Editorial
Frontline employees make up the majority of the workforce for most organizations, but few companies tap into this intelligence source for business decisions. It is your frontline employees whose resilience gets tested every day through their encounters with operational complexity. That’s a missed opportunity when defining what resilience looks like for your business and aligning the skills you need to thrive in constant disruption.
Voice of the employee listening tools allow you to collect the frontline perspective to capture insights to inform your skills mapping strategy. Frontline employee experience feedback uncovers the operational breakdowns, process inefficiencies and skill gaps that you may not see at a distance. Using frontline employee input also builds trust and buy-in for any skills-related initiatives you roll out.
Their perspective can give you a holistic view of your entire skills ecosystem, highlighting what makes performance sustainable across teams. Your skills mapping strategy will become more actionable in the short-term and will be more adaptable in the future with the resulting repeatable process.
A Story From Frontline Listening: Starwood Hotels
My first HR job right out of college was at Starwood Hotels. It was there I learned that delivering an exceptional guest experience was never left to chance. We didn’t guess what guests wanted. We asked frontline employees how to make the guest experience better. We listened and took action. Frontline employee experience shaped guest service standards, employee training and even brand design. At its prime, Starwood Hotels was one of the most innovative hospitality companies with extremely loyal guests and highly engaged employees.
Starwood’s approach was my first lesson on designing experiences from the inside out. Now, imagine skipping the “future skills” guessing game and applying the same curiosity to build an effective skills mapping strategy based on employee input.
Skill Mapping: Static Snapshot
Crafting the right skills mapping strategy continues to be an elusive priority for C-level leaders and HR teams. “Leaders rank ‘workforce strategies that cannot keep up with the pace of disruption’ as the number one talent risk to business growth,” according to a 2025 report from The Adecco Group.
Most organizations follow traditional workforce development models built in a vacuum, blending top-down input, competitive benchmarks and AI-driven tools. While this approach is anchored in job descriptions, it’s a snapshot in time that overlooks the human side or “lived experience of work.” Employees who interact with customers or encounter operational breakdowns are perfectly placed to share their perspective on where and how resilience gets tested every day.
Leveraging frontline input helps clarify a potentially elusive skills mapping strategy by adding a dynamic flow of information on your business needs now and the skills to build next. This approach also sets the foundation for a more complete view of your skills across all levels of the organization, from frontline support teams, to managers and higher leadership levels. You stop guessing and start building capabilities from the ground up. It enables you to capture the right mix of skills across teams for sustained performance tailored to your business.
Dynamic Skill Mapping: Frontline Voice of the Employee (VoE) Tools
Voice of the Employee (VoE) tools can help you identify the resilience hotspots. These qualitative listening tools can show where employees feel overwhelmed or spot successes to emulate or amplify.
The three VoE tools I typically use for skills mapping strategy and talent development are: journey maps, empathy maps and “how might we” reframing.
Journey maps visualize how frontline employees experience the process of work. They provide a view of end-to-end workflows and help identify where friction or inefficiencies occur. Empathy maps help you dive deeper to understand the emotional or human side of specific workflows: what employees see, feel, think, say and do in specific moments. Both tools give you a foundation to identify and map skills based on reality and not assumptions.
You can validate your findings using “How Might We” reframing to turn pain points into possible skill gaps to remedy. For example, if a frontline employee feels unsupported during difficult customer interactions during high-volume times, you might reframe the challenge as: “How might we equip your manager to help you respond with empathy in a high-volume day filled with challenging customer calls?”
The last step is to translate the frontline experience input into skills by grouping them in “categories” to connect daily pain points and emotions to broader skill mapping at different levels (e.g., “conflict resolution” or “empathy” for frontline employees, other teams, direct managers, etc).
Translate Frontline Employee Experience Into Skills Mapping Strategy
Designing an effective, balanced skills mapping strategy to build a resilient workforce takes time, yet you can build a strong foundation for a repeatable process with these actions:
- Stay Focused for High Impact: Identify and select areas where resilience is most needed, like teams experiencing the fastest change or underperforming areas with critical roles driving customer experience or operational metrics.
- Close the Loop: Thank and recognize the frontline employees whose input helped you shape your approach. Share with them how their feedback is being used and its impact. It builds trust and support for any skills development or change initiatives you roll out.
- Make Listening an Ongoing Habit: Continue to involve frontline employees in skills mapping strategy pilots and two-way informal feedback forums like team huddles, 1:1s and town halls. Train your managers to listen and spot the signals in the everyday frontline work experience.
Closing
Leveraging frontline employee experience input can build a more balanced, effective skills mapping strategy capable of responding to changing demands in real-time. No guesswork needed on what a resilient workforce means for your organization.
Start where resilience is being tested every day. When you include the human side of work, you uncover real needs, strengthen employee trust and fuel performance. You just have to ask, listen and build together from there.
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Editor's Note: For more insights into employee listening, read:
- Employee Listening Is a Strategy, Not a Survey — Traditional employee feedback methods aren't cutting it anymore. So what's the alternative?
- Employee Listening Is About Conversations, Not Vanity Metrics — It's a great paradox: the more emphasis leaders place on employee feedback scores, the less meaningful the scores become.
- How to Master Your Employee Listening Strategy in 5 Steps — Discover how to master employee listening with our five-step guide to transform workplace culture and boost employee engagement.
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