Your people are out on the shop floor, on the road, in customers’ homes, on construction sites and keeping essential services running. They’re often busy doing hands-on work, rather than sitting at a desk checking their inbox.
So if your approach to employee feedback starts with an email invitation and ends with a lengthy survey, you might be missing some important voices.
Deskless workers can make up a huge part of your workforce. But when feedback tools are built around office-based routines, hearing from everyone becomes much harder than it needs to be.
The answer isn’t to send more reminders or cross your fingers and hope for a better response rate. It’s to make employee listening work for the people you want to hear from.
Keep reading for a few tips on how to do just that.
Why deskless employees can be missing from the conversation
Think about how your organisation communicates. Important updates might go out by email, survey invitations land in inboxes, and managers are asked to share results in team meetings.
That can work well for some employees. But what about the care worker moving between visits, the construction operative on site or the retail colleague working a busy shift?
They might not have a work email address. They might not have easy access to a computer. And they probably don’t have time to jump through hoops just to tell you how work is going.
When feedback is harder to give, participation can suffer. And when you hear from only part of your workforce, you risk making decisions based on an incomplete picture.
Your deskless employees are often closest to customers, services and day-to-day challenges. They know what’s working, what’s getting in the way and what could make their jobs better.
You don’t want those insights getting lost simply because someone doesn’t have an office chair.
5 ways to get better feedback from deskless workers
Getting useful feedback starts well before you send a survey. You need to reach people where they work, ask questions that reflect their day-to-day experiences and make it worth their while to respond. Here are five ways to make employee listening work better for your deskless workforce.
1. Take feedback to your people
Your employees shouldn’t need to find a laptop, log into a work account or remember a password they use twice a year just to have their say.
Make feedback easy to access on mobile devices, with a straightforward process that fits around the working day.
Depending on your workforce, that could mean mobile-friendly surveys, SMS invitations or QR codes that employees can scan when they have a suitable opportunity.
The key is to think about the experience from their side. How would someone working a shift, visiting customers or moving between sites actually complete your survey?
If the answer involves too many steps, it’s time to simplify.
2. Stop relying on email to do all the heavy lifting
Email is useful. It just isn’t a universal solution.
If some employees rarely use a work inbox, sending another survey invitation there isn’t going to solve the problem.
Look at the channels your people already use and trust. That might include text messages, mobile-accessible platforms or communication through team leaders.
There’s no single channel that works for every organisation. The important thing is to choose an approach that reaches employees in the flow of their working lives, rather than expecting everyone to work like your office-based teams.
3. Ask questions that make sense on the frontline
A good survey doesn’t just ask people how they feel. It helps you understand what’s shaping their experience.
For deskless employees, that might mean asking about the equipment they rely on, the information they receive before a shift, their access to support or whether they can raise concerns without worrying about the consequences.
For example:
Do you have the tools and equipment you need to do your job well?
Do you receive the information you need to work safely?
Do you feel listened to when you raise a concern?
Do you have the support you need from your manager?
Are changes that affect your role communicated clearly?
Of course, a care worker and a construction operative won’t have exactly the same priorities. Tailor your questions to your workforce, and give people the opportunity to raise issues you might not have thought to ask about.
And please, keep it focused. If a question doesn’t help you understand the employee experience or decide what to do next, ask yourself whether it needs to be there.
4. Don’t make employee listening an annual event
You wouldn’t wait until the end of the year to find out whether a problem with equipment, communication or workload was affecting your teams. So why rely on one annual survey to understand the employee experience?
Regular pulse surveys can help you spot changes and explore issues while they’re still relevant. They can also give employees more opportunities to share what’s happening, rather than asking them to remember how they felt months ago.
That doesn’t mean surveying people every five minutes. Nobody needs another task for the sake of it.
It means building a listening approach that combines the bigger picture from employee surveys with more focused questions when you need to understand a particular issue.
The right rhythm will depend on your organisation, your people and what you’re trying to learn.
5. Prove that speaking up is worth it
Here’s the bit that matters most: what happens after someone submits their feedback?
If employees take the time to explain what’s frustrating them, only to hear absolutely nothing back, why would they bother next time?
Closing the feedback loop doesn’t have to mean fixing every problem overnight. It means being honest about what you’ve heard, what you can change and what happens next.
Try to:
Share what you heard. Tell employees about the main themes emerging from feedback.
Explain what happens next. Be clear about which issues you’re prioritising and why.
Give managers a role. Help them turn feedback into useful conversations and practical action.
Keep people updated. Even if something takes time to fix, explain where things stand.
And think carefully about how those updates reach deskless teams. A brilliant intranet post won’t help much if the people who need to see it never log in.
Listening is more than collecting answers. It’s showing people that their answers can make a difference.
Mistakes to avoid when gathering feedback from your deskless employees
Even with the right tools, a few common habits can get in the way:
- Assuming everyone has a work email: Check how employees will actually access your surveys before you launch them
- Sending the same survey to everyone: Your questions should reflect the different roles and realities across your workforce
- Confusing low response rates with low engagement:Â Before drawing conclusions, check whether employees had a fair opportunity to take part
- Asking too many questions: Respect people’s time and focus on what you genuinely need to understand
- Collecting feedback and disappearing. If you want employees to keep speaking up, show them what happens after they do
Make it easier for every employee to have a say
Your deskless employees shouldn’t have to work harder than everyone else to make their voices heard.
When feedback is accessible, questions reflect real working experiences and people can see that their input matters, you’re in a much better position to understand what’s happening across your organisation.
That means fewer blind spots, better-informed decisions and a more complete picture of employee experience.
And it starts with a simple question: are you making it easy for all your people to be heard?
Your listening shouldn't stop at the office door
Your deskless employees have valuable insight into what’s working, what’s getting in the way and what could make their working lives better. But you’ll only get that insight if people can easily share it, and trust that someone will listen.
Start by removing the barriers to taking part, asking questions that reflect the realities of frontline work and showing employees what happens next. You might not be able to act on every piece of feedback, but you can make sure people know their voices matter.
Because employee listening shouldn’t depend on where someone works. It should work for everyone.
Want to understand how your people really feel about work? Find out how Hive helps organisations gather employee feedback and turn insight into meaningful action.
Not sure what to do with employee feedback once you’ve collected it? Give our AI Actions Coach a go below for practical ideas to help turn workplace challenges into meaningful action.
