Your Frontline Workers Are Ready For Better Tech

Who are frontline workers?  

Frontline workers, also known as mobile workers, do their jobs outside of an office or traditional, stationary workstation. The frontline workforce includes a massive number of employees and contractors: field service techs, mobile healthcare workers, maintenance and delivery workers, sales reps, consultants, and many more. Nearly three billion strong, mobile workers play an essential role in industries like healthcare, utilities, education, manufacturing, transportation, construction, and agriculture. 

While the COVID-19 pandemic brought the value of frontline work into stark relief, the demand for these workers hasn’t lessened. In fact, many of the top industries for frontline workers expect to see rapid growth in the near future. Home healthcare, for example, is projected to grow 3x faster than the overall healthcare industry by 2031. 

With increased attention on the importance of frontline workers, and abundant data on the challenges they face in doing their work with efficiency and satisfaction, what’s standing between mobile workers and the technology they need to succeed? Tech enablement.

How a lack of frontline tech enablement hurts your business

With the arrival of personal computing in the 1970s and the internet in the 1990s, desk-based workers not only had abundant access to tech but ample time to embrace it. Companies outfitted their offices with desk-based hardware and adopted CRM, ERP, and HRIS platforms (to name only a few) from big-name SaaS providers.

For decision-makers, it seemed easier to equip and train a centralized, office-based team of workers on new tech than to equip and train frontline workers. And complex regulatory landscapes, especially in some industries,  limited broad-based investment in the mobile worker experience and supporting technologies. 

This led to an imbalance in tech investment, with tech for the frontline workforce accounting for less than 1% of the estimated $300+ billion in VC spend on employee software.

Deprived of tech that would make them more efficient and satisfied in their careers, the mobile workforce got by with manual, inefficient processes, augmenting them with their own workarounds when needed. Smartphones and tablets became essential tools for frontline workers—and, more recently, so did cloud computing and 5G connectivity. 

At present, a lag in mobile SaaS implementation collides with escalating demand for frontline workers. And mobile workers are understandably frustrated. Retention rates are concerning, and workers report feeling overworked and underappreciated.

It’s time to listen to frontline workers and equip them with the tools they need to deliver optimal service. 

What frontline workers really mean when they say they want “better tech” 

Because tech enablement was office-driven for so long, there’s a profound misconception that frontline workers lack tech literacy—an assumption that discourages investment in making them more efficient and content in their work. 

In fact, frontline workers acutely understand how mobile-first SaaS tech could help them: 41% say more tech would make the difference in their success, and 61% say their employers haven’t provided it. Mobile workers are frustrated by existing tools that are slow, inefficient, non-collaborative, and difficult to implement. 

Frontline workers want SaaS with a friendly UI, designed for field use, and flexible enough to adapt to their unique workflows and processes. They want accurate and fast schedules, automated recurring tasks, and real-time status updates with minimal manual effort.

And they don’t just want better tech because it will help them be more efficient. They say better tech is one of the top factors in reducing their job-related stress. When workers handle thousands of customer interactions per day, those better equipped for the job deliver the highest quality service.

What better tech can do for your mobile workforce

Mobile workforce management technology can make a timely and sizable impact on five key areas: 

• Communication – 96% of frontline workers want tech that simplifies and improves communication across frontline workers, managers, and office staff. They’re looking for real-time, secure notifications and updates, centralized data collection, and seamless integration with existing CRM, ERP, and HR platforms across the organization. 
• Task Management – Assigning and tracking job duties is more transparent and efficient with smart scheduling. Desk-based and mobile workers benefit from AI-assisted scheduling based on customizable parameters that fit the specific needs of the business and the service being delivered. In fact, this tech decreases weekly job delays by 67% and increases on-the-job productivity by nearly a third. 
• Training – 55% of frontline workers reported a lack of training and prep to successfully adopt digital tools. Training and onboarding resources built into MWM software help newer workers ramp up faster, reducing the time between hiring and productivity targets. 
• Health and Safety Monitoring – With frontline workforce technology, worker safety tools like route optimization, GPS tracking, and mobile-first communication are incorporated into job workflows
• Real-Time Troubleshooting – Workers can immediately access equipment specs, product manuals, technical guides, and support from managers and peers from the same tech they use to do their work each day, improving the speed and accuracy of mobile work.