Oopsie, we have spilled a secret sauce to improve your field employees’ engagement during their shift schedule. Know how you can lure your staff to stay positive and accomplish tasks more dedicatedly. 

Managing a field team is one task. But ensuring they retain for long is another task. When you expose your staff to a work culture with never-ending tasks and salaries delayed by a few days — you lose out on your valuable staff.

Note that higher field employee engagement is proportional to lower turnover rates!

Companies with higher engagement levels have seen 18% turnover rates (which was earlier 40% without retention strategies).

It’s managers’ duty to ensure their field employees engagement are valued and motivated to work hard and are not outright overburdened with their tasks. And also, are provided with timely feedback, salaries, and tools — they need to ensure their workflow is smooth.

Are you a soaring field service business? Finding it difficult to retain your staff? Are you seeing some skyrocketing labour turnover? Well, this guide is for you. We have planned 8 ways you can keep your employees engaged with a positive frame of mind.

What is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement is when your workforce is happy, content, and motivated enough to work hard with more focus. An engaged employee looks like Steve, your diligent technician who:

• Happily shows up on time for the assigned shift or tasks.
• Has a beautiful smile and zeal to take on the workday – because tasks are optimally allotted without burdening him.
• Is content with timely disbursements of salaries and allowances.
• Is overjoyed because he is given time-to-time feedback and workshops to scale up his skills and knowledge.
• Can fearlessly reach out to you whenever there is a slight inconvenience.

Field employee engagement is as important as making a kid happy. The opposite of a happy kid is cranky, and we don’t like it, do we?

Benefits of an Engaged Employee Workforce

When your staff has that energy and vigour to work, they:

• Run after tasks to finish them.
• Readily accepts more work during peak demand.
• Close more tasks and tickets and attain more sales orders.
• Stay longer at the job, without having second thoughts.

When your staff is more engaged in the workplace, it shows that they are motivated and driven to work with you for a long time. They won’t think about underperforming or switching jobs to leave your business hanging dry. That answers very well why is employee engagement important.

How to Improve Employee Engagement in the Workplace? (Field Team’s Edition)

If you are seeing your workforce low in energy or aren’t very devoted to current tasks — there could be an underlying problem. Here are some easy-to-apply (and proven to work) strategies that aid in positive employee engagement.

1. Schedule Shifts & Tasks  (without choking your staff’s bandwidth)

Wouldn’t it be great if your staff showed up at work with a happy state of mind and had an optimistic approach towards work? Well, isn’t it dreamy?

This can come true to reality if you plan your staff’s shift and schedule optimally and rationally. You can use our smart field employees’ shift scheduling tool like TrackoField that is good at arranging invariable types of shifts in a balanced way (without overstuffing your staff’s routine). And lets you assign shifts once you enter the inputs like:

• Employee details like their names, roles, and contact info.
• Your staff’s availability or certain days or hours they can or cannot work.
• Shift requirements (number of employees needed for specific roles or times)

It lets you create a shift schedule for your multiple staff in one go and even lets you accommodate last-minute changes or special demands. Such balanced shift assignment leads to increased field employee engagement.

2. Share Feedback, Reward Them (and hear what they have to say)

Giving feedback to field staff effectively is crucial for maintaining performance and improving outcomes. When you sit down and share feedback with your team they feel more accountable and tend to focus well on tasks ahead.

So ensure you share feedback with your staff while minding the following aspects:

Be Specific	Provide specific & detailed feedback on how well the task was done or if it requires any improvement.
Timelines	Share feedback over regular intervals based on your staff’s behavior or performance.
Balance	Offer constructive criticism, and don’t share lenient remarks all the time. Provide balanced feedback that highlights the scope for improvements.
Use Examples	Use scenarios or real-life examples to make your staff better understand their actions or behaviors. This makes feedback more tangible.
Focus on Behavior	Share feedback for the behavior that can be changed rather than focusing on personal traits. This makes feedback less confrontational and more actionable.

Also, don’t forget to sit with your staff to listen to their concerns or doubts regarding the work style or tasks. Plan weekly one-on-one meetings to just discuss routine, and discuss bottlenecks or suggestions. This level of up-close conversation will make your staff convey aspects that are bothering them.

3. Process Salaries & Expense Claims (at a horse speed)

“Your salary is credited!”

This message is therapeutic for every staff who is working out from the office or field. Every employee expects their salary to be credited as specified on their contracts. A slight delay in salary processing by a day or two can piss your staff to the core and convince them to maybe look for another job. Oh god, we know you cannot afford another labor turnover.

Choose payroll management software that makes compiling timesheets and attendance data less painful and much faster, resulting in faster payouts. Don’t forget to pair it with top-notch expense management software. That simplifies the process of receiving travel or food claims and reimbursing them without tangling your staff in never-ending paperwork and processes.

When your staff experiences salary processing on time, you expect them to feel more valued and interested in their work. It’s like they don’t lose motivation to do routine work (even if it’s taxing or mundane).

4. Conduct Training Programs & Workshops

Forbes in 2023 surveyed that 59% of employee engagement report receiving no workplace training.

