Deskless Workers

2.7 billion.

That’s approximately the portion of the global working population that doesn’t sit behind a desk. From construction workers, healthcare providers, package delivery drivers to retail associates, subcontractors, and more, the deskless workforce comprises about 80 percent of the total workforce. Forming the backbone of the global economy, these are generally the people who cannot opt to work from home even during a pandemic. Deskless employees work hard to ensure businesses are operating round the clock. Unfortunately, companies often overlook this part of their workforce when it comes to software technologies that can help drive improvements in productivity. Instead, most software designed to keep employees productive is built for employees that work in an office environment with access to a personal computer. The lack of a conscious effort to engage and communicate with deskless employees poses the risk of a disengaged and uninformed workforce, which can negatively impact productivity, customer satisfaction, and profitability.

This is precisely the narrative that Deskless Workers intends to change. On a mission to help employers empower their deskless employees, the Washington-based company has developed a content publishing and communication platform that allows users to communicate, share, and receive information more effectively across their organization. Deskless Workers is the brainchild of two visionary entrepreneurs—David Young and Michael Herr. Back in the day, the duo realized that employees’ needs could not be overlooked, regardless of whether they sit in an office, work remotely, or stand on their feet all day working hard without a desk or computer. Following their penchant for transformation and a passion for connecting people worldwide through technology, Young and Herr soon realized that technology could be used to keep employees working productively outside of an office environment and their management connected and aware of what they were doing. They set out to build a mobile-based platform that would be both easy to use and engaging, allowing it to be used for everyday communication.

In 2019, the company recruited an experienced CTO named Uri Stern to lead technology development for the company. The three men set out to build a powerful employee management platform designed specifically for the deskless workforce. The product now known as RemoteForce lets employers better manage any employee with a smartphone. “Only 1 percent of software venture funding has gone into applications designed for deskless workers. The market craves software specifically crafted to drive improvements in productivity and engagement for the deskless and frontline workforce. This is where our RemoteForce platform is moving the needle,” says Stern.

Bringing Comfort and Simplicity to ‘Deskless Workers’

Designed to help businesses effectively manage their deskless teams, the RemoteForce employee management platform allows leaders to gain insight into what their employees are doing by allowing them to assign tasks in real-time, and hold them accountable for performing those tasks. “Our robust software provides companies with the tools to effectively measure employee productivity and engagement. We designed powerful feedback tools in the product that include polls, surveys, quizzes, and forms, to help companies collect feedback and the like and helps organizations to better understand employee sentiment,” informs Stern. The platform enables users to publish content (company news, announcements, videos, training materials, and essential documents), communicate with their employees in real-time, and receive feedback. Packed with such unique features, Deskless Workers focuses on reducing training costs and allowing new hires to onboard quicker and become productive much faster. RemoteForce improves collaboration, builds a sense of community, and helps employees feel more valued.

The RemoteForce product was carefully designed and crafted from a robust API platform, built from the ground up for performance, scalability, and security. The API platform enables Deskless Workers to build customized versions to meet the particular demands of industry verticals. For example, Kinetic is specifically designed for the US and Allied Military Forces to ensure readiness and resiliency in operations. Boost, was developed for the beverage industry, and is designed to incentivize employees and better train them on products that boost sales and ROI. Sidekick, is our latest work in progress and came about as a result of the demand created by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is built for the events industry to allow event creators to live stream virtual events and better engage audiences through communication and collaboration tools, surveys and games.

Finding the right balance is key, where they get enough of the valuable content in a Mobile App to increase their productivity and become a more effective employee without it being a distraction. And that’s when you truly become a more engaged employee, when you are productive, involved, and committed

Video is a key part of our product roadmap moving forward. “We are adding powerful features such as live streaming, video conferencing and even the ability to create your own OTT channel to the platform. Products like Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams are showing the value of communication tools for the office, our goal is to create the ultimate communication product for the 2.7 billion deskless workers,” says Stern.

A Paradigm Shift through Innovation

At the core, Deskless Workers is squarely focused on seamless communication between employers and their employees in frontline or deskless roles. Stern emphasizes that communication has to be a two-way transfer of information to be effective. In many frontline or deskless roles, employees are often working somewhere where they are unsupervised doing their job, or sometimes working solo, not monitored by any co-worker. The perfect example will be a package delivery driver or cable installer who may go through most of their day only interacting with customers rather than co-workers or supervisors. Our platform allows workers to receive information, and provide communication and feedback to management along with real-time insight into what they are getting done.

