Thrive's Top Tips to Give Your Employee App a Jolt This July!

Each month we've been on the lookout for great ideas and examples of best-practice in our customer's apps. At the half-way point of 2026, we hope these monthly ideas have helped to spark some inspiration, encouraged you to make the very most of Thrive and to take your employee app to the next level! Here are this month's ideas to give your app a real jolt this July...

Your Company in Bloom... 🌻

July is the perfect month to use your employee app for a summer growth and gardening celebration. Lots of your employees will be hard at work perfecting their gardens this month and they'll love the opportunity to show off those giant sunflowers and questionably-shaped carrots! Then continue the theme to encourage both personal growth and to get some visibility of the great things colleagues are doing for each other every day to help your organisation Thrive.

• Grow Together: Create a space for employees to share their photos, tips and tricks of what they and their families have been growing in their gardens, greenhouses and allotments.
  
• Summer of Growth: Pose a question weekly in your app and ask employees to comment their answer. How do you grow your self-confidence? What's the best way to nurture Leadership skills?
  
• Blooming Brilliant: Run a peer recognition campaign to encourage employees to highlight their colleagues: Rising Sunflower (new starter), Mighty Oak (dependable employee), Helpful Hedgehog (supportive colleague), etc. We can change your app's peer recognition values to these new categories for the campaign and can always change them back after!

Go Behind the Badge with Regular Employee Q&A Features 👮

While short and bite-sized content often tends to work best on a platform like an employee app, one of our customers has recently had a lot of success and app engagement by supplementing that with a more in-depth approach.

Our customer Cambridgeshire Police have been publishing a weekly series in their app of 'get to know you' style employee profiles called 'Behind the Badge' - a series of quick-fire questions - some light-hearted and others going a little bit deeper to highlight their reflections on their lives and careers.

Cambridgeshire Police hosts a form in their app where employees who want to take part can answer these questions and upload a few photos. If you wanted to introduce something similar in your app however, to get things going initially you might consider asking some specific people across your organisation to take part, and get their answers and photos by email before turning it into a post in your app.

One of the key aspects to the success of these Q&As is consistency. The Cambridgeshire Police app admin team are making sure that they have a new Q&A post ready to go every week in the Behind the Badge section of their app. So to ensure the same kind of success in your own app: plan ahead with multiple requests to employees you'd like to feature (you can always create two at once and schedule the extra one for publication the following week!) and make sure that one of your app admins is assigned ownership of creating and publishing the content on a regular basis.

Feedback and app engagement with the Behind the Badge posts has been overwhelmingly positive for Cambridgeshire Police and has been a great way for their Officers and employees to get to know more about each other! Add the same kind of ongoing employee Q&A features to your own app to enhance employee engagement and foster a sense of community and openness in your organisation!

Pride Doesn't End When June Does 🏳️‍🌈

So you've taken down your Pride flags and removed the rainbow from your company logo at the end of Pride Month in June. Pride Month might be over, but that doesn't mean putting diversity and inclusion back in the box until next year. You can continue to use your employee app to demonstrate that inclusion is an ongoing business priority rather than just a seasonal campaign.

• Use your app to get feedback about diversity and inclusion improvements and initiatives that your employees would like to see. Use the Thrive Formbuilder to create a survey, or embed a 3rd party survey in your app from sites like Surveymonkey.
  
  
• Partner with LGBT+ charity organisations and use your app to encourage employees to sign-up to volunteer and get involved. Use our Acknowledgements Feature to capture those sign-ups!
  
  
• Create app content to highlight diverse role models and success stories across your organisation.

Keep using your Thrive app to show your employees that your organisation's commitment to inclusion doesn't end just because Pride Month does!

Host Training Applications to Lower the Barriers to Progress & Development 📚✏️

Last month in our June Ideas Blog we talked about the importance of solving problems for your employees if you want them to use your app. Giving them really clear and tangible reasons for opening your employee app - especially when you're competing for their attention against popular social media.

We always advise our customers to take a whole-business approach to app content creation by getting as many stakeholders from various departments involved, rather than your app just being that thing Internal Comms does... So why not get your Learning & Development team involved to promote the various training opportunities that are available to your employees? And go a step further by allowing your employees to apply or express interest in the available courses!

Your employees working at Head Office or behind desks might find it much easier to access these kinds of opportunities than your remote and deskless workers - especially if they're currently hosted on an intranet. So here's an opportunity to expand access and level the playing field for those deskless employees to take advantage of the training and advancement opportunities on offer.

Create a List in your app called Training Opportunities for example, and post the details about each available course as a separate Page in that List. Then use the List Type tab to add an application or expression of interest form where your employees can let your L&D team know they're interested, and the team can reach can out to that employee with the relevant information!

Have Some Footy Fun for the 2026 World Cup in July ⚽️

We're into the business end of the World Cup in July now that the knock-out rounds have arrived! While neither Ireland nor Northern Ireland qualified for the finals this time around, we know that many of your employees will be getting excited about their countries’ chances of bringing it home!

Your app doesn’t have to be all-business, all the time, so why not tap into some of that hype and excitement among your employees, and have a bit of footy fun?

• Host a World Cup Quiz: Add an existing World Cup quiz from the internet to your app, like this one on the FIFA website. Add it as a Web Page, give it a title and a featured image and you're good to go!
  
  
• Show Your True Colours with a World Cup Photo Wall: Promote engagement with a UGC list to encourage your employees to post all their best pics and videos of themselves, their colleagues and their families cheering on their countries!
  
  
• Run a World Cup Score Predictions Game: Create your league at a site like Predict The Football and post your invite code to your app. Any employees who signs up will automatically get added to your league. Keep making new posts every few days to show who's winning the most points with their predictions!

We'd love to see you bringing some of these ideas to life to give your app a Jolt this July, so please let me know if you're planning to implement any of these and I'll be happy to help if you have any questions or need some assistance to get them set up in your app!

If you're sharing your success on social media, please tag Thrive.App on LinkedIn, Facebook, or X!