Reaching Deskless Workers With Better Comms
I explore the communication gap between overloaded desk based workers and deskless frontline teams who often lack email, intranet access or formal IT logins. The video highlights why relying on line managers, notice boards and unofficial messaging apps is outdated, and why workplace screens can become a more effective way to share timely information.
Key Takeaways
- Deskless and frontline workers make up around 80% of the workforce, yet many lack basic digital access.
- Email, verbal updates and printed notice boards create delays, gaps and poor engagement.
- Screens placed in the workplace can share operational updates and safety messages more clearly and quickly.
Topics
- Communications
- Digital Signage
- Deskless Workforce
- Health and Safety
Transcript
We have a barbell challenge when we're communicating with our employees. The desk-based knowledge worker is being inundated with information, busy inboxes, notifications from Teams and Slack, etc. And at the other end, the deskless and frontline workers, well, they're in the dark. We call these people the digitally detached, and there are over 2.7 billion people in the workforce today, 80% that are considered deskless. Now, only 5 to 10% of those have an IT login, meaning they don't have an email address or access to the intranet. And so often, most of them will end up using unofficial apps like WhatsApp and Messenger for their work communications, which is clearly not ideal. Now, when we speak to leaders of companies with a large deskless frontline workforce, they say the biggest barrier between head office and those workers is indeed communication. If you look at the challenges they're facing, well, they're pretty big: high turnover of staff, low productivity, health and safety information, the list goes on. Now, if you look at the communication channels they're currently utilising, email is overwhelmingly being used, and verbal updates. Well, these people don't have email addresses, so we're sending an update to a line manager in the hope that it gets printed out, put on a notice board, or verbally communicated, and it's just not really good enough. And this is the kind of site we see. We go into very modern warehouses and manufacturing plants, and you see notice boards everywhere with printed out content. This is really 1970s technology in really otherwise very sophisticated places. It's out of date, slow to update, if it even gets updated at all, and really not that inspiring or engaging. So we see a massive opportunity for screens, these big luminous boxes up on the walls that could be such a powerful information radiator if we were to just utilise them correctly.