Rising to these challenges, Deskless Workers offers many ways to communicate information to employees within the application. With the upcoming release of RemoteForce, organizations can publish news, announcements, videos, and training content to a mobile device seamlessly with the easy-to-use authoring system that makes it easy to post from any mobile device or web browser. They can also publish essential files to a document repository, such as training materials, support guides, as well as, corporate and HR policies. Beyond news and announcements, the app also enables critical communications through SMS text messages or push notifications down to the user’s device, which can remind employees when a task might be due. The product even includes a full-fledged instant messaging client that lets employees chat and collaborate with one another. This can come in handy when an employee needs the help of a supervisor or peer.

RemoteForce’s out-of-the-box functionality provides business managers with deep, valuable insights into how their workforce feels and helps them step up their efforts in augmenting employee engagement levels. Deskless Workers has cracked the engagement code fulfilling what today’s workers seek and need using habits and methods they embrace in every other area of their “social” lives to fulfill business goals. Deskless Workers bridges the gap between employees working from disparate locations and their leaders. The product’s intuitive dashboard makes it easy for enterprises to track content that engages workers and get actionable data that can drive improvement across the organization.

Understanding and Measuring Employee Engagement

According to Stern, “To be honest, we really hate the word ‘engagement’ when it comes to the expression ‘employee engagement’ because it is such a misunderstood term, especially by people in our industry. Although its origins date back to the 1990s becoming more widespread and accepted in the 2000s, it has somewhat become synonymous with employee satisfaction and experience. The problem is the word engagement has become a buzzword that has been hijacked by other industries, most notably marketers using it to measure the amount of time someone spends with web or video content. So, there are some competitors in our industry who believe that by simply publishing video content or training materials and getting employees to view them, they are somehow automatically doing something to raise employee engagement. This is nonsense. Just putting a bunch of stuff in an App does not make your employees more engaged, even if they derive value from the content. If you think about it, that is the exact opposite in fact of what an employer even needs. Think about a hotel employee or a factory worker.

The more time they spend interacting with the app daily, whether watching videos or reading posts, the less time they actually spend doing their job. Finding the right balance is key, where they get enough of the valuable content in a Mobile App to increase their productivity and become a more effective employee without it being a distraction. And that’s when you truly become a more engaged employee, when you are productive, involved, and committed. What you are really looking to measure is how engaged an employee is to the company, how engaged they are to their individual manager, and how they feel about their team. Those are the key measures of engagement.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many disruptions and changes to the way we work. With more companies moving to a remote workforce, it is now more important than ever to track employee sentiment to ensure your employees are feeling valued and getting the support that they need to do their jobs. “RemoteForce includes built-in employee engagement surveys that let you take the pulse of your employees and measure how they feel about your company. Using metrics like Employee NPS (Net Promotor Score), you can easily assess employee engagement and satisfaction, and explore why employees feel the way they do about your company,” remarks the CTO. As such, these efforts have positioned Deskless Workers as a strategic problem solver for many organizations managing a remote workforce in the wake of COVID-19.

Guiding Clients to Enhanced Employee Engagement

Measuring engagement is not just all surveys though according to Stern. “There are other things we learn about the employee based on how they interact with our system that can help measure engagement. An engaged employee is often one who is productive, involved, and committed. We can use data from our content and task management features to measure how involved and committed to a team’s success an employee is. For example, employees who are continually not getting their tasks done, or not getting them done on time may not be engaged employees. We filter out high and low anomalies and look at average performance over time. The goal is by using data from our system paired with survey information we can create a comprehensive view of individual employee engagement and identify at risk employee populations with low engagement and help the company significantly improve employee churn,” he adds.

As a future-driven company, it even plans to incorporate sophisticated technologies that use historic data and artificial intelligence to detect patterns and behaviors of employees that are no longer with their company. “Based on the patterns identified, employees can be classified as disengaged, passively engaged, or actively engaged. We are working on an algorithm to use these patterns to predict low engagement issues before they happen so that we can allow a company to stay ahead of the curve and take corrective action,” says Stern.

The company had the opportunity to work with the US Air Force Reserve Base in Homestead, Florida on a unique software pilot. The company built a version of their platform that was engineered specifically for the US and Allied Military Forces. The product not only provided a secure, cloud-based platform but also leveraged military-specific features designed to ensure readiness and resiliency. The result was that Airmen were able to hit the ground running by the time they arrived for their once-a-month UTA weekend because they were kept up to date on important communications and could get necessary paperwork completed prior to their arrival.

“Over the course of the pilot, we witnessed a 68 percent increase in task compliance, a 53 percent increase in productivity, a 40 percent increase in engagement, and a 37 percent increase in content consumption. The pilot was the ultimate case study because it made us build the software for the exacting demands of the Air Force when it comes to performance, security, reliability, and being able to deliver mission-critical communications,” recalls Stern. Today, the one-year software pilot at Homestead Air Reserve Base serves as a model for how the product can adapt to help improve communication, productivity, and engagement across an organization. Deskless Workers is on a mission to learn from its customers and create a platform that gives a voice to the deskless workforce.