{"id":44257,"date":"2026-08-04T22:44:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T20:44:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/smartfense.com\/?p=44257"},"modified":"2026-08-05T15:02:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T13:02:45","slug":"awareness-for-people-without-a-desk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smartfense.com\/en\/blog\/awareness-for-people-without-a-desk\/","title":{"rendered":"Awareness for people who don’t work at a screen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Awareness for people who don\u2019t work at a screen<\/h1>\n

Air New Zealand is on its 23rd safety video<\/a>. The latest one stars a basketball legend playing against a group of kids, in a scene that escalates all the way to a stadium. We are talking about the pre-flight safety briefing, the one piece of mandatory training that millions of people receive every year. It runs two minutes, and across those two minutes the airline controls nothing about the attention of whoever is watching. That is why it decided the thing deserved real production value.<\/p>\n

Now think about how security awareness reaches deskless workers, who face the same attention constraint plus several more on top. On their feet, moving, no inbox, both hands busy. In most organisations, it doesn\u2019t reach them at all.<\/p>\n

And there are far more of them than we tend to assume. According to Eurostat<\/a>, in 2022 close to 30% of employed people in the European Union used digital devices for all or most of their working time. A program that lives in email speaks very well to that slice and quietly writes off the rest.<\/p>\n

Who does an email-based program leave out?<\/h2>\n

The deskless audience is made up of people whose work doesn\u2019t run through a computer, such as plant floor and construction staff, field and delivery crews, customer-facing and maintenance roles, and anyone on rotating shifts.<\/strong> Some of them share a terminal in the locker room. Others have no corporate email account, full stop.<\/p>\n

For them, the usual repertoire collapses. There is no phishing simulation, because there is no inbox to receive it. There is no weekly reminder landing on a Tuesday morning. There is no twenty-minute interactive module, and even if there were, there are no twenty minutes.<\/p>\n

The uncomfortable part is that risk doesn\u2019t skip them in return. Someone holds a door open for a visitor with no badge, someone finds a USB stick in the car park and decides to work out whose it is (a perfectly good intention), someone scans a QR code taped to a machine because the sign says it logs the shift, and someone takes a call from a person claiming to be from IT who sounds in a hurry. Every one of those micro-decisions happens far from any corporate screen. None of them shows up later in the monthly report.<\/p>\n

The very definition of the audience of an awareness program<\/a> starts by accepting that it will be heterogeneous. What usually goes untranslated is that this heterogeneity plays out as much in the channel the content travels on as in the topics it covers.<\/p>\n

Why does the job change the way people learn?<\/h2>\n

The job decides the format before any teaching preference does.<\/strong> If the shift is spent standing and moving, the content has to be receivable standing and moving. Written down like that it sounds obvious, and yet most programs offer exactly one way to receive everything.<\/p>\n

In a noisy environment, voiceover is useless. With both hands busy, anything that asks for a click is useless. With nowhere to stand still for five minutes, the long session is more useless still. And where shifts rotate, one message is three audiences that never meet, so sending it once means sending it to a third of your people.<\/p>\n

Physical safety solved all of this decades ago, and solved it without email. The five-minute talk before the handover. The locker room notice board. The sign placed exactly where the mistake gets made. The demonstration with the equipment in hand. None of that asks for an account, a password or a browser. Cybersecurity awareness<\/a>, meanwhile, keeps going out by email and waiting for someone to open it.<\/p>\n

And there is a logistics detail that carries more weight than it looks. In these roles the real channel tends to be a person, whoever runs the handover or hands out the day\u2019s tasks. When the content reaches them as a PDF to forward, it dies there. When it reaches them as a short script to tell out loud, with a concrete scene and a question at the end, the talk happens. Designing for that person is part of the job too, even though it appears in no catalogue of formats.<\/p>\n

Which formats reach people with no inbox?<\/h2>\n

The ones that travel on a physical or shared channel, and the ones that fit the slice of time the job actually leaves.<\/strong> The useful move here is to start from the constraint of the job and then look for the format that gets around it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Constraint of the job<\/th>\nFormat that gets around it<\/th>\nBehaviour it trains<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
No corporate email account<\/td>\nComic printed on the notice board or projected in the canteen<\/td>\nRecognising a whole situation in two panels<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Shift spent standing and moving<\/td>\nShort video on the locker room or canteen screen<\/td>\nSeeing the whole trap in under a minute<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Hands busy, noisy surroundings<\/td>\nSign or panel at the exact point of use (the machine, the entrance, the printer)<\/td>\nStopping right where the decision gets made<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Rotating shifts<\/td>\nThe same piece repeated across all three handovers<\/td>\nMaking sure no shift misses the week\u2019s piece<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Team gathered before the handover<\/td>\nQuick team round with a visible scoreboard<\/td>\nDeciding under time pressure and talking the mistake through out loud<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Whoever runs the handover is the only stable channel<\/td>\nA five-minute script to tell, not a PDF to forward<\/td>\nMaking the talk happen without depending on anyone reading<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

None of those formats is new, and the question of which format suits which behaviour<\/a> is the usual conversation. What changes here is the vehicle. The same panel that reaches an office as an image in an email reaches a plant printed and pinned where people walk past.<\/p>\n

The logic of microlearning<\/a> fits these roles particularly well, because time shows up in doses of minutes rather than blocks of half an hour. And the quick team round before the handover takes advantage of something the desk never has, which is having people together and allowed to get it wrong out loud. Getting it wrong through play<\/a> works even better when the mistake gets discussed in the team, on the spot.<\/p>\n

The range of formats in the SMARTFENSE catalogue exists for exactly this reason, because an organisation with a plant, an office and a delivery fleet has three audiences that take information in very different ways.<\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/p>\n

How do you measure it when there are no clicks?<\/h2>\n

With no email account there is no click rate, and no automatic record of anything either.<\/strong> A comic projected on the canteen screen leaves no trace of who looked at it, or of whether anyone lifted their eyes from the plate. Worth saying out loud before building a dashboard that promises more than it can hold. Here the measurement changes unit. It stops being the person and becomes the shift.<\/p>\n

With that on the table, there are four things that do hold up.<\/p>\n