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smileguide 16

March 2017

Engagement on the move

Sponsored by

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Engagement on the moveIn this smileguide, which is sponsored by Staffbase, we look at why mobile is so important for employee engagement, and why an employee app is the new must-have for internal communications. You’ll discover what to consider when implementing such an employee app and learn from case study examples that show how others have benefited from them.

Companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their less engaged peers by 147% in earnings per share. (Gallup 2016)

Report author: Alison Boothby is a freelance business writer specialising in change, engagement and topical workplace issues.

In summary,Your internal communications app can become your most valued channel in building employee engagement. If your employees have the information they need to make informed decisions, if they can

see that the work they do is aligned with business goals, if they are recognised for their achievements and feel good about what they do at work you will see tangible benefits in the business. With the social sharing functionalities of an app, and through the day to day interactions with the information you publish on it, you will not only be able to measure outputs but outcomes too. It is the outcomes of your internal communication endeavours that build advocacy and start to give you the real measure of an engaged workforce.

This is your complete guide to employee engagement on the move.

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Employee engagement is not a new concept for internal communicators. But it is right at the top of the workplace agenda as businesses become increasingly global, increasingly fragmented and increasingly keen to attract and retain the best talent. In fact, 70% of business leaders believe employee engagement is critical to achieving business outcomes yet only 20% admit that their current initiatives are working. 1

Considering that companies with engaged employees outperform those without by 202% 2, customer retention rates are 18% higher when employees are highly engaged and organisations that have over 50% employee engagement retain over 80% of their customers, it makes sense to ensure

that the way we get our work done supports the employee engagement agenda.

In our highly digital age it is surprising to see that the tools for engagement still lack mobility. It seems perfectly obvious that whether they are on a business trip, in the field, in factories or on the road, the only way to communicate with employees simultaneously and instantaneously is via the one thing they all have in common — a mobile device.

With mobile now accounting for 65% of digital media time 3, the growing smartphone penetration is a great opportunity for internal communications to reach all types of employees. It’s more efficient and with higher reach than ever before.

1. Millennials Expect Mobile Communication: Millennials and Gen Z are technology natives and they expect information to be fast, interactive and accessible from everywhere.

2. Your Workforce is Already Using Their Mobile Devices. 72% of employees already use mobile devices and BYOD is a big trend. Allowing employees to use devices they are used to and that are embedded in their daily lives increases engagement and makes distributing information easier.

3. Mobile Makes the Monologue a Dialogue. Internal communication strategies are most effective when they work both ways. Mobile channels open up the possibilities for direct responses as well as sharing, likes and comments.

4. Mobile Enhances the Employee Experience. The employee experience is impacted by culture, the technological environment and the physical environment. Using mobile as a comms channel supports your employee brand, shows that you are able to adapt to new technological developments and encourages two-way conversation.

5. Mobile helps with transparency and crisis management. Employees today value transparency as one of the most important aspects when considering where to work. While it is impossible to be the only source of information, it’s important that employees have a source they can trust, and one that provides timely and accurate information.

5 reasons why mobile is so important:

1 CEB2 Dale Carnegie3 Comscore

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Demographics and technology dictate the pace of changeIn a recent survey conducted by Fortune Magazine, 84% of “non-desk” workers at U.S. companies with more than 1,000 employees said they don’t get enough information from management, and 75% said their employers aren’t telling them enough about changes in policies and goals. Almost the same number (74%) said “consistent” messages from senior management are important to them. Whilst alarming, these findings are probably not surprising. What is surprising is that we have been slow to address these issues, relying on outdated workforce models that favour a permanent and desk based staff. Now is the right time to get on top of the engagement agenda.

Today’s workforce - and especially Millennials and Gen Z, who have surprisingly similar outlooks - expect employers to incorporate technology into the workplace. Over the past decade technological advancements, how and where people connect with

each other, and the importance of big data have resulted in a period of disruptive change, transforming the way we work. The next decade is likely to see even greater disruption. In Randstad’s report Workplace 2025 the message to employers is to “equip their businesses for what’s to come - operationally, culturally and strategically - with increasing reliance on an on-demand, agile workforce to bring the dexterity needed to remain competitive in a fast-changing digital world.”

So, the future of business is a networked one and managers will have to meet the needs of the digital native generation - our Generation Z. These are the people who have grown up with wireless technology and will never remember a world without internet. They carry their world in the palm of their hand, always available and rarely separated from their smartphone.

