6 Best Internal Employee Communication Apps in 2024

The lack of communication for companies and the inefficient use of internal communication tools can hinder understanding and improving employee experience. According to a study by Deloitte, nearly 80 percent of executes rated the employee experience as important while only 22 percent reported that their companies excelled at creating a differentiated employee experience.

Employee communication apps can help businesses to improve the employee experience by streamlining collaboration and information sharing.

What are employee communication apps?

Employee communication refers to the sharing of ideas and corporate information between employees. An employee communication app facilitates accessing and sharing information within a company. Without changing their personal numbers, employees can communicate with other people in the organization via a mobile employee communication app.

Can you use messaging apps for employee communication?

Yes, we do that. However, specialized employee communication apps such as Slack are designed to facilitate communication and collaboration between employees. In contrast, general-purpose messaging apps like WhatsApp or Signal were not designed with employee communication in mind and may lack important features.

Employee communication apps are dynamic communication tools and their main purpose is to provide collaboration among employees. These apps offer one-to-one and group chat, audio calls, and video conferencing for businesses. They can also provide advanced file-sharing and archiving features that employees can use to search and access necessary files later.

What are the main employee communication channels?

Email

Email is still the most popular internal communication tool. However, 83% of employees feel overwhelmed with high volumes of business emails. According to the Constant Contact study, the average email open rate (the number of emails opened compared to the number of emails sent) is 17.61%, and the click rate(the number of people who clicked a link within the email) is 8.74% across all industries.

When things are time-sensitive or messages are frequent, email is not the most efficient way to communicate. For example, resolving disagreements can become daunting with email. Complex situations require more frequent feedback and more immediate responses so specialized communication channels can be more effective in these contexts.

Social Networking

According to the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the use of social technologies by knowledge workers can increase productivity by 20-25%. If companies use social media internally, messages can become content, and company information shared through the messaging app becomes an information base for employees. Collaboration between employees with instant messaging makes the company information more accessible. Through social networking, the time employees spend searching for company information can be reduced by up to 35%.

Video Meeting

Video is one of the most effective engagement channels for communication because:

• Easy to access on multiple devices
• Provides more personal interactions
• More suitable for small teams or one on one conversations

Intranets

Intranets are enterprise software that can only be used by employees. Unlike the internet, intranet only gives access to certain users and the content is not available to the public as it is on the internet.

However, depending on the structure of the intranet, it may not be practical for employees to access company information. For instance, mobile communication with the intranet is difficult because many intranets do not support mobile.

What are some popular employee communication apps?

Slack

Slack is an enterprise software platform that provides communication and collaboration between employees. Everything shared within Slack is automatically archived. It creates a knowledge base and users can always access the information archived here with the search tool in the application. The total funding amount of Slack is $1.4B. The app is supported by platforms such as Web, Android, and iPhone/iPad. It provides:

• Video conferencing
• Individual and team audio calls
• Management on document such as PDFs, images, videos

Staffbase 

Staffbase is a mobile-first internal communication application. It enables frontline workers to get information about the developments in the company. It has a $190.8M investment.

Dynamic Signal

Dynamic Signal is an engagement platform that connects organizations with their employees. It claims to be used by 350 companies such as Toyota, IBM, UPS to increase the employee experience. It is available for both desktop and mobile devices and employees can securely access personalized information. It has raised a total of $114.8M in funding.

Beekeeper

Beekeeper aims to increase the productivity of frontline workers by providing access to company updates and necessary contacts. It describes itself as the core application for frontline workers. The application can be used via mobile or desktop devices and users can send group messages and polls through the app. In addition, users can share content such as documents, images, and videos with each other. The total amount of funding of Beekeeper is $86M.

Wrike

Wrike is a collaborative communication platform. Its general use is project management and task assignment. In addition, it reveals team performance and success with statistical results. It has raised a total of $26M in funding.

Smarp

Smarp is a cloud-based employee communication platform. Information can be shared externally and internally. It is supported by platforms such as the web, Android, iPhone/iPad. Smarp combines internal and external communications for its users and can be used as a B2B and B2C marketing tool. Its total funding amount is €9.9M

Workforce Insights is an analytics platform developed by Smarp. It enables corporate communicators to make data-based decisions.

Watch the video to find out more about how it works:

Other apps to support employee communication

Though these apps have limited direct messaging features, they enable collaboration & project management so they are an important part of employee communication.

Trello

Trello is an internal employee communication platform used for project management. It helps employees to keep track of their current tasks and previous teamwork. With Trello, you can assign tasks to team members and move tasks to different boards. Employees can easily keep track of what has been done and what needs to be done.

JIRA

A popular application that is used for project and process management processes. With JIRA, you can:

• create a task and assign it to the relevant person.
• log time by estimating how much time will be allocated for tasks.
• prioritize tasks.
• plan sprints (a sprint is a set period of time to complete a specific work).

Confluence

Confluence is a team workspace and an internal wiki tool. It is available on both desktop and mobile. Some key features of Confluence are:

• Sharing and giving access to documents to the certain user from various department.
• Creating hierarchy between documentation.
• Provides simultaneous editing on documents.

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