With headlines continuing to be dominated by the discussion about the ‘return to the office’ it can sometimes be easy to forget that for many people there has never been any debate about their place of work.
Around 80% of the world’s workforce are believed to be ‘deskless’ workers – that is, those whose jobs require them to be in a location other than an office and don’t involve them being desk-based.
Whether it’s NHS workers, retail and hospitality staff or those working on infrastructure projects like road and rail, there is a whole army of people out there who are rarely looking at phones or computers as part of their job.
So, how do we communicate effectively with them?
It’s something I’ve long been interested in, having first carried out research into the subject in 2019 and again in 2023.
Our Remotely Interested? report brings together the findings from more than 350 staff across 14 organisations, looking at how they like to be communicated with, which methods work best and where there is room for improvement.
We found there were eight core areas organisations could focus on to improve communication with deskless workers:
1) Ensure content is relevant
Relevance is key to unlocking good communication inside your organisation and has an important impact on trust and credibility too.
Content that’s not relevant simply adds to the noise, which people sometimes feel they are bombarded with.
To keep your information relevant, always consider:
– What do you want people to do with the information?
– How do you want them to feel about it?
– What do you want them to think?
If you don’t have an answer to at least one of these questions, the best solution is likely to be not to communicate it at all.
2) Invest in line managers’ skills
Our research found that line managers are the most important channel for deskless workers.
This makes it crucially important for these managers to be given the right information to share with their teams and, more vitally, the time to understand it properly.
Create a space for line managers to have conversations with senior leaders or other decision makers where they can ask the questions they need to know the answers to before they share with their team. This could be a section on the intranet or a briefing call each month.
Investing in line managers’ communication skills should also be a key part of the personal development plan for all leaders within your organisation.
3) Don’t invade their social space
Beware of bombarding staff with information in the places they take their breaks.
Spaces like canteens or communal areas can be a vital area of respite for deskless workers, and they don’t always want to receive information about work while they are in them.
The key to getting it right here lies in the method of communication and whether the employees can choose to interact with it.
A screen, for example, is quite intrusive for people looking to relax, chat to friends and eat lunch. In our research we found people had switched off digital screens or moved them to different locations.
Consider other options like noticeboards or hard copies of newsletters – which fared very positively in our research.
4) Identify what type of deskless worker they are – and communicate accordingly
We identified three different types of deskless workers based on who they worked with:
Mixed: They might work in a team at times and on their own at others. It means their interactions with others are a mix of work and social.
Solitary: These are workers who don’t need anyone else to do their job – for example a bus driver. They only see people they work with during breaks or at the start/end of their working day.
Team: Working in a team and being reliant on each other to complete a task is very different to other ways of working.
Who people work with and when has a fundamental impact on the content that needs to be shared with them. Having this knowledge about their interaction with others helps us see where the points of communication might be, and just how infrequent they are.
It shows the importance of cascading information across and through teams, and the need to make sure this communication can be shared quickly and verbally.
5) Understand their motivation
Understanding whether a worker is motivated by the tasks they need to do or a connection to the brand they work for can help ensure you’re targeting people with the right information.
Those motivated by task are more likely to be what we defined as ‘factory floor’ workers or those who have little customer contact. Those motivated by brand are ‘shop floor’ workers, who are regularly dealing with customers – in retail or hospitality for example.Under our definitions, factory floor workers are skilled and trained, and often more connected to the task and skill they have than the organisation they work for.
Shop floor workers are connected to the brand and need to know what it stands for to enable them to help customers.
The key here is to match the content to the needs of the type of worker – do you really need to talk about the organisational purpose and brand, or is it more about the safety or the customers?
6) Get the right digital tools in place
While digital tools have a huge role to play for office workers who need to collaborate on documents, share files and work at a screen most of their day, things are very different for deskless workers. Their time to access information is minimal.
There are two main things to consider when it comes to implementing digital tools for them:
– How will they access it?
– What is the purpose of it? What are we trying to achieve? Is it to allow them to connect to each other as a team or group, or for the centre to communicate with employees?
Focus on adoption and then engagement, and have clear strategies for both, working with line managers and unions as needed.
7) Create content that can be easily shared verbally
Deskless workers are a verbal culture. Content is shared quickly and briefly. This is different to those in an office who work in a written culture using email and reports to communicate.
This verbal culture requires an entirely different way of communicating. Sentence structures are different, content is shorter and it is much more direct. Don’t use long paragraphs of text with quotes and detail. It needs to be to-the-point information that can easily be shared verbally.
8) Define the purpose of your communications with them
You may feel that the main purpose of communicating with your deskless workers is to help them feel more connected and engaged with your organisation.
But, perhaps surprisingly, our data found that the workers we surveyed did feel connected to their team and their organisation.
So, take some time to work out what problems your communications should solve. What do your deskless workers get frustrated about? What should the communication teams in your organisation focus on?
Want to download these 8 handy tips to share with colleagues?
To see the full results of our research and more insights into the best ways of communicating with deskless workers you can download the full Remotely Interested report here.