Generation Z started to join the

workforce in 2015 and in five years it is estimated that they will constitute a fifth of the workforce. Not only will they be more spread out, work from different locations, travel more for work, but they also want to stay connected 24 hours a day. As well as the generational expectations, the entire workforce model is changing. We will continue to see less reliance on a traditional permanent employee base supported by temporary and contract workers at times of heightened need. Rather, a greater reliance will develop that focuses on an on-demand workforce of agile workers who may work in a temporary, contract, freelance and consultancy capacity. It’s the rise of the ‘gig’ economy. Employers who recognise the distinct advantages of using social and emerging technologies will thrive in this new environment.

68% of workers agree that advancements in technology and mobility have made agile working easier. (Randstad, Workplace 2025)

DILBERT © 2011 Scott Adams. Used By permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. All rights reserved.

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Apps drive changeAccording to a Future of Work study from 2016, developments show that employee apps are going to be the driving force in transforming the workplace in the next three years. 58% of companies are considering implementing an app. Apps enable you to bridge the gap between the non-desk and desk workforce while using a device that has become the younger generations’ heartbeat: the smartphone.

While new technologies offer advantages in terms of productivity, reach and time, the dark side to this development is the fact that social networking is extremely distracting to both Millennials and Gen Z. Constantly checking Snapchat, Facebook, LinkedIn,Twitter and Instagram distracts employees from their daily tasks.

“Between the Internet, mobile phones and co-workers, there are so many stimulants in today’s workplace, it’s easy

to see how employees get sidetracked.” Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer of CareerBuilder, said in a statement.

In addition, studies suggest that Gen Z attention spans have shrunk to eight seconds and that they’re unable to focus for extended amounts of time. However, other studies have actually found that Gen Z has what is called highly evolved “eight-second filters.” Gen Z grew up with unlimited access to information and have, hence, learned to filter extreme amounts of information in a very short time. The information they do deem worthy they are intensely committed to and focused on.

Simon Sinek takes this point further and in a recent talk about Millennials in the workplace, he discusses the addictive nature of smartphones and social media, and the effects of this generation’s “unfettered access to dopamine-producing devices.” He

makes several very important points and it is worth bearing in mind that it is in part this ‘addiction’, together with the instant gratification of life lived via smartphone, that makes employee apps with push notifications so successful as part of a communications toolkit.

Certainly the challenge for businesses in the next few years will be to balance the efficiency and distraction of modern technologies.

The key thing for employers, then, is to realise that they are competing for the attention of their employees and have very little time or space to grab this attention. Any content internal communicators put out there has to be at least as compelling as all the other distractions on an employee’s smartphone.

So what does this mean for internal communications?

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Improving employee communicationThe challenge for internal communicators is twofold: how to communicate with their digital savvy workers and how to reach an increasingly agile and remote workforce while integrating everybody into the company culture.

Considering those who work at a desk, their interest lies in reducing the burden of email, filtering through the noise to make collaboration better, faster and more efficient. But the majority of workers who are not at a desk just want to know what is going on, how it affects them and want to feel that they are part of the organisation. They want to know their voice can be heard. For both groups it is communication that is at the heart of their engagement and sense of inclusion with the organisation. When

as many as 70% of workers do not work at a desk, this is only possible with mobile communication solutions; solutions that connect all workers across departments and locations and hierarchies.

Employee communication should not just rely on social media-like internal tools but more on validated and curated channels that can be interactive and fast while ensuring an effective company-wide distribution of (validated) information. Ideally, your employees should not need more than 5-10 minutes every day to see and understand all relevant communication and information around their workplace and the organisation. And even then they are likely to digest the information in 30 second bursts.

There are certain things we can do to make sure employees take notice of mobile communications: keep messages short and to the point; deliver a variety of content mixing the necessarily dull with the lighthearted; attract engagement with giveaways and competitions; accentuate the visual and use photos and video for impact; use compelling facts and figures; don’t be too formal and don’t forget to measure so you know which messages and posts are read and which are ignored.

70% of workers do not work at a desk.

Creating an atmosphere of friendliness and sharing achievements, recognitions and awards brings us closer together. Thanks for the initiative to keep us connected.

Mike Ward, Tradewinds

Great ideaTake the pulse of your

organisation with a daily check on employee happiness.

