Effective communication is the lifeblood of any high-performing organization. However, facilitating seamless information sharing across hybrid and distributed workforces poses major challenges. A 2022 study found that 58% of companies rate poor communication as the biggest obstacle to productivity.
This guide will examine the employee communication app landscape, providing actionable insights on navigating the crowded marketplace. We’ll cover:
- The business case for investing in modern communication solutions
- Leading categories and capabilities of apps
- Implementation best practices
- Pros, cons, and key considerations for top platforms
- The future of smart workplace collaboration technology
Let‘s dive in.
The High Costs of Communication Breakdown
Legacy email continues to dominate intracompany interactions, but proves ineffective for dynamic team coordination. Excessive CC’ing and reply-all storms lead to information overload.critica detail frequently gets buried. Rapid-fire messaging requires immediate response rather than thoughtful input.
These disjointed workflows take a major toll on productivity and innovation, with enterprises losing over $26,000 per knowledge worker annually due to communication inefficiencies.
Beyond direct economic impact, poor organizational communication severely degrades company culture and employee experience by:
- Reducing alignment across departments
- Limiting visibility into strategic priorities
- Stifling knowledge sharing opportunities
- Increasing stress and frustration
Staff are left feeling disengaged, isolated, and out of loop. The end result? Decreased loyalty and higher turnover.
Modern Communication Apps Connect Teams
Leading organizations are fighting back against these troubling trends by deploying next-gen communication platforms. These tools go beyond basic email and messaging to provide intuitive collaboration hubs for aligning distributed teams.
Core capabilities include:
- Messaging: Instant group chat with threaded conversations
- Audio/Video Calls: Built-in high-quality video conferencing
- File Sharing: Secure cloud storage and document co-editing
- Search: Powerful indexing to instantly find conversations and content
- Analytics: Usage metrics for optimizing workflows
- Integrations: Bi-directional syncing with popular business apps
- Security: Granular access controls and encryption
These tools represent a major upgrade from email. They facilitate transparency, spur collaboration, streamline work, and help companies unlock productivity.
Getting Employee Buy-In
The user experience makes or breaks adoption of any new technology. Employees will only migrate conversations from email if communication apps provide concrete advantages.
Transforming ingrained habits requires driving engagement across the organization. Best practices include:
- Launching with executive endorsement and structured training
- Incentivizing usage via objectives and key results (OKRs)
- Highlighting efficiency gains around finding information
- Integrating with existing workflow systems like CRM, HRIS, BI
- Evangelizing early adopters and power users
- Soliciting ongoing feedback to refine the platform
With persistent guidance and support, companies can successfully rollout communication apps at scale.
Cloud Office Suite vs. Specialized Tools
When investigating options, organizations must decide between leveraging general-purpose platforms like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace versus standalone point solutions.
Cloud office suites simplify stacking a breadth of functionality covering email, video conferencing, documents, and more into a single environment. However, these platforms rarely match best-of-breed tools specialized in a specific capability.
For example, Google Meet and Teams serve core webcasting needs but lack advanced features offered by dedicated products like Zoom, Hopin, or Demio. Similarly, SharePoint offers a baseline content management system yet can’t rival sophisticated solutions like Box or Dropbox.
This tradeoff applies to communication functionality. Although Microsoft Teams and Google Chat centralize team messaging/calling, consider if they provide the richness offered by Slack, Zoom, and Discord.
Carefully examine current versus desired business workflows before determining the ideal mix of suites versus specialized apps. Be cautious about overstandardization if it limits meeting unique communication requirements.
Leading Employee Communication Apps
Now let’s explore major contenders vying for your company’s collaboration strategy.
1. Slack – The Favorite for Developer Teams
Slack reigns as the pioneer that popularized channel-based messaging for the workplace. It remains the preferred choice among engineering and IT departments.