Training employees after their onboarding shouldn’t be looked at as an additional expense, especially for field staff. Rather it should be viewed as an opportunity to level up your staff’s obsolete skills (that are old and self-taught.) Exposing your staff to continuous development and training programs will help them learn new skills and experiences. This will help keep them engaged and deliver better services to your customers.

Brands like Blink it and Zomato, time-to-time curate some workshops and training programs to fill their executives’ knowledge gaps and boost their situational awareness. This solves their ulterior motive of increasing employee retention.

Zomato’s Hero Program is a Great Move to Engage Staff! Zomato has recently initiated a “Hero Program” which is a first-responder training program initiative for its fleet of delivery partners PAN India. This famous food ordering and delivery platform will now train delivery partners about life-saving skills around medical first-aid & CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation) through professional and certified training programs.

5. Show Them the Outcome of Their Work

To increase your field employee engagement with your organisation, it’s best if you start to show your workforce the result they helped you achieve with their produced work.

For example, there is Scott, your dedicated repairer, and over the month of April 2024, he

• Closed some 20 tickets.
• Got good responses from 8 out of 10 customers.
• Have good ratings amongst his peers.

All this resulted in him bringing new revenue and a more positive reputation for the company. Share this data with him (and other hard-working staff). Trust us, they will feel more valued and start striving to achieve more.

As a human trait, we tend to work hard and are more interested when we know we are making an impact. TrackoField generates precise reports around how many tasks were completed, how much revenue individual staff helped generate, what was the TAT, and more metrics. It offers you a special target vs achievement report with which you can see how many tasks were completed against the assigned tasks.

6. Promote a Positive Work Culture

Foster a positive work culture even if you are self-managing a giant team of field staff. Promote a collaborative and respectful work environment that drives your staff to show up daily and do tasks as assigned.

You can try implementing some team-building activities, timely organize social events, or seed opportunities that can help strengthen the bonds of your employees with their colleagues. When you choose the best field employee management software, you get features like in-app messaging with which you can communicate with your staff. This will work toward increasing your employee engagement retention.

7. Give your Staff Some Flexibility (to self-assign tasks)

Offer flexible work arrangements if possible — to better accommodate the needs of field employees. You can assign flexible work shifts and schedules,  promote flexible time-offs, or authorize your team to decide on the order of tasks as per their convenience.

TrackoField lets you stay on top of a flexible work environment by letting your staff:

• Self-allocate day’s tasks amongst their team.
• Mark attendance and send leave requests from any remote location (without the need to visit the head office).
• Re-schedule or re-allocate tasks to another day or to another technician (in case they are unavailable and have a lot on their plate).

8. Introduce your Field Force to a “Field Executive App”

Equip your team with collaborative tools, repair equipment, and resources they need to fulfill field service tasks. You can ask your team to install TrackoField’s field executive app that simplifies your staff’s routine. Over this app, your team can access:

• Day’s total tasks with complete details like task type, duration, address, and complete customer data.
• Optimum routes over which they can travel and save their time.
• Attendance and leave data to flag issues in real time.
• Order management tool over which they can smoothly collect sales orders.

➕A Takeaway for Field Managers! As a field manager, it is your duty to: Ensure your field staff has a well-defined and optimum workload. Make sure they aren’t stacked with work to the neck. Ensure you are in constant touch with your staff and are sharing constant feedback (without being indecent or harsh). Equip your team with handy collaboration tools over which they can receive tasks, mark attendance, see their payroll data, and chat with you to convey any updates. Motivate your diligent staff and reward them with timely incentives or bonuses. Surprise them with something they can cherish.

The above employee engagement strategies work only if you have adopted employee management tools where you can assign them tasks, track their progress, and compile their salary data.

Final Takeaway!

As a manager, the biggest challenge is to sustain a dynamic (oftentimes unpredictable) field force. You have to be on your toes to ensure your employees are not overburdened with work, have flexible shift schedules, and are often praised for their hard work.

To ensure your staff retains for long, you need to build a connected and collaborative work environment and equip your team with field employee management tools that simplify their routine. If you can’t find one tool, then we would suggest trying TrackoField for free. Just to warn you, the software is easy to integrate and super user-friendly to control.

FAQs

• Why Is Employee Engagement Important?

  To ensure the field employees have a positive frame of mind, have optimism to work hard, and aren’t demotivated to work for a long tenure.

• What is employee engagement?

  Employee engagement is when your staff is dedicated to work, has some motivation to work toward assigned tasks, and has the can-do spirit to complete tasks before or on the assigned deadline.

• Which employee engagement best practices are worth trying?

  To increase your field force’s productivity and engagement in the workplace, you can go for the following:
  - Schedule Shifts & Tasks (without choking your staff’s bandwidth)
  - Share Feedback, Reward Them (and hear what they have to say)
  - Process Salaries & Expense Claims (at a horse speed)
  - Conduct Training Programs & Workshops
  - Show Them the Outcome of Their Work
  - Promote a Positive Work Culture
  - Give your Staff Some Flexibility (to self-assign tasks)
  - Introduce your Field Force to a “Field Executive App”