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App vs IntranetWhile the magic weapon of an app is without doubt the use of push notifications, statistics suggest that an app also has a three times higher engagement rate than the intranet, a higher reach than email, is faster than paper and works on a channel that is already in your employees’ pockets: the smartphone. It is the device we pick up more than 85 times a day and the first and last thing we look at. We’ll look at push notifications in more detail later. But first it is worth considering here the advantages of an App over a mobile intranet.

Typically, less than half of all employees with access log on to the company’s intranet daily - and they often just click past it because it’s their default company browser start page. In addition, intranets quickly become complex. With the rise of team sites and social networking this new “everybody can do everything” style intranet comes at a cost. Hundreds or even thousands of teamsites and project spaces mean less structure, more noise

and more confidential content potentially in the wrong hands.

“While a modern intranet might be a great digital workplace vision for passionate knowledge workers - it’s a nightmare for the majority of employees who are just keen to understand what’s going on in the company and what they need to know to do their job best. Modern intranets come with more features but make less sense for the majority of your target audience. Imagine you are thirsty and somebody comes up with a fire hose - that’s what social collaboration has done to internal communications.” explains Frank Wolf, CMO of Staffbase.

Apps instead are much simpler to use and will show your employees what they need to know within just three layers of navigation. They are easy to install, mobile and integrate themselves into your employees lives.

Great ideaFind a plug in for virtually anything as and when

you’re ready

We reached a 70% participation rate within 8 months..

Susann WanitschkeInternal Communications T- Systems

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Case study: T-Systems Cutting through the noise“What we needed was something that could cut through the noise” said Susann Wanitschke, Internal Communications at T- Systems. “Our employee app launched in its pilot phase in September 2015 with three channels and 400 users. The goal was to provide all of our employees with timely company news. In the first six months, our offer was enhanced by meal plans, current IT news and videos of company communications. Exclusive content and gadgets like an online Advent calendar put the cherry on the cake.

“Within a short period of time the user numbers almost doubled and have continued to grow steadily as we continue to add new use cases. There is a trade-off between cool and highly relevant use cases and data security, but it is important to understand and determine what can and can’t go on the app.

Push notifications“Push notifications are really positive for us but we set some rules around them. We have made an agreement with the works council that we can send as many push notifications as we want between 9am and 5pm. Since we don’t want to annoy or spam our employees, we are only sending one notification daily, mostly every second day. According to the statistics, pushed contributions are read up to three times more often than other news. The teaser for a push notification (currently it is the title of the article) plays an important role. Interesting, funny or thrilling teasers are opened more often. But the time the push notifications are sent, influences the reading rate too. Does the employee have enough time for reading news or is he already working? Once the employee unlocks his phone e.g. for a call, the teaser is no longer shown on the start screen and falls into oblivion. So we are pushing directly before lunch or closing time.

Employee involvement“During our recent debate on innovation culture, we used the employee app as one of two communication channels. The app made it possible for employees to see essays and video presentations and to express their opinion in comments or likes even when they were outside the office. Also, the app accompanied our live events during the innovation debate.

Into the future“A lot will happen in the future. We are working through suggestions from a company-wide survey to help us better adapt the functionality of the app to what our users really care about. As a result we are already implementing more of the features available in the app such as a chat feature for employees and the option to subscribe to channels or add favourite news to a personal reading list. As well as an integrated calendar for internal and external events, including contact data of all employees and different company locations having their own channels will further increase the usability of the app.

Our employees enjoy the fact that they could be updated to the minute and the information is right there at their fingertips.

Margarita Yepes, Tradewinds

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Where to start?With a wide range of employee apps available today the possibilities really are endless, especially over time. It’s entirely up to you how you decide to get started: will you coerce employees to go to your app by leading with essential HR tools such as holiday bookings, shift rotas and payslips for example, or from an internal communications perspective, will you choose to create a news-driven app focusing mainly on communication use cases? Staffbase provides solutions for both approaches and much more. There is no right or wrong here but it is important to research your use cases. Try not to get carried away. Overwhelming your employees or wanting to do too many things at once can lead to a confusing user experience and can stop your app adoption before it even started. Our best advice is to approach your app like you would a business plan for a startup: Think big but start small.

