Top 3 Apps to Boost Employee Engagement and Communication

The way we communicate has come a long way since the ancient scratches and drawings on cave walls. The modern world of work is fluid and ever changing, with ‘ agile ’ solutions being required to solve contemporary problems. Work habits are changing as Millennials are demanding not only different working environments; with standing desks and cubicle-less, open planned work spaces; but also innovative technologies and solutions to keep them engaged, and to aid them in improving their overall employee experience . Consequently, this has made the work of internal and corporate communications professionals considerably more demanding. Yet despite this appreciation of the need for changing work circumstances, the ‘ 2016 Digital Workplace Communications Survey ’ conducted on over 250 companies concluded that almost half of all employees (48%) advocated for a change in their company’s digital workplace communications. Here is a list of the top apps to implement to boost employee engagement and communication.

Slack


Slack is a cloud-based set of team collaboration tools and services. The name is an acronym for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge", which concisely indicates it’s primary functions. Slack has humble beginnings and initially was used as an internal tool by its founding company. Since its creation in 2013, Slack has become one of the darlings of the tech scene, becoming one of the fastest growing apps in history. Slack was recognized as the best start-up of the year at the 10th Crunchies Awards, organized by TechCrunch. By the end of 2016, Slack was valued at $2.7 billion. Features offered by Slack include organized chat rooms (channels) by topic, private groups, and direct messaging. All content inside Slack is fully searchable This enables workers to search for all kinds of data including files, conversations, and users. Conveniently Slack is integrated with many other available services such as Google Drive and Dropbox; thereby making it simple to implement, and even easier to share and save files.

Impraise


Technology is here to make our lives easier. Having a conversation with someone on the other side of the world is now simple and instantaneous. There’s no delay. That’s precisely how good performance management software should work, and is the key to Impraise’s performance management software. Multi-award winning Impraise, is a web and mobile application, that was founded in 2013. Since then, the start-up has grown impressively with over 130 clients including booking.com , NRG , Fandango and Shopify all using Impraise to streamline their in-office communication. Ease of use and accessibility are at the heart of Impraise’s performance management tool . Impraise allows you to gather relevant and accurate feedback for your employees faster and easier than ever before. Collaborative feedback is set up in a matter of minutes, giving an excellent understanding of your team’s strengths and possible coaching needs. Prompt feedback results in faster learning and encourages social interaction amongst your team.

Asana


Asana is web based ‘software-as-a-service’ designed to improve team collaboration. It comes in both web and mobile app versions, and enables users to manage projects and tasks online without the use of email. This is a crucial part of Asana’s mantra, as its foundersDustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein launched “an audacious attempt to change the way people connect at work, where the incessant drumbeat of email has become an excruciating annoyance”. Asana works by giving each team its own unique workspace. These workspaces contain projects, and projects contain tasks which can be assigned (or owned) by a team member. Users can follow projects and tasks and, when the state of a project or task changes, get updates about the changes in their Asana inboxes. The app also contains a social network, instant messaging application and online calendar. These features enable teams of employees to share information and do most of their jobs without relying on tedious emails. This is a revolutionary idea as the ‘ 2016 Digital Workplace Communications Survey ’ found that 97% of employees still use emails for both internal and external communication.

Without continuous and free flowing communication in the digital workplace, companies will fail to innovate and progress will be stunted. There are many applications that companies can adopt to improve communication however Slack, Impraise and Asana are our three favourites.