How to choose the best employee experience platform in 2022

What is an employee experience platform? Before the concept of the employee experience platform arose, user-centric systems that enabled internal communications and collaboration were more commonly known as intranets. Just like the original definition of an intranet, an employee experience platform is a private enterprise network designed to support an organization’s employees to communicate, collaborate, and perform their roles. It serves a broad range of purposes, but at its core, intranet software helps users by connecting them to their employers, colleagues, and the information they need to do their jobs; it’s a system that exists to support workers to have a better experience.

You may already know from experience that intranets were not always the social, collaborative platforms they are today. When they emerged in the 1990s, they were usually built from a single welcome page that featured essential company information. Flat and text-heavy – and with the traditional blue hyperlinks – they pushed basic, one-way, top-down communications. These intranets were later turned into document management systems (DMS).

If you’re looking at new corporate communications platforms, you probably have a list of challenges you want to address and/or additional tools you’d like to have in your arsenal. To help you refine your search, we’ve put together a checklist of the top features your corporate communications platform should have, in order to get the highest return on your investment.

When people think of internal comms, most people think about monthly newsletters and updates: top-down information regarding holiday allowance or new security regulations. It’s normally formal in tone and written from a senior level. However, in reality, internal communication is a lot more than memos from the top. It is more inclusive – and relies as much on the employee as it does the employer.

Your internal communication efforts depend greatly on being able to achieve proper reach and getting great engagement, which is highly dependent on having the right platform. 

There are three key metrics that we use in GuavaHR to measure this:  (1) Adoption (2) Activeness (3) Contribution

Internal communication systems are usually voluntary, they're not mandatory. That is why we need to measure how big the adoption is - how many users actually adopt the system meaning that are they started to use it. After they have adopted the system, do they continue using it? That is activeness. This can be measured by day, week, or monthly activeness. Contribution metrics indicate interactions beyond just simply views. Contribution in this context is defined as clicks, comments, likes, and shares. Just because an employee saw your post in their feed doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll read it, that they’ll recall it later, or that behavior will change in the way you want. In order to build a relationship with your employees, you need contribution.

Most companies are either relying on a single internal communications tool or have taken an approach with a broad range of tools that helps you to distribute your message far and wide.

But are they effective? When was the last time you analyzed your current comms platforms? Can they be improved upon?

What to look for in an employee experience platform

• Ability to define audiences or teams Your employees are busy, so it’s your job to send the right content, at the right time, to the right people. When your workforce trusts that you’re only sending them relevant information, they’ll be more willing to set time aside to read and act upon it. By segmenting your audience by team, department, geographical location, language or initiative, you can specify which groups will receive which content, avoiding distractions and information overload
  
  
• Engagement Features There’s a reason that popular social media sites incorporate “like” buttons, upvoting, and comment sections into their platforms. If you want to see similar levels of engagement from your workforce, you should do the same. Not only will your content be more interactive, but you can use that feedback for future strategies and confirm who has completed mandatory reads.
  
  
• Awesome Analytic Love them or hate them, analytics are critical to every big decision you make.  Most tools offer basic stats, like the number of opens or link clicks your content received, but look beyond that. Look for things like unique opens, adoption rates, activeness and contribution rates, and other data points that will be meaningful for your specific goals.
  
  
• Enable your employees to confirm they have received and read information or approve important documents. Your corporate teams are likely drowning in information and notifications, while your frontline workers lack tools and feel out of the loop. Make sure you can send out all the important stuff so the employee can confirm they have read it or even approve it. 

Summary

Your goal is to bring everyone into one conversation, which they can tap into from the platforms and devices they use most. It’s the difference between a disengaged team and a community building something together.

Here is what the right type of communication platform will provide:

• An opportunity to contribute for everyone
• A detailed breakdown of Adoption, Activeness and Contribution rates
• Customizable e-learning sequences to be used for example onboarding of new employees
• Be simple and easy to use
• If you have a workforce without company email, make sure you can add them to the platform using telephone numbers
• Affordable pricing

A common concern is whether or not it’s worth making a change, can a new communications platform really make that big of a difference? The answer is yes.

If you are ready for a modern communication platform, we’d like to introduce you to GuavaHR. 

GuavaHR empowers you to quickly make the changes you need and demonstrate your team’s value to leadership.