Often, employees at the top of the corporate hierarchy are well-known across the company while ideally enjoying all the glory. But the truth is, employees that make the most difference to your brand and business operations are the ones lying at the bottom of the pyramid – the frontline workers. In a way, they play the role of a bridge between your customers and company.
From selling/cross-selling your product to the customers, resolving their queries and issues in remote locations, delivering services to customers to carrying our production tasks, frontline workers play a huge role to keep the business rolling. In short, your frontline workers have immense influence on making or breaking your company’s image and impression. They are the ones who create the foundation of customer experience and satisfaction.
So, what measures does your company take to improve their productivity and participation?
It’s not an option but a growing necessity to take steps to motivate and engage frontline workers and drive their productivity, which in turn will ensure improved customer experience and better business outcome at all levels. Although it is important to look at their professional well-being from every possible angle, technology tools and digitalization play the most crucial role in crafting winning strategies to not only enhance their day-to-day performance at work but also to imbibe the sense of empowerment in them by engaging them in operations involving innovation, revenue-generation, growth and creativity.
Read the guide: How Scalefusion enables your frontline workers
Let’s look at the following aspects business leaders should consider to up the productivity game of frontline workers.
Create an environment driving enhanced communication: As most frontline workers operate from remote locations it needs more than just emails to share and exchange messages and information. While emails are essential, interacting with your frontline workers requires embracing a digital internal communication strategy that works wonders to get all your frontline workers under one big umbrella. The first step might include in having a team communication app, which will drive and support on-the-fly and real-time communications between team members and back office operators. These easy-to-use communication platforms encourage frontline workers to stay informed 24/7 and enable them to communicate through receiving, sending and responding to instant messages within a controlled and secured environment. This opportunity helps them to make more efficient decisions, quickly resolve issues and drive faster time-to-market.
Train & encourage them to use smart devices and technology tools: Companies need to understand that most frontline workers are millennials who are aware of the eruption in digital technologies and their business implications. Hence, it is more than necessary to encourage them to use digital or rugged devices and technology tools that they can leverage to increase their productivity and efficiency level. Introduction to digitalization and the required training processes within the workspace will allow the frontline workers to feel connected and empowered to carry out their daily jobs effortlessly while minimizing errors, process delays and even device downtime. Usage of software platforms and smart devices will help them automate their routine tasks, organize their daily deliverables, manage their shift timings, identify roadblocks, access and exchange critical company information, data and content and gain improved visibility. A proper corporate training strategy to encourage the use of digital devices will increase employee engagement tenfold.
Also read: How to drive frontline productivity with corporate-owned rugged devices
Encourage a collaborative working atmosphere: Most frontline workers tend to work from remote locations and sometimes they work individually and rotating shifts, which makes the importance of team collaboration even more prominent. Collaboration tools can do more than just facilitate the frontline workers to collect, access and exchange valuable information amongst the team members. It also supports work flexibility, precision and efficiency, which in turn allows the frontline workers to manage and streamline their work with improved effectiveness and time-convenience.
Companies should take proactive measures like application integration to introduce and implement a collaborative workspace through tools like file-sharing app, project management platform, team communication software, inventory management software, platform to feed delivery report, digital customer signature and so on. These apps and mobile platforms when used via smart digital devices undoubtedly enable the frontline workers to do more in less time and enjoy work-life balance and work efficiency.
Improve and elaborate your onboarding process: A thoughtfully-created onboarding program proves to be beneficial to encourage and motivate your frontline workers to stay productive throughout their stint with the company. Most studies conducted by corporate giants confirm that the first 6 month’s experience makes a huge difference to an employee’s decision to stick around. A great onboarding strategy boosts retention as it will make your frontline executives feel welcomed, appreciated and important.
Onboarding program often includes creation of apt documents, cheat-sheet, training videos, training schedules, how-to articles and tips to help your frontline workers consume the information as an when needed. Since, they are the ones who make the most interactions with your customers, it becomes even more crucial to motivate, encourage and engage them while introducing them to the company’s culture, aligning them with the business vision, long-term mission and goals. A healthy and well-balanced onboarding system will definitely bring about the elements of productivity and efficiency in your frontline workers.
Find out how: Scalefusion drives and supports your frontline workers
Recognize their contributions and promote their achievements: It is important to make your frontline workers feel good and a proper strategy and tool for employee recognition and appreciation make a lot of difference. It doesn’t only improve sense of job satisfaction and reduce turnover rates but also increase their zeal to work better with enhanced productivity and efficiency. Nothing motivates better than a ‘job well done’ email along with a hearty acknowledgement of an employee’s achievement and this does a wonderful job in increasing frontline workers’ productivity at multiple levels.
Some of the ways to do so is to announce your frontline executive’s achievements in a town hall meeting. This can also include promotion of work anniversaries, winning sales pitches etc. Give them a reason to celebrate and feel pampered. One can also use ‘thank you’ notes in digital platforms to express company gratitude towards their success. Apart from this, HR can also introduce other benefits like flexible work hours, medical facilities and other compensations to keep them happy at work.Your frontline workers do a great job to keep up the brand image of your product, service or solution by serving your customers with the right kind of experiences. Enable your frontline workers with the right kind of endpoints managed by a powerful Mobile Device Management solution – a complete win-win for the business-owners (company) and the device-users (employees).
