Employee engagement has always been important, but now even more so as business accommodates remote working. A new app process provides a time-saving staff engagement tool.
Many companies have had to change how they do business during the pandemic, and in many cases those changes can have a great impact on the employees – particularly when they also have to adapt to working from home, or in a new environment, while dealing with all the other stresses of the pandemic.
The app solution for employee engagement
From a businesswoman’s perspective, you need your employees to be at their best to do their best. But engaging and motivating staff, let alone driving positive change, can be time-consuming. And with so much else going on, how much is actually being taken on board with employee engagement?
Increasingly, businesses are turning to apps – particularly game-style apps – for employee engagement to connect with staff and motivate positive changes in their businesses.
Take for example global waste management company Veolia, which was able to help its customers – mostly large shopping centres and office towers – change the way their staff dealt with waste, to ensure their sustainability goals were met. Given the success of the sustainable waste program rested on time-poor frontline retail, cleaning and maintenance staff, often casual employees who had little to gain from the initiative, they decided to try a simple, fun and efficient solution – an employee engagement app.
Together with Australian no-code app building platform Cogniss, they created the “Way To Go” employee engagement app using games on staff members’ mobile devices to not only educate them but also motivate them to recycle correctly, using rewards and challenges, and friendly team competitions.
Building on Cogniss templates, it uses short texts and videos to deliver information while users play games and earn points by putting waste in correct bins and scanning a QR code.
How gamification fosters employee engagement
Playing different games at different times and engaging in challenges meant the important messages were better retained, and it made it fun for employees to take simple actions each day that led to a larger company-wide change – 84% of users said the app made a difference to how they recycled, and overall correct waste disposal rose from 25% to 96.5%.
The technology is known as gamification – using elements from games in non-game settings to engage people and encourage behaviours to achieve business objectives. The employee engagement apps can be updated and adjusted as policies – or employees – change.
A global construction company uses the Cogniss employee engagement technology to adapt workplace safety learning – including fun games to reinforce the messages and positive behaviour – across different worksites, and even different governments’ policies.
It also has the advantage of workers being able to access the apps, and therefore the information, on their phones on worksites – rather than having to sit down at a computer to watch a training video and take a multiple choice test. Updates can be delivered quickly, and regular messages and games engage workers and ensure they understand what is required.
The technology can be adapted to all sorts of positive behavioural and workplace cultural change, including promoting diversity and acceptance, or improving employee motivation.
The Cogniss platform is also being used for other apps that can be adapted to the workplace, such as emotional and physical wellbeing apps – even yoga programs. Whether for policies and changes, staff engagement or wellbeing support, the app platform gives businesses “all the tools to drive cultural and behavioural outcomes”, Cogniss CEO Leon Young said.
And it delivers them at a fraction of the cost and time commitment that custom-built apps and programs require, and without the need for your own software development expertise.
Anyone who has the subject matter can build an entire app, picking from a range of user experience elements and sophisticated features including inbuilt social networks, gamified rewards systems and artificial intelligence that maximise user engagement, learning and behaviour change. They can then continue to tailor the content, logic, features and design to their own needs – or the changing needs of the user … all without the need for technical support.
Cogniss is currently used by corporate, government, university, and not-for-profit customers including the Black Dog Institute, Raising Children Network and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.
Summary
“With Cogniss an app that takes an agency months to build and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars can be built in days or weeks with no big upfront costs and just a low monthly fee,” he said. “We even have a plan that allows first version products to be built and tested before commercial use for free.
“Cogniss gives anyone the opportunity to create an app that drives long-lasting learning, health and lifestyle outcomes. It is really inspiring to see it being used by all different organisations to deliver real world positive outcomes.”
Cogniss is the world’s first no-code app building platform making it possible for anyone to build apps that can transform lives, no coding or design skills required. Cogniss combines proven neuropsychological techniques, best practice user experience design and artificial intelligence algorithms into an intuitive tool that can be configured to create sophisticated apps that drive health and learning outcomes.