The term Deskless Workforce is getting thrown around a little bit so in this lesson we want to outline exactly what it means. Deskless Workforce Management is a category of mobile-first, cloud-based applications and services that helps deskless workers increase the efficiency and impact of their work. These deskless workers (a term which encompasses a variety of mobile and field workers) generally work in high-touch service industries and often have direct customer interaction on a regular basis.
No matter if your deskless workers are out and about or conducting work at a fixed location, one thing can be sure, mobile workers are often the face of the company. They’re the ones working with customers and clients directly, which means they have the biggest impact on customer experience and retention. The ability to manage your entire deskless workforce in a single system, is core to effective workforce management and giving the team the tools to coordinate work and create optimal schedules can mean the difference between a proactive and reactive process, which in turn impacts overall workforce operations, productivity, and visibility.
To truly get the most effective mobile workforce, it’s good to start with a blank canvas and think about deskless workforce management as a whole. In a typical setting, schedulers are the ones who create, schedule and manage the work , and the deskless workers are the ones who deliver the work. Although, managing a deskless workforce isn’t always about giving your schedulers the tools to instruct the deskless workers on what to do, but instead a more productive approach could be to look at how to leverage the capabilities we offer in our Deskless Productivity Cloud to empower your deskless workers to put their best foot forward on behalf of the company. Getting your solution configured correctly and leveraging our capabilities, can be the difference between autonomy for your deskless workers with schedulers focused on optimising exception management and a reactive team of schedulers having to manually coordinate everything.
5 key areas to effectively manage your workforce
1. Deskless workforce management and job scheduling
Maintain key information about your deskless workers including skills, availability and areas they work in. Schedulers should be able to easily match available and qualified employees to customer requirements, while reducing bottlenecks in your processes and leveraging our optimisation tools. Correct configuration and set up of your data will automate job scheduling, empower your deskless workers to help streamline processes and help schedulers to focus on exception management and optimisation.
2. Employee engagement tools
Deskless workers, schedulers and business owners need to feel connected and know what is expected of them. Be sure to continue exploring our robust features to communicate, manage exceptions and share critical information about the work being conducted, while also giving deskless workers the ability to contribute to their own schedules as much as possible to streamline processes.
3. Strong analytics
Sometimes we can just get bogged down in the weeds of it all, but we encourage you to put an emphasis on the power of measuring and tracking workforce productivity. It gives you the ability to use the insights to improve operational efficiency, better match resources to particular jobs and locations, and make strategic decisions to grow the business, while also understanding gaps in your process, utilisation of staff and customer needs.
4. Configurability
Every business and industry will have unique workflows that work for them. Our applications have a great deal of flexibility and configurability to align our capabilities to your business processes. Missing just a few custom settings and failing to explore our educational content could mean missing out something that could turn a long process into a few clicks of a button.
Skedulo offers configurability for all aspects of the solution; mobile worker management, schedule & dispatch, mobile work execution, data & communications and even some of our integrations and extensions.
5. Integrations and extensions
Skedulo is just one part of a larger puzzle and most businesses have other technology solutions that they use to manage their business. Integrate with your principal systems to support end-to-end workflows while giving your mobile teams a powerful tool to stay synced to the core business. Skedulo’s integrations only touch necessary data and respects data ownership in other systems, to create a seamless enterprise tech stack across your business with Skedulo’s mobile workforce management software as your system of record for mobile work.
Skedulo can integrate with just about anything, provided the other vendor has the capabilities to do so. You can contact our Customer Experience team to explore your options or keep an eye open on the new content and courses here.