can get benefits from an employee mobile app. However, it is important to understand what makes these apps successful before you start building it.
Do not just build an app for the sake of doing it. There has to be a reason and purpose behind building an app.
Every business is different, but there are certain common features that every employee app should include. Therefore, you can use this guide as a reference for building your mobile app.
Once you have decided that you are ready to build an app, get in touch with AppMySite WordPress mobile app builder to create a successful mobile app for your business.
