Powering Employee Engagement with Microsoft Power Apps

Employee engagement has long been a problem for many business owners. Companies with high engagement levels can achieve around 21% more profit than their counterparts. Unfortunately, most leaders don’t know where to start when it comes to connecting with their workforce. In fact, 63.3% of companies say retaining employees is harder than hiring them. 

With the disruption of 2020 pushing many staff members to rethink their working situation, engagement is tougher to achieve than ever. This is particularly true now that your employees may be working remotely, from distributed locations around the world. 

How do you get your team members actively absorbed in what they do, when you might not always see them face to face? 

The Evolution of Employee Engagement

Achieving engagement in the workplace isn’t as simple as having a “casual Friday” every week, or actively asking each of your employees how they’re doing on a daily basis. There are numerous factors reasonable for employee engagement, from how comfortably your team members feel in their physical workplace, to how much they can visualise a future with your business. 

True employee engagement involves a number of different pillars, including:

• Technology: Empowering employees with the right technology naturally makes them feel more engaged and less frustrated by the work they do. 
• Communication: Enabling communication, even in a remote or hybrid working environment is crucial. Tools like Microsoft Teams help to keep the conversation flowing.
• Transparency: Creating a feedback loop so leaders can understand the needs of staff as they evolve is essential to continue enabling employees. 

Over the last few years, the approaches companies take to ensuring engagement have evolved. Increasingly, we’re seeing how agile development strategies can quickly and cost-effectively influence the sentiment of employees. 

It all starts with recognising a problem and exploring opportunities for digital transformation. 

Using Power Apps to Increase Employee Engagement

85% of employees aren’t engaged in the current workplace, but a small change could be all it takes to change that. Consider, for instance, Samit Saini’s story. He used to work in the Heathrow Airport Security segment and was introduced to Office 365, complete with Microsoft Power Apps. He realised that the inefficiencies of manually tracking what could and couldn’t be loaded onto a plane using physical books was too time-consuming. He wanted to make the process digital, mobile, and future-proof. So, he taught himself how to use the Power Apps solution. 

Impressed by Saini’s intuition, his managers created a new role for him, of “IT Solution Specialist”, and the Heathrow Airport began to evolve, taking on more developers to build efficient applications. Low-code applications and simple tools like Microsoft Power Apps can now enable businesses to resolve problems more rapidly, without the need for excessive planning. 

Anyone who has access to PowerApps can build an incredible experience without background coding skills. Microsoft’s solution means companies like Heathrow can train new teams specifically to focus on developing apps to solve common issues damaging employee engagement. 

Unlocking Opportunities with Business Apps

The enterprise application market is set to reach a value of $259.51 billion by 2022, and companies everywhere are relying more than ever on these simple, accessible tools to ensure productivity, boost efficiency, and lower costs. Fortunately, for those without excessive technical skills, there are various routes available to help with building your applications. 

Microsoft’s Power Platform, for instance, with both Power Apps and Power Automate, make it easier for companies to design tools for automating repetitive tasks. You can build comprehensive workflows in a straightforward, visual way, speeding up decision-making through connectors that align data across the workforce. The Microsoft Common Data Store integrates across solutions, workflows, and platforms easily. 

In the past, creating intelligent, streamlined applications to improve company workflows wasn’t possible for any company without a huge IT department, and a significant budget. Resource requirements and extensive concerns surrounding security and compliance often meant that when funding was approved for digital transformation, the timeline for building the technology was slow, cumbersome, and expensive. The complexity of these tools also meant it was difficult to ensure absolute adoption throughout the workforce, minimising ROI. 

Creating Secure Solutions, the Easy Way

When it comes to designing business applications in the new world, companies can take a different approach. Cloud-based solutions like Power Apps from Microsoft and Power Automate means large scale, cumbersome projects aren’t always necessary. Agile teams can transform into developers with minimal training or support. 

An aligned, agile, and cloud-based solution for development also means IT security teams have more scope to minimise risk, by controlling data access on a central level, preventing loss and leakages. What’s more, the Microsoft app development ecosystem means you don’t have to compromise on security and compliance to access engagement.

Microsoft holds its ecosystem to the highest security standards, maintaining compliance with GDPR and other high-level regulations. This means that you can rest assured you’re not taking risks with the data responsible for fuelling your applications. 

Let’s Re-Engage the Workforce

At Resonate, we’ve seen first-hand how simple but effective applications can revive the engagement levels of any workforce, driving better results for the entire business. We’re experts at empowering the employees of our clients with solutions built to address their pain points and enable excellence. 

With developers in both Slovakia and the UK, we’ll guide you through the process of app creation, and help you to discover the best possible method of increasing employee engagement. Get in touch to learn more about how we can help you to achieve the engagement benefits of big brands, without the expense.