How Technology Adoption Empowers Your Deskless Workers

More and more companies in manufacturing and beyond are exploring opportunities for digital transformation. And while AI, robots, and automation attract a lot of attention in these discussions, there’s one crucial factor almost all companies miss. As companies look for ways to adopt new technology into their facilities, they often neglect their frontline workers.

According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, 51% of workers in non-management positions on the frontline don’t feel valued as employees, and 60% say their company could do more to prioritize culture and communication, starting with leadership. But what would such a job site look like? And what do companies stand to gain from workers who can easily communicate across roles, departments, and language barriers?

This vision represents a new era of safety and productivity for all workers across a wide range of industries. In this new paradigm workers can proactively engage with machinery, instead of being replaced by it through automation. In order to claim this future, we strongly encourage plant managers and digital transformation leaders to embrace technology adoption through supportive, worker-centric digital solutions. 

By selecting a communication and safety platform with simple, safe, and smart implementation, you can help your workers and your enterprise in a number of ways.

Key Takeaways:

• When frontline workers successfully adopt new technologies, they can communicate more effectively and collaborate with ease.
• Introducing new smart technologies like the Walt Smart Radio can minimize delays in communication, which allows for an improved rapid response during emergencies. This unified communication system supports fast, informed decision-making and best-practice safety protocols in any industrial setting.
• The adoption of new technology for deskless workers can improve performance and safety, support skill development, and stimulate business growth.

Tech Adoption Increases Accessibility and Connectivity for Frontline Workers

From smartphones to smart homes, the world grows more connected every day. But there are unique challenges that come up when you decide to connect your workforce, including safety considerations, connectivity, and ruggedness to name just a few. 

Factory workers, construction crews, and facility managers are essential to your enterprise precisely because they spend most of their time away from a desk. And there’s never been a better time to connect all these workers with appropriate technology.

Over the past decade, keeping office personnel digitally connected has been a priority when adopting technology, but now it’s finally possible to connect your entire workforce with the Walt Smart Radio System by weavix.

How Connectivity Empowers Your Frontline Teams 

When frontline workers can hold a complete digital communication platform in the palm of their hand, it revolutionizes how work gets done. Instead of relying solely on posted announcements or word of mouth — especially for time-sensitive or business-critical communications —  frontline workers can have direct lines of communication with each other and anyone else within the enterprise, whenever they need it. 

What good is encouraging communication among your frontline workers if they’re blocked from doing so by the very nature of their work? Unfortunately, this occurs all too frequently. Connecting the frontline workforce is all about putting your money where your mouth is, and it’s one of the best reasons for adopting new technology. 

“I wanted my team to feel like they had a chance to share things. I wanted my forklift team to be empowered to communicate back to us and tell us what was going on. I don’t know that we’ve always given our team the tools to make sure that what they’re doing every day and what they’re seeing is getting back to the appropriate people. With weavix, we now have that opportunity.”

— John Moulton, General Manager at Innovative Fiber

Give your frontline workers the right tools so they can proactively respond to their surroundings, and watch what happens next.

How New Tech Adoption Unlocks New Business Opportunities

Let’s take a few steps back and ask the bigger question: what’s the point of all this new technology? The most fundamental goal of adopting new technology is to improve our lives. And not just a few lives here and there, no! New tech should improve quality of life for everyone.

This simple fact points to a much deeper connection between your workforce and any technologies you might want to implement on the frontlines. We believe new technology often requires a minor shift in culture. And for new technology to be considered a success on the frontline, it needs to achieve the twin goals of productivity and worker safety. And if it doesn’t help you do both, then it’s not living up to its promise.

Harnessing Technology for Business Success

In Paul O’Neill’s first speech as Alcoa’s new CEO in October 1987, he stunned everyone by focusing on safety instead of short-term shareholder returns. (This is one of our founder’s favorite stories, in fact). O’Neill understood that the only way to reverse Alcoa’s fortunes and regain their primacy was to create a culture of excellence. All of their hiring, all their training, and all the new technology that came after that was in service to this goal. 

And it worked.

When O’Neill left Alcoa in 2000, the company’s income was five times higher than when he’d started. Oh, and their market value? It shot up from $3 billion to $27 billion. Talk about new business opportunities!

