The Deskless Workforce - who are they and why are they important?
As the name suggests, the Deskless Workforce is made up of workers who do not have a designated working space.
Instead, they are constantly on their feet, and do not have the luxury to work from home even during the pandemic.
Deskless Workers come from all sectors such as retail, food and beverage services, hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing, construction industries and more. We may sometimes refer to them as Blue-Collar Workers, Frontline Workers or Rank-and-File workers.
Deskless Workers are the vital people who keep our economy running every single day.
We meet countless Deskless Workers every day in our daily activities – such as eating at a coffee shop, going to a mall to shop. Even when you are home, ordering online delivery, you are interacting with a Deskless Worker.
With the increasing number of technology innovations and the ever-changing business landscape, we meet even more Deskless Workers than we used to in the past.
Believe it or not, Deskless Workers make up 80% of the global workforce.
However, only about 1% of businesses’ spending on software goes to these important workers in their companies.
This needs to change as devoting more resources and better training for the Deskless Workforce lead to higher productivity for businesses who employ them.
How can we boost employee performance and increase productivity?
To boost employee performance and increase productivity for companies, it is a MUST for companies to shift our working mindset to investing more in your Deskless Workforce.
In the past, onboarding (induction), training and upskilling of workers had to be done face to face. For companies who constantly get new hires, this would mean repeated onboarding briefings for new hires who join at different times, which exhausts our trainers.
Training may also be restricted due to language barriers, as not all our Deskless Workers are English speakers. In all, the onboarding, training and upskilling process is traditionally time-consuming, tiring for all, and to which the efficacy is often uncertain.
Today, there is a better way.
We are seeing an increasing number of adopters of platforms which can help businesses onboard, train, understand and support our Deskless Workforce. ArcLab is one of these SaaS platforms, which we built to be a fuss-free way for businesses to train and communicate with our workforce – Anytime, Anywhere, in Any Language.
How is ArcLab different from other providers?
Most fundamentally, ArcLab was built from the ground up FOR the Deskless Workforce, rather than adapting an existing solution that was built for office workers.
1. ArcLab does not require managers to install any software, nor require workers to download an app.
2. ArcLab training modules can be easily created and distributed via secure authenticated hyperlinks via email or SMS (most Deskless Workers do not have email – which impedes traditional platforms).
3. ArcLab training modules can be easily built in multiple languages using ArcLab SmartTranslate, catered for our workforce who may not be proficient in English.
What should businesses do to better support our workforces?
Businesses should strongly consider moving training programmes to digital and mobile platforms, where it is more flexible and accessible for our learners. Platforms like ArcLab come with many benefits such as enabling bite-sized learning, which has proven to be well received by learners as training, done in small bites, helps knowledge to be retained faster and longer.
With more widespread adoption of COVID-19 vaccines globally, governments all around the world are slowly opening borders, which will help our domestic businesses, affected by the COVID-19, a chance at recovery.
Businesses polled by Singapore Department of Statistics have higher expectations for an increased revenue for months October to December 2021 as compared to the previous 3 months of July to September 2021 as more people start looking forward to living with the new normal.
With the upcoming festive periods, the rate of employment is also expected to increase in service sectors such as the retail trade and food & beverage industries as well as the accommodation industry. Hoteliers expect to hire more workers to support the increased demand with VTLs (Vaccination-Travel-Lanes) to more countries and the year-end school holidays.
To capture opportunities from the reopening, it is important for businesses start upskilling their workers NOW.
Now that we know the deskless workers are one of the most important (yet underserved) segments of our workforce, the questions we should consider are:
How can we provide the necessary and sufficient support they need?
How can we train these workers without having to halt or slow our business down?
How can we effectively train every new hire that comes onboard?