With over five million apps available across the world, just about every fathomable function of daily life can be aided by a finger-tap on a smartphone.
People spend at least two hours a day using apps. But so far this US$1.3 trillion market has barely serviced the place they spend most of their waking hours: the workplace. That’s starting to change.
Workplace apps are increasingly being used for tasks like booking meeting rooms, ordering a morning coffee for collection upon arrival at work, or signing up for extracurricular activities like running clubs. The promise is increased productivity and better engagement with the company.
“As our professional and personal lives increasingly blend, there is a growing appetite for apps to communicate with us in the workplace,” says Michael Taggart, Head of Digital Solutions in Australia for JLL
When apps gain traction, the results are clear. For instance, when global financial group Capital One rebranded its real estate function – changing the name to Workplace Solutions from Corporate Real Estate – it introduced an app that helped people find transport and parking, access amenities in the building and local area, book meeting rooms, and even navigate their first weeks on the job.
There is a risk though that apps sit unused, an all-too-common result. Around 23 percent of people will abandon an app after a single use if it doesn’t meet their liking, even if there’s a chance the updates will.
“You have to be solving a problem that already exists, not trying to solve ones that don’t,” says Taggart. “There’s no need to overcomplicate things. Apps like Uber, and some airline apps, just serve the most basic functions, such as booking a taxi, or booking a flight.
“Apps have the ability to address many superficial concerns of comfort and convenience, such as adjusting air conditioning or lights, but that’s not really a priority for many employees – and they’ll quickly lose interest. If companies really want to make apps a part of everyday working life, they need to ensure it serves useful purposes in the workplace and does things that mobile apps are already doing for employees in their personal lives. That’s the key to mass adoption.”
Mitigating risks
In these early days of adoption, the enthusiasm of companies to iron out their tangle of tech platforms isn’t matched by the rate of success. In fact, 84 percent of digital transformation efforts in the workplace will fail, according to Forbes.
On the app front, there are multiple reasons for this, including businesses rolling the platform out too quickly and with too little consultation with staff, says Stewart Elliot, chief executive of app developer, Modo Labs. Employees can feel overwhelmed with too much technology.
“The best way to achieve mass adoption is to introduce an app that solves key pain points, and then scale up from there,” he says. “Apps can fail to get traction when this approach is ignored, or when it occurs to a business that they have opted for a product with significant long-term costs, that is a continuous drain on IT resources, or it simply takes too much time to develop, deliver and maintain.”
Digital success in real life
Capital One is an early adopter of the workplace app. It branded its app @Work and used it to replace multiple platforms that staff once navigated to carry out basic functions and get company news.
The app has now been rolled out in 125 office locations, says Samantha Fisher, the company’s Senior Director of Workplace Experience.
“We wanted one solution to show that we understood our colleagues’ challenges, and we knew that it needed to be intuitive and function just as any consumer app does today.”
Fisher adds that the app helped the business take “commercial real estate out of the age of bricks and mortar and into digital hospitality”.
“It has been a game changer for us. We were really dedicated to ensuring it delivered value, knowing that it was the key to take up and I’m so glad we stuck with it to get it right before rollout.”