Contents
How is HR already using AI?
Why deskless workers benefit most from AI-powered listening
The benefits of including AI in your strategy for listening to deskless workers
How WorkBuzz supports AI-led listening for deskless teams
How can AI help you listen to deskless workers?
Deskless workers make up the majority of the global workforce (comprising over 80%), yet they’re often the hardest group to reach, hear, and support. In sectors such as retail, hospitality, logistics, healthcare, and construction, employees don’t sit at desks, they don’t have regular email access and they often work across shifts or in distributed locations.
Traditional employee listening approaches weren’t built for these employees. But, new AI-powered tools mean you can finally create an employee listening strategy that’s inclusive of all employees, wherever their work takes place.
In this article we’ll look at new tools and communication approaches that use AI to make your employee listening more effective and inclusive than ever.
How is HR already using AI?
According to our Quick Guide to AI, HR leaders clearly recognise AI’s potential to save time, reduce workload, and increase impact, yet adoption into the HR workflow is still low, with only one in five HR teams using AI as part of their day-to-day work. For deskless workers in particular, this gap highlights an opportunity to incorporate AI into listening, analysing what’s heard, and feeding into communication and action planning.
Why deskless workers benefit most from AI-powered listening
Deskless environments paired with large workforces (think hospitality, retail, manufacturing) tend to generate large volumes of feedback and the outputs from surveys and always-on channels can quickly overwhelm small or shrinking HR teams, especially when open comments and qualitative feedback are added to the mix. Without AI to do the analysis, insight is slow to surface and action gets delayed which we know erodes trust amongst front line workers.
AI enables HR to move from collecting feedback to analysing and making sense of it. AI tools can surface and summarise patterns, sentiment shifts and emerging risks across roles, sites, and shifts. This allows HR to respond before issues escalate into disengagement or unwanted attrition.
AI also allows HR to track change over time, to understand what’s driving scores up or down, and to understand how changes in process, personnel or even something as simple as a change in the customer menu in restaurants, affects the experience colleagues are having on a daily basis.
The benefits of including AI in your strategy for listening to deskless workers
As the Quick Guide highlights, HR teams already using AI are applying it to analysing open comments, detecting sentiment, spotting trends, supporting action planning and even forecasting attrition. For deskless workers, this means HR can be using AI for:
- Faster follow-up after surveys to maintain and build trust.
- Clearer priorities for managers who are the critical connection between deskless workers and HQ.
- More visible ‘you said, we did’ action via timely and targeted communication.
How WorkBuzz supports AI-led listening for deskless teams
WorkBuzz is designed to help HR adopt AI responsibly and effectively, especially in deskless environments where we help clients with AI-powered listening including:
- People Science AI which analyses open-text feedback at scale and surfaces the themes that matter most at a team or site level.
- Highlighting risks and the highest impact opportunities across locations, roles and shifts.
- ACT action planning enables faster, clearer follow-up by creating plans for line managers so they know where to focus.
- Perspectives brings the employee voice to life, turning employee comments into human stories leaders can engage with.
Because our employee listening programmes are accessible via mobile, QR codes and kiosks, deskless employees can feel fully included in employee listening.
How can AI help you listen to deskless workers?
No matter whether you’ve not even set out on the AI journey or you’re already using it in your daily work, our Quick Guide to AI is a great place to start. Download the guide and start tuning into your employees, wherever work happens.