New Tech as the Driver of a Collaborative Culture

Adopting new technology solely in service to increased frontline productivity misses the bigger picture. People often think new tech is an angel or a saint. We disagree. New tech must be an agent of change in service to a more connected, collaborative culture. A culture where everyone has the resources, training, and backing from leadership to perform their best work. 

That’s been our focus at weavix^® from the day we were founded, and we’ve brought it to life with the Walt Smart Radio System. Unlike any other smart industrial radio, Walt instantly connects your workforce to our safety and worker enablement platform. Elevating your frontline workers’ voices also creates a lot of opportunities for your enterprise. Working together, your frontline workers can quickly:

• Share critical information to help solve complex operational issues at your job sites
• Report and respond to emergencies and incidents quickly and safely
• Bring visibility into your facilities through seamless communication
• Overcome language barriers with instant, automatic translation services powered by AI

A lot of companies adopt technologies to improve productivity and safety separately. Real change only comes when new tech enables a cultural shift. Increased productivity and a better safety record are the results of that shift. 

Adopting Technology Heightens Efficiency Enterprise-Wide

Encouraging adoption of new technology across your company can drive improvements in productivity and safety, starting with operations. 

But how do you know when you’ve made an impact? Measuring efficiency and productivity on the frontline has always been hard. This puts the plant managers in an increasingly challenging and awkward position. Up until now, there has never been an easy way to understand what’s really happening on the frontline other than through conversations, meetings, or old-fashioned, paper-based reports. 

Subjective observations are a poor guide to increasing your job site’s overall productivity. And they’re even less effective for improving safety. What we’ve observed time and time again is that frontline workers need a way to proactively communicate the status of their equipment or potential safety risks.

Enabling Teams with Real-Time Data

Executive teams are constantly demanding more and more data from every other department, and now they’re targeting operations teams. With the Walt Smart Radio System by weavix, you can show your leadership team the exact data they're looking for. 

As this new data set grows over time, you can gain unprecedented insights into worker activity and facility operations. This creates an opportunity to implement improved safety measures, which can help you avoid incidents before they happen. With Walt, plant managers and safety officers can take appropriate actions to prevent costly errors or accidents, reduce operational risk, and boost the bottom line.

While IoT sensors can give you limited data about the health of specific machines, equipping your team with Walts creates the IoW: an Internet of Workers that can adapt to complex situations much more quickly. 

The Walt Smart Radio System gives you better visibility into everything that happens on your job site by combining a rugged communication solution with accurate data. All because you encourage a culture of enterprise-wide collaboration.

Tech Adopters Promote Safer Training and On-Site Activity

Safety is constantly reinforced through training and procedures, no matter where your company sits on the technology adoption curve. While technology can help create a safer work environment, it should also be used to reinforce the individual safety of your workers.

Just as there’s increased pressure for operations leaders to use data for continuous optimization, there’s also increased pressure for safety officers to use data to reduce the risk of incidents on the frontline. Walt Smart Radio allows safety teams to respond much more quickly to an emergency with a workforce danger alert system, which highlights each worker’s location during an evacuation to ensure they’re in the right place. 

It’s Not Too Late to Connect Your Workforce

Additionally, safety leaders can contact workers through the Walt Protect console directly via alerts or by using the dispatch function. This creates a secure audit trail in the cloud, which the safety team can easily access for fact-finding or compliance needs.

The Walt Radio System by weavix is the new gold standard for combining worker safety with worker enablement as a unified platform. Over the past decade, many facilities were busy connecting things with IoT devices and sensors. But these same teams overlooked the importance of connecting their workers to each other. 

It’s not too late.  

By connecting individual workers with advanced technology — instead of just connecting machines to other machines — companies can prioritize worker safety with every improvement to their process.

Adopting New Technology Increases Accountability for Industrial Teams

As digital transformation moves into the mainstream, companies can finally connect every aspect of their operations to improve process and profits. And if there’s even one guideline emerging from this shift, it’s this: don’t leave your workers behind.

If you want to understand the technology gap most frontline workers have to deal with, it’s important to put yourself in their shoes. Off-site, they can contact friends & family instantly through their smartphones and get updates about their environment through smart home devices. 

