Great HR Apps for 2018

It’s January 2018 and some of you out there will be entering another year of your major “HR Transformation”. You’ll probably be over-budget and behind schedule

and you’ll be starting to doubt whether the panacea promised by the system provider will ever materialise. I’ve been there and I feel your pain…..

Why not relieve some of the misery with some great HR apps and digital offerings that are not only quick to implement and relatively inexpensive – but might actually get used by your line managers and employees?

Here’s some that you might want to try out in 2018!

Attendify

This is actually an event app but one HR Director we know told us that he’s using it for induction. He told us that it’s easy to use and customise with your own branding and you can load content that will help your new guys feel welcomed and informed. Attendify says that you can go from start to finish in one week. Makes a change from looking at those Gantt charts that promise “transformation” in 2020?

Looop

Remember the days of the cumbersome “Learning Management System”? Kiss it goodbye with Looop. We all know that learning needs to happen where and when it suits the learner and that this new agile learning needs an intuitive and cost-effective platform. Clients of ours who’ve used this say they love the ease with which they can load and curate relevant learning content. It’s totally customisable so it looks and feels like you. It’s designed for mobile so always looks great. It’s also easy to navigate and manage content for different types of users. And at only $499 a month for up to 250 users, it’s got to be worth a pilot?

Smarp

Last year’s Edelman Trust Barometer (the leading annual research into ‘who we trust’) told us that we trust “people like us” far more than we trust leaders – and as much as we trust professional or technical advisers. Our fears about letting our employees loose on social media mean that we’re missing a trick in not harnessing the power of our employees as advocates. Smarp is an app that not only recognises the value of employee advocacy – it enables it. You can use the app to create, schedule and publish content for your employees to share via their own social networks. Great analytics, gamification tools and integration with all of the key social channels – this is a smart idea, well executed.

NextJump

NextJump offer all sorts of great HR digital products in the perks and feedback for employees space. But the one I want to call out is the “Top 10” programme. This great mobile-based product is all about rewarding collaboration and generosity of spirit, rather than individual achievement of targets. Your employees are asked a simple question, “who has helped you succeed?”, and the programme focuses on the people in your organisation who have made the largest impact on their colleagues. Monthly voting and a leader board keeps this fresh and fun and the best part is that employees get to reward their colleagues with actual cash. This helps create an environment of collaboration and an adult to adult approach to reward. Check it out.

Clear Review

There are stacks of apps in the performance management space but what I particularly like about Clear Review is that it incorporates the lessons of what works and what doesn’t in PM and has features like frequent check-ins, real-time feedback and peer-to-peer review built in. Too many of the current PM apps have simply put a broken system (annual objectives, ratings, etc) onto mobile. I also like the fact that it’s got short videos on how to do stuff like how to have a check-in conversation. Given that 2018 has GOT to be the year that you finally give up your tired old PM system, this has got to be worth a try?

NB: No money changed hands in the writing of this blog – we just genuinely like these products!