Must-have HR tool in 2023: an App for Employee Experience Managers

Employee satisfaction is one of the key factors of any business’s success: motivated employees work more productively and tend to stay with the same company longer. According to the Gallup research, an alarming 70% of the US workers are not engaged enough, leading to lower productivity and, therefore, to potential financial losses. 

In 2021, there is a solution to that. Various business management software proved themselves as powerful tools, and employee experience apps are an efficient way to improve your team’s productivity. 

So in this article, you will find out what employee experience software is, what features it has, how to develop such an application and how much it costs. 

What is Employee Experience?

Employee experience (EX) starts with the first employee interaction with a company as a candidate and lasts for as long as he or she stays with a company. Employee experience management aims to provide a positive experience to employees, which results in a higher degree of customer satisfaction. Only committed and enthusiastic team members can create a desirable customer experience and maintain a positive company image.

EX is more than just some employee perks, such as a free gym membership. It’s about the company’s management, workplace, and even software tools they use during working hours. In simple terms, if you want to improve your employee experience, you need to optimize every tiny thing they interact with. And that’s where the employee experience manager and employee apps would be very helpful.

A lot of top companies actively invest in improving employee experience, among them are Facebook, Google, Apple, LinkedIn, and Airbnb. In case you’d like to follow their example, it’s time to implement their best practices in your company as well!  

Employee Experience Manager vs. HR Manager

Employee satisfaction does not fall within the competence of the HR department. The Employee Experience Manager is the one who is in charge of attracting and retaining talented employees. This can be achieved not only by providing competitive remuneration but also by appraising employees to make them feel recognized. 

The main responsibilities of the employee experience manager include organizing training sessions, arranging rewards programs, creating feedback surveys, and any other activities that are aimed at enhancing employee engagement with their jobs. Often these responsibilities are carried out by the human resources department. Regardless of whether there is an employee experience manager position in a company, you can’t deny that employee satisfaction is extremely important for any business.

Employee Apps for Employee Experience Improvement

An Employee App is a relatively new solution, but thousands of companies have already noticed benefits from using it. The objectives you can tackle with apps for employees and managers are the following:

• praising employees by celebrating their milestones at work to make them feel appreciated;
• conducting polls and surveys to show their opinions are being valued;
• collecting feedback about processes at your company to suggest a possible room for improvement;
• providing employees with easy access to payslips;
• enabling official requests to be sent directly to the executives to both save time and resources;
• managing sick leaves, days off, and vacations to make your employees feel organized;
• providing abundant information about your company’s internal policy, rules, regulations, and procedures in a way that everyone can quickly access.

Often companies provide employees with apps that can be used both on desktops and smartphones. While using applications on desktop computers at work may be more convenient, using the mobile version may come in handy when an employee is away on sick leave or on a business trip. 

Speaking about business trips, adding expenses in the app may become a very useful feature. Each company has its particularities to be taken into consideration when it comes to an employee satisfaction app.

Possible Features for the Employee Apps

Workplace software can be diverse and include dozens of interesting features but here we highlighted the most significant ones.

Benefits of Building a Custom Employee App

Although you may purchase a ready-made solution of workplace experience apps, we highly recommend you consider developing a unique app that will tackle your exclusive business goals and address the specific needs of your industry.

As a company with more than 100 employees at the moment, we use custom employee software to streamline interactions between our internal teams. We realized the need to build an app when our team reached the number of around 40 employees. Since then, communication in our company has been improved significantly and so has the employee experience. We’ve emphasized the most explicit benefits of employee experience application usage, considering our experience.

• Your custom employee app can be developed specifically for your business goals. Subscription-based solutions are usually targeted at a wide range of companies; that’s why they may lack some features crucial for you.
• When you have a big team, it might be hard to monitor performance and the level of employee satisfaction. A custom-built app can help to optimize this process, for example, by implementing regular in-app surveys.
• The employee experience can be improved with more transparent workflows and easy access to operational information. Everyone will be able to follow the company news and stay involved.
• The custom-made app can make your employees feel that they belong to a community that cares about their needs. They will feel valued and heard, and that will increase loyalty to your company.
• You can store all reports about employee satisfaction and productivity in one place instead of thousands of folders and spreadsheets. Moreover, report generation becomes automatic. As a result, and you get data ready for usage with no additional effort.
• You can communicate with your employees via the app instead of email or messengers. Sometimes, a company needs to deliver important and urgent news that can get lost on the way through dozens of other messages in email boxes. The app notification system can guarantee that your message will be noticed immediately.

Hiring a team for developing employee experience software

When you’re looking for a team to develop your workplace application, you need to keep in mind the following points. 

• Expertise: what technologies they use for client-side and server-side development and what level of experience in development they have.

• Experience: how long they have been on the market; what apps they have already created.
• Reliability: check if they have good reviews and testimonials on different listings; they must be able to provide clear cooperation terms and transparent communication.
• Approach: pay attention to whether they focus on your needs and wishes; they must be flexible enough to implement changes during the development process.

We suggest you compare several teams: check their portfolio, Clutch, and GoodFirms accounts. Contact them directly and find out if they’ve ever developed software for companies in your industry.

To create an employee experience platform, the development team should consist of:

• Product Manager
• Designer
• Front-end developer
• Back-end developer
• QA engineer
• Admin 
• Scrum master

Altamira expertise

With 10 years of experience, Altamira has created more than 200 applications and websites. We have wide expertise in developing software for business purposes: for example, check our case of developing project management tool or construction management system Leo.

We know that development requires a certain degree of flexibility. Especially when it’s related to creating an app for optimizing employee experience: new challenges or requests may arise in the middle of the development process. That’s why we follow Agile methodology that allows us to implement changes or vary the application stack without missing deadlines. 

We appreciate efficient communication. At the beginning of our cooperation, we provide you with the estimation of the project timeline and cost.  During the development process, our managers constantly stay in contact with you. We also conduct regular feedback sessions to keep your team updated on the project status. 

Estimation for employee experience app 

Developing employee experience software is a resourceful task, but the result is worth it: you receive a powerful enterprise-level tool that increases your business productivity. 

The cost of each software is different and depends on the complexity of the application, the number of features, design requests, chosen technologies (programming languages and frameworks), and the level of the developers (junior, middle, senior).

To give you some pointers, we prepared an estimate with some average costs for an employee experience application development:

If the final cost exceeds your budget, you can start with MVP development — a basic version of your software with the most crucial functionalities. It will take less time and resources, and later you can scale with additional features.

Bottom Line

Employee Experience is key to keep your company successful. A satisfied team works at the full capacity to reach the best result possible. Employee Experience software is the best investment, as it allows monitoring, analyzing, and managing employee experience. Your approach becomes data-driven, and for big enterprises, it’s the only way to get a full picture. 

Custom employee application provides you with a solution tailored to your team. Instead of figuring out how to adjust the subscription-based solution, you can get an application already customized and secured for your business needs. 

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