Mobile Strategy: Digitising the employee experience

This article is for people looking for a mobile strategy that will increase efficiency and employee satisfaction.

Digitising the employee experience means using digital tools to help people in their day to day employment.

The strategy can be specific your mobile users, or part of a broader digital strategy where you want to to reduce the burden on HR and give employees easy access to information.

What to digitise through an app?

The general idea is to give employees useful information and tools whilst reducing the burden on your HR and admin staff. Here’s some examples of how you could implement this strategy.

• An app that allows employees to book holidays
• Enable employees to access payslips via an app
• Provide operational manuals that can be read easily accessed via a smartphone or tablet
• Publish company news via a mobile app
• Allowing taxi drivers to pay their weekly rentals through an app

Creating mobile apps is sensible when your staff don’t all sit at desks or where they don’t have easy access to a computer. You can combine Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and pay employees for using it for work purposes. A good starting point is to look for use cases where:

• Employees aren’t sat at a desk – think drivers, checkout staff, retail shop floor, and warehouses
• Employees might want to access information away from the office – e.g. payslips, holiday calendars, pension info and travel guides

Who’s doing this?

• Financial advisors create mobile travel guides that enable employees who travel a lot to lean how to operate in different countries.
• Supermarkets offer holiday booking, operational manuals and payslips through an app.
• Facilities management companies offering maintenance staff access to their accumulated earnings through an app
• Taxi companies offer apps to allow drivers to pay their weekly car and head-unit rental fees through an app.

You can be more efficient by giving your employees access to information and tools on a self-service basis. This reduces the strain on admin teams and increases employee convenience.

Implementation

There are many ways to create enterprise apps to help digitise the employee experience. Here are a few guidelines:

• Don’t rush the innovation phase, take time to practice design-thinking to find out employee needs and test ideas.
• Avoid re-inventing the wheel, many of your systems may already offer rich mobile functionality that you can simply make available to staff.
• Consider both BYOD and Enterprise App distribution.
• Expect to integrate with your existing digital systems using API’s – Intranets, CRM, reservation systems etc.
• Drive engagement to increase usage. Incorporate push notifications to alert employees to significant events, such as when a holiday request is authorised, or when a new payslip is available.
• Consider many technologies; native mobile apps, wrapper apps and Progressive Web Apps (PWA’s) as tools to achieve your goals.

We can help

We’re mobile experts who help companies innovate by creating mobile strategies, practicing design-thinking and agile delivery. We’d be happy to help you increase your efficiency and employee satisfaction by digitising the employee experience. Get in touch if you’d like to discuss your ideas.