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One trend having a huge impact on employee engagement involves our new app-centered world. We have apps to help us do everything — from banking and monitoring our fitness to making restaurant or hotel reservations — usually faster and easier than doing it in person or from our laptops.
Our apps are downright addictive for many reasons, but here are some of the most compelling:
Our apps help us be more productive: We can take advantage of micro-moments in our day to find info and accomplish tasks.
Our apps are personalized: They know who we are, where we are, and what we like.
Our apps are intelligent: They make smart recommendations based on our prior preferences and behaviors.
My guess it that most employees would not use these same adjectives to describe the tools they use to get their work done. And this difference between the tools we use outside work and the ones we use at work is a huge disconnect. According to the “State of the Connected Customer” research, some 71% of employees want the company they work for to provide them with the same level of technology they use in their personal lives.
The good news is that companies can do this, and Salesforce can help.
We, and many of our customers, are using the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform also as our platform for employee success. Let’s take a look at some examples of how we innovate our employee tools to make it easier to get work done, delivering a more engaging experience for our teams and more productivity for our company.
One employee tool in desperate need of innovation is the company intranet. Most intranets serve as an aggregated access point to launch employee apps, find people, look up info on employee programs and services, file help tickets, and read company news. Employees go there because they need to do these important tasks, but clunky interfaces that are difficult to search and usually not interactive or mobile make for a frustrating experience. See how you can ”Transform Your Intranet into an Engaging Employee Experience with Salesforce.“
We replaced our intranet with a series of apps, and employees cheered. Now they launch apps from our single sign-n page where they can move their apps around to any custom order. They use our Concierge app to perform a Google-like search for info on their employee programs and services versus browsing drop-down menus. If they don’t find what they need (which doesn’t happen very often), they use Concierge to file help tickets right from their phone.
And they get their company news and connect, communicate, and collaborate across functions and geographies in our employee social network. Employees join groups relevant to their roles and leverage the power of the crowd to find info, people, and files that can help them accomplish their goals fast. See how employees can collaborate more effectively with Chatter.
Another area in need of innovation is performance management. Today’s employees want to be able to manage their goals in real time and get feedback that helps them improve their performance on an ongoing basis and from multiple directions, not just once a year and not just from their manager. We’ve build apps to accomplish both objectives.
Employees use our goal setting app to set their goals, track results, and discuss progress and adjustment in priorities at weekly one-on-ones. And because we’re tracking all year long, there is no need to look back, remember, and write down what you did at the end of the year in an annual performance review.
And we’ve created a culture of feedback where everyone in the company can provide one another with constructive, real-time feedback via our — you guessed it — Feedback app. Feedback flows peer to peer, manager to employee, and employee to manager, allowing for 360-degree improvement.
One of the main reasons employees cite for low engagement or leaving a company is lack of growth opportunities.
Our Trailhead app empowers our employees to pursue their career ambitions in a fun, interactive, and self-directed way. Employees use this platform to engage with relevant learning modules and even follow complete learning paths that guide them through mastering professional skills like how to “Manage the Salesforce Way” as well as Salesforce skills like how to “Create and Customize Lightning Apps.”
And because we’re collecting all this data in our goal setting, Feedback, and Trailhead apps, we are able to work on our next innovation – a digital talent agent app. This app will guide employees throughout their career, suggesting relevant people to connect with for mentorship, relevant learning modules on Trailhead to explore potential career paths, and even relevant job openings inside the company that might be a fit.
Remember, your employees have great experiences with the brands they love, and they have the same expectations of an engaging experience with the most important brand in their life – the company where they work.
Want to jumpstart your digital transformation? See how you can build employee apps fast. Download the e-book.
This is the third in a series of five blog posts that look at how Salesforce engages employees and how you can, too. Read post #1, Use Culture + Tech + Data to Deeply Engage Employees, and post #2, Turn Your Culture into a Competitive Advantage. We hope you’ll join us as we share useful insights and actionable ideas on how have been able to grow the company rapidly while remaining one of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” nine years running
