Frontline employee engagement directly impacts overall business success. It should come as no surprise that these employees play a crucial role in making a business reliable as they are the ones with whom clients initially interact.
In the hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing sectors, frontline employees perform the majority of the work.
It is crucial, therefore, to retain your frontline staff by providing them with a pleasant workplace.
Frontline Employees Are Leaving Their Jobs En Masse
According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, frontline workers often look for better job prospects because they are underpaid and have a poor work-life balance. 63% of these people look forward to job opportunities that technology creates, while 56% say they feel pressure to adapt to new technology over fear of losing their jobs while 55% have been forced to learn new tech on their own without any training being provided or offered.
That’s why — while providing new tech to your frontline teams is imperative — your business should pay attention to coupling the practice with appropriate training.
Frontline employee retention is a huge issue so make sure to address it properly! But first you’ll need to understand the employee engagement lifecycle, and how you can provide support that urges your employees to stick around.
Let’s see what can be done.
Provide Onboarding Training
The instant a new hire enters the company, onboarding training must be scheduled.
There aren't many excuses to put off learning. Thanks to the popularity of mLearning and eLearning (as well as some cutting-edge techniques like gamification), everyone can keep learning.
Consider the software combination that will make learning enjoyable and ensure learning is taking place. Look out for information overload! Rather than overwhelming your new hires, serve chunks of information at a time.
Finally, take another look at employee scheduling. Flexibility should be prioritized because frontline employees commonly complain about a lack of free time. Additionally, offer real career advancement opportunities.
Polish Communication
Anyone who has ever tried to manage a team is well aware of how important stellar communication is.
Alas!, frontline staff frequently lack access to the most recent technology, including practical and convenient communication tools.
Make sure you promote communication and establish appropriate communication channels. Provide training as needed and listen to employee feedback.
Deploy a Reliable Job Management System
The vast majority of frontline employees seeking alternative employment opportunities report having strained relationships with the management.
As a matter of fact, this is the number one reason why frontline employees are leaving their employers.
By putting in place a job management system, you can ensure everything runs smoothly while also upskilling the team.
Although management appears to be complex, it is actually a set of clearly established processes, as follows:
- Customer acquisition – Use marketing, advertising, and promotion
- Estimating & quoting – Estimate a cost and ask for customer feedback
- Task outlining – divide the job into smaller tasks
- Scheduling – Allocate the necessary resources and staffing +
- Timesheeting –Record employees’ working hours
- Emailing & document exchange – Dispatch documents relevant to the job to stakeholders
- Cost management
- Work-in-progress management
- Invoicing
- Reporting – Collect the data for further reference
Can you use new tech to help your frontline managers support each of these steps?
Train Your Frontline Managers
Keep in mind that all of these points will be close to useless if your frontline managers aren’t trained. Just think about how poor frontline staff management would affect the clients of a trading company.
The main problem here is that conventional frontline management training typically comprises of academic knowledge. Field experience is obviously missing, so make sure to remedy the issue ASAP.
Frontline managers should be given access to, and encouraged to develop, a mix of theoretical knowledge and practical experience.
Organize Call Center Processes
Create procedures for customer service representatives.
To help you decide which subjects to cover, consider the following questions:
- What should customer representatives say when they pick up the call?
- What should customer representatives do when they don’t know the answer to the question?
- How will customer representatives track the inquiries?
- What should customer representatives do when the call is over?
Add business-specific queries to the list and you’re good to go, whether you offer supervised or unsupervised learning.
Deploy Knowledge Management Systems
Knowledge management systems can help you better manage frontline teams, among other benefits.
A knowledge management system is a platform made up of different individuals and processes that collects and stores data in one centralized place. Its primary goal is to facilitate information sharing and maintain knowledge circulation.
Modern knowledge management systems gather information from various sources, especially if you reinforce it with artificial intelligence (AI).
Offer the Right Tools and Processes
Use modern technology whenever it will help streamline tasks rather than make them more difficult. Since new technologies are developing quickly, new apps are constantly popping up.
Additionally, look at your processes and how they can benefit your team. For example, having proper inventory management can help shipping, while price anchoring can increase sales.
For all stages of frontline work, take into account proper tools and be sure to provide training.
As you can see, there is still a lot that can be done to support your frontline employees — from dependable procedures to cutting-edge technology.
Sometimes even the slightest tricks can be useful. Use one of the many apps that are available to modernize your manual procedures and eliminate monotonous repetitive tasks that are the chief woe of your frontline teams.
Invest in learning and career advancement prospects. Listen to your employees. Train your managers. Establish clear communication. The rest will fall into place over time.
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