Looking at Frontline Work Holistically: How to Optimize the Frontline Lifecycle
Learn how digital solutions can streamline the frontline worker lifecycle in your industry.
Cris Grossmann, CEO and co-founder of Beekeeper, shares how digital tools can enhance the frontline worker lifecycle, from onboarding to offboarding, to reduce stress and turnover.
Four years ago, at the pandemic’s peak, everyone was happy to pay lip service to the idea that frontline workers are integral to our society’s functioning. Curiously, this increase in respect has not been matched by a commensurate focus on making frontline work better. If anything, frontline workers today are more stressed than ever, and this unhappiness has disastrous consequences for the economy.
According to our recent frontline workforce report, turnover rates for frontline workers are at an all-time high: 40% on average and 60% in some industries. If a frontline worker is dissatisfied or feels their needs aren’t being met, they will not hesitate to seek employment elsewhere. If frontline workers were easily replaceable, this might not be a problem—but they decidedly are not. Suitable candidates can be impossible, and training new hires can drain limited time and energy from essential business objectives.
For this reason, the frontline worker lifecycle is in dire need of streamlining. This has, after all, already happened for their desk-bound counterparts in management, whose daily routines are optimized by countless HR tools. If we accept the premise that frontline workers are just as essential as office workers, and we know that they are, then we have to provide them with the same tools to enable them to thrive.
Accomplishing this means looking at frontline work holistically. The frontline employee lifecycle is a living, breathing process, each stage demanding intentionality and forethought.
Enhancing Frontline Training Through Self-service Digital Solutions
At many frontline workplaces today, onboarding is a casualty of the “Frontline Disconnect.” The people who draw up the training materials work at desks in air-conditioned offices; the people tasked with learning those materials are often stationed miles away and embedded in what can feel like an entirely different work culture. The end result, time after time, is a communication breakdown.
It’s easy to understand why this happens. Training demands a substantial investment of time and resources on the part of a given employer, and those two things are always in short supply. But that doesn’t mean this state of affairs is tenable. Frontline workers in, for instance, construction are often tossed into challenging work environments with limited or inadequate training — this inevitably exacerbates stress and leads to higher levels of turnover. And that’s not to mention the sheer safety risks at play: if a construction worker, for example, is not comprehensively trained on safety protocols for a piece of machinery, it could lead to on-site accidents.
Optimizing this process requires a new emphasis on self-service. A few scattered in-person training or safety sessions here and there aren’t enough: frontline workers need continuous access to training materials, best practices, and other protocols, and they need to be able to consult those materials repeatedly on an as-needed basis. According to our Pulse Report, a lack of feeling safe is one of the top three stressors for frontline employees. Given that fact, recentering the onboarding experience around self-service digital training can go a long way toward reducing stress (and, subsequently, churn).
See More: How to Future-proof Training with Headless Architecture
Keeping Workers Happy on the Job
Of course, beyond the onboarding phase, there is the day-to-day work of keeping your employees satisfied and productive. Here, too, overhauling antiquated paper-based technologies can pay major dividends.
Take something as simple as shift scheduling. We know that many frontline workers are responsible for dependents — either children or elderly or disabled relatives. We know, too, that many of these same workers take on multiple jobs to make ends meet. When these workers are left in the dark about their schedules — or prevented from easily swapping shifts with co-workers — it creates a feeling of uncertainty that can infect the entire working process and ultimately creates precisely the kind of stress that leads to churn. Something as simple as the ability to swap or schedule shifts through a mobile app can make a meaningful difference in overall workforce sentiment.
On the same note — returning to the Frontline Disconnect concept — it remains that frontline workers are more often siloed from their HR departments and corporate decision-makers in general. This makes it difficult for the people in charge to assess employee sentiment and act accordingly. This is one reason why the rise of AI-powered sentiment analysis is so exciting: for the first time, managers can regularly take the temperature of their workforce and — through high-level analytics — gain meaningful insight into both overall operations and high-level team concerns. This has significant implications for retention — because the sooner you know your frontline team’s pulse, the sooner you can course correct to better meet teams’ needs.
Optimizing Offboarding Processes for Frontline Workers
Of course, no one stays at a business forever: some degree of churn is a healthy and inevitable part of the process. What is often under-recognized, though, is that offboarding is an equally crucial stage of the frontline worker lifecycle — one that is likewise ripe for technological transformation.
For many businesses, offboarding is an afterthought — a matter of sorting out paperwork and adjusting the payroll. In fact, optimized offboarding experiences can be just as central to your business’s overall health as optimized onboarding experiences — and are perhaps even more critical when it comes to insider risk reduction.
The fact is that, in a frontline work context, referrals are one of the key drivers of recruitment — and a negative offboarding experience can reduce the likelihood of those referrals. A negative offboarding experience can also increase the odds of negative reviews on job sites like Glassdoor — thus potentially scaring away future applicants. Conversely, positive offboarding experiences can be a major boon for recruitment. They can also significantly reduce the chance of insider risk events by helping to ensure the employee departs on good terms with the company. This is why streamlining and digitizing exit interviews, paperwork, and uniform or equipment returns are important. These innovations help to maintain a steady stream of referrals while facilitating knowledge transfer from departing employees.
Addressing Security Concerns in the Offboarding Process
During offboarding, companies overlook critical security concerns that could result in unintentional insider threats from departing employees. This is why accounting for an employee’s entire lifecycle involves thoroughly removing employees’ access to private company data and communications channels. This process is seamless for companies that have already taken steps to digitize their frontline workforce.
Important preventive measures of comprehensive offboarding also include post-departure security training. With phishing attacks becoming increasingly prevalent, this means informing former employees that they will not be contacted for personal information in the future and directing them to forward any such fraudulent messages to HR.
The more people with access to company information, the more the company is at risk of that information falling into the wrong hands. This is especially true for former employees, who might not even be accounted for when reviewing company access permissions. Many insider threat incidents result from human error rather than malicious intent, but protecting companies’ data should not depend on the cyber hygiene practices of former employees. No matter how unintentional, overlooking their access leaves the door wide open for hackers and bad actors.
We’re discussing a total reconceptualization of frontline work that prioritizes the needs of both HR teams and frontline employees. If these teams want to keep up, we need to jettison outdated protocols and provide the full benefits of an optimized, digital-first world. This applies across the board to every aspect of a worker’s employee lifecycle — from the day they’re hired to the day they depart. We have seen how the latest communications technology can boost productivity and employee satisfaction in an office setting. It is now time to bring those same advantages to the frontline.
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