5 Essential Considerations for Measuring Your Employee App Success

When measuring the success or effectiveness of a digital platform like an employee app, it’s easy to fall into the trap of relying only on the numbers: the number of logins per week, the number of comments or likes, or the amount of employees with the app installed. While those stats are of course useful, they don’t tell the whole story. We’ve come up with the five following considerations to help you get a richer understanding of how to measure the success, impact and effectiveness of your employee app.

1. Be clear about what you want to measure and why

It’s tempting to want to measure every aspect of your app: the number of comments, downloads, engagements with user generated content, page views, and every other stat available in your Insights Dashboard. But it’s important to think about what each measurement is actually for. What does it achieve? For example, if you’re just measuring the amount of likes and comments to put into a monthly management report, then how is that helping you to show a correlation between business outcomes and the app’s value to the organisation?

You should have a clear rationale for each measurement you make, record and report on, and that links back to the reason that the organisation wanted an app in the first place. It’s okay that the app is not ‘all things to all people’. Your organisation likely had some clear reasons for wanting an app – perhaps based on feedback from employees. So, the stats that you’re measuring should be with the purpose of comparing the performance of the app against the reasons for the app existing.

If you aren’t clear on what those reasons are, or even how they might have changed or evolved since the app was introduced, then it’s time to reflect on your organisation’s current goals and the insights and feedback you’re getting from employees. This will give you a clear understanding of what impacts you want your app to make on your organisation. Set clear goals and measure against them.

2. Use Success Measures and Impact Measures

Stats don’t tell the whole story. You should not only measure the success of content, but also the impact of it. For example:

Success Measure: An article about our new company values is viewed by x% of app users within x weeks of publication.

Impact Measure: When we polled employees, or held focus groups to measure the understanding of new company values after the content was published, we saw an increase in knowledge from x% to y%

Simply measuring the number of views of a piece of content only tells you how many times that content has been viewed. It doesn’t tell you how effective that content has been in communicating the message that you’re trying to get across. It tells you how successful that content has been, but not how impactful. That’s a key difference when you consider that it’s very likely you introduced this app because you wanted to make a positive impact on the organisation and your employees.

Success measures are easy to access - you just have to open the Insights Dashboard in the Thrive Content Management System, and the data is right there! You have to work a bit harder to uncover those impact measures, but if you want the full picture you need both. An effective way to do this is through regular polling of your employees.

3. Polls can help you raise awareness and measure impacts

Poll questions can highlight content you want employees to be aware of, while also allowing you to measure awareness. For example, you could ask something like “Did you know about our new Cycle to Work scheme?” then provide a link below the poll to the article that talks about it.

This gives you some data as to how many people already knew about the policy (how many pageviews vs how many people chose yes or no), so it gives you information about how impactful your content about the Cycle to Work scheme was. But it also helps you raise awareness of it.

An employee app is the perfect channel to make use of this kind of polling, and it’s so easy to create a simple poll on a third-party site like SurveyMonkey or Typeform for example, then use an HTML embed code to embed the poll on to a page in your app. You can find instructions on how to do that here!

You can even do the same thing with app functionality that’s recently been introduced. In a previous blog post we discussed how to increase employee engagement with your app using our @mentions feature. You may have already created an article in your app to let your users know that they can now mention colleagues in the comments section, but if you want to measure the impact of that content, and continue to raise awareness of the new feature, a one-question poll on your app saying “Did you know you can use the @ symbol in comments to mention your colleagues and send them a notification?” can help you to do so. The poll question doesn’t even have to be its own separate page in your app. You can include a quick one-question poll at the end of an article about something different altogether.