Outdoor work is not one industry.
5 industry divisions in Australia do most of their work outdoors, and between them they employ 2,863,600 people. They do not share a risk profile and they do not share a season.
Where PocketMode is used.
A crew of 6 putting in a fence line and a crew of 60 on a road corridor still need the same 3 things: a roster somebody can read, a timesheet that matches what happened, and a record that stands up afterwards.
Farms and horticulture
Seasonal crews, split shifts, long distances and the worst injury rate in the country. This is the segment PocketMode was built out of, and still the one we understand best.
Picking crews, packing sheds, spray and irrigation, livestock
Construction
Residential and commercial sites where the supervisor cannot see everybody at once and the paperwork has to survive an audit. The largest outdoor workforce in Australia.
Trades, labour hire, formwork, scaffold, site supervision
Civil
Road corridors, earthworks and infrastructure, where a crew is spread across kilometres and the plan changes on the day more often than it does not.
Roadworks, drainage, plant operators, traffic control
Landscaping and bush regeneration
Small crews moving between several sites a day, often on private land, often with no fixed depot and no reliable signal at any of them.
Soft and hard landscaping, revegetation, weed control, parks
Forestry
Remote coupes, heavy plant and genuinely long days. Reception is the exception rather than the rule, so an offline record is not a nice-to-have.
Harvesting, haulage, silviculture, fire crews
Transport
Drivers and yard crews whose hours are already regulated, where what the record shows about start, finish and breaks matters more than in almost any other segment.
Line haul, local distribution, yard and depot, plant float
Utilities and councils
Vegetation crews, water and power networks, grounds and parks maintenance, where work happens well away from any office and often well away from reception.
Network maintenance, vegetation management, grounds, waste
Mine services
Contractors on and around mine sites, with site inductions, controlled access and no public network underground.
Contract services, shutdowns, drill and blast support, rehab
Something else outdoors
The product does not change between industries, because the roster, the timesheet and the duty of care do not change either. If your crew works outside, it will fit.
Marine, fencing, solar, telco, events, emergency services
It works inside. It is just not what we built it for.
We built PocketMode for outdoor crews, so here is the straight answer about indoors. Rostering, clock-on and clock-off, timesheets, breaks, incident and near miss reporting and the manager dashboard all behave exactly as they do outside.
Two things degrade indoors, and both are worth knowing before you decide.
Geofencing is the part that does not work
Global positioning system accuracy falls away inside a building, and in a warehouse, a shed or a multi-storey fit-out it can be wrong by enough to put a worker outside their own site boundary. Clock-on still works. The geofence around it is the piece you should not rely on.
Phone distraction status gets less reliable
The classification reads how a smartphone moves. A phone in a pocket on a moving worker is easy to tell from one held in a hand. A phone lying flat on a desk, a bench or a counter is neither, so indoor work with a fixed workstation produces a weaker signal than a crew moving around a site.
Indoors, the rostering and the timesheets will do their job well. The geofence and the distraction signal will not be at their best, unless your workers are expected to keep their smartphone in a pocket through the day rather than flat on a desk or a counter. If that is not how your crew works, a platform built for the shop floor will suit you better.
Tell us what your crew actually does and we will give you a straight answer about whether it fits.
How many people work in each of the 5 divisions.
The divisions where the work is mostly performed outdoors account for 19.0 per cent of everyone employed in Australia. Construction is nearly half of the total on its own.
| Industry division | Employed persons | Share of workforce |
|---|---|---|
| Construction | 1,328,400 | 8.8% |
| Transport, postal and warehousing | 720,100 | 4.8% |
| Agriculture, forestry and fishing | 432,600 | 2.9% |
| Mining | 230,900 | 1.5% |
| Electricity, gas, water and waste | 151,600 | 1.0% |
| Five-division total | 2,863,600 | 19.0% |
| All Australian industries | 15,109,700 | 100% |
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Labour Account Australia, March quarter 2026, employed persons. Landscaping, bush regeneration and mine services sit inside these divisions rather than beside them, which is one reason the official categories are a poor fit for how this work is actually organised. The full method is set out in the employer edition.
How dangerous each division is, per worker.
Headcount and risk point in opposite directions. Agriculture, forestry and fishing is a small division with the highest fatality rate of any industry in Australia, more than 10 times the all-industry rate.
| Industry division | Deaths per 100,000 | Serious claims | Claims per million hours | Median weeks off | Median paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agriculture, forestry and fishing | 13.7 | 3,800 | 10.0 | 6.4 | $14,300 |
| Transport, postal and warehousing | 7.4 | 10,400 | 9.0 | 8.8 | $20,700 |
| Mining | 3.4 | 3,300 | 6.7 | 11.1 | $36,400 |
| Construction | 2.8 | 17,600 | 9.3 | 8.4 | $20,000 |
| Electricity, gas, water and waste | 2.5 | 1,500 | 6.0 | 7.5 | $19,900 |
| Outdoor 5 total | n/a | 36,600 | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| All Australian industries | 1.3 | 146,700 | 6.8 | 7.4 | $16,300 |
Sources: Safe Work Australia, worker fatality rates by industry division, calendar year 2024; and serious workers compensation claims, 2023 to 2024 preliminary, with medians from 2022 to 2023. Do not mix the vintages.