If one thing’s for sure, you want your employees to be engaged as possible. More engaged employees means higher productivity and a much greater chance they’ll stay with the company over the long term.
The tricky question is, though, how do you foster such engagement? Is it even possible in the age of distraction to keep teams connected and fully focused on their work?
Luckily, a host of technology companies have made it their sole mission to provide answers to this exact problem. To share some of them with you, we’ve rounded up four of the best mobile apps for businesses that were specially designed to enhance employee communication and engagement.
Slack
If you’re still using email to communicate with your team, it’s about time you switch to Slack.
The very reason the cloud-based communication platform was created was to provide a solution to the clunky and time-wasting back-and-forth of email. The interface looks a lot like a social media site, making use of channels, hashtags, and instant messaging, but without the news feed, ads, and distractions.
You can use Slack on desktop and mobile, for internal team communications and client projects, and for general chit chat and transferring secure documents and files. All this, along with features like the search function that means you’ll never lose a correspondence again, makes for quicker turnarounds, swifter communication, and higher employee engagement.
Yammer
Other than Slack, the other popular mobile app for businesses for improving internal communication is Yammer.
Microsoft-owned Yammer likes to see itself as the social network for professionals, with its founder saying it’s meant to be like an enterprise version of Twitter. It features a newsfeed, groups, hashtags, a people directory, and all the usual features you’d expect. However, the big difference is that instead of being public, its use is exclusively for within the walls and bounds of one company.
This means it drastically cuts down on internal email and can significantly increase the ease at which employees collaborate across departments. It also allows them to be heard throughout the whole company — making them feel their voice is important and improving levels of engagement.
Toggl
One of the most popular mobile apps for businesses out there is Toggl. The time-tracking and billing solution can help everyone from freelancers to small agency teams in improving how and where they spend time on tasks and projects.
When employees or staff are more in control of their time, they’re much more likely to be engaged with their work. What’s more, as Toggl is so easy to use, with one-click time tracking, well-designed reports, and support across various devices and platforms, it can help increase anyones level of productivity.
It’s free for teams up to five, but you get more advanced features and an unlimited team size for £6/user/month — worth it to improve engagement among contractors or remote workers.
15Five
The only mobile app for businesses on our list that is specifically designed for employee engagement, 15Five is built on research in positive psychology and proven employee development methods.
Similar in structure to Facebook, the app’s focus is on feedback, recognition from peers, and improved communication between employees and managers. Some of its features include a weekly check in for each employee, a question management feature that employees can use to raise problems or queries to those higher up, and the invitation for employees to share how they’re feeling.
15Five helps improve morale among employees and is particularly effective in teams that lack direct and regular feedback. It’s used by big names like Spotify and LinkedIn and integrates with many other popular business apps, making it a top choice for businesses of all industries and size.