How to Create a Sense of Belonging for Mobile Workers

Humans are social creatures. The need to feel like part of a group is strong, and that need extends to the work environment, too. Particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic put our social connections into sharp focus, companies have been working to ensure employees feel a sense of belonging at work. 

And for good reason. According to a 2019 report from Cigna, workplace loneliness costs businesses an estimated $154 billion in lost productivity as a result of absenteeism. And research from the Harvard Business Review found that employees who feel like they’re accepted at work are more than three times as likely to work to their full potential compared to those who don’t feel accepted. 

But improving workplace belonging is a complex issue. It requires a multifaceted strategy focused on workplace culture and management skills, as well as employee engagement, satisfaction, retention, and enablement. That strategy becomes even more complex when your workforce is mobile. Given the lack of a central work location, organizations with mobile and deskless staff have fewer opportunities to facilitate workplace connections, have less control of the physical work environment, and more. 

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to drive a sense of belonging for mobile workers and field service teams. In this article, we’ll discuss some strategies for tackling this thorny issue, from creating good workflows to setting workers up with the right tools.

8 Ways to Improve Belonging for Mobile Workers

Belonging at work is complicated and subjective. What drives belonging for one worker or one role may not work for another. A robust strategy will depend on the specifics of your organization, industry, and employee demographics. That said, here are some strategies that can work for many companies:

Prioritize learning and development

Make it clear that your business invests in and cares about staff by actively encouraging opportunities for learning and professional development. First and foremost: create a clear onboarding timeline and process for new hires. It sets the tone right away that the organization is committed to staff and wants them to succeed. 

Another approach is offering to pay for industry-specific training. Maybe there are certification programs or exams that can help them better carry out certain processes or even qualify for more senior positions. For instance, there are many exams that telecommunications technicians can take to specialize in a specific sub-sector or upskill. Advertising that these options are available and company-funded shows employees that there’s a vested interest in their development. 

Additionally, companies can implement direct feedback from mobile workers—whether that’s collected via regular performance reviews or an independent survey—to see what kind of training they’re interested in. This might be cross-training with other, related departments or even reskilling so they can make a vertical move. 

Making these options available and actively encouraging employees to take advantage of them means people are more likely to feel like there’s a true give and take, and thus more likely to be engaged and feel like they belong. 

Invest in tools built for mobile work

Companies that invest in the right equipment and software for their mobile workers do everyone a favor. Even the most skilled and knowledgeable team member can’t do the job without the right tools. And if employees are frustrated and held back from their potential, they’re likely to feel disengaged and undervalued—both deathblows to a sense of belonging.

Prioritize tools that are built with mobile-first capabilities that directly speak to the needs of employees on the go. Offline access, real-time data synching, the ability to self-report availability on mobile devices, excellent uptime, and clean UX are some of the primary features to look for. With a robust platform that offers these capabilities, mobile workers can access and input the information they need when they need to and spend more time with customers, completing jobs, and directly contributing to whatever goals your company has set. 

Streamline workflows for common tasks

Similar to how people feel undervalued at work—and ultimately, like they don’t belong—if they don’t have the right tools, people disengage when they’re forced to follow clunky, inefficient workflows. To reduce friction in everyday work, talk to your staff. Hear what they have to say about how processes play out in live scenarios, what’s holding them back and what they actually need. 

Lean on field service automation to ensure tasks are as simple as possible. For example, instead of making field workers manually upload photos from the job site to a shared server, utilize technology that automatically syncs photos on a device to your cloud network. Or, auto-populate known data onto common forms: use an employee’s log-in info to populate their name, their GPS data to fill in arrival time, their client’s name from your CRM or scheduling software, etc. 

Take the onus off employees for these mundane tasks to help them focus on the work that really matters. This helps frontline workers stay engaged and feel their time spent with customers is making a significant impact.  

Recognize employees’ successes

Another way to boost your staff’s sense of belonging at work is to be vocal about their wins. Did a real estate agent at your brokerage close a big sale? Did a patient leave glowing feedback for a home healthcare worker’s attentive care? Did a fiber technician get a commercial customer’s internet back up and running in record time during a busy sales day? Congratulate them directly (be sure to tell their team, too). 

In one recent survey, nearly 78% of respondents said they’d be more productive if they were recognized more often, and nearly 82% said being recognized for their work made them feel more engaged. According to Great Place to Work, recognition is a top motivator for workers to do their best, and those who feel recognized at work are twice as likely to bring new ideas forward. 

Simple acts of recognition can make a substantial impact on employees’ work experience and whether or not they feel like a valued part of the team. Companies with a sizable deskless workforce should also consider a recognition program or employee recognition software. These tools ensure that workers receive recognition from each other and from their manager when they do excellent work, and many platforms offer social features that encourage—and even incentivize—recognizing each other.

