3 Ways Automation is Giving a Lifeline to the Frontline

The past two years have shown the world just how important frontline workers are. Covid-19 has affected all industries, but the ones that rely on employees being out in the field have taken the full brunt of the pandemic. It’s never been more important for us to keep our workers safe and happy in their vital roles.

Going into 2022, frontline industries continue to face tough challenges. The ‘Great Resignation’ has led to labor shortages around the world, exacerbating the problems of the pandemic. Recently, we carried out our biggest ever survey of frontline workers and more than a third of the frontliners that we spoke to said that having understaffed teams was their biggest stressor at work.

Discover everything we’ve learned from our survey in our 2022 Frontline Trends Report!

So on top of Covid-related obstacles, there are also fewer people to get the job done! That’s where automation can come in to make processes more efficient and to reduce the pressure on the frontline. Repetitive manual tasks can be automated, saving workers’ time and effort, while reducing the chances of human error.

That’s why we poured our efforts into developing customizable automated workflows to make your work life easier and safer. The applications of automated workflows are endless, but here are just a few ways in which they are helping frontline businesses through these particularly tough times.

1. Maintain Covid Precautions At Scale

Managing large, diverse, and distributed teams of frontline workers is complicated enough, even before adding regulations and restrictions relating to Covid-19. So it’s really important to make Covid processes as seamless and as automated as possible.

Collecting Health Status

The first step in ensuring that your workplace is safe from Covid-19 is regularly collecting the vaccination status or test results of your employees. Beekeeper gives you a secure mobile channel in which to do this, so you can reach all of your workers, no matter where they are or what kind of job they are doing. All they need to do once they’ve downloaded the Beekeeper app on their phone is complete a form and attach a photo of their vaccine card or test result.

Verifying The Submissions

As soon as a vaccine card or test result has been submitted, a task can automatically be assigned to a manager, or if you prefer, an open task can be assigned to a group of managers, which they can assign to themselves as appropriate. Managers can then quickly and easily approve or reject the submissions.

Ensure Only Eligible Workers Are Given Shifts

You can now easily ensure that only employees that are eligible to work are given shifts. You can view a list of all eligible workers and even integrate with your shift scheduling software. You can also see a snapshot of your company at any time. See what percentage of your workforce is vaccinated or tested, in a particular region or globally.

Automate Reminders & Notifications

Now, save time and effort by automating the recurring Covid processes. For example, you can automatically send a message to employees every week to remind them to submit their new test results. Or you could automatically alert HR as soon as an employee submits a positive Covid test result.

2. Gathering Employee Referrals To Help Fight The Labor Shortage

Your workforce could be an untapped source of high-quality job candidates! It’s possible to start an employee referral program in Beekeeper to save you time and money that you would usually spend on recruitment, and make sure that you’re always filling your vacancies as quickly as possible.

A great example of a frontline organization that has done this successfully is Wanzek Construction. They generated 525 referrals in just three months!

So how do you go about setting up a referral process?

Give Employees An Easy Way To Refer Candidates

In Beekeeper, you can set up a Stream dedicated to promoting job openings internally. Each post about a vacancy can include a link to a form, so frontline workers can easily make a referral straight from their mobile phones.

Automatically Send Submitted Referrals To Your HR Team

With Beekeeper, there are multiple automations that you can choose from once a form has been submitted. Each submission could be sent in a chat message or email to an HR manager, or they could be displayed in a Stream that’s only visible to the HR team. Alternatively, a task could be created for an HR manager for each referral that has been submitted. You can choose the automation that best suits your company’s process.

Keep Track Of Your Referral Program

Stay on top of your hiring progress by building an employee referral dashboard that you can pin to the home screen of your Beekeeper app.

3. Improving Employee Retention With Great Onboarding

As we’re facing a labor shortage crisis, it’s really important to think about the employee experience, and how that affects retention. It’s been shown that the better the onboarding process for employees, the more likely it is that they will stay for longer.

Automate Messages And Tasks For New Hires

Make onboarding seamless, repeatable, and consistent, while reducing repetitive manual tasks. With Beekeeper, all new employees can automatically receive all of the information they need to get started, and they can automatically be assigned Tasks that they need to complete for their onboarding.

Provide Easy Access To Digital Training Materials

Eliminate paper training materials and decrease onboarding time from weeks to hours. You can even integrate Beekeeper with your existing HR tools like ADP and UKG and provide instant mobile access to safety documents, training manuals, and SOPs.

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