Enhancing Employee Experience with Super Apps & Personalization – Sivadas Radhakrishna

Nena Dimovska: Welcome to another episode of the People Pulse podcast, where we delve deep into the difficulties of building a thriving workplace. Today, we’re exploring the vital connection between internal communication and employee experience, uncovering actionable insights from an industry expert. The following is a conversation with Sivadas Radhakrishna, Internal Communications and Employee Experience professional with 12 years of experience in strategic people initiatives, marketing, and communications. He worked across industries such as aviation, entertainment, sports, automobile, and academia. A voracious writer and believer in sharing whatever he learns through his constant engagement with the internal communications and employee experience community over LinkedIn, which recognized him as a top voice in the internal communication space. Hi Sivadas. Thank you for being with us today and welcome to the podcast.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Hi. Hi, Nena. It’s a pleasure. How are you?

Nena Dimovska: Doing great. Thank you. I’m looking forward to discussing all these interesting topics with you today.

Nena Dimovska: Now, can you perhaps share an example where digital employee experience was transformative and another where it caused frustration, but only because I guess it wasn’t properly communicated or people weren’t taught how to leverage this technology?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: I think if you discuss with any employee experience professional or somebody who is in a digital space one thing that you would see across all organizations is: there is a lot of implementation for tools and technology done in silos previously. So you would have, you would have, let’s say your talent acquisition team has implemented something independently to kind of source the candidates. You have data or records team, which has implemented something very separately.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: You have, let’s say, some benefits portal, which is another system implemented as a separate channel altogether. Now think of the cognitive load on an employee when they come in and they need to remember, let’s say, 13 passwords. Because every time the passwords are different, right? And you’re actually spoiling your time and draining the energy of employees to do these additional things.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So one transformative example that I have seen is, and this is something which is a very upcoming trend within a lot of organizations, is the concept of a super app. So there is an application which kind of speaks to all these systems individually, but as an employee, you don’t really need to log into all these systems.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: You just log into one single application, which is like a wrapper or an aggregator for all these systems. And there is a technological challenge. A lot of organizations are not able to replace their old systems. Because there’s too much data dependency, too much integration dependency. So they’re not able to replace them with, let’s say, a new swanky ERP.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So what people are doing is they’re creating a wrapper on top of it, which interacts with all of the systems. And this becomes highly transformative for employees because now they don’t have to log into like 13, 14 applications. They just log into their employee application.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: They can do all the things from there. And that kind of helps a lot of people. It saves time, it saves remembering multiple logins, passwords, missing out on tasks because you didn’t log into some system which had some approval for you to do. All of this can be now tracked from a single place.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So this is transformative. Now, you asked a very interesting question about drawbacks, because this is not something people look at. People always speak of only positive stuff. They want to transform things and stuff, but it’s very important to remember the drawbacks also.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: One major drawback that I see is the financial aspect. There is a lot of investment required to improve your digital experience. It is not a cost-effective method. It’s not. You implement any external platforms—there is a huge cost involved. You want to develop something natively within your organization—there is a cost involved. So one factor is definitely the financial factor.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And is there buy-in from management to make this investment? This is another question. A lot of times the decision makers may not really be tech-savvy. So how do you explain the benefits to them in very simple language? Communication becomes very important.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Yes, this is one. Second is—with so much digital coming into an employee’s life—data privacy becomes a major, major aspect. And you look at places like Europe and the U.S.—the data protection laws are very, very strong.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And anybody who is implementing things needs to be aware of these laws. You need to have that level of specificity. Something else is cyberattacks. If you are a large organization or one of interest, cyberattacks can happen.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So these are some drawbacks. Another drawback also comes from the people themselves, which is the biggest—adoption rates. People implement a lot of solutions and systems, but what’s the adoption rate? Are your employees really using those things?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: It’s good to put it in a presentation and say, “I have implemented A, B, C,” but what’s the ROI? How well are your employees able to use those tools? These become major questions to ask.

Nena Dimovska: Very, very good points. I would say that I have to agree that how we communicate with management—that improving the overall digital experience is an investment—is key. It’s not a cost. It adds significant value to an organization in the long run, with increased productivity, streamlined processes, enhanced customer satisfaction.

Nena Dimovska: You know, as you’ve mentioned, very important: strengthened data security. And if we can prove those high adoption rates, these digital enhancements offer clear benefits for any company. And to gain this leadership buy-in, we always have to know how to emphasize the ROI and alignment with broader company goals.

