The Situation: Why Northwell Health Took Their Internal Comms Strategy Mobile

Prior to launching the “myNorthwell” employee app, Northwell Health used a myriad of tools to communicate with its diverse workforce. Each served a distinct and important purpose but came with its share of challenges. For example:

• Email: While all employees are provided with a Northwell email address, most are front-line workers who are on their feet throughout the day and night, and only periodically are able to access email via a desktop computer.
• Employee Intranet: The company recently overhauled its Sharepoint intranet—a massive and expensive undertaking. However, given the complexity of the intranet, with the information and tools not yet mobile-accessible, and sitting behind the organization’s firewall, it was not a one-size-fits-all tool.
• Print: Posters and flyers are hung in the employee common areas at many hospitals and facilities. However, print is not a sustainable model and clutter often becomes the norm. Also, since they tend to be grouped together on places like bulletin boards, there is no way to measure their effectiveness or determine who viewed specific messages.

The App: My Northwell

In considering innovative and more modern ways to communicate with employees, the communications and HR teams at Northwell knew they needed a mobile solution to cater not only to its quickly growing Millennial workforce, but also the many other employees who were increasingly becoming dependent on their mobile devices and social media. The solutions provider needed to meet the following criteria:

• Core mobile offering in employee communications and engagement
• Turn-key, cost effective and quick to deploy
• Customizable in brand and content (Northwell required its own look and feel to mirror its rebranding effort)
• Flexible enough to include a variety of communications tools and linkage to existing workplace portals, such as the HR self-service portal

After evaluating numerous options, Northwell Health selected theEMPLOYEEapp.

Northwell Employee Testimonials

“Definitely a huge time-saver to have everything I need in one place and available any time.”

“Innovative thinking combined with common sense communication for mobile employees.”

“Great app. I don’t need a PC any longer. I am encouraging everyone to download it.”

Northwell Health & theEMPLOYEEapp Successes

Since its launch in the beginning of 2016, the myNorthwell app has succeeded in becoming a mobile hub for employees that allows them to obtain easy access to information and workplace tools whenever they want. It also has allowed the organization to more directly engage with its workforce and, given the nature of mobile technology and the analytics that come with theEMPLOYEEapp, to quantify the effectiveness of the information being made available to employees.

Key stats since the company deployed myNorthwell:

• 11,000 employees are using the app in three months
• More than 600,000 page views
• Average app open time: 3 minutes
• Over 93,000 visits to mySelfService through the app
• Over 25,000 visits to new wellness program through the app

myNorthwell has been adopted across all employee functions. Northwell Health’s mobile communications strategy allows it to push “just-in-time” content to complement its other employee engagement and communications strategies. After only a few months, the myNorthwell app quickly became a critical and institutionalized solution helping Northwell Health better communicate and engage with its employees across the enterprise.

About Northwell Health

Northwell Health is the largest private employer in New York and one of the country’s largest healthcare systems with more than 61,000 employees. The organization has 21 hospitals, 450 physician practices, a renowned medical research institute and a medical and nursing school.

Learn more at northwell.edu.