Contents
Why listen to your deskless workers?
The key challenges of reaching to deskless workers
How top organisations listen to their deskless workforce
Top tips for listening to deskless workers
Why WorkBuzz works for deskless workers
If you have a large population of deskless workers in your business (think retail, hospitality, engineering) you might not think that employee listening is as applicable to them. No desk, no company email address, and often little time to spare in front-line or customer-facing roles means these employees sometimes get overlooked.
Listening to your front line and operational workers is just as important but it needs to be done differently. In this blog post we’ll look at the tools, techniques and communication strategies that make your deskless workers just as included in employee listening. As with all employee listening. It’s important to meet people where they are, respecting how, when and where they work. Here’s how to do it.
Why listen to your deskless workers?
Of course we should listen to all employees but deskless workers offer a unique perspective - they are often closest to customers, making them a barometer of the customer experience and fast indicator of market changes. Add to this that deskless workers may feel physically and culturally distant from head office, the need to listen to them, and create employee engagement benchmarks for them, becomes even greater. Listening to your deskless workers strengthens trust, reduces churn in high-volume roles, and builds a healthier, more connected culture.
The key challenges of reaching to deskless workers
Deskless employees often face barriers that make traditional listening approaches to ineffective:
- They may have no work email or system login for example, retail employee engagement, hospitality employee engagement.
- Shifts, time pressure and physical roles limit opportunities to participate in traditional surveys.
- Surveys completed in front of managers can undermine honesty and psychological safety.
- Language barriers and varying levels of digital confidence can reduce inclusion and participation.
- Past experiences of ‘listening without action’ damage trust across all roles, deskless included.
Without including deskless workers in intentional design up-front, these challenges can lead to low participation and muted voices which is exactly the opposite of what employee listening should achieve. At WorkBuzz we work with a huge range of customers that have a large deskless workforce, here are a few of the things they do differently.
How top organisations listen to their deskless workforce
We work with logistics provider Whistl to introduce on-site kiosks and QR codes, alongside personal email links, so employees can choose how and where to give feedback. This reduced the feeling of being monitored and has led to more honest responses.
With construction and infrastructure organisations like VolkerWessels UK we advised the team on creating dedicated time and space on site, bringing teams together in canteens or welfare areas and providing shared devices so field-based workers can take part.
For clients such as Altrad we have embedded listening into everyday frontline communications, using welfare cabin screens and posters with QR codes reinforcing that feedback was expected, welcomed and acted upon.
At WorkBuzz, deskless workers are always included in any employee listening exercise. Here are our top tips for making sure your employee listening is inclusive:
Top tips for listening to deskless workers
How to measure employee engagement amongst deskless workers:
- Designed for no email and no logins
- Offer multiple access routes (QR codes, kiosks, mobile links)
- Create protected time to participate
- Reinforce anonymity and confidentiality
- Use simple, clear language
- Listen little and often with pulse surveys
- Segment insights by role, site or shift
- Empower managers to act locally so that employees see results
- Close the loop with clear “you said, we did” communication updates
Why WorkBuzz works for deskless workers
WorkBuzz is designed with complex, distributed workforces in mind. Our platform supports flexible survey types, mobile-first access, QR codes and kiosk use which make participation inclusive for all without compromising psychological safety.
Tools such as People Science AI, ACT action planning and Perspectives, support by proving the insights and follow-up to ensure not only representation of deskless workers, but action based on what’s been heard.
To find out more about employee listening, download our Employee Listening Toolkit that details everything you need to know about running an employee listening exercise:
- What should you measure?
- What should you ask?
- How often should you listen?
- How to measure employee engagement without surveys?
… and much more.
Download the full Employee Listening Toolkit and start listening – wherever and whenever work happens.
