11 Best Employee Engagement Apps You Should Definitely Try In 2024

If you’re looking for a way to keep workers connected in your organization, an employee engagement app might be the solution you’re looking for. Apps for employee engagement are becoming increasingly popular and have a range of uses in keeping your workers informed and engaged, no matter where they are working – from a desk, remotely, or in a non-desk based role.

Table of contents

What is an employee engagement app?

Why you should use an employee engagement app

11 best employee engagement apps

6 things to consider when choosing an employee app for your organization

Tips for rolling out a new engagement app

What is an employee engagement app?

An employee engagement app is software that is installed on employees cell phones and tablet devices and lets them stay connected with the company no matter where they are at that moment in time. It can keep them appraised on news, events and other happenings and also let them share information back to the company. An employee app will enhance internal communications and ensure that all employees have access to timely and targeted communication from the company.

Why you should use an employee engagement app

Deskless workers account for about 80% of employees around the world, and some 83% of frontline staff don’t have a corporate email address.

If you’re relying on email and corporate intranets to communicate with staff in your organization, you’re probably missing out on reaching a huge number of them.

Employee engagement apps make it easy to reach these people, whether they’re working in retail outlets, factories, transport, construction, healthcare and other non office roles. Most people have a smartphone and this has revolutionized the way companies can communicate with employees.

Apps can be used to share information in a number of ways to keep people informed. This can include:

• Providing updates about the company
• Sharing project milestones and achievements
• Letting people know about new policies and procedures
• Sharing rosters
• Promoting corporate events
• Promoting training opportunities
• Sending polls and surveys and getting instant feedback
• Facilitating conversations for problem solving
• Strengthens company culture
• Boosting productivity
• Increasing morale.

11 best employee engagement apps

There are many different employee engagement apps on the marketplace today. Finding the best one for your organization will depend on its unique needs and any challenges that you wish to overcome. Here’s a guide to some of the best employee engagement apps around in 2022 to consider:

1. DeskAlerts

DeskAlerts is an internal communications software solution and engagement application that comes with an employee app, letting you push notifications to your workers’ phones no matter where they are working from. You can also send surveys, polls and quizzes and get them to RSVP to corporate events. You can target communications to specific employee cohorts and schedule comms to be sent in advance – and reach 1000 people in less than a second! As well as being a mobile app, you can also install it on PCs.

2. Blink

Blink is an employee app that focuses on frontline staff by providing employee feeds, secure chat functions and mobile access that doesn’t rely on the staff member needing to have a company email address. The app can also analyze employee satisfaction and can be integrated with other systems and tools.

3. EngageWith

EngageWith is a platform that focuses on employee rewards and recognition and enhancing your company culture. It’s designed to promote recognition in a fun way and integrates with MS Teams and Slack.

4. Engagement Multiplier

Engagement Multiplier is an employee survey app that harnesses data-driven people management for companies that want to drive up their employee engagement scores. The app lets you benchmark your organization’s current engagement levels and then use the survey capabilities of the app to get feedback from employees going forward, which you can use to build actionable reports through the app’s analytics functions.

5. WorkDay

WorkDay is an app that brings together corporate functions such as finance, planning and HR in a way that your employee can engage with. It helps management to assess workplace sentiment as well as providing a benchmark comparison against other organizations in your industry so you can see how you fare.

6. OfficeVibe

OfficeVibe lets you collect feedback from your employees and conduct surveys so that you can measure your employee engagement levels and identify any areas that need improvement. You can use it to track different employee engagement metrics. The app provides a fun, interactive way for employees to share their

7. Bonusly

Bonusly is a team building app that encourages rewards and recognition in a fun, interactive way. Employees are given an allowance of points to give to their coworkers (for help, doing a good job etc). Points can then be exchanged for rewards either unique to your company or for spending with third-party brands.

8. Enborder

Enborder is an employee app designed for onboarding new employees when they start with the company. There are lots of ways you can use the app to immerse the new hire in the company, including automating tasks, giving them virtual tours, and providing videos and other interactive communications.

