Deskless workers live on the front line of your operation, and during COVID-19, their safety responsibilities changed overnight, making retraining essential. To protect your customers, your team, and your business, you need to quickly determine what that retraining will look like – and identify the technology you’ll need to accomplish it, writes Matt Fairhurst, CEO of Skedulo.
Retraining deskless workers during the pandemic requires a twofold approach
The term “deskless worker†encompasses thousands of jobs across various industries – from mobile workers (e.g., solar technicians) to in-home healthcare workers. But regardless of the role, the nature of a deskless job means these workers spend the majority of their day on the front line, where they are more likely to come in contact with the coronavirus.
In this context, pandemic-based retraining for deskless workers requires a twofold approach: (1) safety training for in-person services, and (2) skills training to those same services in a virtual environment.
1. In-person safety precautions
Before the pandemic, safety training primarily focused on tasks like operating dangerous machinery or performing routine medical services. In these fields, risky tasks are heavily regulated, and workers are periodically certified to the required level of safety. Now, all businesses that interact with the public face a new dimension of safety considerations regarding personal protective equipment (PPE) and necessary approvals to interact with others. These safety precautions involve a level of risk that workers have not previously been trained to handle. Furthermore, rules and regulations vary by municipality or state.
2. Virtual delivery of services
With stay-at-home orders and the threat of new waves always looming, many deskless workers have shifted to the virtual delivery of certain services and require entirely new skill sets. Consider in-home healthcare workers: Prior to COVID-19, companies trained these workers on the delivery of personalized healthcare while in the homes of their patients. During COVID-19, however, training shifted, and these same healthcare workers had to learn how to give personalized care to their patients via remote channels like video chat. This forced digital transformation and subsequently required technology training in tandem with new skills training, turning many deskless workers into tech workers.
Both types of training are critical for sustained operations during the pandemic. But it’s just as critical for organizations to provide the platforms and technologies necessary to facilitate retraining efficiently and effectively.
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Remote Training Hinges on Technology That Simplifies Complexity
Evolving safety measures that vary across jurisdictions make training a geographically dispersed team of deskless workers increasingly complex. But there are several technologies you can lean on to stay on top of the latest safety regulations and certifications to employees and customers safe.
1. Customer relationship management (CRM)
A broadly available and secure CRM system or central database is essential for retraining initiatives. If your organization has not yet implemented a CRM database system, this is the place to start when assessing your training needs. An organized, easily accessible database of current customers and their needs is critical to understand exactly what training is necessary and which employees to train.
A CRM system can take into account customer requirements that shape an employee training agenda. For example, if a customer doesn’t speak English or they have children with special needs, the CRM will log that information and ensure the employee assigned to the job is properly trained to meet the customer’s needs.
2. Video conferencing
Some deskless workers may be wary of video-conference learning opportunities, but face-to-face training is necessary for the success and efficacy of your training initiatives. And during the pandemic, video conferencing technology has made it easy. Zoom is exceptionally simple and a good match for hesitant workers – by simply clicking the meeting link, your workers can open the video and join the training. While video training is effective for soft skills, software guides and onboarding, more tactile training (i.e., operating machinery or performing medical procedures) might still require in-person learning.
3. Sophisticated scheduling
Once you know your training curriculum and have established an easy-to-use digital medium to retrain deskless workers, the final step is standardizing on a dynamic scheduling system that can intelligently accommodate the demands of hundreds or even thousands of workers at the same time. A dynamic system automatically accounts for special skills, language, geographic location, availability, etc. Gone are the days of schedulers spending weeks emailing back and forth with hundreds of employees trying to coordinate and host tailored, certified and regional training. With sophisticated scheduling, a single scheduler completes the effort using a reliable, accurate and 100% digital system.
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When the pandemic hit, employees grappled with sudden changes to the way they worked. Across industries, deskless workers had to relearn how to deliver their services safely – and they will continue to adapt their services as the crisis evolves. But with the right technology suite, your organization can confidently deploy the necessary training to keep deskless workers safe and customers satisfied amid uncertainty.
Which best practices are you following to retrain your frontline employees during the pandemic? Let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window .