Over the past year, we’ve seen our customers overcome tremendous challenges. Frontline workers and their companies have shown just how incredibly flexible, creative, and resilient they can be. As a company dedicated to empowering frontline workers, the Beekeeper team has never felt more inspired to deliver and improve our product.
We’re particularly excited to see how teams are already making real improvements to their operational processes with the newest additions to Beekeeper’s Operational Suite: customizable Forms and Tasks.
What Can Teams Do with Forms in Beekeeper?
Imagine you’re a machinist in a factory. You’re scheduled for four shifts next week, but a family member is sick and you’ll need to take the week off to care for them. You don’t have any other shifts scheduled this week, and you didn’t have a chance to submit your paper PTO form while you were at work.
Now, you need to drive 30 minutes back to the plant to fill out and submit your PTO form. From there, the form enters a stack of other PTO requests that might take 2-3 days to approve. You’re going to have a stressful weekend checking up on the request.
This is a scenario that comes up across industries and departments. It’s not just PTO requests that trigger expensive, time-consuming paper-based processes.
These are the problems our customers are solving with Forms in Beekeeper.
Beekeeper’s Forms feature is part of a suite of operational tools that help teams digitize and streamline processes. With Forms in Beekeeper, administrators can digitize virtually any form with an easy drag and drop interface.
Forms can be shared with the whole company, or with specific teams or locations. That way frontline team members can fill out and submit relevant forms from anywhere on mobile or on the web.
Admins can download form submissions from the Beekeeper dashboard, or send form submissions to a specific user or Stream. Form submissions are also webhook-enabled. That means teams can build workflows that span multiple tools or systems. For example, they can automatically send a form submission to email or to a third party task management system.
With the flexibility of multiple field types, we’ve seen customers streamline workflows around:
- Employee order forms
- Equipment order forms
- Equipment maintenance
- Name badge order forms
- PTO requests
- Room cleaning checklists
- Opening shift checklists
- … and more!
We’re especially excited to see teams digitizing forms to keep employees safe, like daily health check forms. What’s more, we’ve seen companies reporting increased activation and engagement from staff after rolling out digital daily health checks.
One customer increased the number of staff members who receive updates by 16% by simply digitizing just one daily health check form.
Team members who weren’t interested in receiving news and updates before are now using the platform daily, and getting more critical information as a result.
And it doesn’t stop with engagement — forms are driving real cost savings.
Several companies have reported saving between 8 and 15 minutes per employee per day by switching from a line to submit a paper form, to a digital alternative. After a full year of the pandemic, this could amount to over $260,000 in time-related cost savings for a 1,000-employee company.
What Can Teams Do with Tasks in Beekeeper?
Tasks is the newest addition to Beekeeper’s Operational Suite — a suite of tools to help teams collaborate more efficiently on the frontline. With Tasks in Beekeeper, frontline workers can create to-do lists for themselves on mobile, or keep track of tasks assigned to them by their managers. Tasks can include due dates, images, links to documents in the Document Library, links to 3rd party solutions, or links to forms or checklists in Beekeeper.
Frontline employees can create new tasks directly from chat messages, quickly replacing disorganized, ad-hoc messaging about daily activities, or they can add new assignments directly in Tasks.
In this way, Tasks can easily help teams stay organized around things like:
- Employee onboarding
- Maintenance issues
- Room or section cleaning assignments
- Equipment inspection and maintenance
- … and more!
Plus, team members and managers can stay organized with other variable daily activities. For example, managers in manufacturing can make mobile to-do lists to keep track of employee requests or issues employees flag while walking the floor at the beginning of a shift. With a mobile checklist, things are less likely to be forgotten or overlooked.
What Can Teams Do with Forms, Tasks, and Documents Together?
This is where things get really exciting. With Forms and Tasks available on-the-go, teams can start streamlining operations between management and team members.
A task to clean a patient or guest room is great! But it’s even better when it’s attached to a full room cleaning checklist. With Forms and Tasks together, managers can confirm that all assigned rooms have been cleaned and that each room was cleaned correctly. Employees can check off every step in the room cleaning process. Then, they can submit the room cleaning checklist to a manager or add it to a tracking spreadsheet. Finally, they can check off the task for that room, adding the room cleaning task to their manager’s list of completed assigned tasks.
Similarly, a task to perform regular maintenance on a machine is useful. But it’s even more useful when it contains an equipment maintenance checklist. Frontline workers can open the task, click into the checklist, go through the steps, send the completed checklist to their manager, and then mark the task as complete.
A task to read the employee handbook during onboarding is great as a reminder. But when it’s linked directly to a mobile version of that handbook, it’s even better. New employees don’t need to search for what they need to perform the task. It’s all right there in the task, interconnected within the same app.
With Tasks, teams can make other operational tools actionable. They can streamline workflows and coordinate work across and within teams in a format optimized for frontline teams.
So, What’s Next for Tasks and Forms in Beekeeper?
As with all our features, Tasks and Forms are able to integrate with other systems. This helps teams keep the tools they love and bring more of their frontline solutions together in one easy-to-use interface.
Plus, we’ll continue building functionality that makes these features more flexible, connected, and automated, so the Beekeeper platform can do more work for you. With mobile-optimized tools, communication channels, and workflows, companies can deliver efficient, stress-free real-time collaboration for their frontline teams.
