Employee engagement app

Apps, apps and more apps. And a Mood Meter

Apps for banking, Employee engagement app, apps for shopping and apps even for chasing Pokemon around the streets of New York.

Companies are investing more and more into the development of application technologies.

Amongst these, apps to measure employee engagement as a smart, low-cost and interactive means of determining how well they’re doing.

Some are even going as far as installing a ‘Mood Meter‘ or apps to track changing employee moods in the workplace, an example of which is offered by Swedish company Celpax.

 

Apps work well as they provide a tactile way of communicating real-time information back to an employer.

Recently on site we installed a Celpax machine to measure real-time employee engagement. Fantastic!

The employees have the option of remotely accessing the dashboard which tracks all moods to see how they compare following the push of a happy or sad face (in our office we call it the ‘Happy Sad Face Machine’).

I check it weekly and post the statistics up on the board to encourage future use, and this week we’ve had our greenest week yet!

So this got me thinking:

We’re all for gathering feedback using apps, but what about actually giving it back to the participants? And I don’t mean in an email summary…

I previously worked at a fully automated site for a well-known UK supermarket chain.

‘Fully automated’ meant that as soon as someone clocked in in the morning, you could track the time it took them to log onto a machine, how many items they could pick in their shift and so on and so forth.

It was all very high-tech until it came to the delivery of the information: a print out posted on a noticeboard.

On almost a daily basis, thousands of us ask and fill out opinion polls, post little stressed-out rants on social media sites like Facebook, sell our second-hand shoes on eBay or share our Candy Crush high scores with each other.

But what if we distributed our sitewide ‘high scores’ using an app-based platform?

What if we let Bob know that he was the best picker today using an app downloaded to his smartphone rather than on a printed A4 sheet stuck up on a noticeboard for all to see?

What if we gave Bob the ability to see his results, and share them on whatever social media platform he wanted to?

What if we gave Bob the ability to ‘like’ his friends scores and encourage friendly competition between themselves?

What if Bob could give his manager a great idea in real time, rather than when he next sees his manager?

I once read an article that gave the following recommendation for dieters: post what you eat on social media so you become more conscious of what you eat, so therefore you eat healthier.

Apps like FitBit and the iHealth app on iOS allows us to do these things already (I’m barely hitting my 10,000 step target by the way).

So maybe we need to apply the same logic to the way we run our businesses to boost employee engagement:

by becoming more conscious of how we perform, and be willing to share it with each other, maybe we’ll be more inclined to work ‘healthier’.

So what if we encourage engagement through app based platforms rather than using them simply for measuring?

Do you use an Employee engagement app?

Let us know in the comments:)

Alexandra Lanchester is a WCM Process Engineer based in Birmingham, UK. This post has previously appeared on Linkedin where Alexandra blogs about lean and continuous improvement techniques.

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