Beekeeper Announces App Extension for Team Collaboration
In a recent blog post, Beekeeper discussed how it possesses numerous ways to recognize, poll, engage, and connect the mobile workforce and their office-based colleagues. It then announced an app extension designed expressly for a vital but often underutilized component of employee communication: sharing and voting on ideas.
The Beekeeper Innovation App, available in the Beekeeper Marketplace, can be used as an online collaborative incubator for employees to submit ideas and users with voting rights to vote on these ideas. Aside from team collaboration, the Innovation app extension provides the following benefits for dispersed teams:
- Transparent, open forum for idea-sourcing, which contributes to your mobile workforce feeling validated and valued
- The ability to respond to and act more quickly on ideas that are already proven popular among your workforce
- As a digital team collaboration tool, the Innovation app reduces the need for in-person brainstorming meetings while increasing employee communication
- Invites innovation from a wider pool of input from all departments and decreases management silos and echo-chambers
How the Innovation App Works to Increase Employee Communication
The Innovation App consists of two main functionalities: streams and a voting tool. Write and read permissions can be assigned by team app administrators, managers, or other designated employees to fully customize who is contributing and how within specified streams. All users with write permissions can submit––and include supporting materials such as images, links, and questions––within these streams, which sync automatically with the voting tool. When voting is over, the winning idea and post is celebrated by posting the top-voted idea at the top of the voting stream. All users with read permissions have voting rights and can vote on any of the submissions in the voting tool via a navigation extension accessible under the “More” tab.
Users can then allocate their votes, which are clearly visible and travel with you down the page as you scroll through submissions. Also in the traveling scroll bar is how many days you have remaining to vote on content in the stream. Change your mind about an idea? Votes can easily be changed once submitted.
Customizable Filters For Voting Efficiency
There are many ways to determine what users see in the Innovation App through the use of a variety of filters. This ensures that users can sort content to make sure they aren’t missing any new posts, or can find issues or content they care about more quickly. The end result? You get the answers you need exactly when you need them, without having to coordinate work calendars to set in-person team collaboration sessions. Innovation App filters include:
- Date
- Month
- Category
The amount of points allotted to each user is set by the administrator. Timeframes for voting can be set at a minimum time period of one month and maximum of one quarter. At the conclusion of the voting period, the Innovation App generates a post on the stream with the voting results. Best of all, the top-voted idea is reposted at the top of the stream at this time as well.
Potential Innovation App Use Cases
- Company-wide, crowdsourced brainstorming
- “Viral Content” employee engagement campaigns
- Ways to improve operations such as trainings, onboardings, and safety procedures
- Corporate charity donation suggestions
- Team event suggestions
- Employee recognition, nomination, and reward schemes (such as Employee of the Month)