The majority of mobile productivity apps designed to enhance the employee experience miss the mark. By trying to provide a platform that offers everything, they end up creating a cluttered mess that’s frustrating for employees to navigate.
A fantastic mobile experience for your employees boosts productivity, acting as an enabler for retaining and attracting top talent.
However, a decade into the mobile revolution, we find that there’s a massive difference between consumer apps designed to deliver services, and those built for commercial enterprise. Speak to any person, and ask then about their consumer vs. employee experience, and they’ll tell you it’s worlds apart.
What Can Enterprise Apps Learn from Consumer Apps?
If you take a look at any successful consumer-facing app, you’ll find that it’s purpose-built. Whether you’re ordering a meal or hailing a ride, each of the apps does something well. They don’t try to do too many things at once, and that’s what makes them so user-friendly.
However, organizations often try to get their apps to do too much. For example, instead of focusing on the five key functions, employees need to improve their employee experience; companies create dozens of features or apps that provide little value and more distraction.
As a result, employees get an app that provides a confusing, frustrating, and mediocre user experience. Most employees use the enterprise app because they have to, not because they feel it improves their employee experience.
Fortunately, companies and managers are catching on with all of this inefficiency. More organizations are starting to offer consumer-style enterprise platforms and apps as an enabler to attract talent, enhance productivity, and improve engagement with employees.
Tips for Building a Successful Mobile Employee Experience
When creating the best mobile experience for your employees, follow this list of best practices to ensure you get results that matter to managers and employees.
Examine Use Cases in Your Business – Look for areas in your company where you frequently encounter bottlenecks with employee workflow. Look to solve real problems your employees deal with every day.
Ask Your Employees for Feedback – The best way to build a system that benefits your employees, is to involve them in the design and build process.
Push People Out of Their Comfort Zone – By encouraging experimentation, you push people into finding solutions that work. However, it’s critical to listen to the feedback and use it to simplify the processes wherever you can.
Plan for Exceptions – You can expect exceptions in both the design and execution phases of your new mobile employee experience. However, by working with your team, and relying on their feedback, you can build a solution that dramatically improves workflow efficiency and morale at your company.
Give it a Human Feel – Providing your new mobile app with some character certainly increases its adoption rate. For instance, linking your apps chatbots to recognize the phrase, “good morning,” results in the app bringing up your task list for the day.
The Future of the Employee Experience is with Mobile
From the standpoint of attracting and retaining top talent, the mobile aspect of the employee experience is paramount to younger hires. If your organization has a platform that’s far beyond anything they’re used to working with, then you can expect this to affect their decision to join your team in a negative way.
While mobile devices are not yet capable of handling everything you can do with a desktop, the technology is not far off. The future lies with mobile, and those companies that are early-adopters in the transition from desktop to mobile will reap the rewards in the employee marketplace.
By bringing the mobile experience to your employees in a user-friendly and efficient package, you create a culture of accessibility and ease-of-access, while enhancing transparency and efficiency.
