Reaching Deskless Workers with The People Experience Hub
Reaching Deskless Workers with The People Experience Hub
Around 80% of the workforce are considered “Deskless Workers” – these are employees who are typically in frontline worker roles rather than those who work remotely.
The Problem
With a large proportion of the workforce based on the frontline, this group typically has different access to company communication tools such as Email, Slack, Teams, and other solutions designed for desk-based workers.
This presents a challenge when you run any online employee surveys.
Typical industries that have a large number of Deskless Workers are:
- Agriculture
- Transportation & Logistics
- Manufacturing & Production
- Construction
- Hospitality
- Retail
- Utilities
- Healthcare
- Education
According to the UK Office of National Statistics, these industries employ around 60% of the total UK workforce.
Most employee feedback providers have removed the old paper survey from their toolkit and replaced it with online surveys—this is fine for employees with email addresses but can make it difficult to reach Deskless Workers.
What's been tried?
Many survey providers introduced the ‘Open Survey,’ which did not require a login and was simply a survey that employees could take part in via a generic link.
This caused a few issues, with the main one being that employees could participate as often as they liked!
We have stories of clients who tried this and ended up with 175% of the HR team taking part or 250% of a store taking part.
Basically, in this scenario – you cannot really trust the data!
How we solve the problem
At The People Experience Hub we focused on two key areas:
- The Technology Approach
- Winning the hearts and minds
The Tech Solution
We took the approach that our survey platform is going to be used during the working day, potentially on personal devices, so it has to be:
- Easy to access from personal or work devices
- Built into existing touchpoints
- Secure
- Simple to use
- Accessible for all
We developed our platform to be used by as many people as possible, we are Level AA accessible, and we do things like support dyslexia-friendly fonts. (Read more here - Dyslexia Support)
Employee Portal
Our Employee Portal supports Single Sign-on from most modern systems currently in use (Employee Benefits Platforms, HR IS systems, Intranets, learning Platforms, etc.) and, of course, Google and Microsoft 365.
This means that it is easy to signpost your people to their surveys through software they already use.
WhatsApp and Text Messaging
You can send survey communications straight to your people's mobile phones, meaning that they can click the link and see the survey in moments.
You would need permission to communicate this way, but we see it successfully used in Hospitality, Construction, and Retail.
Kiosk Mode
We can create a standard site for your people to go to and access their survey, they can enter a code and take part really easily.
3rd Party Integrations
Different to Single Sign on, for this we work with your other tech partners and can embed our surveys into their solutions.
Multi-Language
Our surveys can be translated into any language, and if someone has set up their browser to be their preferred language our survey can open with that language selected – making it super easy to take part.
The People Solution
It is important to provide the technology to reach all of your people; however, we also work hard on the people aspect of delivering any Employee Feedback solutions, our Client Success and People Science teams are with you for the journey.
The Results speak for themselves
Jordans Dorset Ryvita have several Food Manufacturing sites where the majority of their people are deskless workers, working with The People Experience Hub they managed to get 91% of all employees to take part in their annual employee engagement survey.
AB World Foods are a global food manufacturer producing brands such as Patak's, Blue Dragon, Levi Roots, Al’Fez and TABASCO®, working in Australia, Thailand, USA, UK and Western Europe. Partnering with The People Experience Hub AB World Foods were able to achieve an 81% participation rate on their most recent annual employee survey
Great Organisations who have Trusted us to Reach their Deskless Workers
Get in Touch
Start reaching your deskless workers with The People Experience Hub, speak with our team to get a demo of what we do and to kick off a great human conversation.