If you’re among the 9 out of 10 organizations worldwide that rely on frontline workers, you will already know first-hand the challenges that come with managing this essential workforce.
You might also understand the complexities of onboarding them remotely, integrating them into your organizational structure and creating an experience for your company that’s inclusive of your frontline teams.
What you might not know, however, is just how strongly frontline workers feel a need to be connected to their organization… and just how few organizations meet their expectations for a meaningful digital employee experience.
Make no mistake, better engagement with your frontline teams makes your business more productive, profitable and attractive as a place to work. As the face of your company, your frontline employees pass those benefits on to customers, too.
However, that can only be achieved by bridging the gap that exists between your organization and your frontline teams.
That’s what an employee communications app like LiveTiles Reach can do.
What is our new frontline app, LiveTiles Reach?
LiveTiles Reach is an employee communications app designed to help internal communications teams connect with mobile-first staff: frontline workers, contractors, freelancers and temps.
It ensures that, even without a computer, frontline workers have access to a rich digital workplace experience that helps them communicate, collaborate and engage with every resource your company has to offer.
In other words, it ensures that you include every employee everywhere. Let’s explore how.
Here are 10 things you need to know about LiveTiles Reach
1. It’s a digital workplace in your pocket
LiveTiles Reach is an employee app that offers a full mobile intranet experience – with the same experience-changing functionalities that are available to your office-based and information workers.
Reach gives your frontline staff access to a responsive communication app with instant messaging and push notifications, an employee social network and file storage and sharing… as well as a whole host of productivity, training and self-service tools.
The important thing is that both you and your employees shape the app to be as useful and meaningful to them as possible.
2. It’s easy to deploy
LiveTiles Reach is designed to be accessible to every employee. If they have a smartphone, they can download the app from their preferred mobile app store.
It’s as simple as that.
3. It’s endlessly customizable
It’s your employee app, and you can build features into it that matter to your employees. With the Reach plugin framework, Viva Connections Cards and Reach Web Parts, you can build embed features as useful as pages for social events, to powerful automation of inventory, expenses and mobile onboarding with Zapier integrations.
There is no feature that can’t be tweaked, customized, added or removed to totally customize your experience.
4. It helps employees find what they want.
Your employee can spend less time searching and more time ‘doing’ with powerful personalization and search tools. They can customize what appears in their feed, opt in and out of communications, and use Elastic Search/Microsoft Search to quickly find the resources, groups and conversations they need.
It ensures what they see on the app is essential, meaningful and helpful – nothing else.
5. It encourages user-generated content
There’s no communication as authentic as employee-led discussions. Easy-to-use tools let them post status updates, create groups, videos, polls and events – and help them engage with one another with social media features they are used to.
(Don’t worry: moderation tools also let you ensure conversations remain productive.)
6. It’s secure
You can’t guarantee the security of your employee’s mobile connection – but you can guarantee that the content they access via Reach is. Authentication with Azure AD, Google, Okta and OpenID, along with data storage in secure GDPR-compliant European servers ensure that sensitive information is only accessible to those who need to see it.
7. It’s a fully-branded experience
You know how vital brand-building is to retaining loyal customers – and the same goes for your employees.
As a ‘white-label’ platform, our employee communications app will transform into your branded hub for your mobile-first teams – ensuring that they don’t need to set foot into an office to be fully immersed in your brand and company culture.
8. It’s future-proof
Your frontline employees may not need a computer (or even use one with an OS newer than Windows 98) but their employee app can’t remain in the past.
That’s why AI is embedded into Reach to help teams find, share, and analyze information more quickly and make better decisions with data.
- An evolving AI virtual assistant will deliver fast responses to workplace queries, and summarize key information, data and updates.
- An emotionally intelligent AI content creation assistant will enable you and your employees to draft, tweak and even rewrite content… with predictive analytics that indicates how posts will perform before they are even published.
With regular updates and ever-expanding capabilities, Reach integrates AI functions to help employees and internal communication teams work smarter, not harder, in the truest sense of expression.