Jonathan Phillips, previously of

Coca-Cola European Partners and now a digital workplace consultant at claritydw says: “The beauty of an app is the speed at which you can get it live - just a few weeks in many cases. Contrast this with the average 18 month time span for a large scale IT deployment and you can start to see the appeal. The key thing is to lay out the foundations well and this will enable you to develop and grow the app bringing your employees with you on the journey. My advice to anyone introducing an employee app is consider five things:

1. Understand your audience

2. Get the use cases right

3. Governance - it’s boring but so important

4. Have a clear strategy

5. Get the content right for the device

By acknowledging that it is an

iterative process, you can really put the power into the hands of your employees.”

So considering that advice, make sure you do the thinking first so that you will end up with an app that your workforce will love: an app that brings measurable success to the organisation.

Voluntary not mandatory Internal communication is predicated on the principle that your employees can choose whether or not to pay attention to the content you deliver. If we are honest with ourselves, no one is as interested in IC content as the IC team themselves, but although you can’t force an employee to read what you publish, you can do a lot to make sure the content you produce is content your employees actually want to digest. Creating compelling content has never been more important. From an engagement point of view, the more relevant

the information is to their own work and interests, the higher the adoption rates will be. Finding an app that enables you to target your content is the best idea.

It’s also worth acknowledging that in most cases you will be asking your workforce to use their own personal devices: few organisations provide smartphones for everyone these days. And in any event, the device that will be looked at the most is their personal phone so it makes sense to communicate with them where they spend most of their time. If, however, you plan to use your app for more mandatory operations, take up on personal devices is likely to be lower unless the company contributes either by providing the devices or by subsidising data tariffs.

Think big but start small.

Great ideaA personalised newsfeed to keep

everyone up to date.

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Use cases and targetsThe out-of-the-box apps available today are feature rich and getting richer all the time.The app from Staffbase is no exception here. While putting together your initial set of use cases be realistic. Launching with an all singing and all dancing app that does everything from Day 1 is unlikely to be as successful as one that develops more gradually in direct response to feedback from the employees using it.

“Experience has shown that a minimalistic launch and starting with a basic set of features works best. This process has the advantage that you are building a product in line with what your users want instead of just developing a product and putting it out there. Changing the app as you go helps you to concentrate on the features that will be used and saves hours of work on a

product that users might not like. You are building an app with your users and supporters. This means that you will possibly have to change use cases later. Using a ready-made app platform or SaaS supports this mobile solution so make sure you invest only in what you really need and add on new features, new plugins, languages and target groups later.” advises Staffbase.

Jonathan Phillips has a simple rule of thumb for starting out: “It’s easy to get excited by all an app can offer, but get back to basics. Find out what an employee does and what they are interested in to get their job done better. Deliver this on the app from the start.” From a body of case study experience this is usually a combination of essential company news and updates together with key information or processes - and

that could be holiday bookings or even the local menu! “When we launched iConnect at Coca-Cola European Partners we went live with holiday bookings, payslips and calendars and put compelling internal comms news material within easy access of those tools. That way you can certainly benefit from the drift between the two types of content.” added Phillips.

Great ideaReduce communication chaos

and get better results.

It is a great way of communicating with our team. It provides important updates about the company, it enhances our company culture, and is a great way to stay competitive internally and externally.

Youssef Boulos, Tradewinds.

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Native app or web app?Native apps are those downloaded from an app store and designed for smartphone and tablet use. They carry one huge advantage in that only native apps are able to deeply affect the devices’ features which enable push notifications for example as well as access to the camera, GPS etc. They also have the advantage of being available offline. Web apps are essentially websites accessed through a mobile browser on a smartphone, and not through an icon on your home screen. Although easier to create, they cannot be distributed through an app store and do not enable push notifications. Developing and maintaining a native app is more expensive although the functional benefits arguably outweigh those of a web app. A good approach is to combine the best of both worlds and create a hybrid app - these are native apps which have a web app inside them.

GovernanceAs with anything IT in the business, you must set out your guiding principles. Make sure you know what the goals are. What will the app do and - just as importantly - not do? What information is OK for the app and what do you want to keep strictly within your firewall? “An employee app is great for sharing company news, social events, your lunch menus and your holiday bookings, but it’s not clever to share details of your latest innovation or your company bank account out there!” says Martin Böhringer, CEO of Staffbase. Who will have access rights to which sections and who will be able to view which content? How will future decisions about the development of the app be made? Who is accountable for it and what will your success measures be? Putting up some rules and standards around how the app will be used is time well spent. Take push notifications for example: they are incredibly effective for boosting

readership but if you push too often, or at the wrong times, or push the wrong type of content to the wrong people they will simply turn them off. Talk to your employees and find out what will be acceptable and then keep on asking for feedback.

