The tool that actually fixed our internal communications (and why I didn't expect it to)
I'll be upfront, I wasn't looking for another platform.
We already had tools. Too many of them, honestly. Something for messaging, something for HR announcements, a survey tool nobody opened, and a recognition program that lived in a spreadsheet someone forgot to update. It looked like a tech stack. It didn't feel like communication.
The real problem hit me when I realized our frontline team, the people actually doing the work every day, had no idea what was going on at the company level. Not because they didn't care. Because nothing we had actually reached them.
That's when someone mentioned HubEngage.
I almost didn't look into it. I was tired of demos. But I did, and something clicked pretty quickly.
It's not trying to be one thing. It's your employee app, your intranet, your recognition tool, your survey platform, your push notification system, all in one place, all actually connected. For us, that meant we could finally retire three separate subscriptions and stop asking people to check four different places for information.
But the part that genuinely surprised me was how well it handled our frontline workers. We could reach people by shift, by location, by department. A message for the warehouse team didn't land in a retail associate's feed. Push notifications went to people's phones — no company email needed, no intranet login, just their phone.
And the app looked like us. Our branding, our name. Small thing, maybe. But people actually downloaded it.
I'm not saying it's perfect. No tool is. But for the first time in a while, I felt like we actually had one place to go, and so did our people.
If you're managing a distributed team or a workforce that doesn't sit at desks all day, and you're cobbling together tools that don't quite talk to each other, it's worth a serious look.
I wish someone had told me about it sooner.