Revolutionising the Future of the Frontline Workforce
At Northzone we’ve already invested in several companies within the Future of Work over the years, including the likes of Personio, Wagestream, Medwing, and Yonder (Benefits). While our interest in the space remains broad, the purpose of this perspective is to zoom in on the challenges and opportunities we’ve found within the frontline workforce segment, as we believe it is underserved by technology and is suffering more acutely from structural issues such as demographic shifts and labour shortages.
Labour shortages are becoming a regular occurrence in a growing number of countries and industries. We see this as one of the defining trends in the Future of Work space. While exacerbated by the pandemic, there are also structural, decade-long factors at play that mean that the problem is set to get worse over time, most acutely for the ‘frontline workforce’ and their related industries.
As a result, we are seeing demand for better solutions across the entire talent value chain; talent acquisition, retention, productivity, training and development. Whilst these topics are not new, we believe that the growing issues around labour shortages are increasing employers’ awareness and willingness to engage with tools that can help solve these problems. We believe this provides the backdrop for challengers to emerge with new solutions.