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Push Notifications Push notifications are a game changer in internal communication. They are one of the huge advantages of choosing an app, making immediate responses and receipt of important information possible anytime, anyplace, anywhere.

Push notifications boost app engagement by 88% and pushed contributions are read up to three times more often than other news items. Governance around using push notifications is important and using them comes with a warning: use them wisely or people will turn them off, or worse, delete

your app. Statistics aside, there are clear advantages of using push notifications which are highlighted below:

In terms of wording, messages need to be clear, concise, and compact. The aim is to quickly communicate the message and catch your employees’ attention, not to inform them in depth. Statements are more effective than questions and messages with fewer than 10 words have higher click rates. In other words, notifications should offer clear, concrete value that encourage the employee to click-through.

Advantages of push notifications

Push notifications boost app engagement by 88%

1. Engaging Users: We don’t have one single app on our phone, we have dozens! Push notifications help you to keep users active and coming back. They also provide relevant information, encourage engagement, spark recognition and increase involvement.

2. Insight into Employee Behavior: Push notifications provide valuable information on user behavior. Being able to measure who has opened the notifications, and measure reaction times helps you to know how well your messages are being received.

3. Usability and Effectiveness: Push notifications are already a central part of your employees lives, and a lot less messy than emails. Arriving on the device with the highest response rate, they are quick, easy to manage and simple to produce in an app at no additional cost.

4. Emergency updates: Do you have employees who are always in the field or outside on job sites? It’s essential for these employees to know about immediate dangers like weather hazards or road blocks. With push notifications enabled, you can easily send emergency updates to your field workers.

5. Schedule reminders. One of the biggest advantages of mobile push notifications is that you can include deadlines into your publishing plan. The report is due tomorrow? Send a targeted push notification to the people involved in the project.

£$#!£$#!

£$#!

£$#!

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Case study: Adams Land and CattleCommunicating quickly in a crisisWhen Liz Babcock got up on Saturday morning and saw the snow outside the window she knew it was going to be a stressful day…

“We had an ice storm early last week, but thanks to our teams’ preparation and hard work, we were able to continue operations and make sure the cattle were well taken care. Our mobile app has become an instrumental piece of our crisis plans, particularly related to weather and we

have begun revising our communication plans for those contingency situations to include utilizing the mobile app. We have created different user groups based on location and work groups so that in situations like the ice storm, we sent out tailored communication to the relevant work groups affected. We also have made plans that if in a situation, where we need to ensure they received the communication, we will use the

‘acknowledgement’ function. As our operations includes employees who don’t have access to computers, we appreciate that in crisis situations, we are able to communicate to them quickly, via the app, to the right groups, while ensuring they received that communication.” Liz Babcock, Director of Communications and Talent,

Great ideaReal time alerts for

immediate response

Make sure your Push notifications aren’t pushy.

1.

2.

Create value for your employees. When you send out push notifications always be mindful that you may be interrupting your employees in their daily life. If the notifications aren’t valuable to them they will simply turn them off.

Create relevance. No that’s not the same thing as value. According to a Push Index data study, highly targeted messages increase response rates by 293%! Consider targeting the push notifications according to departments, locations and teams.

3.

4.

Align with your company culture and brand. Before you send your first push notification take some time to consider how you want to come across and how you want to say things. Push notifications are an extension of your company and your relationship with your employees so make sure that you are consistent in your tone.

Engage, not repel. Provide timely and relevant information so your users are the first to learn about company news, benefit plans or shift updates.

5. Measure, learn and improve. Track the push notifications and the open rates. This will help you to determine which notifications are more interesting and engaging to your employees and helps you to fine-tune the process.

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How to deploy your AppUndoubtedly the simplest way to distribute your internal communications app is through a public app store. Employees are already used to this process because they most likely have installed other apps on their devices. However, Apple and Google are strict in how they deal with apps for closed user groups. This means that all apps, even if employees are the primary target group, need to have a public area with relevant public content. A cautionary note here from Jonathan Phillips: “Any app available in the public app stores needs to be easily identifiable to your employees yet have suitable material for an external audience to interact with on its splash page. Apple in particular are very good at simply turning off your app if they do not perceive it to be of any value to public users. In practice this means there must be something tangible to interact with for anyone who finds your app. This could be general information about the company, a list of locations, current job vacancies, press releases or news feeds from the company’s customer-facing social media accounts, for example.”

