How many times has your heart skipped a beat when you thought you lost your phone or other mobile devices? You turn over your couch cushions, check every pant pocket you own and scour the cracks of your car seats. The point is this: it’s more than that sudden dread that your mobile device is missing – it’s the dread that your connection to your friends, family and the outside world is gone. You’ve lost your means to instant communication with the people that matter.
Mobile devices are a critical factor for engagement ideas, strategies and other data-driven initiatives, which is why companies from virtually every industry are adding mobile technology to employee engagement plans for 2019 and beyond (if they haven’t already integrated it). One of the main reasons for this transition is the continued rapid growth of the gig economy, and with it the need to incorporate more feedback from deskless workers – these are remote employees and mobile-oriented workers that operate on increasingly flexible schedules that need accompanying technology to maintain a seamless work-life balance. Mobile engagement technology is quickly becoming an important communication channel for deskless employees (outside of email), and as such, it needs to be reliable, fast and frictionless to provide the engagement experiences your employees need to grow and thrive.
Employee Appreciation Day can be a great time of the year to set aside a specific day for engaging your workforce outside of your normal engagement strategy, but what about your deskless workers – your remote employees? For those not working in-office, this is a critical time to reinforce their value to your organization, so tailor your engagement strategies to include them! Here are 3 mobile employee engagement ideas to make the day memorable and create lasting engagement change in your organization:
Empower Your Employee Voice
Making communications flexible and mobile is critical to the engagement of your remote employees. A rapidly growing trend among millennials and Gen Z is the demand for authenticity – they want transparency and understanding from their employers. These qualities have become synonymous with company culture and employer brand, which become valuable assets for engaging your workforce.
Authenticity for millennials and Gen Z takes many forms, but arguably the most important is the need for open communication – employees want their voice to be heard with actions created and taken from their feedback. This becomes more easily achieved with mobile communication channels outside of a-typical emails and inboxes. Bottom-up, crowdsourced real-time ideas and feedback must become a part of communication channels so they can double as advocacy programs – encouraging remote employees to share their feedback, thoughts and ideas, while also empowering and strengthening their voice.
Upgrade Your Mobile Engagement Communications
43% of employees in the U.S. work remotely at least some of the time. These workers need to be kept in-the-loop to maintain productivity, and as such need fast, reliable technology to do it. More internal communications teams are turning to mobile tech for employee engagement because it does exactly that: it allows encourages rapid collaboration and instant exchange of information. After all, one of the biggest issues for engaging remote employees is making them feel present and important to their company culture, so they need extended, flexible efforts that meet their equally flexible work schedules. The key is to diversify the channels you communicate with, such as apps, text messages, push notification tools, and social media.
Video messages/conferencing
87% of remote workers feel more connected through the use of video conferencing. In addition, a consumer behavior survey by Hubspot showed that more than half (55 percent) of their users report consuming entire videos, compared to 33 percent for interactive articles and only 29 percent for blogs.
- Example: Zoom is a great channel for video conferencing and working through a collaborative, video-communication medium. You can use Betterworks Engage.
Team communication software
Sometimes what your remote employees need is increased connectivity – access to systems and exchange files and messages in text, audio and/or video formats between different computers or users. This is where communication software fits into your engagement strategy.
- Example: Slack enables your team to work seamlessly as a cohesive unit. When it comes to project collaboration, Slack lays the foundation with fast and efficient communication.
Mobile communication apps
By 2021, an estimated 2.48 billion people are expected to have messaging apps, there have been over 4 billion downloads of messenger apps, and 6 of the top 10 most used apps globally are messaging apps. Messaging apps are also now 20% more popular than social media networks in terms of monthly active users.
- Example: Whatsapp is the most popular messaging app in the world – with over 1 billion users in over 180 countries. These communication apps emphasize the need for mobile-facing technology, but something more specifically catered to employee engagement, like Betterworks Engage’s real-time mobile engagement surveys.
Augment Email’s Role in Employee Engagement
Inverse to experimenting with new technologies, another avenue is looking into how you can augment the way your business uses email to engage remote employees. 86% of professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes, but mobile users check their email three times more than non-mobile users, making mobile usage much higher.
Do you ever feel that your inbox is cluttered or overloaded with information, though? The main issue email has with engagement is it offers little to no personalization for communication, meaning it’s often strict or rigid in its layout. To keep employees excited and motivated about communications through email, you can boost employee engagement strategies by creating and/or using a more personalized news portal or mobile channel for employees to customize and personalize their company news. This is made possible by filtering content by location, team, and interests within the company.
Another solution to the email issue is to host your own internal podcasts to recap what’s going on in the company. It’s a great way to keep on-the-go employees updated on the latest news from HQ no matter where your employees, remote or in-office, are working from.
Make this Employee Appreciation Day memorable and filled with inspiration for lasting change in your employee engagement strategies. Take your employee feedback from your engagement process and translate it into actionable insights for improvement. At Betterworks Engage, it’s our mission to work with you to unlock the full potential of your data-based engagement strategies. Use Betterworks Engage’s data-driven tools to find actionable insights your engagement process is missing – People Analytics!
