Managing deskless workers: How to overcome the biggest challenges

The deskless workforce makes up 80% of the global workforce. The top 8 deskless industries: Agriculture, Education, Healthcare, Retail & Wholesale, Hospitality, Manufacturing, Logistics, and Construction, employ 2.7B employees. But despite making up the majority of the global workforce, these workers are being overlooked by technology providers, and deskless workers are only seldom being provided with business software to enhance their day-to-day tasks and working processes.?

Millennials now make up the majority of the workforce, which not only means that workers are familiar with technology, but that they expect it to facilitate every aspect of their daily lives. The same goes for their workplace. There aren’t enough hours in the day, day-to-day work lives are stacked with tasks, projects, and calls, but the right technology can help become more productive during those hours. That is why more and more companies that employ deskless workers are investing in technology, specifically mobile technology. Some of the main reasons companies report doing so are productivity (33%), employee experience (23%), cost savings (21%), and communication (11%).?

But investing in technology is a complex undertaking which needs to be carefully thought through. Currently, most of the technology being built addresses the workforce sitting behind a desk. Therefore, employers of a deskless workforce need to pay extra attention that they invest in the right technology to overcome the specific challenges involved. We will now dig deeper into these challenges, and how that impacts the technology investment choices of companies.?

Lack of training?access

76% of deskless workers are currently not being offered digital skills training, while 46% of workers are not being trained at all. Indeed, a few challenges come up when having to train workers that are always on the field. Here are two examples:?

Reduced access to technology

Technologies optimized for desk jobs don’t integrate with the day-to-day work life of nurses, drivers, waiters, cashiers or even sales people on-the-field. These deskless workers need access to technology that they can access while doing their jobs. This means, firms must invest in compatible training technologies and heavily focus on providing deskless employees with mobile learning solutions.?

Time constraint

Even “normal” employees have trouble finding time to focus on learning during a workweek. Employees who are always on-site and directly involved with customers have even less time to spend on their development. Workshops or online meetings don’t really work because they? steal productive time. If employees join on-site workshops or training sessions, the time they give up will often has to be replaced with double shifts. On top of that, employees on the field are spread apart, so additional travel costs are involved if they have to attend training. All these reasons suggest companies must find alternative solutions that enable their deskless employees to micro-learn, e.g. in the form of learning nuggets. Learning nuggets are small bites of information that can be accessed at a person's own pace and time. Creating learning nuggets leaves companies with a big pool of compact and clear information sources that learners can individually choose from, whenever they have a few minutes.

audvice is the technological solution to overcome these common barriers when training the deskless workforce. audvice lets you record authentic and bite-sized learning content in the form of perfectly structured playlists. These playlists can be listened to from anywhere and at any time, directly via the app on your phone. Not only does audvice solve the problem of access to technology and time constraints, but it also enables you to invite the experts in your company to share their knowledge, simply by recording a playlist directly on their phone, and adding it to your company's audio knowledge base. audvice turns knowledge into streamlined training episodes (and onboardings, which we will talk about below) with just a few clicks. This also eliminates the need for in-person workshops or meetings, because your employees can still get access to personal and authentic content, directly from the person who knows best.?

Problems with onboarding?

In this year’s The State of Training in the On-Demand Industry report, leaders state that the highest drop-off of deskless employees occurs between activation and completing the first job, trip or tasks. But why would people who have successfully completed the onboarding process throw away all the time they spent on it and suddenly quit? It’s because they feel they still lack important knowledge to perform successfully. In fact, 90% of deskless workers felt like the general onboarding experience could be improved, and 84% of leaders, as well as 75% of workers want to see faster onboarding processes. 23% of employees who quit during the first 3 months say that a more clear understanding of their role and responsibility would have encouraged them to stay on the job.

If companies want to decrease the high drop-off rate of their deskless employees, they need to give them access to shorter, more powerful and more engaging onboarding content than their “normal” employees. Processes need to be fast, but the lack of in-person onboarding needs to be compensated with formats that still allow deskless employees to form an emotional connection with the company, and a sense of belonging.?

audvice enables you to do all of the above. Playlists consist of bite-sized tracks that you record and structure according to your needs. These playlists are stored in your audio knowledge base that your employees can access directly via the audvice app on their phone or via a web version through their browser. You can create groups for various onboarding purposes. Let’s say you’re in the retail industry, and you want to onboard employees in your stores across different locations. In audvice, you can create different groups for each store, and add onboarding playlists to them. Your deskless employees can then access these groups, and fill all of the relevant playlists that they need to listen to in there.

audvice also solves the problem of the lack of personalization of a digital onboarding process. The power of voice allows you to add more emotional context to your onboarding materials than video tutorials or text. Your employees will listen to real people that they can connect with, and will therefore establish an emotional connection to your company right from the beginning.

Lack of loyalty?

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to the digital workforce? is the lack of loyalty they have towards the companies they work for. 50% of workers actually report that they don’t feel any sort of loyalty towards their employers. One explanation for that is the perceived distance between headquarters and the employees on the field. Deskless workers are often left in the dark about the things that are happening at headquarters. Naturally, this makes it harder for your employees to feel a connection to your company and brand.

Do you want to know how to overcome this challenge? Then make sure to continue reading here.