The public area of your app serves as the gateway to your internal app and only users who are invited into the app and have a login will have access to anything beyond the public area.

Martin Böhringer of Staffbase again: “The advantage of deploying the app over a public app store, apart from the easy usability, is that the app store also ensures that the app is updated on a regular basis. We publish a new release of our app with improved features and bug fixes every six weeks. As most smartphone users have automatic updates enabled - and you are prompted if you don’t - you can be pretty sure your people are benefiting from the latest version.”

Alternatively, it is possible to distribute the app outside of the app stores. Some organisations - particularly large enterprises for example - may set up their own internal app store (or MDM), but it is not as straightforward to install and updates are cumbersome. Version control is certainly more tricky in inhouse app stores.

MeasurementThe beauty of an employee app is that everything is measurable and you have access via a dashboard to graphs, data and statistics for every piece of content. You’ll have a comprehensive overview of user numbers, you’ll be able to see which content is most popular - and the content that isn’t of interest, too. You’ll know how often your employees are accessing the app, how many are truly engaging with content and contributing though posting, commenting and social likes and shares. It has never been so easy to take the pulse of the organisation while at the same time delivering more of the content your people want to see and less of the stuff that bores them. Being able to demonstrate ROI on engagement is real progress for your internal communications.

Great ideaMake content fun and versatile

with images and video.

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5.Limit the information you put on your app. Decide wisely on what you want to make visible on your app. and use the app for sharing news, the next christmas party, a black board or the meal plan. Not the spaceship you’re building.

Make sure company secrets on your intranet can’t be accessed from a private smartphone. The smartest solution here is to have your app running on a separate infrastructure.

Consider the lifetime of your user’s sessions. Ideally your app should provide options for keeping everybody logged in as well as logging people out after a certain period of time.

Make sure to provide secure logins. Using SSO is the most secure - even your app provider does not get involved with your user’s passwords.

Only give your information to an app provider you trust. Check out their credentials (ISO27001 or SSAE, the UK and USA IT safety standards) and make sure they sign confidentiality agreements.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.Use an app that enables you to decide the security standard for each employee. Determine who will have access rights to which parts and who will be able to view which content.

Make sure that all information is encrypted on its way to your app. Thoroughly check the app you plan on using. There should be strong HTTPS encryption to ensure that connections are private, authentic and reliable.

Choose an app that is verified by other industry leaders. It is a huge advantage if your app runs on a platform which has already proven its value to other companies.

There are certain threats that are common on the internet. Your app provider should be able to deal with things like CSRF, SQLi, and XSS.

Make sure that there are daily backups and check out the uptime of the servers the app uses - you want 99.9% or more.

Ten Top Security Tips The most important things to consider in order to ensure security and privacy in your internal communications app according to Staffbase:

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Case Study: TradeWinds Engaging with the company culture TradeWinds’ growth presented a business challenge. Over a very short period of time, the company had grown from 700 employees to over 1,100 employees. As a resort, they operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Most of the staff do not go near a computer in their daily activities and do not have access to company email. The challenge was to encourage all employees to engage and interact with their culture in a way that fitted with their schedule and their mobility. A mobile internal communications app that felt like a social media app was critical to the success of this endeavour, and it needed to be able to handle all forms of media. They chose to partner with Staffbase.

“Having a portal to reach our employees en mass has changed the culture of the company drastically,“ says Jessica Leonard, Internal Communications Coordinator at TradeWinds.

Don Wooldridge is Vice President of Culture Development and Training at TradeWinds. He told us: “Over 75% of my employee population does not have

access to a desktop computer during their work day. Most of our people are scattered all over property so to communicate to all of them, we have to be mobile. Also, mobile feels more like social media so it is more popular and more fun. It is easier for employees to interact, post pictures, and comment etc. when they can access the app on their phone.

