Connect the disconnected with offline intranet reading

Introducing Unily’s offline reading

Connecting hard to reach employees is one of the most persistent challenges enterprises face today. With workforces more globally dispersed than ever before, employers face greater difficulty in simply reaching everyone with communications, let alone connecting them to the tools they need to do their best work.

Uniting your enterprise means uniting everyone, and with the arrival of offline reading, Unily is making strides in expanding the reach of the intranet to every corner of your workforce, ensuring our mobile experiences offer unparalleled inclusivity. Give your employees access to your intranet even without access to the internet.

Connecting the disconnected and engaging those furthest from HQ, Unily’s new offline reading feature promises to bring once hard to reach employees back into the fold. Allowing users to select and save content from the native Unily mobile app, offline reading means even the most disconnected employees can access engaging internal communications, even without an internet connection.

Overcome frontline engagement barriers

Frontline and remote workers remain the most difficult demographic to reach and engage because they lack the same access to desktop computers their office-based counterparts enjoy. Instead, mobile is the battleground for engaging the frontline, where companies must compete for the attention of their employees with mobile experiences that stand toe-to-toe with consumer app experiences.

For desktop users, you can create, publish, and target content with confidence that your communications reach their audience, even retargeting to users yet to see content or making specific updates mandatory. With frontline and remote users, however, you can take all of these steps and still end up with substantial portions of your workforce left in the dark and, ultimately, disengaged.

The simple reason behind this frontline disconnect is access: these employees don’t have the same opportunities to access content and communications and actively engage with your intranet as your desktop users do.

Use cases for offline reading

Frontline retail, hospitality workers and more often don’t have time to read the latest updates as the nature of their roles doesn’t allow employees to use a computer to check their intranet while on shift. The only chances these types of users may get to engage with your intranet is on their breaks or commute, where desktop computers aren’t available and data and internet connection may be unreliable. For these employees offline reading may be the only chance they get to catch themselves up with the latest news and updates.

Other, more remote roles, such as those working on freighters, oil rigs, or airline cabin crews, simply don’t have access to the internet. In the travel and transport industry – be it airlines, cruise ships, or anything in between – internet connection is, for the most part, unavailable. Offline reading offers a way of turning frontline ‘down time’ into engagement opportunities. The same applies to workers in the oil, energy, and even logistics industry, that when working remotely or, for instance, on oil rigs, are similarly prone to periods without access to the internet.

Offline reading opens a door for these types of users, offering a way of consuming content and engaging with your intranet despite these barriers, giving you the chance to stay connected even without internet connection.

Enhancing the mobile experience

Connecting frontline and remote users with your wider enterprise helps to unlock the valuable insight they hold, offering a unique perspective different from those working in offices behind the scenes. They are also, however, chronically disengaged. Of all employees, non-desk staff have the highest turnover rate and the lowest engagement scores, and all this disengagement is costly.

Gallup recently found that disengaged frontline staff cost your organization an average of 34% of an employee’s annual salary and lead to 37% higher absenteeism, 18% lower productivity, and 15% lower profitability.

Delivering consumer-grade mobile intranet experiences is crucial to connecting and engaging mobile users, and, as a primary concern for our clients, it is an area that Unily is continuing to focus development and investment on improving. Throughout 2021 the Unily platform will see key enhancements to its mobile experiences, ensuring that your frontline stays connected and mobile users enjoy the full Unily experience, no matter what device they use.

Customer-driven innovations

The addition of offline reading to Unily aligns with our objective of developing the Unily platform to continue to solve the challenges facing modern enterprises. This means that our product is in constant conversation with the needs, wants, and problems of our clients.

Offline reading is a perfect example of this kind of feature development, produced to directly address the common pain points of Unily clients across several industries, including travel, transport and logistics, and hospitality. Originally a request from Unily’s exclusive customer community, offline reading was built in partnership with several clients that provided feedback and insight along the way.

With our ideation portal available to the Universe customer community, we are committed to building solutions directly tailored to the challenges and problems facing modern enterprises.

Consumer-grade experiences for your frontline

Over recent years people have come to expect certain features from the technology we use. Consumer offerings often lead the way, with innovations typically reaching the public before making it’s way to the enterprise technology market.

Much like our Google-like search experience, with the new offline reading feature, Unily is working to level the playing field, ensuring that your intranet is as cutting-edge as the consumer-grade technology we are accustomed to in our daily lives. With offline reading and beyond, Unily’s mobile experiences are being enhanced throughout 2021 to deliver on these expectations and ensure the frontline is as connected as anyone else.

Deliver the mobile experiences your frontline needs with offline reading

If your workforce includes employees on the frontline, working remotely, or often without access to the internet, find out what offline reading can do to help boost employee engagement by getting in touch with a digital workplace expert today.