How Do I Reach a Non-Desk Employee?

Have you ever been frustrated because you weren’t able to communicate easily with your non-desk employees? You are not alone! In industries like construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and warehousing, it’s a common problem that workers at a job site or on the production floor have trouble staying connected with the front office, managers, or the rest of the team. These employees are busy working hard, and not checking emails regularly during the day (if they even have company email addresses). If this sounds familiar, internal text communication between the office and your non-desk employee is the communication solution your company needs to stay in touch!

What Are Non Wired Employees or Non-Desk Employees?

Non wired (or non-desk) employees are those workers who do not sit at a desk or work on a screen as a regular part of their job. They include workers on construction sites, factory floors, in warehouses, production plants, on the farm, and many other vital positions that make up the backbone of the global economy. It may surprise you that 80% of the world’s workforce is non-desk, which means being able to communicate with them effectively is very important.

How Do You Communicate with Employees Without Email?

Many of your non-desk workers will not have regular access to email during their work day. They may also be resistant to downloading communication apps onto their personal mobile phones and checking them regularly for updates. There may also be problems having access to WiFi or concerns about using data on their personal devices to receive this work communication.

SMS text messaging solves many of these problems in a very straightforward way, but traditional text messaging from your personal phone isn’t ideal for communicating with a large number of employees, or maintaining privacy and record of what was said.

So what’s the best way to solve this lack of communication between the front office, managers, and employees? An SMS text messaging system that allows managers and HR to communicate with all the necessary employees. This system also needs to keep record of what was said and maintain the privacy of personal phone numbers.

How Do You Effectively Share Information with Team Members?

There are many great tools out there for staying connected, and often businesses try using a variety of types of employee communication to connect managers and non-desk workers, but can’t find one that is a good fit. Let’s look at some employee communication examples and why they may not be a good solution for this problem.

Email

• Not accessible on every phone
• Not checked during regular work times
• Not every employee is given a company email, and they forget their passwords

Downloadable App

• Employee reluctance to download
• Lack of consistent adoption and use
• Lack of WiFi or data access

Group SMS Texts

• Too many messages means people turn them off
• Can’t share private information
• Everyone has access to each other’s phone number

Standard Individual SMS Texts

• Time consuming to send individually to large groups
• No permanent record of what is said
• Require personal phone number sharing

This list of options that don’t work well highlights the need for a different option, something simple and streamlined. Yourco is a way to send direct SMS messages that show up as individual texts to employees, but can be used by HR, supervisors, and managers as a web-based app with all the functionality that brings.

Here are some features of Yourco that solve the problems the other options had:

• Nothing to download
• SMS does not require smartphones or internet connection
• Can send messages to any sized group of employees with the click of a button, but they show up as individual text messages to the recipients (not as a group text)
• Save all message history on each employee, even after termination
• Maintain personal phone number privacy, as employees cannot access each other’s information and managers only have access to numbers that administrators grant them access to

Examples of Sharing Information: Yourco’s Common Use Cases

Now that we know how best to reach our non-desk employees, what are the most common times when Yourco really improves how your business operates? These are our most common use cases, although there are hundreds of other examples.

• Company wide announcements, like a weather delay for a construction project
• Emergency alerts, such as a medical emergency of a worker on a job site
• Operational messaging, for example alerting staff that a shipment just arrived in a warehouse
• Scheduling, like an employee reporting an absence
• Onboarding new employees, sharing documents and procedures
• Sharing training videos, by providing links to individual videos or courses 
• Internal job postings, to let your employees know you are hiring or promoting, or to generate employee referrals
• Employee surveys, to check in on how things are going with your workers and get helpful feedback

Yourco: Giving a Voice to the Entire Workforce

If you’re ready to improve communication with your non-desk employees and make sure everyone can be in touch seamlessly, you’re ready for Yourco! Try for free to see exactly how we can help or contact us today.