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3 Employee listening strategies to reach deskless workers
Deskless employees—also called frontline or non-desk workers—include manufacturing staff, field sales teams, clinical trial staff and healthcare professionals. They make up 80% of the global workforce, but many organizations struggle to hear their feedback.
According to a recent survey by SHRM, deskless workers have a 1.6 times higher turnover rate than other employees. That’s not just a frustrating retention issue; disengagement hurts your business, too. Disengaged employees cost businesses up to 30% of their annual salary in lost productivity.
Listening strategies designed for office employees often fail with deskless populations. Yet these employees are frequently closest to the work that drives safety, quality and operational performance. If organizations aren’t hearing from them, they’re missing insights that directly affect business results.
At bink, we’ve found that the most effective employee listening strategies for deskless workers include mobile-friendly surveys, in-person focus groups and ongoing feedback loops.
1. Optimize your surveys for deskless populations
If you’ve had poor success generating engagement from deskless workers in surveys or other feedback opportunities, it’s possible that your efforts aren’t considering their unique workplace experience. Getting a busy desk-based employee who works primarily on a computer to complete a survey is one challenge. Getting a deskless worker who might not own company-issued technology is another.
Strong employee listening strategies require internal comms and HR teams to tailor not just survey questions but survey delivery tactics. Here are a few approaches we’ve used to increase survey engagement among deskless workers.
Create incentives
There are two types of rewards for participating in an employee survey: implicit and explicit. Until you prove to your team that their feedback will be taken seriously (and drive real change), you’ll have to rely on explicit incentives. You don’t need to make them fancy or complicated. For example, we’ve seen teams increase survey participation by offering a pizza party for the department with the highest response rate.
Bring the survey to them
Set up shared workstations for survey completion or ask managers to walk around with a tablet, inviting employees to complete the survey during work hours. You can also try distributing pen-and-paper copies. This approach might sound antiquated, but it’s practical. Employees without work-issued laptops or phones might find pen-and-paper surveys more convenient to complete.
Make it mobile friendly and accessible
If you plan to rely on employees to complete the survey on their mobile devices, make sure to test the mobile experience. A survey that’s challenging to complete will negatively impact your response rate. You can also increase survey engagement by making them easy to access, too. Put up QR codes in break rooms, common areas and other physical employee touchpoints to serve as reminders.
⭐ Before you create your survey, make certain that any topic area you’re asking employees about is one that you’re ready to address. We often tell clients that there’s no such thing as survey fatigue; there’s only fatigue from sharing feedback and seeing no action taken.
Further reading: 4 Critical mistakes ruining your employee survey results & how to avoid them
2. Start real conversations with focus groups
There’s no better way to truly understand a person’s experience than sitting across a table, face-to-face with them in their actual work environment. Our team has hosted focus groups in warehouses, transportation centers, labs and even an air traffic control center. We’ve even led overnight focus groups with healthcare workers on the night shift to get their unique perspective. Hearing directly from employees in their real working environment often reveals insights that traditional surveys miss.
Here are a few key considerations and tips for focus groups:
Focus group size
When conducting focus groups, aim for a cross-section of your employee population, which can usually be achieved in 5 to 8 focus group sessions total, no matter the organization size. Each group should be comprised of roughly 10 to 12 participants. Pro tip: invite around 15 to 20 to account for day-of-drop-off.
If pulling together groups of this size isn’t feasible in your organization, you can also consider a small group strategy. Pull groups of 2 to 3 employees into a break room during line shifts. These smaller, quicker discussions often work particularly well in fast-paced, production-focused environments like manufacturing and healthcare.
Psychological safety
Creating a psychologically safe environment is critical. Employees need to feel comfortable sharing productive feedback. We recommend completely separating managers from frontline workers to avoid any power dynamics that might limit open feedback. Having senior leadership or members of the HR team can also make employees wary of speaking too honestly.
Experienced facilitation
From there, we refined the specific values language, pressure-testing it against real client moments and internal decisions. Our values aTo keep conversations productive and safe, hire a professional third-party facilitator. A skilled and experienced leader prevents focus groups from becoming an unproductive airing of grievances.
Companies are often reluctant to pull deskless workers from their frontline role for a focus group discussion. Sometimes, employees’ union may even raise concerns. Despite the logistical challenges, these conversations often produce the most actionable insights and are well worth the effort.
3. Plan to collect ongoing feedback
Intermittent touchpoints like surveys and focus groups are essential to your listening strategy with deskless workers. But in fast-paced environments, where employees must change and adapt often, ongoing feedback loops are especially crucial. These look different for every organization, depending on the structure and culture. Here are a few we’ve seen work.
Employee councils
Hand-pick employees who were vocal in the focus groups to form a standing feedback committee. Check in with this committee periodically to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s happening across the organization.
Pulse surveys
Surveying a portion of your deskless population once every quarter can ensure you’re getting fresh and timely feedback without overburdening any one employee group.
Easy-access opportunities
An old-fashioned paper-and-pencil suggestion box or simple feedback kiosks in break rooms give employees the opportunity to offer direct, anonymous feedback when it comes to mind.
Combined with focus groups and surveys, these strategies help your organization stay agile and responsive to the needs of your deskless employees as you take the time to implement long-term change.
Listening is the first step to meaningful change
Organizations with engaged deskless workers see 20% higher profitability, 15% higher productivity and 50% less turnover. But listening alone isn’t enough. Leaders must translate insights into visible change so employees know their voices matter.
When organizations build listening systems that reach their entire workforce—including the frontline—they create a stronger foundation for culture, performance and long-term growth.
Want to build an employee listening strategy that reaches your entire workforce?
bink helps life sciences organizations design research-driven listening systems that capture insights from scientists, sales teams and frontline employees. If you’re rethinking how your organization listens to its deskless workforce, we’d love to talk.
Create a stronger foundation for long term growth.
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