Learn more about LiveTiles AI tools.
9. It integrates with Microsoft
Over 120 million employees use Microsoft 365 globally, and LiveTiles Reach can fully integrate with that ecosystem.
With Microsoft integration, you have a wealth of tools to make your employee app work for you – and limitless ways for Reach to make your Microsoft investment go even further:
- Access Reach with minimal app-switching within MS Teams on desktop.
- Empower data-led decision-making with PowerBI reporting and analytics tools.
- Rapidly implement new functionalities with simple drag-and-drop Viva Connections Cards or create new tools with the robust Microsoft Power Platform.
What matters most, however, is choice. You can pick and choose what you integrate with Microsoft, but Reach’s versatile features and integrations will ensure you don’t miss out by not doing so.
10. Iterate, improve and comply with robust reporting and analytics
Even in a global setting where face-to-face meetings may be few and far between or never happen with your fully remote, mobile-first employees, it’s still possible to foster meaningful engagement with them.
With granular reports on content engagement and consumption of important materials such as policy documents, you can ensure that the content and tools your frontline app provides are relevant… as well as ensure policies and procedures are being read and understood.
Want to see every feature you will be able to use with Early Access? Read the full feature list.
What can you do with Reach?
What matters more than features? The way that you use them.
No two organizations work the same way. Every team will have unique barriers and organizational siloes that prevent you from unlocking the potential of a truly-connected digital workplace. That’s why Reach can be deeply customized to match your enterprise’s needs – and help you achieve your vision for a united digital employee experience.
Need some inspiration? There are more than a few ways you can use the platform to engage, communicate and connect with employees in new ways.
Here are just a few possibilities:
Build an alumni network – and boost retention
With an alumni network built in Reach, you can ensure your company alumni have a secure way to stay connected with their colleagues and goings-on in your organization.
With temp workers and contractors in your network, you can fill vacancies with experienced ‘re-joiners’, and put the call out for ‘boomerang employees’ should you need their skills again.
Deliver a completely seamless remote onboarding experience
You may not have the chance to meet every new joiner face-to-face, particularly in a fast-moving sector like retail. However, with a frontline app like Reach, you can create a dedicated, human-centric and supportive onboarding experience.
Set up automated workflows to ensure they receive training materials, sign policy documents and use the ‘nudge’ feature to ensure they don’t miss an important message. Embed them socially by inviting them to ‘new joiner’ groups or inviting them to company AMA/all-hands events.
React quickly to emerging crises
Preventing a crisis is always preferable to reacting to one. Reach lets you monitor emerging situations with push and priority notifications on discussions happening among your frontline employees.
If a crisis emerges that affects your employee’s safety and well-being, the same tool lets you immediately contact those affected and provide support. Targeting of regional teams and specific subsets of employees ensures incidents in one location are dealt with effectively – without disrupting operations elsewhere.
Build a culture of recognition among mobile-first teams
Recognition matters just as much to frontline staff as it does to ‘task’ workers, and the way you celebrate their contributions can be just as flexible.
Whether you want to incorporate ‘kudos’-sharing features into the app front page, celebrate a work anniversary on the news feed, or even automate a task flow ‘gamify’ work-related achievements such as completing onboarding, you can boost employee satisfaction by recognizing their hard work through Reach.
Respond to emergencies, react to opportunities, and build an unbeatable workplace culture. Even if you can’t meet your hard-working frontline employees face-to-face, your employee app can help you reach out and support them as you would your office-based teams.
See how Reach can transform your employee communications and sign up for early access
An improved digital EX is possible with an employee communications app like LiveTiles Reach, and connecting front-line and hybrid employees more effectively with your central organization has incredible benefits for their well-being, job satisfaction and productivity.
Whether you integrate Reach as the ‘front-door’ to the wider LiveTiles Intranet platform (and Directory), or you use it alone, LiveTiles’ employee app enables you to bridge the gap between strategy and operations and connect employees everywhere with your organization.
LiveTiles Reach has the power to do it, and you can see exactly how by signing up for early access today.