9. Glint

Glint is designed to collect and analyze data from your employees. It lets you send pulse surveys regularly that provides anonymized employee engagement data – which is then converted into a heatmap that shows you vital information about the health of the organization. Leaders in the company can view dashboards that shoe them relevant metrics. At the conclusion of a pulse survey, managers are sent action plans so that they can boost team engagement.

10. Lattice

Lattice is an employee app for HR functions including performance management and receiving feedback from employees. Goal setting and performance management reviews are easy through Lattice’s user interface. It can be integrated with lots of other communication and HR platforms, and survey results can be collated and analyzed in real time.

11. WeThrive

WeThrive is an employee engagement app that focuses on employees’ mental health and wellbeing. It enables you to create surveys designed to check in on your employees’ wellness and to take appropriate actions to resolve any issues.

6 things to consider when choosing an employee app for your organization

Different employee apps do different things. Depending on your company’s needs, you might only require certain features and functions. These are the main things to consider when you are looking to invest in an employee app for your company:

1. Will it be a channel that reaches employees in real time?

One of the major benefits of many employee apps is that they can be used as a channel that reaches everyone instantly. If the app doesn’t offer this sort of immediacy, it may well be redundant.

2. Can you send targeted and personalized content?

Some employee apps only let you communicate with all app users at once. This can risk you overwhelming employees by sending irrelevant content to them constantly. Ensuring you can send communications to targeted audiences will make the app more effective.

3. Does it provide two-way communications?

The ability to get feedback from employees is crucial for best practice internal communications – particularly if your workers are remote or out in the field and don’t have the opportunity to speak with managers face-to-face. An employee app should provide some way to communicate back to the organization, for example via surveys or polls.

4. Does it fit in with your internal communications strategy and goals?

Have you done an audit of the strengths and weaknesses of your company’s internal communications and critically evaluated where there are gaps and what improvements need to be made? It’s important to do this before choosing an employee app so that it will deliver what you need from it.

5. Ease of deployment

Is the app something that can easily be downloaded and set up on employee devices or will they need a lot of help to use it? Consider the demographics of your workplace when answering this question: some people are digital natives while other workers struggle with technology, particularly those employed in roles that don’t use tech.

6. Does it have analytics?

An employee app is a huge investment so it’s important that you can see if it is delivering bang for your buck. Analytics should be able to show you how well people are interacting with the app.

Tips for rolling out a new engagement app

Once you have an app for employees to use, you need to deploy it. It’s not much use if people don’t put it on their phones and use it. Ideally everyone will get on board a the same time, say over a one week period.

When you’re rolling the new engagement app out you should do the following to ensure maximum take-up:

• Adequately promote the new app in the lead up to it being released
• Explain the features and benefits of the new app
• Provide employee training about how to install and use the app
• Provide information about things like privacy to address any employee concerns.
• If the app integrates with other workplace tools, show employees how to do this to get maximum benefits.
• If the app is replacing existing systems, you need to decommission these and move people over to the new app.
• Include your company branding to help strengthen your company culture.
• Send reminders to people who do not have the app installed.

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If you have a complex organization with employees who are hard to reach, or even if you just struggle getting people to pay attention to your internal communications, an employee app can be a game changer. Get in touch with our team today to find out how the DeskAlerts employee app can improve your company’s internal communications and employee engagement.

FAQ:

What are employee engagement apps?

An employee engagement app is a modern mobile based software tool that lets you communicate and engage with employees on their phones.

How do you do employee engagement online?

Employee engagement can be carried out online via employee apps meaning that your employees can be reached no matter where they are located, all they need is connection to the internet.

What is employee engagement software?

Employee engagement software is specialist software designed to track levels of employee engagement within an organization and provide useful and actionable data so that you can put processes in place to improve it.

How do I use an app to improve employee engagement?

An employee engagement mobile app can be used to improve employee engagement by creating engaging content, encouraging interactivity and by getting data from employees that measures different aspects of engagement.