Key Strengths
- Robust platform with exceptional reliability
- Customizable channels organized by topics, teams, projects
- Fluid integrations with business-critical apps
- Facilitates transparency and knowledge sharing
Best For
- Remote/hybrid organizations
- Customer-facing and distributed teams
- Developers and technical workers
With steady enhancements to security and compliance capabilities, Slack continues maturing into an enterprise-grade standard for unified communications.
2. Microsoft Teams – Ideal for Companies Using Office 365
While Microsoft entered the space late following Slack‘s success, Teams leveraged Office 365‘s market dominance to gain significant traction. It recently passed 270 million monthly active users.
Key Strengths
- Tight integration across Microsoft 365 apps
- Strong voice/video meeting capabilities
- Ability to collaborate directly within Office docs
- Third largest video calling user base globally
Best For
- Larger enterprises invested in Microsoft stack
- Companies that value unified IT environment
- Heavily regulated industries requiring advanced security
Teams will continue making inroads by bundling into Office 365 licenses as default messaging client for many large customers.
3. Facebook Workplace – Leader in Frontline Comms
With over 9 million paid users spanning enterprises like Nestle, Spotify and Delta Air Lines, Facebook@Workplace stands out for engaging deskless workers.
Key Strengths
- Users already familiar with Facebook‘s interface
- Multilingual support across 60+ languages
- Integrates with leading ID systems and HR platforms
- Advanced analytics on content consumption
Best For
- Frontline industries like retail, manufacturing, healthcare
- Multi-national organizations
- Companies focused on corporate culture
By tapping into billions of existing Facebook accounts, Workplace removes technology adoption barriers that frequently undermine frontline communication initiatives.
4. Zoom – Meeting Virtually Anywhere
With its supremely reliable video infrastructure, Zoom skyrocketed from 10 million to 300 million daily meeting participants since 2020.
Key Strengths
- Flawless call quality even with weak connections
- Support for meetings with up to 1,000 participants
- Broad device support spanning desktops, phones, and conference room systems
- Hot-desking to securely log in from shared devices
Best For
- Media, entertainment and design teams
- Companies with large virtual events
- Strict meeting security requirements
As hybrid work cements itself for the long-term, Zoom maintains pole position as the pure-play web conferencing leader.
5. Beekeeper – Empowering Frontline Staff
Beekeeper‘s mobile-first platform targets historically underserved populations like non-desk employees. Users across retail, healthcare, hospitality and logistics rely on Beekeeper.
Key Strengths
- Guaranteed 99.9% uptime and rapid content delivery
- Seamless onboarding without emails or passwords
- Curated news feeds personalized to each worker
- Advanced analytics revealing content engagement
Best For
- Deskless workforces
- Shift workers
- Companies with high turnover
By meeting frontline workers where they are, Beekeeper meaningfully improves visibility, collaboration, and agility across distributed locations.
What‘s Next for Smart Work Tech
The worldwide health crisis and remote work explosion will have permanent impact, requiring communication solutions to continually evolve.
Key developments on the horizon include:
- Integration of predictive analytics to uncover usage trends and future platform optimizations
- AR/VR to enable visually immersive collaboration across remote participants
- Workflow bots helping automate standard processes
- Enhanced data security protections driven by shifting regulations
- Closer ties with leading HR systems as engagement platforms
Technology will play an integral role in redefining the future of work. Agile organizations must invest today in developing tightly aligned, digitally-powered, human-centric cultures ready for any challenges ahead.
The Bottom Line
With distributed teams now the norm, dated email chains simply can’t facilitate enterprise-grade coordination. Purpose-built tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Facebook Workplace break down silos to sync coworkers.
Carefully review key considerations around change management, security, compliance and scalability when selecting platforms. Most importantly, ensure your chosen solution empowers staff rather than introducing new burdens.
The competition remains fierce as vendors clamor to become the command hub powering teamwork. But companies willing to boldly reimagine workflows will gain major advantage. The future favors the connected.