WorkJam

Andrew Myers, Managing Director, APAC

Andrew Myers, a longstanding business management professional, summarizes this predicament very well. “If you think about it, most people today have digital relationships with their families, friends and maybe their favourite brands, but not necessarily with their employers,” he says. Myers’ words shed light on the fact that many organizations lack the necessary digital resources or practical strategic guidance to implement new practices that improve communication to frontline employees. Such an organizational setup does not bode well for the company as a whole—especially in today’s pandemic-struck world— where worker productivity levels can plummet, and a company’s bottom line is directly affected. An improved line of communication is quickly becoming the need of the hour across several industries as c-suite executives everywhere recognize the value of enhancing their workforce management strategies. Fortunately for them, WorkJam, the frontline digital workplace, has spent the last seven years decoding the secrets of employee engagement and proffers a simple yet powerful vehicle to capacitate a healthy digital relationship between the business and dutiful frontline employees.

#AlignTheFrontline

According to Myers, who currently heads the APAC division of WorkJam as its managing director, WorkJam leverages the mobility of modern digital technologies to effectuate this direct communication within an organization. The firm’s co-founders (who were instrumental in the success of Hybris, now acquired by SAP) did something quite unconventional when establishing WorkJam: they carried over a concept popular in the ecommerce arena to the world of human resources. “E-commerce today is all about creating adigital, frictionless relationship between a business and a customer. We have taken the same ideology and applied it to the employer-employee relationship, which is not common in this space,” expresses Myers. With such an eventful start to the business, WorkJam quickly understood the industry’s challenges and promptly developed incredibly robust digital workplace solutions with a catchy hashtag “#AlignTheFrontline” to support companies in their journey to improve productivity.

WorkJam helps organizations orchestrate their frontline workforce—in a modular fashion—around the areas of employee communication, learning, task management, among many others. It also delivers improved retention through its exclusive OpenShift Marketplace, which creates waves of opportunities for both employers and those seeking employment actively.
Traditionally, frontline employees are hired for one particular location with a dedicated number of shifts.

We better employee labour capacity by enabling mobile learning and open shift picking in each market

Arming the Workforce

WorkJam strives to uphold a collaborative mindset, ensuring that the client’s entire organization, including frontline workers, are provided with the necessary operational capabilities to steer a business to success, all the while complying with the IT preferences of the enterprise. Its administrative functions ensure that clients comply with the current labour regulations, both nationally and internationally, arming them with administrative tools, security, and fencing capabilities. Irrespective of the client’s business footprint, WorkJam scales its solutions and addresses multiple requirements, small or large; the company recently published that it supported frontline workers across 42 languages and countries.

In the case of organizations that use an intranet for housing policies or procedures, frontline employees have limited or no access to this network, which makes it difficult for the workforce to engage their management. WorkJam’s platform equips business leaders with multiple tools to communicate with their employees more directly and quickly. The company also pays close attention to the relevance of information exchanged across the value chain, ensuring that all stakeholders are only provided with the necessary information, thereby improving business efficiency. It also streamlines paper-based information aggregation by moving such workflows and tasks onto the digital platform.

More importantly, it consolidates business-critical resources on a single pane of glass, amalgamating communication, task management, and learning functions, all collectively enhancing the user experience. Case in point, the platform fosters a consistent adoption rate of 90 percent while also enabling businesses to develop comprehensive workflows through sequencing surveys, messages, micro-learning, and similar activities. Effectively, such information management could address the root causes of operational management challaneges. In turn, clients can substantially reduce their operating costswhile also recording higher frontline productivity. Recently the independent firm Forrester Research found that WorkJam clients enjoy a 410 percent return on investments in as little as six months, validating WorkJam’s merits in the HR space.

With such a robust digital solution for the HR marketplace, WorkJam is helping companies worldwide improve their employer-employee relationships as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, even during unforeseen emergency situations. For example, take their longstanding collaboration with a global mobility provider that operates across 5,500 locations worldwide.The client in question had already implemented WorkJam’s solutions for mobile punch and communications throughout North America; however, the onset of COVID-19 meant that they had to contain the spread of the virus across its locations. Continuing its prosperous relationship with WorkJam, the client approached WorkJam’s Customer Success Team to develop a scalable, easy-to-manage health check solution. WorkJam’s proposed solution ensures that the combined use of technology could proffer health, safety and peace of mind to both the mobility solution provider and its employees.

Across Australia, EMEA, and the Americas, WorkJam helped c-suite executives overcome COVID-19 pandemic-related challenges, excelling their organizations by constantly updating and informing in real-time. WorkJam Learning and OpenShift Market feature further bolstered their digital success by upskilling their workforce to take on workload from across the organization.

WorkJam co-developed with its customer base added value functions, including multi-point geofencing, mobile punch, and mandatory response communications. The initiative collectively minimized employee crowding while upholding social distancing norms needed for collective safety. It also oversaw the development of a reliable, user-friendly route for employees to conduct health checks at all of the client’s locations.

Founding Principles

Numerous such success stories attest to WorkJam’s capabilities in nurturing a holistic employee-centric culture in today’s fast-paced enterprise arena, a culture rooted in the company’s establishment. Interestingly, the company was founded as a response to three critical questions that needed resolution:
1. Digital workplaces exist at the head office, but given the importance of the frontline workforce to operational and customer success, why don’t they have one too?
2. What would a frontline digital workplace need to look like to suit the unique way each organization works?
3. What capabilities are needed to drive frontline productivity that genuinely represents each organization’s brand?

“Every day, we come to work thinking about these questions and how we can fundamentally progress the frontline worker to employer dynamics by providing the right tools needed to manage the frontline better while simultaneously improving hourly workers’ economic and mental wellbeing,” adds Myers.

In the foreseeable future, the company intends to continue improving the communication between business leaders and their employees, with recruitment and geographical expansion plans in the works. Case in point, WorkJam works with some of the most popular brands across Australia and the world, enabling seamless communication, learning, shift, and task management for over 3,000,000 associates in their respective industries, delivering what it calls workforce orchestration