Autumn Ideas to Brighten Up Your Employee App This October

Each month we highlight great ideas and examples from our customers who are making the most of Thrive and really embedding their apps in their organisations, along with tips and advice from our Client Success Team. Here are four tips for improving your Thrive employee app in October!

Level-Up Your App's Look and Feel With Our New Combined Feed & Social List Layout 🆕

A new look and feel can really help to freshen-up your app and keep things interesting - especially if you've had your app for quite some time. Our new Social List Layout evokes the style and feel of a social media feed and works particularly well for Lists featuring User Generated Content like Share Your Halloween Costume Photos, Buy & Sell, Share Your Good News Stories, etc. With the Social List Layout enabled, your employees can interact with each post through likes and comments without having to go 'in and out' of each post in the List - just like they would on a social media feed! Try it out by enabling it in the Appearance tab of any List in the Thrive CMS.

Also consider giving content discoverability a big boost by adding a new Combined Feed to the top of your app's homescreen, and letting your News list drop down into second place. The Combined Feed allows you to display all of the new content from right across all the various Lists in your app, all in one place. So rather than your employees having to hunt through all the various sections of your app to find what's new, they'll see the Combined Feed containing all the latest updates they need to know about!

10th October: Separate Mental Health Myth vs Fact for World Mental Health Day 🧠

Saturday the 10th October is World Mental Health Day. Aside from the usual advice of making sure that you're including information in your app about your employee assistance programme and the various other support structures your organisation has in place to support your employee's mental health... consider using your employee app to post some simple, bite-sized messaging in the week running up to 10th October to raise awareness among your employees of mental health myth vs mental health fact.

An employee app is the perfect channel for this kind of short-form content, and you can even encourage your employees to share their own experiences in the comments of each post. Consider making one post like the following examples each day during the week running up to October 10th:

And remember: it might be the case that your company doesn't have a culture where sharing thoughts in the comments of an employee app is a 'normal' thing for your employees to engage with. If that's the case, you can use this as an opportunity to start building that culture of sharing and engagement. You just might need to get ball rolling by asking a few close colleagues if they would post some comments below these posts... and it works, because when your employees see other people commenting they're much more likely to 'join in'!

If you would like some of these Mental Health Myth vs Fact images to post in your own app, please drop us an email to support@thrive.app and we'll add them into your media library!

Measure The Impact of Your App, Not Just How Often It Gets Used 📈

The Thrive Insights Dashboard gives you loads of useful information about how often your app is being used and what content is most popular. But it's easy to fall into the trap of only relying on usage numbers to get an idea of how successful your app actually is, but they don't tell the whole story. You also need to think about the impact that the app is having on your organisation... and that's a little bit more difficult to measure.

For some detailed guidance on how to measure the impact of your employee app, have a look my blog post linked here: 5 Essential Considerations for Measuring the Success of Your Employee App which gives five top tips to help you avoid the trap of focusing only on usage rather than impact and success.

And when you're ready to put that advice into action, you can also read my follow-up blog post here: What Does Employee App Success Actually Look Like? Which gives advice on how to choose the success metrics that are important for your business and how to measure them against your own stated business goals for the app - the reasons for you having introduced the app in the first place! A quick example:

"60% of our employees used the app in the last month"

...tells you how many of your employees are using your app, but it doesn't really tell you anything about the impact your app has had on your business. But...

"Reports of safety near-miss incidents in the business have fallen by 40% in the last quarter since we started using the app to get employees to watch and sign-off on equipment safety videos"

...gives you genuine insight into how effective your app and its content has been - and that's why usage numbers don't tell you the whole story! If you would like to discuss this further and get some help to unpack your app's impact measures, please get in touch and I'll be happy to schedule a call!

31st October: Run a Spook-tacular UGC Theme for Halloween 👻

These times of the year are always perfect for having a little bit of fun with your employee app by encouraging employees to post their own photos and videos. If you've got a section of your app like Share Your Photos & Videos we always recommend that you make it themed and regularly change that theme to keep it interesting, fresh and to encourage repeat participation among your most-engaged and willing employees!

Make your theme for the second half of October: Share Your Spookiest Halloween Costumes & Decorations!

Encourage your employees to post their very best costumes and decorated homes, from professional tier cosplay to the bargain bin sheet with eyes cut out with scissors. Or you could even have a pumpkin carving competition where they post their most creative pumpkin or turnip carvings for halloween! For a few more Halloween app ideas, have a look at our blog post linked here.

Even something basic like a free lunch or a free coffee from the staff canteen for the post with the most likes by 1st November can be a welcome incentive to encourage engagement!

We'd love to see you bringing some of these ideas to life to give your app a boost this October, so as always 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.