If the epidemic It made us completely rethink the way we work, that We – The number of workers at home who enter meetings in their pajamas while zooming in – leaves a large workforce that continues to be physically available for work all the time. As knowledge workers explore the complexities of the virtual office, frontline workers across critical industries still lack the basic tools they need to perform simple tasks like changing shifts, asking HR questions, or seeing when their next paycheck arrives.
“This workforce cannot be overlooked, there is now a business imperative…[and] There is a very exciting opportunity to create more pathways into the middle class,” Anthill founder and CEO Muriel Clawson told TechCrunch.
Clawson and Antill founder and CTO Young-Jae Kim met through a PhD program in industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Georgia. Through their shared academic research interests, Clawson has identified what he describes as a “huge gap” in the relationship between front-line, deskless workers and their employers — a gap into which workers frequently fall, to the detriment of all:
[There are] Globally, 2.7 billion people have never sat down at a computer to do their work. So they never worked from home during the pandemic and never will because they really can’t do their jobs that way. So often people think about production, distribution – basically anyone out there working in the field with their hands on the land.
These people don’t use software, and especially work software, they just don’t use it in general and the reason is that it doesn’t sit on computers, they don’t use something on the desktop. You may not be using email. [and] They probably don’t even have an email address. And they’re not downloading or using apps on their phones — or they don’t even have a phone to use apps on.
For employers managing an in-person workforce, bullying is a big issue. Many employees are not fluent in the language of their workplace and face other barriers to communication in the workplace, creating communication problems when they cannot communicate effectively. Anthill, based on the disruptive Startup Battlefield platform, offers a non-app way for employers to connect with employees – and vice versa – through text messaging, a secure platform that reaches everyone and doesn’t let anyone fall through the cracks.
“We knew as researchers if we wanted these people to talk to us and stay in our studies,” Clausen said. “And we’re very bullish on technology that connects people where they are, that works within the fabric of where they already work and live their lives, and doesn’t require them to learn a whole new set of technologies.”
The idea is to give employees a way to get any information they need – a pay schedule, a meeting with their manager, a sick day – all via text message. And a way to automate that much on the employer side while providing a complete data portal without forcing everyone to download or jump through apps they can’t manage.
To make access to those resources even more equitable, Anthill translates its services into more than 100 languages—a feature that helps employers retain employees who may experience language isolation in the workplace.
“Many of us have family members who have not been able to participate in benefits adoption or know how to have any kind of non-work community through their employer, like tax season and schedules and the basics — because language was a barrier,” Clawson said.
“There are a lot of people who can work in English, but that doesn’t mean it’s their preferred language, and it doesn’t mean it’s going to be the language in which they successfully navigate their work.”
Anthill plans to focus on a few key out-of-doors industries, including manufacturing, distribution (think Amazon warehouses), and agriculture. Kim and Clawson see opportunities to connect deskless workers with employers in retail and healthcare, but note that those areas are less tech-savvy than other sectors.
“We really focused on individual needs. [and] “What they need is communication,” Kim told TechCrunch. “Those employees, of course, need very simple things, but they want answers right away. While some employers have gone the route of using chatbots and apps, Anthill wants managers to keep up-to-date answers to common questions and leverage technology.” Focused solutions allow them to personalize the resources in a way that they can forget about.
It may be hard to imagine for both knowledge workers and big tech companies, but the two mediums that Clausen Anthill most frequently replaces are AM radio followed by old-fashioned billboards.
“We try to stay focused on the industry vertical. So right now our focus is on manufacturing workers in plants or distribution workers in distribution centers or truck drivers,” Clausen said. “That’s where we’ve seen the biggest pain points and that’s where we’re going to focus first.”
Anthill first launched in alpha in late 2020, with paid pilots and a beta version of the product next year. The company It launched the full version of the platform in 2022 and currently operates at more than 300 sites in the US, with contracts in the pipeline globally in 2023.
According to the company, large employers that test Anthill often conduct a pilot test with a single distribution center or a set of regional locations and scale up from there. You can buy Antihill per user, per month, which makes it relatively easy to scale the platform and exit if it’s good. The services are opt-in, not on-demand, but Kim and Clawson have seen rapid adoption through word of mouth, starting with the first employee who successfully answered a required question.
“It’s really an interesting problem to solve — I think we’re working together on the most overlooked, underappreciated workforce that has an increasingly important voice,” Clawson said.
