Editorial
Research Report
The ROI of Employee Experience
An acquaintance runs a car dealer network for a premium brand. He once asked a long-time engineer of the manufacturing company why their cars fail so often. The answer?
"Because we test them with professional drivers."
And this is why so many enterprise processes and tools fail, because they build tools around the wrong persona.
Table of Contents
- 12 Ways the Work Experience Is Different for HQ Managers and Frontline Employees
- 1. Motivation
- 2. Skill Sets
- 3. Knowledge
- 4. Comms Channels
- 5. Size of Informal Support Team
- 6. Approach to Tasks
- 7. Optimization in Isolation
- 8. Apps
- 9. Findability
- 10. Departments
- 11. Change Management
- 12. Processes vs. Tasks
- What Happens When You Focus on the Wrong Persona
12 Ways the Work Experience Is Different for HQ Managers and Frontline Employees
HQ managers and frontline employees appear to be from two different planets. Which explains why making an HQ manager walk in the shoes of a regular employee is very challenging.
Below, I've identified 12 clear gaps between HQ managers and frontline employees.
1. Motivation
HQ managers invest heavily in their careers, while many frontline employees just want a job to pay the bills and go on a nice holiday. They are keen to do a good job, but not looking to turn the world upside down with their work.
You need to make your business better at working with regular people, or it might not run after a while.
2. Skill Sets
HQ managers tend to need analytical and problem-solving skills for their work.
Frontline employees need more practical hands-on or sales skills, while analytical abilities land lower on the job requirements list. Also, solving cumbersome problems in relationship with the HQ maze may not be their cup of tea.
You need to simplify the experience the frontline employees have with your company and not expect them to raise their abilities to meet your business complexity, because they won’t.
3. Knowledge
HQ managers have advanced knowledge in a narrower field, while frontline employees have practical knowledge spread over a larger spectrum.
HQ managers assume employees remember most, if not all, training and communication they receive. Frontline workers are often overloaded with information and therefore can quickly forget new information.
When an employee performs a task, make sure all the required know-how is readily available.
4. Comms Channels
Email is the most used communication channel because it is very easy to click "send." The assumption is it's then the employee’s responsibility to read, understand and commit the message to memory.
However, HQ managers typically behave as if they are the only one communicating with employees and deny the existence of things like information overload.
When you step into the employee’s shoes, it's clear the amount of messages they receive from all parts of the organization is more than they can process.
Design your digital workplace so that whenever an employee performs a task, all the recent operational updates on that topic are the first to be seen.
5. Size of Informal Support Team
HQ managers have a lot of opportunities for internal networking, so when they need help, they know who to turn to solve their problem.
Frontline employees typically work in much smaller teams and don’t necessarily know who to turn to when issues arise.
Digital workplace designers shouldn't assume that frontline people will solve issues easily and correctly. On the contrary, workplace experience should be designed with the assumption that there is no support network.
6. Approach to Tasks
HQ managers tend to multi-task, while frontline employees often need to focus on one task at a time, like on a production line or helping a customer in a store.
With requests coming in across multiple tools and channels, it makes it difficult to accurately track each request.
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This is why it is best to build a consolidated list of their open tasks, irrespective of the system that generated them.
7. Optimization in Isolation
Every HQ manager I’ve met understands at some level that they need to make their work accessible to frontline employees. The problem is that each approaches the task in their own way.
Frontline employees interact with multiple topic owners, with each taking a different approach to organizing their process resources. Additionally, they regularly change the way they organize their resources.
You need to change the perspective and startbuilda work experience centered on the employee, with is consistent across larger categories of tasks.
8. Apps
An app typically manages several processes. HQ managers focus on the app as a whole. Frontline employees’ only interest is the module that helps them solve their specific task, not the entire app.
App names cause confusion for employees who have to deal with dozens of apps with generic or misleading names like SAP's Success Factors or Microsoft's PowerApps.
Adding to the confusion is the way specific apps cover functional areas. For example, you might have an app covering most of the HR-related processes, but the recruitment or budgeting processes are handled by different apps.
This is why it is important to think in terms of topics relevant to the employees and their associated functionalities.
9. Findability
Headquarters typically assume employees have access to all of the tools and information they need.
On paper, they might have the best business digital tools. The assumption therefore is they should have the best business results.
In reality, given the overwhelming amount of digital resources available, when a frontline employee cannot quickly locate the relevant resources needed to perform the task, the resources may as well not exist.
This leads to poor EX, productivity loss, operational errors and compliance issues.
Organizing resources around operational topics, in a consistent manner, makes them easier to access.
10. Departments
HQ managers think in terms of departments and the org chart, for good reasons. Organization needs these structures, people are assigned to different departments, they own budgets, processes, tools, responsibilities, etc.
Frontline employees think differently. They don’t care about these boundaries and think more in terms of services provided by these departments. So, when an employee wants to have their expenses reimbursed, it is not so much about Finance as it is about the service of managing the expense reimbursement which is provided by the Finance department.
Additionally, the department that handles some of the services isn’t always the one you’d assume — and it can change over time. For example, Administration may initially handle travel services but then HR assumes the responsibility later on or it is outsourced to an external vendor.
If you want productive frontline employees, you need to eliminate the complexity generated by the org chart and to think in terms of services delivered to/consumed by the internal customers.
11. Change Management
HQ managers occasionally must communicate a change to the affected audience. The expectation is that following an established framework like ADKAR from Prosci is enough to ensure a smooth transition.
When you transition into the frontline employee shoes, you will see that there are many other HQ guys fighting at the same time for their limited attention and memory.
You need to build clear, efficient and effective communication channels between each topic owner and his internal audience, channels that will also support communication of all upcoming changes.
12. Processes vs. Tasks
HQ managers are trained to think in terms of processes, because processes are how the company produces value.
But there’s a catch. Process thinking assumes that the employees involved in the process execution just do their job mechanically and fail to consider the human factor.
Employees think in terms of tasks, of “what do I have to do,” in relation to all the processes they are part of. This is where their experience of work, in terms of their relationships with all the tools and processes, makes a big difference.
I can go on with more differences, but I think you get the point by now.
What Happens When You Focus on the Wrong Persona
Unfortunately, the operating model of all the companies I know focus on producers (HQ managers) and their tools and processes, not on the consumers (the frontline employees) and their needs.
This creates frustration on both sides and leads to a range of everyday business issues. These gaps result in several avoidable challenges for your organization: low engagement, poor compliance, quality issues, slow adoption of changes, increased operational costs, and weak uptake of new applications or features.
Employees aren’t struggling because they’re lazy or inattentive, but because they’re drowning in complexity.
As a result, most of the good work performed by the HQ is lost to complexity and corporate noise.
Frontline employees simply use a different reference system from the one used by the HQ managers and we have to learn and adapt to it, if we want to move to the next level of efficiency and employee experience.
Instead of expecting people to cope with an ever-growing maze of products, processes and changes, we should flip the script.
If you want to build an effective and efficient operating system and/or digital workplace, you need to move the focus from HQ to the experience of the employee.
All internal service owners must align on a digital architecture centered on the needs of the employees, not the convenience of HQ.
The way employees interact with every important topic across the organization needs to be simplified and standardized.
A practical way to approach this challenge is to think of a mall with digital services, where each task of an employee is handled by a specialized shop. Link?utm_source=reworked.co to
That’s how you create clarity, reduce friction, facilitate change and make all the hard work from HQ heard.
It is not easy, but it is well worth it for your employees, your customers and your shareholders.
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