Frontier Wear

#5 Lessons the Pandemic Taught Us About the Importance of Connected Workers

The pandemic showed us how unprepared some organisations are to major disruptions. With travel restrictions and social distancing rules, many companies in the industrial sector were forced to scale back productivity to ensure the safety of their frontline workers, equipment experts, project supervisors, and clients.

This is in stark contrast to knowledge workers who continue to work remotely. This reduction in efficiency across the workforce highlights the importance of a digital transformation strategy and how a Connected Worker approach can ensure business continuity.

While many industrial workers are deskless and unable to work from home, they can still be a connected worker with technologies that integrate them into their worksite and empower them with real-time information.

Here are 5 ways connected workers were able to maximise productivity during the pandemic.

1. Connected workers reduce operating costs

During the early months of the pandemic, health officials didn't fully understand the virus and testing was unreliable. Many countries advised and enforced a 14-day quarantine for suspected exposures and traveling plummeted. Unfortunately, many organisations had factories or worksites all over the world and relied on air travel to allow technical experts to maintain and repair equipment.

Organisations that deployed Realwear technology during these times were able to respond quickly when sending people to locations was no longer an option. A worker at location, even a lesser skilled or experienced worker, could wear a Realwear headset that enabled 2-way audio and video for a remote expert to guide the onsite team through a process and collaborate in real time. Not only saving the time and costs associated with travel, but the 28-day quarantined that would have applied.

Going forward, this shows how connected workers can reduce costs associated with travel, lost time, and extended equipment downtime through their own Connected Workers. Not to mention the training and up-skilling.

Another Navigator 520 Tough Kit out the door today. This time it's heading to an Engineering business who want to consolidate an streamline their project material and documents into a head-mounted device that can be viewed safely, on-site, when needed without carrying all the reference material. Ensuring the right Engineer and Project Manager have the right material for the job. What else? they can now call colleagues, partners and join Teams meetings to conduct project walkthroughs from their point-of-view.

Having 5 brands across the Frontier Group means we offer a diverse range of products and services to our clients. It also means we can have anyone of our frontline team members working in remote locations across our service areas on any day. Activities range from installation of ICT & security services, fitting out fleets of vehicles with in-vehicle management solutions, or residential visits for our electrical business.
We also have a range of subject matter experts to support those activities. So how do we connect the frontline teams to the right expert in real time? We practice what we preach by using the Realwear Connect solution.
One of our team in the field can use their Realwear headset to request support from the exact area of our business they need, sending an email and SMS notification to the exact experts that can help straight from the Realwear Connect app via their voice. Recuing downtime and improving the support for our people in real time.
Talk to Frontier Wear today about navigating the different service areas of your business.

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