But as soon as most workers arrive at the jobsite, they have to surrender their personal smartphones, turn the clock back 20 years, and rely on clipboards, PA systems, and other outdated communication methods for vital information that’s not even delivered in real time. None of the latter encourage accountability on the job site. And none of them encourage open lines of communication that can keep workers safe.

How a Secure Platform Ensures Team Accountability

By improving communication through a secure, digital platform, workers can now hold each other accountable for their tasks and responsibilities on-site. Historically, radios on worksites were only reserved for certain crews and positions, which meant oversight was practically near zero. 

When teams equip every worker with a Walt Smart Radio, supervisors are instantly connected to their workers, allowing them to share updates and ensure tasks are completed correctly and on time. Workers can easily communicate with each other thanks to guaranteed message delivery and real-time translations. And companies can finally create reliable reports of worker actions, locations, and message threads for compliance and audit purposes. 

When plant managers, operations managers, and EHS leaders can tap into the benefits of digital transformation in their day-to-day workflows, it has the potential to shape your entire team culture for the better. 

Streamline Your Technology Adoption Cycle with weavix 

By partnering with weavix, your workers will have the most advanced platform to improve productivity, collaboration, and safety. 

To see the difference Walt can make to your technology adoption, schedule a demo with weavix today. The meeting will be much more than a demo. We’ll learn what matters to you and how the platform can help you with your needed outcomes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the stages of technology adoption?

The stages of technology adoption follow a proven cycle, which consists of five stages: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. This well-documented cycle guides organizations in understanding new technologies and implementing new tech across their workforce. 

The process begins with company or team innovators who truly embrace new tech, ideas, or solutions. This is followed by early adopters who recognize the potential benefits for themselves and others, as well as maintaining an interest in technology in general. The technology adoption cycle then continues through the early majority, late majority, and finally the technology laggards who are always the most averse to new technologies or even changes of any kind.

We need to take different approaches for each type of technology stage. Each stage in the technology adoption process requires a different approach:

• Innovators: Tech enthusiasts and leaders who actively seek out and test new solutions. Think of this group as your internal champions for all types of change management initiatives. As such, it’s important to solicit their perspective on a regular basis.
• Early Adopters: Quickly grasp new ideas and their potential to improve everyone else’s workflow. This group can go a long way towards validating technology’s benefits for everyone else.
• Early Majority: These members are pragmatic. They adopt technology after seeing proven success from Innovators and Early Adopters, which makes this group crucial for widespread acceptance.
• Late Majority: These are more conservative members. This group will only pick up new technology after it becomes an established standard. While age and demographics may play a role, every worker is different and should be assessed based on their own individual behaviors.
• Laggards: Total skeptics that will only adopt technology when it’s absolutely necessary, or when mandated to do so. 

Understanding these stages helps you and your organization develop the right training, support, and, most importantly, change management strategies. These strategies will help ensure a better implementation across your enterprise. And while recognizing these stages is even more important for deskless workers, that also signifies a much stronger potential for improvements through adoption of new technology.

How do tech adopters from different industries benefit from Walt Smart Radio Systems? 

Tech adopters in many industries can significantly improve their operational efficiency, safety practices, and communication by implementing the Walt Smart Radio Platform.

Keep reading: How disruptive tech benefits disruptive thinkers

Why is the technology adoption curve important when introducing new tech to frontline teams?

The technology adoption curve helps organizations anticipate, identify, and address pushback on new technology. 

Unlike office workers who constantly use many different types of software, frontline teams face completely different challenges – from limited computer experience on one end to serious concerns about job safety and security. By mapping your implementation strategy to the technological adoption curve, you are identifying potential problem areas and solutions before you even get started.

The adoption curve becomes even more vital when you start introducing powerful platforms like smart radio systems that have the potential to improve daily operations. Those who ignore the natural progression of the technological adoption curve often face failed implementations (leading to less productivity and higher worker turnover). 

Your success requires the identification and strong support of Innovators and Early Adopters. These are the best groups to demonstrate the technology's value to everyone else, as they already have the trust of their peers. If you demonstrate or over-advocate yourself without leveraging Innovators and Early Adopters, your success rate for adopting new technology will decline. 

In parallel, you will need to provide extra training and encouragement to those who may be more hesitant (the early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards). This targeted approach is a great step to help ensure that new technology is adopted across your entire team and that it is seen as an enhancement to their daily workflow, not a disruption.