Gallup’s State of the American Workplace report indicates that highly engaged teams enjoy better customer engagement, higher productivity, stronger retention, fewer accidents and higher profitability.

Employee engagement delivers significant benefit to the organisation. From carers to educators to salespeople, frontline workers are the backbone of many organisations and particularly not for profits. Why then, does digital employee experience planning tend to focus on people sitting at a PC?

By leveraging technology with a digital workplace, it’s possible to have a real impact on frontline workers: their engagement and productivity, and ultimately success in realising the organisations’ vision.

“Most frontline content is neither recognised or managed as business critical… impacting the quality of day-to-day customer service.”  Step Two

Reference material like client history, processes, maps and legal guidelines must be current and accurate, but also easy to find and search. Not everyone has strong digital skills or the latest hardware – it would be worth conducting a quick UX audit with a range of abilities and devices.

Start optimising for mobile use by:

·      Minimising slow-loading images

·      Build web pages to render only the necessary content on first load

·      Allowing adequate button/link spacing for fingers

·      Introducing a simple Q&A chatbot

If you are currently using SharePoint Classic to create and store information, consider moving to SharePoint Modern. It will require some investment as there is no easy way to migrate, but compared to SharePoint Classic, it is in another league for mobile experience and ease of content creation.

A recent survey indicated that 73% of frontline employees are still using paper forms[1]. Introducing e-forms and automation to processes such as incident reports or travel reimbursements can deliver immediate benefits with low investment.

Microsoft 365 users can create workflows without an IT project using Power Automate and Microsoft’s Project Syntex is using AI to help organisations import employee, client or contractor data by simply uploading a photo of a form or certificate.

The key is to involve your frontline subject matter experts from the beginning to leverage their expertise and get buy-in. Why not run a pilot with your top three processes?

A quality introduction via an onboarding series, sales success for donations teams or safety tips for in-home support staff can improve performance and reaffirms that frontline workers are valued.

A Learning Management System can sit happily in your digital workplace, accessed via a learning hub as well as links from other relevant topic pages. There are many mobile training delivery platforms such as Go1 and eLearn Australia, and Microsoft have recently announced Viva Learning - a central hub for training in Microsoft Teams. 

Consider mobile staff when designing your educational content. No one wants to sit in their car and watch a 45 minute video on a tiny screen. Often the most effective way to deliver training to non-office staff is via micro learning: bite-sized chunks that they can consume and immediately incorporate into their day.

If frontline staff don’t have a channel to interact with each other, connect with the office support team or be recognised for their great work, they can feel disconnected and forgotten. They may also resort to non-official channels with insufficient security like Messenger, WhatsApp or Snapchat. Importantly, the rest of the team miss out on their insights and (often entertaining) stories.

A staff intranet within a digital workplace is the obvious place for engagement activities, culture and corporate communications so if yours is underused or non-existent, your team may become disengaged. It doesn’t need to be complicated. A simple Teams channel or SharePoint site can let everyone – senior leaders included – share their photos, experiences and lessons learned.

The recent pandemic has highlighted the incredible value of frontline workers. They deserve to be supported and included and in many cases, need their own engagement and retention strategy. With the right planning and technology, providing the right information, efficient processes, training and opportunities for connection will deliver results for both your teams and your organisation.

[1] Survey: Digital Workplace Key to Engagement for Frontline Teams