1. Journey Begins - Talk to your Staff

 Before you do anything else, you need to be clear about why you're getting an employee app at all. Your app shouldn't just solve a problem for you as an Internal Comms professional - it needs to solve problems for your staff too.

Talking to your staff before you start to plan content has loads of benefits. It makes people feel like their opinions are important, it creates a grassroots buzz among staff, and it pays dividends later on when you look at your uptake numbers.

When talking to your staff, you need to ask them what they would find useful in an employee app, and then you need to figure out if it's do-able. Get everything on the table without shooting down anyone's ideas!

Of course, some people will ask for functionality that isn't feasible, but it's all about finding as many things as possible that your staff are going to find useful.

You'll do this by asking questions, and actively listening. One of the most common things we hear from employees across all sectors, is that they get frustrated by finding things out 'on the grapevine' because they're shop-floor or remote workers without email access, or because their Team Leader forgot to mention it in the morning brief.

Ask questions about their frustrations, about the repetitive tasks they have to do, and about whether there are particular types of information that they find themselves having a hard time finding.

The answers to these questions will inform the next step, which is your content planning!

There are lots of ways to approach this stage of 'feeling out' your staff. You can go for the formal route and hold workshops and focus groups, or you can be more casual about it by approaching a cross-section of different employees for a chat.

We recommend that you don't use things like online surveys here. Getting out and about, and talking to people to get a real sense of what they would find useful in an app is crucial.

So before you do anything else, and certainly before you start to plan your app content, get out there, get on the road and talk to your people. They will be the ones that you want to download and use the app, so it's key that you're listening to their needs from the start!

If you get some ideas and feedback from your staff about the types of content they'd like to see in their app, but you aren't sure how to make it happen, discuss it with your Client Success Manager at Thrive. We'll be able to advise you on the best way to go about implementing it on our platform.