Communicating with a Distributed Workforce in 2022

Originally posted on: March 27, 2018

Keep your workforce informed, engaged, productive (and safe).

Communication is a key element to creating a workforce of engaged employees. According to Gallup, a leading global research company, engaged employees are defined as, “the workplace involvement and enthusiasm of employees in both their work and workplace.”

Statistics have shown that companies with engaged workers experience improved job performance (by 56%), and reduced turnover (by 50%). When your workforce is distributed across multiple locations, the lines of communication become more complicated. And, keeping up with important compliance needs, such as meal break reporting, adds to the difficulty.

These complexities can be lessened with specific strategies and solutions geared towards employees through mobile communications and support solutions.

Communicating using mobile technology.

Mobile technology can help support quick, reliable and secure methods of reaching your distributed workforce across multiple locations. While mobile phones are widely used, there are specific considerations to keep in mind when using this channel in a professional capacity.

• One-way communications: these can act similar to notifications. They don’t require a response, but are effective in communicating process changes or announcements.
• Responsive communications: messages meant to elicit a response.
• Delivery confirmations: A message that can notify the sender of receipt or read status.
• Quick-access messages: standardized communication types (think, texts or push notifications) that focus on speed and efficiency.
• Message targeting: the ability to send messages to individuals or small groups (by location) depending on the message you’re communicating.
• Employee self-service portals: A hub of information that can be updated by administration and accessed by field workers independently.

These communication tactics can be used independently or together, depending on your specific business needs.

How to increase team productivity using communication.

One of the best ways to increase productivity is through feedback. By giving employees access to data collected through quality assurance tools (think: checkpoints, audits or inspections) they can see how the services they are performing on location are rated.

With actionable feedback, adjustments can be made to improve or streamline the work they are doing to achieve even better results. If you have employee benefits programs correlated to performance, this is a great strategy to improve employee productivity.

“Work orders, safety issues or updates – whatever we need to communicate to our employees, we can do through a mobile app,” said Greg Springall, Menzies Chief Executive Officer. “It eliminates the need for contract managers to manually track down a cleaner onsite. That’s especially important in the instance where an emergency clean is warranted, for example. The knowledge that we’re doing everything we can to shorten the time it takes to resolve an issue makes all the difference for our customers.”

Read how Menzies is communicating with their mobile workforce in this case study.

Communication: an illustrated look.

How can mobile tools help support your communication strategies? Take a look:

Improving workplace safety in the field.

Often, your distributed teams are operating as lone-workers or in small teams by location. Technology can help improve safety measures by providing quick methods to signal distress or safety automations. Through automated configurations, you can keep your workforce connected to their supervisors or command centers, capture photos and locations of incidents and issues, and trigger response protocols that alert response teams. You can even include client stakeholders in your communication process, so they are always updated on how incidents and issues are being resolved on their sites.

Communication tools are evolving. Stay in-the-know.

As technology changes, the way you implement it across your teams should, too. Check back with updated resources. For now, keep reading additional resources to learn more.

How Mobile Software Improves Workforce Communication

Workforce Management Software Improves Communication to the Field

Chat with our team about communication needs.