HR Magazine - Five practical steps to empower deskless workers

Deskless workers comprise 80% of the global workforce. These workers are relied upon in a multitude of ways across our international economies, yet they are often overlooked in favour of their office-based counterparts.

This growing deskless disconnect is leading to low morale, high staff churn, and exclusion between employees and an organisation’s mission.

So, how can we empower and appreciate deskless workers?

Reimagine communication channels

Communication is key to maintaining an engaged workforce. But deskless workers often don’t have access to a company email address or a corporate device. This is a fundamental pitfall which results in instant disconnection for frontline teams. Organisations need to ensure that essential information is accessible to everyone, not just those based at the office or behind a desk.

One proactive way to achieve this is through mobile technology which can be accessed from employees’ pockets, without the requirement for a corporate login process. This ensures organisations can share company updates and store schedules, policies, and performance metrics via a social-media-style news feed which brings the workforce into one, centralised community.

Personalise the employee experience

Personalisation is key to engaging a dispersed workforce and showing how the organisation recognises and values its employees as individuals. This can manifest in several ways, one being through a comprehensive wellbeing offer. Providing benefits and perks that align with the working schedules and personalised needs of deskless workers helps boost morale, engagement and their desire to stay with the organisation. This includes ensuring that benefits not only cover a wide range of aspects, including physical and mental health, financial wellbeing, retail discounts, and where possible, flexible working, but are also unique to employees themselves, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.

Create a sense of belonging

Belonging is integral to nurturing a happy and engaged workforce who want to remain in their roles. Research from McKinsey in 2022 found more than half of those that leave their job lacked a sense of belonging.

Building an inclusive workplace community is pivotal to this, especially for deskless workers that often work in silos. One way to do this is by publicly celebrating employee’s achievements, ensuring their contributions and successes are seen and heard across the entire organisation. Employee recognition can be established in several ways, from peer-to-peer celebrations and long service awards to nominations for employee awards. This enhances visibility of often overlooked deskless teams and by doing so bridges the disconnect between frontline and corporate teams.

Reinforce the company mission

Clear and consistent communication of the organisation’s values and objectives will help deskless workers contextualise how their role contributes to the bigger picture and instils a sense of purpose for all. It also means that managers don’t need to be relied upon to cascade information and instead, values and culture become a central part of employees’ day-to-day, wherever they are based.

Measure success

Investment in meaningful engagement strategies will go to waste if success isn’t measured. Establishing key objectives and metrics to track employee engagement, satisfaction, and turnover among an organisation’s deskless workforce is fundamental to understanding the strategy impact.

Conducting regular surveys to gather feedback from employees is also pivotal for understanding how they view their role, position, and the organisation as a whole, identifying crucial opportunities for improvement and innovation.

Chris Brown is CEO of HR platform Rippl