Although the labor market has softened slightly in 2024, many economies are confronting some of the tightest conditions they have experienced in the last two decades. Just last year, Singapore, the US, Japan, Norway, and Sweden all had more job openings than job seekers. Layer on structural factors such as skills gaps and geographic constraints, and it’s clear why company leaders are still very worried about attracting and keeping great talent.

In an earlier version of our “Making Work Work” survey, we explored employment trends among office workers—defined as employees who can do most of their work from anywhere, provided they have a laptop and internet access. We found that people’s enjoyment at work strongly correlates with their decision to stay in their role. In the most recent iteration, we sought to understand the attitudes of deskless workers—those who need to be at a physical location or asset to conduct most of their tasks—toward their work.

Deskless employees make up roughly 80% of the global workforce^[1]“The State of Technology for the Deskless Workforce 2020,” Emergence, October 1, 2020., in such critical sectors as health care, education, and manufacturing. Many of these jobs are physically draining, lower-salaried, and often undervalued by communities despite being essential to their function. These employees also have a significant impact on the bottom line: at employee-centric companies like Costco and Trader Joe’s, strong performance on employee metrics translates into strong performance across customer (and business) metrics such as Net Promoter Score and sales per employee.