Updating the newsletter“We used to have an electronic newsletter that was sent out to every computer in the company daily. That was about 200 desks and managers were supposed to post them and share them with employees who did not have access via computer. In practice this didn’t happen reliably. We couldn’t publish pictures and articles changed so infrequently that readership dwindled to almost nil. The app has taken over that vehicle entirely with fresh, content rich graphics, pictures, videos and so much more that the old system just could not deliver - and all accessible to every employee (almost) in

real time. Which leads me to this point. We have discovered about 15% of our population is not electronically enabled and probably never will be. They are either just not interested or have chosen not to participate in anything electronic. So, we are seriously considering a printed piece that comes out weekly or every other week that basically highlights what they missed by not having the app. We constantly remind ourselves that the mission is communication, The app is just a tool and if the tool doesn’t work for everyone, then we need to offer other communication channels that reach that population if economically feasible to do so. As it stands, we are reaching around 800 employees and over half of them are engaging with the app every week.

“Having a portal to reach our employees en mass has changed the culture of the company drastically.“

Jessica Leonard, Internal Communications, Tradewinds

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Push notifications“Initially, we told employees that we would be very conservative with our use of push notifications. We wanted them to know that we respected their time and their privacy. And also we did not want to give them any reason to turn push notifications off on their personal device, since one of our goals was to have a communication channel to our employees in case of emergencies. It is important to note that, even with these precautions, we had a very few employees say that we dinged their phone too often and they just turned us off. But I think those people were going to turn us off anyway. After we had the app for a while we did a survey about push notifications and found the results quite interesting. We had a large portion of our population tell us that they wanted the phone to ding every time something was published on the app. These people made it clear that they only looked at the app when it got their attention and if we wanted them to see the message we had better push notify. Then we had

a second, equally large population that said they only wanted push notifications in case of emergencies. This group was clear that they would check the app when they had time but did not want to be bothered on their off time and then, of course, there was a pretty sizable group in the middle who were fine either way.

“Where we are now is that we have a policy that we only use push notifications in three instances:

1. If we sponsor a contest on the app (which we do frequently),

2. If there is an emergency message of some kind or,

3. If the President sends a message.

“We also have a Managers Only Channel which goes to Managers who have a company phone. I push notify to that far more frequently because it is a company phone and they are required to keep notifications turned on.

Deciding what to publish“When it came to deciding what to publish, again we asked people what they wanted to see on the app. The responses fell clearly into two camps. We had one large group of employees who were socially driven. They didn’t look at the notices but wanted to hear about what was going on in other departments; they wanted to post pictures; they wanted to ask upper management questions. (We have an open post channel that is a direct line to our President). In short, they didn’t want the news, they wanted to know about the people and engage others. We had another large group of employees who couldn’t care less who was having a baby or celebrating an anniversary. They just wanted to get the notices and leave all of the “fluff” (their word) alone. The

solution was that we structured our channels so that employees could look at the content they wanted to see and leave the rest alone.

“We try to communicate just about everything we think people will be interested in hearing, but on the proper channels so that employees can filter what they get”.

Getting important information out to our employees is as easy as literally pressing a button.

Jessica Leonard, Internal Communications, Tradewinds Great idea

Keep internal chatter safe and away from WhatsApp

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Security“I’m often asked if we are worried about the security on the app. Yes, we are sensitive to proprietary information but having said that, one of the reasons we have an open post channel to our President is that there is a lot of transparency in our company. We share a lot about the business with our employees. We call our Employees “Employee Partners” for that very reason. We believe that all of our employees are “partners” in making our business a success. So, we share a lot and pretty frankly.”

What success looks likeAt TradeWinds, company-wide engagement programs generate hundreds of interactions. For example, they recently completed a fun culture development program that revolved around a large stuffed fish as its mascot. “We launched a “Selfie with the Fish” contest that generated over 250 pictures posted on the app in just one week with entries from virtually every department in the company,” says Wooldridge. “And on a more serious note, there are some significant improvements in our internal communications made possible through the app:

The app is great and easy to use. It is very helpful to the employees when it comes to the happenings around and on the beach, for example when the bridge is closed or when there are races going on.

Marko Ivanovic,Tradewinds

• The President has an open channel in which anyone can ask him a question and he answers it in a post so everyone can see both the question and the answer.

• The TradeWinds app links out to other apps and websites that employees use in their work.

• They can now share with everyone good news stories, celebrations and recognition that was previously only shared at the departmental level.

• Posting videos of all employee meetings - so those who could not make it can see the meeting later.

“And we are just getting started,” says Wooldridge.

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