Nena Dimovska: Great. Can you perhaps tell me… now considering the advancements in AI and all these digital technologies, what would you say is a safe prediction to make for the future of internal communications?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Actually, I would say that while adopting any digital solution, okay—I think AI is part of the conversation throughout now. You pick anything, it eventually leads to some integration with AI.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So, I would say while adopting digital solutions, we need to align them with our strategic objective. And this is very important. If you say that you want to improve your cross-department collaboration, are you implementing solutions to achieve that?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: This becomes a major question because a lot of times we go out and someone pitches us an amazing idea. You have a lot of very smart, knowledgeable people who are pushing digital platforms across to organizations.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: We have to be very aware… is this matching our strategic objective? This is very important—something we have to always remember.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: How does this transform into the future? I think something to remember is that today, a lot of focus is on emergent experiences—apps, devices, processes that tie into all these things.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: But I think as we go toward the future, these emergent experiences will transform into more coherent experiences where one thing ties into another. You’ll have employee journeys—from onboarding to offboarding, and even beyond—going into the alumni experience and creating a cohesive journey throughout.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So a lot of systems would start doing tasks in a very personalized manner because personalization is going to be the key as we move forward.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Think of an example: AI today is so powerful it can create a video where your CEO is welcoming individuals by name. You just need one speech and then you can alter the name using AI.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So you’d have your CEO—imagine a CEO of an organization with 100,000 employees—actually taking the name of an entry-level employee who just joined and saying: “Welcome to [Company], to this family.” It creates that bond.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So you have this kind of power in your hands, but how do we use it and transform it becomes very important.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Personalization is something I would say is very, very key going forward. And this concept of sending mass messages? It’s something you’ll probably see slowly die out from the internal comms space.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: One email going out to 100,000 employees saying “Tomorrow is XYZ”? That’s not going to happen anymore.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Probably in five years’ time, you would stop seeing this kind of thing. You’ll need more personalized messages. You’ll need to engage people at moments that matter.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And if you look at the future, I think you can divide this into two parts: planned moments and unplanned moments.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Today, a lot of organizations can communicate with employees during the planned moments. Let’s say you’re onboarding—you get a nice message from the organization. You’re promoted—you get a nice message. You’re offboarding—you get a thank you and an exit survey.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: These are planned moments. But what about unplanned moments?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: There’s an untimely death in the employee’s family—how do you deal with that? Can we have solutions to support employees in these situations?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: What if I’m going through a marriage or a divorce? Are there platforms that can support me during these unplanned moments?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And I think this is where you’ll see a lot of AI integrations, automation, and learning—machines learning on their own, with empathy.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: For example, if there’s a compassionate leave—do you want the employee to apply for that and explain why they need it?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: You don’t need that. Can you automate it?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: I think this is where I see the future going.

Nena Dimovska: Great. Thank you. And you’ve mentioned some very interesting concepts that are yet to be discovered and utilized by companies.

Nena Dimovska: And I could not agree more—personalization-driven integration, especially in the internal comms space, is a game-changer. It will help us be more empathetic and address both planned and unplanned moments that matter in people’s lives.

Nena Dimovska: Which again, will boost engagement and alignment with the company’s strategic goals.

Nena Dimovska: Now, Sivadas, on a very different note—I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and your career over the years, and it seems that you have a track record of success across different industries.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So… thank you very much.

Nena Dimovska: I’m interested in understanding—what is your secret sauce to being successful in different roles? And what advice would you offer to folks who are just kickstarting their career?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: I think, Nena, actually when you say this—I don’t really consider that I’ve done great stuff. I mean, there is so much more potential, and it’s just a drop in the ocean.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So I look forward to a lot more that we can contribute and achieve together.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Keeping that aside, something I always say—especially in guest lectures—is that discipline is more important than motivation.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: You’re motivated in patches. Today you’re highly motivated. Tomorrow, not so much.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So people rely on motivation to achieve things. But I think discipline is a much better way.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: You don’t need to do a lot. Do small things, but do them consistently. And over time, you’ll see your graph go up.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: A great example I heard in a vlog was someone who started going to the gym for two to three minutes daily. People laughed at him, saying “What can you achieve in five minutes?”

Sivadas Radhakrishna: But he built a habit. And over time, five minutes became 10, then 20, then 30. The motivated people who joined the gym with big goals dropped out. But this person built a consistent, healthy life.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So discipline is key.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Second point—focus on results. You can have great ideas and frameworks, but what matters is results.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Present outcomes to your leadership. Not just concepts. What value did it bring?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Third—continuous learning. We’ve gone from dial-up internet to AI in our pockets. Knowledge is everywhere. Pick it up. Use it.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Fourth—networking. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So make sure you’re surrounded by people who challenge you, elevate you, and open doors. It makes a huge difference.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Last—adaptability. Stay adaptable to your environment. It’s critical.

Nena Dimovska: Great advice. Thank you so much.

Nena Dimovska: So if we can summarize: motivation comes and goes, but discipline is what keeps you on track. Grit helps you push through. Continuous learning and networking help you grow.

Nena Dimovska: Well, thank you, Sivadas, for tuning into this enlightening discussion on internal communications and employee experience. We enjoyed having you as our guest.

Nena Dimovska: And remember: the key to fostering a thriving workplace lies in strategic communication and a relentless focus on enhancing the employee journey.

Nena Dimovska: Stay tuned for more valuable insights in our upcoming episodes. Thank you.