Enterprise apps show passwords are passé

Your intranet may be available to you on your mobile device, just using the browser, but the log on experience is probably infuriating, with or without two-factor authentication. And you’ll likely be automatically logged-out after a week, a day, or even when you close the browser tab.

What everyone wants is the usual app experience. Log on once and then you’re done. What could be better?

Better would be the no log-on experience modern enterprise apps can offer.

McDonald’s recruits customers with a notification

At the recent IntraTeam Event Copenhagen conference I was intrigued to learn that Nordic McDonald’s has an exceptional on-boarding process for new staff that starts with mobile recruitment.

The consumer McDonald’s app will ask the right people if they’re interested in a job as they walk into the local branch. Few people have a CV on their phone, especially not younger people, so the applicants take and upload a short video. Nordic McDonald’s receive 85,000 applications and recruit 8,500 new staff per year for their 426 restaurants.

A phone call can lead to a job offer, and then a text message provides access to the company Workforce app, which is the everyday work app for scheduling, communications, and even bite-size training.

As Katrine Schelbli of Nordic McDonald’s explained, young people are fast and impatient; if it isn’t immediately obvious how to use an app, they delete it. Log-ons kill use. Send an email with a link? No way; everything must be on mobile for our people, nobody will go sit at a computer after work.

The solution is all about systems integrations and single sign-on to ensure the systems know the recruit’s mobile phone.

Take a look at Lisa Riemers’ sketchnote of the process.

Fascinating and fast app-based recruitment and onboarding at McDonald’s in the Nordics – prospective employees upload a video of why they want to work there #IntraTeam20 #EuroDEX pic.twitter.com/AorX2Q3FDM

— Lisa Riemers (@lisariemers) March 3, 2020

You can do this with the right employee app

While at the IntraTeam conference (I spoke about content design techniques), I had the opportunity to try the ‘no log-on’ experience with the Actimo employee app. I got into the webapp so quickly I barely realised what I’d done!

I scanned a QR code (remember them?) while in the exhibition hall, and a web page asked for my name and phone number.

Anyway, I received a text message with a link, which sent me to the webapp – the key thing was that the webapp knew my name, my identity!

Sometimes, a verification code is needed, which is just four digits sent by text. It’s not a password, it’s just a one-time code.

If not ready for a dedicated employee app, you might be able to use Microsoft’s official apps quite easily if your organisation uses Office 365. See about rolling out the Office app for documents, the SharePoint app for internal news, and the MS Teams mobile app for team chat.

But if you want more than Microsoft offers, we can help you choose the right mobile employee app from the many choices on the market. We’ve published our new employee apps report which is easy to use with at-a-glance charts and clear scoring.

All our independent reports will help you make up your mind about the best technology to choose.