YOOBIC Communities: a Secret Weapon to Combat Employee Turnover

We’re excited to announce the launch of Communities, a powerful addition to YOOBIC's Frontline Employee Experience Platform (FEXP)—and a secret weapon to combat employee turnover.

Communities are designed to let companies with frontline workers drive engagement and give employees a space to collaborate, build camaraderie, and create a sense of common purpose. This helps to create connections between HQ and field teams, within regions, peer-to-peer, and between peers and managers.

YOOBIC's game-changing mobile app is already trusted by 350+ global brands, including top retailers and restaurants like Levi’s, francesca’s, Lacoste, Boots, BurgerFi, and Lidl.

Communities empower frontline teams to easily create common interest networks and design and launch their own micro-communities within the organization.

The result? Organic team building based on a foundation of meaningful friendships and rich, new opportunities for mutual support, collaboration, and innovation.

Why YOOBIC Communities?

With employers still feeling the impact of The Great Resignation, and broader labor shortages, YOOBIC Communities offer an important tool to create engagement and boost employee retention.

According to Gallop’s State of The Global Workplace 2022 report, only 21% of workers are engaged at work. Research shows that employees want to feel like they belong and are part of something bigger than themselves. Gallup research also shows that companies with engaged employees have higher revenues, less absenteeism, and less turnover. 

That is exactly what YOOBIC Communities delivers—giving frontline teams a real stake in their organization and the ability to shape and take ownership of their company’s culture.

Fabrice Haiat, YOOBIC CEO and co-founder explains, “Our app is the critical space where workplace orchestration meets employee experience. As the category-defining FEXP innovator, we’re determined to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible for the success of our customers.”

Related: 5 Employee Retention Strategies for the Retail Sector

How to use YOOBIC Communities

YOOBIC Communities is a new addition to the employee communications tools already available with YOOBIC. Much like sharing posts in the Newsfeed,  sending chat messages, and starting group discussions, Communities are virtual places where employees engage with one another, and their leaders, to discuss a topic or concern.

Communities are discussion and collaboration groups and can have multiple purposes:

• Role-based: Groups based on employees' roles to facilitate peer-to-peer learning, sharing of best practices, and leadership learning and support.
• Interest-based: Groups based on career pathing, upskilling, reskilling, and employee interests — think company toastmasters, book clubs, languages, and DEI groups.
• Project-based: Groups where people can collaborate and communicate about specific work-related efforts or special projects.
• Camaraderie and just for fun: Create a social committee, a new parent group, or a fan club—the limit is your imagination! 

How organizations succeed with YOOBIC Communities

YOOBIC Communities are an engagement-driving tool for a generation of digital-native workers raised on social media.

Meaningful employee engagement is the key to boosting employee morale and performance, as well as the agility, resilience, and profitability of the organization as a whole. The Communities feature was designed to organically elevate engagement and bring frontline teams together in a powerful, meaningful, and effective way.

This new feature has already been rolled out to our customers with striking results:

• Weekly logins increased by 33% per user
• Engagement on Communities posts was 43% higher than top-down posts on the Newsfeed.

These numbers show that targeted engagement and employee experience are drivers in the adoption and usage of digital tools for frontline workers.    

"We really love the Communities feature. It is another layer that brings our team together in a meaningful way and it has been a game-changer.” 

Case study: How francesca's drive engagement with YOOBIC Communities

US apparel and accessories retailer Francesca's has fully embraced Communities. Since May 2022, the brand has been using YOOBIC's all-in-one Frontline Employee Experience Platform (FEXP) in its 400 stores for task management, real-time learning, collaboration, and communication.

A few months ago, the francesca's team rolled out YOOBIC Communities to its District Team Leaders, or DTLs as they call them. The DTLs created their own Communities to drive even more engagement and provide employees with a shared space to build collaboration and teamwork. The DTLs were able to build a sense of camaraderie and support that wouldn't have existed otherwise. 

“We strive to build a family unit at francesca’s,” said Katie Kepic, district team leader, francesca’s. “We want a strong sense of camaraderie and community when it comes to peer-to-peer engagement. Our teams are utilizing YOOBIC Communities to embrace our districts and be inclusive. Everyone can get to know each other and celebrate all things francesca’s throughout the day in the app. It's given us the ability to transition away from email and really create a place of support and engagement for our teams.”  

“We have really transformed the way we work at francesca’s with YOOBIC,” said Sarah Brown, director, field training and guest experience. “YOOBIC was a critical tool to transition from email and streamline communications with our store teams. We really love the Communities feature. It is another layer that brings our team together in a meaningful way and it has been a game-changer.”