Keeping employees engaged is critical to any company’s success, and employers are increasingly aware of this fact. A recent Deloitte study found that close to half of all businesses surveyed describe employee engagement as “very important.” Yet organizations continue to struggle with providing employees with a differentiated employee experience (EX) that results in high engagement. A separate 2017 report from Deloitte found that less than a quarter of companies feel they offer excellence in this arena.

The tools available currently available for attempting to boost engagement are possible factors; some of the usual suspects —printed company newsletters, companywide emails, text messages or all hands meetings — have good intentions of keeping everyone companywide up to date, but they have clear limitations. For one thing, remote employees often lack access to common physical meeting areas, intranet service and a corporate email address. They can, therefore, feel left out of the loop, isolated and disengaged.

I believe that the solution to this conundrum lies in innovative mobile app technology, which can revolutionize industries from the ground up. This begins by improving the effectiveness of internal communication between everyone in an organization, no matter where they work. Why is this so important? Because connecting employees and making them feel more involved ultimately helps boost engagement, which affects the business’s bottom line.

To fully understand this value-add, let’s examine the manufacturing sector. According to a 2017 report from Gallup, manufacturing workers are the least engaged occupation, with three-quarters of employees disengaged. Several reasons help explain this, from cost-control pressures to troubles attracting and retaining skilled workers due to a talent shortage. It’s particularly important for a sector suffering from dismal disengagement to determine how to increase it because better engagement is better for business. Companies with engaged employees outperform those without them by a whopping 202%.

Gallup found that when business units had higher engagement they not only outperformed less engaged units but additionally experienced a decrease in absenteeism and turnover — factors that are particularly common in manufacturing. Also, safety issues can arise in facilities when disengaged workers take their eye off the ball. A 2016 Gallup report noted that firms with higher engagement levels reported 70% fewer safety-related incidents.

As a technology executive, I spend a lot of time thinking about these issues, which lie at the heart of the employee engagement crisis. I’ve realized that increasing engagement levels companywide requires a key shift in how organizations approach creating and delivering EX. Currently, most human resources professionals, senior-level managers and internal communicators see their role as “talent experts.” Instead, they must become EX facilitators.

I’ve seen firsthand that in a digitally driven world, the most effective way to create a company of EX facilitators involves mobile technology.