The Human Element
Everybody Has a Phone, Not Everybody Has a Laptop: HR for Deskless Teams
HR leaders in healthcare, hospitality, and home care explain how AI reaches frontline workers: mobile-first, around the clock, in their own language.
Most workplace technology—including HR technology—is built for people who work at desks. The problem is that most of the world's workforce doesn't work at a desk.
Deskless workers are the frontline workforce, like nurses, dock hands, caregivers, line cooks, and shift supervisors, who keep the physical economy running. Different analyses estimate they make up between 75-80% of the global workforce. But according to Deloitte, only 23% of frontline workers believe they have access to the technology they need to be productive. For the HR teams supporting deskless workers, that gap represents a daily operational challenge: a workforce that can't easily ask questions, check policies, or find the right people or resources to get them answers.
Dana Rutland, who leads talent for home care franchise Right At Home, described this constraint during a conversation on The Human Element.
"Everybody has a phone, but not everybody has a laptop," she said.
What she meant was that the desk-based HR playbook assumes employees have a screen and a login where they can access the company intranet, the emailed policy PDF, and the self-service benefits portal or payroll dashboard. The reality, though, is that a huge share of the workforce simply doesn't have that kind of access.
But now, people leaders are exploring new ways to close the gap. They're using new AI tools to meet people where they already are: on a phone, in their own language, at all hours of the day (and night). On The Human Element, the HR leaders running deskless workforces across healthcare, hospitality, home care, manufacturing, and early childhood education described what that looks like in practice. Here's what they had to say.
What Makes HR for Deskless Workers So Hard?
For years, frontline HR has been different from its corporate counterpart in many meaningful ways. In our conversations with people leaders, four main challenges came up again and again:
1. Access
The defining feature of deskless work is the absence of a desk—and with it, typically a company laptop, corporate email habit, and the assumption that information is digital and just a login away. Roughly four out of five frontline workers don't have a company email account, which breaks down most tools HR relies on to reach people.
2. Hours
Corporate HR runs on business hours, but the frontline doesn't. DJ Campbell, an HR executive at Sanford Health, a roughly 60,000-person health system, pointed out that employees' benefits questions rarely surface at 2 p.m. on a weekday. They come up after a night shift, when the employee is comparing plans at the kitchen table with their loved ones—and the HR office is closed. A workforce that never collectively clocks out needs support that doesn't either.
3. Volume and Turnover
Frontline hiring is more likely to happen at a scale and speed that corporate recruiting rarely sees. Jill Wrobel, CHRO at Brunswick, described the company's seasonal hiring patterns at its Freedom Boat Club locations, where dock hands may be needed for cycles that only last a few weeks at a time. Still, every cycle is a fresh wave of onboarding, questions, and paperwork, multiplied across 500 locations, in Brunswick's case.
4. Competition for Talent
Frontline employers are competing for workers against other companies in their industry—but also against every other employer hiring hourly talent in the same zip code.
Angela Briggs-Paige, who leads HR for early childhood education provider Acelero Learning, said she competes for the same candidates with Target, Amazon, and Starbucks, who offer "$18 an hour with benefits where nobody bites you during your shift." She also added that the old method of "posting and praying on Indeed" no longer works because the talent pool is just too competitive.
How Is AI Already Working for Deskless Workers?
In our conversations with HR leaders, they pointed to these examples of how AI is reshaping HR for deskless workers:
1. Recruiting At Volume
Dana Rutland described using AI to narrow a field of roughly 30 caregiver candidates down to the three to five worth a case manager's time, then to keep candidates warm through the process so no one falls out of the funnel. Her recruiting assistant has a name and a personality, and candidates respond to it so strongly that they tell her they can't wait to meet it.
2. Onboarding Across Languages and Borders
Ani Nazaryan, Chief People Officer at Las Vegas hospitality operator Siegel Group, elegantly automated an onboarding flow across multiple states, languages, and generations.
"There's a lot of diversity at work, a lot of different generations, a lot of nuance in multiple states. And we have a lot of language barriers," she explained. "We employ front of house employees, back of house employees. So they get these beautifully drafted emails and notifications from our system saying, 'Here's what you have to do. Here's a little video to watch and an attachment to open.'"
3. Matching and Scheduling
Dana Rutland's team uses AI to surface better, faster matches between caregivers and clients, and to absorb the daily "curveballs" of scheduling a distributed, around-the-clock workforce; for example, quickly handling callouts without leaving vulnerable clients unstaffed.
