Top 5 Blue Collar Productivity Tools for Frontline Employees

There’s one catch to all the new productivity tools available these days: most of them are designed for white collar workers. 

Meanwhile, the search for the best blue collar productivity tools can be frustrating. A lot of startups that create the most up-to-date tools cater to desk-bound, white collar workers. But what about those on the front lines? Those who are on their feet all day and don’t have the time to learn complex software?

Fortunately, there are employee productivity tools that do focus on blue collar workers (see also Staffbase alternative). We’ve rounded up the five best platforms to help frontline employees become more engaged, connected, and productive.

Learn about utilizing digital workplace essentials for increased engagement and productivity.

1. Best For Helping Blue Collar Employees Love Their Training: MobieTrain

Training new employees can be challenging for distributed teams, particularly during times of social distancing. What if training for blue collar employees could be fun, simple, and stress-free? It sounds too good to be true. But there’s one company that’s re-inventing employee training: MobieTrain.

The state of blue collar jobs in 2020 is complicated. For one thing, it’s becoming harder and harder to find blue collar employees for highly skilled production work. MobieTrain’s solution is their micro learning approach to training—delivering small bits of information in engaging ways.

MobieTrain allows employers to create customized training paths for their teams and has gamification elements like quizzes and polls to make training more fun. There are many ways to keep employees productive and empowered. With its intuitive, mobile-first design tailored to remote workers, MobieTrain makes training both effective and enjoyable.

P.S. Beekeeper integrates with MobieTrain! Learn more here.

2. Best Of The Employee Productivity Tools That Will Make You A Better Manager: Butterfly

I know what you’re thinking. Employee productivity tools are for employees, not managers, right?

But managers, especially when they’re not always face-to-face with their team, rely on feedback from their team to improve. That’s where Butterfly comes in. 

With Butterfly, managers can:

• Quickly go from receiving feedback to starting a conversation to creating actionable steps
• Create customizable surveys with prompts for academically-backed questions
• Have a real-time dashboard with key metrics like employee engagement drivers
• Stay just as connected with non-desk employees as their desk-bound counterparts

Getting good feedback is the best way to increase employee productivity. Why? If you ask the right questions, you can pinpoint what an employee is struggling with. Then, it’s just a matter of creating clear action steps to help them out.

Pssst. Beekeeper also integrates with Butterfly!

3. Best For Big Enterprises That Need A Tool They Can Modify Easily: Webalo

Webalo has a lot of the functionality you’d expect from a productivity tool geared towards frontline workers.

It allows companies to digitize their documentation and procedures so that remote workers have easy access to what they need.

It also has a Control Tower app that gives real-time awareness of what’s going on in a particular location. That means managers can see and deal with issues as they come up.

What sets Webalo apart is its no-code platform that empowers frontline workers. With Webalo, process engineers can update and maintain apps remotely without relying solely on corporate resources.

4. Best All-around App For Frontline Workers: Beekeeper

If you’re looking for an app that’s designed to keep frontline workers more informed, connected, and productive, you can’t go wrong with Beekeeper. 

No one wants to spend hours searching for information about workflows and company protocol. Especially not frontline workers. With Beekeeper, you can digitize internal processes and organize documentation in a way that’s easily accessible. 

More efficient communication not only leads to more productivity but a safer workplace, too. Workers have health and safety forms and checklists at their fingertips and managers can touch base immediately with their team in a crisis.

Rewarding good work and making employees feel appreciated can be a challenge with remote workers, but Beekeeper makes it simple. One of the ways managers can cultivate an inclusive culture in the digital workplace is to consistently acknowledge individual contributions, no matter how small.

5. Best Among Blue Collar Productivity Tools For Bridging The Skills Gap: WorkClout

Part of making sure employees continue to be productive is knowing and developing their skill set. As skills training for blue collar employees is declining in the US, it’s more important than ever to find innovative ways to bridge the skills gap.

One of WorkClout’s features is skills management, which allows managers to identify what each team member’s skills are and visualize their team’s skill set as a whole. With 80% of employees saying that learning and development are important to them, it’s a great way to make sure that employees continue to improve their skills.

Not only does WorkClout have collaboration tools that let you group events, tasks, and goals into projects, but it has a data analysis tool that makes efficient and effective use of valuable data. Employee productivity tools that present better data = faster problem-solving. Managers can track how their team is doing and make changes accordingly.

It can be hard to sort through all the different productivity tools out there. With the majority of tools geared towards white collar employees, finding tools that suit blue collar and remote workers is a challenge. But as we’ve outlined above, there are some options that make a real difference to frontline workers.

Want to get the most up-to-date info on how to digitize the frontline workforce? 

Want to know how to use blue collar productivity tools to increase productivity?

Download our Digitization of the Frontline Workforce white paper to learn more about getting the most out of digital productivity tools.

About the author

Cristian Grossmann

CEO and Co-Founder, Beekeeper

As CEO of Beekeeper, Cris drives the strategic vision, guiding a global team passionate about making frontline lives easier. Coming from a family of frontline workers and having worked in the frontline himself, he understands deeply the intricacies of solving real business problems for frontline organizations. As a Chemical Engineer and PhD in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich, Cris has over 15 years of experience in strategy, Fortune 500 business consulting, and startups. Additionally, he serves as a board member, advisor, and a first responder in his local community.