IoT and Employee Empowerment: How Connected Devices are Redefining Work

Employee empowerment is essential when implementing IoT devices into the workforce. But it can be easier said than done.

Picture yourself walking through a large retail chain store at the height of the holiday season. As you navigate the aisles, dozens of employees are hard at work—restocking inventory, helping other customers find what they need, and checking people out at the registers.

Now, imagine it all coming to a screeching halt as a handheld scanner or receipt printer stops working. Employees try to reboot their devices and troubleshoot the issue, but in the meantime, they’re losing patience (and sales) with every passing minute.

Digital experiences extend beyond white-collar employees sitting at their desks all day. IoT devices are increasingly popular because they empower dispersed employees in retail, grocery, travel, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and dozens of other sectors. One study revealed that IoT could enable more than $10 trillion in value by 2030. But if you want to keep up, you need to ensure your devices aren’t going down.

The Impact of Disruption

For all the benefits of IoT solutions, they’re also susceptible to crashes and other issues that affect your employees. "Different ecosystems, IP, technologies, and standards have made today’s world of connected devices unfortunately fragmented and clunky" (MIT Technology Review).

Unlike laptops and other standard hardware, replacing many IoT devices is difficult, and multiple employees often share them. As a result, disruptions in IoT devices can have a widespread impact on your employees’ productivity and morale.

Common issues include disrupted workflows as you lose access to communication systems, smart sensors, and other critical tools. This can lead to increased downtime as workers spend time waiting for IT support or finding alternative solutions, and, depending on which devices and networks this affects, data loss, and security breaches.

Minimize Your Risk—and the Impact on Employees

It's clear that employees need empowerment to feel confident using IoT. So, how do you prevent your IoT devices from crashing—or at least minimize the downtime and other issues that can frustrate your employees?

Learn How Devices Work

Start by understanding how your devices are working. The industries that rely on IoT devices the most, like manufacturing, retail, and healthcare, often have heterogeneous platforms and disconnected IT footprints, so it’s hard to get a full understanding of how or if these devices are working together. Lakeside has tools that let companies monitor the performance, usage, and health of IoT devices, including their memory utilization and network connectivity.

Understand How to Fix Problems

Set up real-time diagnostics and alerts for your IoT devices, so you can quickly identify and fix problems remotely. Your IT team needs to be able to identify the root cause of device performance issues without having to travel to the manufacturing or sales floor. By gathering data on performance and health, you can see any issues in real-time. We typically recommend looking for an endpoint monitoring solution that includes anomaly detection to detect unusual behavior in IoT devices, resource optimization tools, compliance tracking for industry standards, and full lifecycle management for IoT devices.

Gather Data

Make sure you’re gathering high-quality data from your IoT devices. Focus on breadth, depth, data history, and other critical factors—especially if you’re considering new AI integrations that can give you even more insight and more impactful results.

Utilize Feedback

Monitor the end-user experience to ensure that your IoT devices are supporting your employees and your customers. With feedback from the front-line workers using these IoT devices, you can make smart, timely, data-driven decisions to improve the employee experience and ultimately the customer experience.

IoT devices–as with any tech–may never be 100% reliable, but with the right support systems in place, you can give your employees the tools they need—and the empowerment they deserve.