What does the future of work look like? How can digital tools affect positive change for the digital workplace experience? At Beekeeper, we’re constantly working to re-define what these concepts and questions mean for our core end users: the world’s mobile workforce to bridge the communication gap.
I had the opportunity to be a guest on What’s NEXT, Samsung NEXT’s podcast exploring the future of technology. The episode, “Mobilizing the non-desk workforce,” focused on how the technology of a workforce app provides secure mobile collaboration across majority non-desk industries.
You can listen to the full podcast episode here.
What’s NEXT podcast host, Ryan Lawler, kicked off the conversation with an excellent key question: What’s unique about non-desk workers, how do they communicate, and what do they need from their employers to do so effectively? This served as an ideal framework for detailing Beekeeper’s ‘reason for being’ perfectly. Namely, that mobile operations management:
- Improves employee communication
- Directly benefits company culture
- Boosts the customer experience
Understanding Mobile Employee Communication Needs
Here’s a typical frontline worker scenario that we see very often. You show up to work. Without an email address or a computer, you have a limited understanding of what’s happening within the organization or of that shift’s details and tasks. Without that necessary real-time transfer of information that a workforce app provides, significant changes could have taken place between your shifts––and you’re left in the dark.
As a non-desk worker, if you don’t have a company workforce app, chances are you have found a consumer messaging workaround. You’re likely communicating with your fellow frontline colleagues via group text messaging, WhatsApp, or similar platform. This is a natural solution because despite the number of employee communication tools out there to communicate with, none are built with mobile accessibility for the frontline workforce in mind.
Why Secure Workforce Apps Matter
Most non-desk industries experience retention issues and high turnover. This presents considerable headaches when it comes to onboarding and offboarding employees from consumer messaging groups, such as WhatsApp groups. Managers might not even be aware of how many WhatsApp groups exist within departments, creating additional and time-consuming challenges to track down and effectively add or remove staff to these largely unmonitored and unsecure chats.
So how do you prevent frontline workers from turning to employee communication solutions that compromise organizational data security and are next to impossible to manage? A mobile workforce app designed for real-time operations management is both scalable and delivers the information your frontline workers need the most directly to their personal devices.
Not only does this centralize employee communication, it gives your operations management a mobile makeover, streamlining the documents, processes, and resources your teams need to succeed.
Operations Management Built for Frontline Workers
The kind of shift-based work done by frontline workers in non-desk industries requires different employee communication solutions than those tailored for desk-based workforces. Take a hotel, for instance: being a 24-hour business, there are a number of different shifts in that cycle. Employee communication gets lost between these shifts, save for ad-hoc word of mouth transfer of information.
Say the front desk director delivers a detailed update of current amenities upgrades to a morning shift. The responsibility of ensuring that crucial information makes it to subsequent shifts then falls on the managers and employees – leaving much to potentially get lost in translation.
Luckily, we’re always solving for this precise gap in employee communication, and the frontline worker is in mind for every aspect of the design of our workplace app, starting with logging in. With our QR code sign-in, managers can use their mobile device to find employees in the User Directory and pull up their specific QR code. The employee just scans their unique QR code, and that’s it: they’re in Beekeeper, and connected to everything, and everyone, at work.
