What Is a Mobile Workforce Management Platform?

It's amazing how, when you aspire to start a company and obsess over this problem like I have for twenty-five years, you can miss the obvious. Being a person who hates clichés, I have to admit I wasn't seeing the forest for the trees! Ugh, still hate clichés.

But in our weekly leadership meeting, our new CIO, Brad, asked a simple question: what is the short answer when someone asks what we are building here? Wow, what an embarrassing question for a founder to be stumped by. I have long-paragraph (or multi-paragraph) answers, but nothing that, with a few short words, helps us explain to someone what Headjacks is.

It didn't take long for us to figure out the easiest way to say it. Headjacks is a Mobile Workforce Management Platform. That's actually an established category of technology, though I think when most people hear it they think of the field service models of bigger platforms like Salesforce or SAP. As a matter of fact, when I first asked AI, it came back with a web page from Salesforce. And it certainly checked some of the boxes in our vision for this platform, but we tend to think of it differently here. So what does it mean to us? What are the parts of being a mobile workforce, or being the people whose company depends on a mobile workforce, that we want to try to improve? It came down to a few categories that can best be defined by surprisingly contradictory terms:

Easily Powerful

You want the power of being able to create custom surveys for the unique types of work you do for your client. You just don't want the process to be tedious and rigid. How do you return work information to your client that will have dozens or even hundreds of data points per job? How do you make sure a mistake on the survey doesn't cause your client to not be able to easily interpret the data? How do you identify a small number of problems when your workers took thousands of pictures of their work? How do you make the surveys adapt to the uniqueness of the locations where they're doing the work? And how do you get changes to your workers in real time? These were the problems we set out to solve, and Headjacks 1.0 is only the beginning.

Governed Flexibility

Mobile workers often choose their profession because they like the flexibility in their line of work. But bogging them down with a lot of bureaucracy, or juggling complicated systems or devices, robs them of that. Many of these workers are part of the gig economy and want to be able to work for multiple companies. For the worker, delivering work on the Headjacks platform is as simple as using your own device and downloading the free Headjacks mobile app. They maintain a profile, they get the full flexibility the work allows, and the companies that hire them get results in real time through a governed, AI-enabled analytics platform that asks the worker only what the client needs to know.

Respectful Accountability

You want to be able to look your client in the eye and say confidently that the work they are paying you for is getting done, and getting done with quality. But you don't want to badger your workforce with questions or make them go out of their way to prove they did what they were hired to do. Work assurance is built into the Headjacks platform natively and naturally. Only when they are at the job site and ready to start working does it verify they are there. And the ability to capture pictures while verifying and analyzing in real time with AI lets you know the work is being done without feeling like Big Brother.

In the coming blogs we will dive more into the features that address these topics, how they work, and what they can do for your individual use cases. Our goal at Headjacks is no less than to be The Evolution of Mobile Workforce Management, and we are just getting started.