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 in keeping the business rolling. In short, your frontline workers have an 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.
Improving Productivity and Participation: What Measures Does Your Company Take?
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 outcomes at all levels. Although it is essential to look at their professional well-being from every possible angle, technology productivity 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 PDF Guide: How Scalefusion enables your frontline workersLet’s look at the following aspects business leaders should consider upping 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 having a team communication app to 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 aware of digital technologies’ eruption 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 frontline workers to feel connected and empowered to carry out their daily jobs effortlessly while minimizing errors, process delays, and even device downtime.
Using 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: Benefits of rugged devices for frontline workers
Encourage a collaborative working atmosphere
Most frontline workers tend to work from remote locations, and sometimes they work individually and rotating shifts, making team collaboration’s importance even more prominent. Collaboration tools can do more than just facilitate the frontline workers to collect, access, and exchange valuable information among the team members. It also supports work flexibility, precision, and efficiency, allowing 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 a file-sharing app, project management platforms, team communication software, inventory management software, a platform to feed delivery reports, digital customer signatures, and so on. These apps and mobile platforms, when used via smart digital devices, undoubtedly enable 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 in encouraging and motivating your frontline workers to stay productive throughout their stints with the company. Most studies conducted by corporate giants confirm that the first 6 month’s experience makes a huge difference in an employee’s decision to stick around. A great onboarding strategy boosts retention by making frontline executives feel welcomed, appreciated, and important.
The onboarding program often includes the 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 bring about the elements of productivity and efficiency in your frontline workers.
Read More: How to Use Scalefusion for Frontline Worker enablementRecognize their contributions and promote their achievements
It is important to make your frontline workers feel good, and a proper employee recognition and appreciation strategy make a lot of difference. It doesn’t only improve the sense of job satisfaction and reduces turnover rates but also increases their zeal to work better with enhanced productivity and efficiency. Nothing motivates better than a ‘job well done’ email and a hearty acknowledgment of an employee’s achievement, which does a wonderful job of increasing frontline workers’ productivity at multiple levels.
One way to do so is to announce your frontline executive’s achievements in a town hall meeting. This can also include the promotion of work anniversaries, winning sales pitches, etc. Give them a reason to celebrate and feel pampered. One can also use ‘thank you’ notes on digital platforms to express company gratitude towards their success.
Besides this, HR can also introduce other benefits like flexible work hours, medical facilities, corporate gifts, and other compensations to keep them happy at work. Your frontline workers do a great job of keeping up the brand image of your product, service, or solution by serving your customers with the right kind of experience. Enable your frontline workers with the right endpoints managed by a powerful Mobile Device Management solution – a complete win-win for the business owners (company) and the device users (employees).