4. Absorbing Seasonal Spikes
Brunswick CHRO Jill Wrobel described an interesting use case for AI: In her seasonal business, she said AI could ingest service manuals and parts data so that when demand spikes — as it often seasonally does in marine recreation — technicians and dealers can find what they need and get customers back on the water without burying the support team. This directly benefits the frontline team; they spend less time hunting for information and more time actually helping customers.
How Should HR Leaders Bring AI To a Deskless Workforce
For other HR leaders considering using AI to bridge the technology gap between their deskless workers and their HR operations, here's a playbook you can follow:
1. Meet Employees Where They Are (On Their Phones)
Technology for deskless workers needs to be mobile-first and login-light. Dana Rutland said that where you previously used a company intranet, you now need a mobile app (which becomes the intranet for a deskless workforce). And it needs to be made for mobile devices, not adapted for phones as an afterthought.
2. Answer Around the Clock
The entire advantage of AI support for a 24/7 workforce is that it's awake when HR isn't. Self-service that only works during business hours isn't really self-service at all.
3. Build In Handoff Governance Before You Launch
Decide in advance exactly where the automated flow stops and a human steps in. The escalation path isn't failure — it's a feature that keeps automation from alienating people or making the wrong choices.
4. Start with One Site or Function
DJ Campbell's advice is to pick a single function and a willing pilot group, then collect their feedback and make concrete improvements before scaling.
5. Measure Time-To-Value in Weeks, Not Quarters
Angela Briggs-Paige said employees should be able to see the benefits of a new tool within about 30 days. If it takes longer than that, they're likely to lose patience.
What Do Deskless Workers Actually Want From AI?
Frontline workers aren't afraid of AI (or technology in general), but they want tools that help them do their jobs better—not get in their way. People leaders said things like upskilling and reskilling, trust, and human connection are most important to deskless workers during AI rollouts:
- DJ Campbell: "We found a lot of folks wanting to learn what I call 'power skills' and re-skilling in things like communication and listening."
- Angela Briggs-Paige: "Trust was the currency for us. That was what we wanted to focus on because we didn't want our people to be afraid to use it. I believe AI adoption is about trust, period."
- Ani Nazaryan: "You can use AI to write up a document, but you're the one delivering it. AI cannot replace human empathy and the connection and the conversation needs to be owned by a leader."
The Frontline Deserves the Same HR Everyone Else Has
Desk workers have long had self-service HR. But the 80% of the workforce that doesn't sit at a desk has mostly been left out of that convenience—because the tools were never built for them.
AI is changing that. And people leaders who recognize it don't treat frontline HR like a lesser version of the corporate kind. Industries that run on frontline labor deserve the same convenient, accessible HR that corporate workers have grown used to. It's now up to HR professionals to embrace the tools that democratize the access.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a deskless worker?
A deskless worker—also called a frontline worker—is an employee who does their job away from a desk and computer: nurses, caregivers, retail and warehouse staff, drivers, manufacturing and construction workers, hospitality teams, and more.
Why is HR harder for deskless and frontline workers?
HR leaders pointed to four main challenges:
- Limited access to technology because most frontline workers have no corporate email or laptop
- Around-the-clock hours that don't match HR's business hours
- High-volume and seasonal hiring that multiplies onboarding and questions
- Intense competition for hourly talent
Together, these challenges mean traditional desk-based HR tools, like intranets, email, and self-service portals, reach only a fraction of the people who need them.
What HR technology works best for frontline employees?
Mobile-first tools that require minimal login friction, work around the clock, and meet workers in their own language. AI-powered support that can answer routine HR questions instantly—and hand off to a human when judgment is required—is particularly well-suited to a deskless workforce.
How can AI help deskless and frontline workers?
AI helps most by handing time back. It can screen and respond to high volumes of job candidates, translate onboarding into multiple languages, improve scheduling and matching, and answer routine HR and policy questions 24/7 on a phone. This frees up HR professionals to do the important, human work that's still needed, regardless of whether a workforce is deskless.
What HR tasks should stay human for a frontline workforce?
Anything that affects a person's livelihood, shapes the culture, or requires judgment. AI can screen, schedule, onboard, and answer routine questions, but hiring decisions, sensitive conversations, conflict resolution, and anything touching someone's job security must be handled by a human.
