Why Mixing Operational Features with Social Interaction is Key to High Engagement in Your Employee App

I spent a very large part of my adult life advising companies in the service industry about their tech stack and helping them implement it. These businesses include restaurant chains, hotels, fitness and leisure centers, entertainment venues, and retail.

Way too often, systems are being bought without looking at the bigger picture. You have a problem with onboarding—super, let’s buy a system for that. Communication is messy, buy a system for that. Daily operations have no structure, buy a checklist solution.

And while all of these systems work fine on their own, they create a bigger problem: people get confused about where to find what, information gets lost, and no one remembers to update them. Suddenly, you are in a situation where you have important news that everyone needs to see—and you have no system where you are absolutely sure that your employees are present.

If your new learning management system is only for learning, people will spend a very limited amount of time in it, doing the absolute minimum and then never coming back into that app again. I have seen this firsthand many times.

The Power of Social Engagement

Nothing keeps people engaged like social interaction. That is, to a very large extent, the reason that platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat are so dominant. People are social animals, and we need that interaction in our lives. Tech platforms should support this, especially if you are dealing with young people.

In order for your employee app to be a success, you need at least 70% of the employees in there on a daily basis—and you can only achieve that if they want to use it. You cannot force numbers like this.

Your employee app needs to be at least as fast and have the same functionality as the social platforms people use in their daily lives. If your app provides these features in a smooth and reliable way, people will automatically start using them—and you will have some engagement out of the box.

If you succeed in having good social interaction, all of your operational features will be much more efficient because people are more likely to actually take that new course you just created when they are already using the app every single day for communication. The same goes for to-do lists, surveys, forms, events, and so forth.

At Monotree, we are super proud that we have achieved creating a system with over 70% daily engagement among young and mostly part-time users, and the stats speak for themselves.