You can be on Entrepreneur’s cover!

Keeping Staffers Without Email (Half the Workforce) In the Loop. For true engagement, companies need to communicate with all their staff – and not just the ones with corporate email. Red e App founder Jonathan Erwin explains more.

By Sarah Max

entrepreneur daily

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

There's no shortage of channels for companies to connect with their employees, from email and social media to custom-built platforms. Yet, most technology has been focused on employees who spend their days working at desks or glued to their smartphones.

What about the 75 million Americans – more than half of the workforce – who work behind cash registers, in kitchens, on factory floors or at job sites? "This group has been completely overlooked," says Jonathan Erwin, founder and CEO of Red e App.

A 24-year technology veteran at such companies as Microsoft and Hosting.com, Erwin didn't give much thought to this segment population until he moved back to his hometown of Louisville, Ky. to work on a different idea, a messaging platform focused on connecting businesses with consumers. "When I started talking with companies, they said "we have a million ways to reach consumers,'" says Erwin, age 47. "What they really needed was a better way to communicate with hourly employees, who either don't have corporate email or don't check it regularly."

Launched in 2011, Red e App can be downloaded to smartphones or computers, giving employees easy access to training, scheduling and benefits information, as well as frequently-used numbers. Scheduling changes or emergency alerts can be sent to specific people or groups, such as those in a particular region or type of job, and show up like text messages, saving managers from wrangling with phone calls. And unlike voice messages, when a staffer reads a notification or accesses a file, his organization knows it.

The app is now being slowly phased in at companies as General Electric and Papa John's International to keep more than 10,000 employees up to speed on everything from benefits changes and job openings to crisis management.

Entrepreneur spoke with Erwin about why traditional platforms have overlooked a critical segment of the working population.

Entrepreneur: For those of us who are at a desk most of the day, it's hard to understand why companies have struggled with how to communicate with such a large segment of the population. Why is that?
Erwin:
Their behavior is different. Many of these people come in and out of those hourly markets or switch jobs frequently. They typically don't have corporate email or don't have time to check it while they're working. Consider a nurse. She's working for 12 hours doing nursing activities. If she wants to interact with her company, she typically needs to do it on her own time, and then it means logging into email or a company website and weeding through vast amounts of information. It's the same for a restaurant worker, retail person or a factory worker.

Related: Don't Stop Recruiting Employees Once They're Hired

Entrepreneur: How do most companies communicate these employees?
Erwin: Single sheets of notices or paper stuffed in payroll envelopes and mailed to people's houses. There are human resource office hours, kiosks on factory floors, and bulletin boards or videos in the break room. All of these are cumbersome, slow and not very effective.

Entrepreneur: If these employees haven't adopted email, why are they likely to use an app?
Erwin: We've found is that most of them have mobile phones, and they're savvy about how they use them. We try to take a very simple approach, and we encourage companies to keep their communications very targeted.

Entrepreneur: Have companies gotten pushback from employees who don't want to use the app on their personal devices?
Erwin: They are sometimes skeptical, and that's expected with anything new. Common concerns are what it will do to their data plans, and if their location can be tracked. Companies publish all of their policies. They aren't collecting data and they don't know where people are with GPS.

Related: How Relationships Are Fueling One Online Locavore Marketplace

Entrepreneur: Is it a one-way street, or can employees communicate with managers or each other?
Erwin: They can, but it's through a verification process, a little like LinkedIn. Some companies give people access to a smart directory they can use to talk to each other, but they might only see the same people in their region or division. It's not willy-nilly. It's a very controlled and managed, and measured.

Entrepreneur: What exactly are companies measuring?
Erwin: Companies can see if employees have read a message, and re-message those people who didn't. In the food world, for example, you need to know who did and didn't see a message about foodborne illness. Companies can also see who's sending messages, who's reading them and how quickly. It's very different from blasting everyone with the same emails and not knowing the level of engagement.

Entrepreneur: Why is improving engagement with this workforce segment is so important?
Erwin:
Understanding who is reading corporate information regarding change management, crisis, training, logistics, scheduling and HR are all critical to business culture, compliance and accountability. There is accountability for the employee, but also a high level of insight, attention and guidance on an individual level for the organization. This has simply never been possible before. It is said that employees don't leave companies, they leave people. Employees (people) want to have relationships with leadership, they want to believe in the business that they work for and that translates to pride and a sense of ownership in the work product.

Sarah Max is a freelance writer in Bend, Ore. She has covered business and personal finance for more than a decade for such publications as Barron's, Money, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. In 2009 Sarah got a first-hand look at the ups and downs of entrepreneurship when she helped launch 1859 Oregon'’s Magazine, a bimonthly print and digital magazine for which she is editor at large.

Want to be an Entrepreneur Leadership Network contributor? Apply now to join.

Editor's Pick

Growing a Business

To Achieve Sustainable Success, You Need to Stop Focusing on Disruption. Here's Why — and What You Must Focus on Instead.

Instead of zeroing in solely on disruptive innovation, embrace a pragmatic approach to innovation, recognizing and leveraging the potential within ongoing industry shifts.

Business News

Mark Zuckerberg Says This CEO Is the 'Taylor Swift' of Tech

Meta's CEO posed with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Instagram Wednesday.

Real Estate

3 Emerging Trends Shaping the Future of Real Estate

These three innovations are reshaping the real estate industry — discover tips for effectively covering these trends.

Leadership

What We Have to Gain By Talking About Grief and Loss At Work

I lost my husband to cancer during Covid — here's how it changed how I lead at work.

Side Hustle

This Mom Started a Side Hustle After a 'Shocking' Realization in the Toy Aisle. Her Product Was in Macy's Within the Year — Seeing Nearly $350,000 in Sales.

Elenor Mak, now founder of Jilly Bing, didn't plan to start a business — but the search for a doll that looked like her daughter inspired her to do just that.

Fundraising

Avoid These 9 Pitch Deck Mistakes When Asking Others For Money

Crafting an efficient pitch deck requires serious effort, but at least it's not wandering in the dark since certain rules are shaped by decades of relationships between startups and investors.