Encourage communication among teams and departments

Communication is the pillar upon which a good business runs. In fact, a 2023 Grammarly study found that 72% of the business leaders surveyed believe their team’s productivity increases when there’s effective communication. And poor communication throughout an organization can quickly unravel the benefits of the strategies we’ve already discussed. A 2024 Project.co survey found that communication logjams caused 70% of respondents to waste time and led 53% to experience burnout, stress and fatigue at work—none of which inspire belonging.

Create an environment that encourages mobile workers to keep other colleagues informed. Make it easy for staff in the field to reach administrators, schedulers, management, and sales—and vice versa. Set up and enforce standards for how and when teams communicate with each other. For example, establish the expectation that schedulers send field staff upcoming schedules at least three days in advance. Or require operations to meet monthly with field service managers to discuss bottlenecks or inefficiencies that crop up in day-to-day site visits. 

Make this kind of communication and collaboration easy with tools that include capabilities like automated location updates to help managers and schedulers see which field workers are near newly added jobs, or mobile-friendly messaging that helps office workers stay in touch with field staff throughout the day. 

Use data to improve field operations

Once good communication processes are established, it opens the door for connection, collaboration and eventually operational excellence—especially with good data in hand.  

Track and use data tied to KPIs like number of jobs completed per day/week/month, time to first contact, workforce utilization, and variance from standard to identify and resolve inefficiencies. Your field employees, for instance, can log when they close out a job, and your scheduling team can analyze that data to determine if jobs are taking longer than expected. If they are, schedulers can take that data to field service management and operations to collaborate and drill down on why jobs are taking longer than expected. 

This sort of cross-functional work not only engages employees, but it helps remove blockers and inefficiencies they run up against in their day-to-day work. And the more engaged, less stressed your team is, the more likely they are to feel valued and accepted at work. 

Create meaningful manager-employee relationships

Managers who foster an environment where team members feel safe, appreciated, and like they belong make a significant impact on employee experience. In fact, according to Gallup, managers account for more than 70% of the variance in how engaged employees said they were at work. The manager-employee relationship is even more critical for field service staff, since many of them work solo throughout the day. Unlike office workers, they don’t have the same opportunities to casually connect with managers throughout the day to get advice, brainstorm or troubleshoot.

As such, field service managers need to take extra care to ensure their teams have everything they need to do their best work:

• Set them up for success – Advocate to get field workers the right tools, training, and workload. That means not only making sure they have access to good training and reference materials, but also providing mobile-first technology that automates smaller tasks and optimizes schedules so they have more time for the most important work.
• Connect work with organization goals – Make sure employees understand how their work ties to the vision and strategies of the business. Knowing how their skills and expertise impact their team, their department, and the company as a whole helps people feel connected to a larger purpose and fosters a sense of belonging. 
• Facilitate helpful feedback – Managers should have meaningful conversations with their reports as often as necessary. Come performance review season, there shouldn’t be any surprises about opportunities for improvement; those conversations should happen as soon as possible, and managers should be coaching throughout the year. But this feedback goes both ways. Managers should actively solicit feedback from their field staff and truly listen to it—and act on it when necessary. This give and take helps build a strong connection and helps employees feel like a valuable part of the team.
• Promote connection – Encourage team members to connect with each other whenever possible, and create opportunities for connection. Maybe that means creating regular opportunities for junior staff to shadow more senior staff. Or maybe that means setting up optional social get-togethers after work hours. Consider unique ways to connect workers with each other that will work within your workplace culture, employee development goals, and industry.

Create an organizational culture that fosters belonging

Many of the strategies we’ve discussed above tie directly into workplace culture, which is the overall set of beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors that employees of a company share. To foster a culture that leads to staff feeling a sense of belonging, it takes a multifaceted approach.

First off, listen to what your team members have to say: Develop and send out surveys for them to assess company culture; include questions that relate to sense of belonging, like if they feel valued at work, if they feel comfortable voicing critical feedback with their managers, etc. 

Then, apply that feedback to make sure policies and practices are equitable. For example, are there accommodations for workers with neurodivergence or, say, hearing-impaired employees? Have promotions been equitable enough that leadership isn’t dominated by a particular demographic group? Finally, ensure your organization is communicating company news clearly and thoughtfully by using inclusive language in both internal and external announcements. 

These sorts of practices and policies all encourage inclusion and help people feel that they’re accepted for who they are in the workplace.

Set your mobile workers up with the right tools

Building up your field workers’ sense of belonging means bettering many other aspects of the company. From building smooth, accessible communication channels to streamlining and automating processes so employees can do their best work and keep customers happy, good workforce management helps your team feel valued, heard, and accepted.

Skedulo’s intelligent field service management platform helps companies do all this and more. 

Keep employees’ workloads manageable with smart scheduling solutions that automate and optimize schedules based on which team members are the best fit for a job. Foster open communication and collaboration with Skedulo’s app built specifically for mobile workers. It supports multiple languages and boasts a user-friendly, accessibility-first design so resources are easily available to all employees.  

Want to learn more about how Skedulo can help you support field service staff to feel included? See how Skedulo helped Connexin improve the day-to-day experience of workers or how Skedulo led Regal Health to better retention of home healthcare workers.