The average time people spend on their mobile devices has been increasing each year since the first smart phone was sold. Americans spend at least 3 hours each day on their phone, not just using social media but also checking important aspects of their jobs. Over 90% of Americans use a mobile app to handle at least one aspect of their jobs. Over 71% of America’s digital traffic is through mobile devices and is set to increase further. Businesses cannot ignore these statistics, which indicate an unavoidable shift towards the use of mobile devices to increase employees’ productivity.
66% of organizations plan an increase in enterprise mobile apps in this decade. Investing a custom mobile app for your business is not cheap though. There must be a real business case to justify the investment. Here are 5 ways a custom mobile app for employees can benefit your business.
Custom Mobile Applications Enable Easier Communication with Staff
Email remains the primary way of communicating with staff for three-quarters of organizations. Should this be really the case when numerous other options exist for people to communicate with friends and family outside work? Emails, when compared to more recent ways of communicating, are low in engagement and can make people feel lonely and isolated.
Companies that have a lot of remote staff can increase their engagement through mobile apps. An enterprise app can increase engagement by up to 47%. It can also increase job satisfaction significantly. An app can help share updates from management, news that affect the business, events, policy changes and so on. The app could also have a blog to which employees contribute as a way of building connections and a sense of belonging.
In terms of productivity, an app can help employees identify and connect with colleagues with whom they can collaborate with or simply get advice. This will impact overall productivity at your organization in the long run.
Avoiding too Many Apps for your Employees
The average employee needs at least 9 employees to fulfill all their daily tasks at work. This means navigating in between different apps, sometimes on different devices. What if they had a way of getting shortcuts to these apps from one place. Microsoft have successfully done this with their Office 365 Suite, which allows access to all of Microsoft’s productivity apps. Similarly, an app can be used to give access to the main functionalities, processes, or information for employees.
Custom apps help to avoid fatigue for employees who would otherwise need to navigate different apps throughout their day. Such an app also will save your employees the hustle of having to download multiple applications. A singular app also saves space and computing power, meaning that your staff may not need to get dedicated hardware devices to run all the organization’s productivity applications. 40% of American employees use a personal device for work related activity. The lighter an application is the more willing the employees will be to install it on their personal devices.
Building a Good Brand through a Custom Mobile Application
42% of American Millennials report that they are unlikely to stay in a workplace in they feel that the technology there does not meet their expectations. This testifies of their confidence in their skills and the unwillingness to compromise on productivity. 81% of Millennials say that technology is an important factor when considering whether to work in a given institution.
Realizing that the work demographic is changing also means recognizing that employee expectations are also shifting. Younger employees expect the organizations they work for to take advantage of available technology to make work easier, faster, and more rewarding. They are confident of their ability to interact with and learn new technologies quickly. This attitude might be different from that of previous generations.
By building custom mobile applications to improve enterprise workflow, an organization is likely to build a good brand as an employer of choice.
Supporting the Work from Home and Virtual Office Concept
Even as the work-from-home culture is becoming more common, organizations need a form of a virtual office where staff can access current and essential information on the go. The staff members can always refer to information on the app whenever in doubt about anything. An enterprise app can be the difference between the productivity of staff of two competing firms. With an enterprise app, an employee can read updates and refer to organizational best practices or other information whenever they need to.
The organization can also include career development modules for its employees within the app. By doing so, the company fosters learning. It also helps to keep employees within the company’s ecosystem, which in turn helps keep the best talent within the company.
Security, Integration, and Scalability
Building a custom mobile application enables a company to apply the security measures that it feels are right given the sensitivity of the information to be shared on the app. With an off-the-shelf application, client companies must rely on the security measures and updates from the third-party developer. Building a custom app also makes it easier to integrate it with existing systems within your company. An application that interrupts workflow will affect the productivity of employees, which can greatly affect motivation.
An off-the-shelf application for enterprise workflow also leaves a company somewhat at the mercy of the developer. The organization hopes the developer will continue supporting the app through updates and security improvements. However, this is not always the case. A custom mobile app for employees lays these fears to rest. An organization can make improvements and even scale the app to perform more functions as time goes by.
Conclusion
A custom mobile application for an enterprise can do so much to improve overall workflow. In fact, it can be a source of competitive advantage. While communication through emails make staff members feel isolated, communication within an app can draw people together. People are unlikely to miss updates and important news. They also have shortcuts to the most important tools for their daily tasks, minimizing the number of applications they need to download for productivity. A custom mobile application is also made to suit a particular organization’s workflow, with updates whenever required. As the demographics of the American workforce continue to change, organizations will have to find innovative ways to integrate new technologies into their workflow because employees expect it. A custom mobile application is likely to be high on the list.
If your organization needs help building and deploying a custom mobile application, check out Transcendent Software. We are a fully-fledged IT services company with more than two decades of helping clients get the most out of IT infrastructure.