3 ways Nuveen built an employee app people actually use

So the internal communications team built one that puts nearly the entire finance dashboard in every employee’s pocket. Adoption is now in the 80% range, said Dan Mulcahey, vice president of internal communications at Nuveen, during Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference.

Mulcahey’s broader message for communicators is that comms has to modernize its own tools: “We cannot credibly explain AI and change and all of those things while still operating like the 1990s.”

Here are three takeaways from how his team built an app employees choose to use.

The One Nuveen app, a custom Teams-based mobile experience, mirrors the finance team’s Power BI dashboard and refreshes each month. That data used to sit mostly with sales and parts of marketing. Now anyone can bring it into a conversation, and employees have stopped Mulcahey in the hallway to call it a game changer.

Nuveen’s CEO talks constantly about One Nuveen, so the team named the app after it. “You probably have One whatever your organization is,” Mulcahey said. Tying the experience to a phrase from the top gives it instant recognition and executive backing.