Editorial
Frontline workers can make or break an organization. These critical employees are the "tip of the spear," executing the organization's strategy and are often the only point of contact customers have with a company.
In recognition of this, many leaders are looking to better support this population. They’re asking:
How can my organizations better enable frontline workers to thrive in their current and future roles?
We at RedThread Research recently tackled that question in a research study, with some surprising results. Here are our top three insights.
Insight 1: Don’t Discount the Similarities Between Frontline and Other Workers
The prevailing narrative about frontline workers tends to emphasize the differences between the support frontline workers receive compared to other workers. It focuses on the extent to which many organizational practices and technologies are not set up to support the frontline workforce.
There’s a lot of truth to that narrative, but it leaves out a key insight: At a high level, frontline and other employees experience many aspects of work very similarly. When we surveyed over 500 frontline and other employees around the globe, their answers to questions about their performance, development opportunities, engagement and belonging were about the same. The response rates had no statistically significant differences (Figure 1).
Frontline and other employees respond about the same to questions about performance, growth, and environment
In other words, all employees — frontline and otherwise — have similar needs and aspirations in terms of big-picture elements like development, connection, support, purpose and engagement. This shouldn’t be surprising, but it does seem to be understated in the current conversation.
What this means for organizations: Some organizations might look at frontline workers and other workers separately, assuming that what works for one population won’t work for another. That’s not always true. For example, in our 2021 research on learning methods, the top two most relied upon methods by both frontline and other workers were manager feedback and the internet.
Organizations like global food company Cargill keep these similarities top-of-mind, aiming for “like needs to be solved,” as learning leader Tabatha Cronin told us on a recent podcast. To do this, Cargill conducts feasibility studies and pressure-tests proposed solutions to determine their viability for specific employee segments, initially focusing on similarities among employees and then addressing differences as they arise.
Related Article: The First Step in Better Connecting With Frontline Workers
Insight 2: Beneath the Similarities, Some Differences Really Matter
Although frontline and other employees are similar at a high level, differences emerged when we looked at how work is done and how employees are developed.
Frontline workers experience significant challenges in some aspects of work compared to other workers, confirming the prevailing narrative in this case.
For example, frontline workers can struggle to get timely access to the information they need to safely and effectively do their work. Although all employees need access to information, frontline workers experience unique challenges associated with:
- Distance. Standard operating procedures or job aids are stored far from where the relevant tasks are performed, sometimes in paper binders. Moreover, info or resources created by central teams (e.g., HR, L&D) may not make it to all frontline workers.
- Managers and supervisors are over-relied on to convey info, making them a single point of failure.
- Tech. Some employees have limited or sporadic access to tech, which restricts how they access info.
To address these challenges, leaders are holding stand-up meetings to convey information and gather input from frontline employees, putting information into the technologies regularly used by frontline workers, and expanding employees’ access to mobile devices.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Some aspects of work are handled better for those on the frontline.
For example, the use of certain hands-on development methods like job shadowing, job rotations, apprenticeships, coaching, simulations and role plays are used more for frontline workers than others. These methods embody the on-the-job, in-the-flow learning that L&D functions have been talking about for so long. They enable workers to develop skills in the context of their jobs and to practice and get real-time feedback.
In our research, when leaders described how frontline employees learn, they said things like:
“You sit there, someone shows you what to do, then you get to do it, and an expert checks you off.” — Director of Learning Experience & Innovation, Global Beverage Company
“Training is done on the job with a more experienced operator.” — Head of Section, Training, Global Mining Company
“It’s a shoulder-to-shoulder experience, someone showing you how to make French Fries.” — Former Chief Learning Officer, Global Fast-Food Company
But many of these methods were used only in pockets of the organization. Great lessons and ideas stayed on the frontline teams where they originated. Forward-thinking leaders were using their positions to surface and spread the great ideas developed in these pockets across the organization.
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Related Article: Find Your Learning and Development Influencers
Insight 3: Build on Strengths And Address Challenges for Frontline Workers to Thrive
Broadly speaking, organizations need to help every employee do three things:
- Perform well
- Learn, grow and prepare for future roles (if they want)
- Work in an environment that motivates, engages and includes them
We asked over 50 leaders how they were supporting frontline workers to thrive in these three areas. They told us about the previously mentioned hands-on development benefits and access-to-information challenges, among many other things. All told, we identified 15 broad actions that organizations can take to enable frontline workers to thrive. They’re not the only ideas we heard, but they were the most widespread and unique to frontline employees. These ideas are summarized in Figure 2.
Perhaps most important, leading organizations actively work to not just address challenges but to also build on what is already done well.
For example, many frontline-heavy employers commit significant effort and resources to serving the communities in which they operate. Employees and employers benefit from this commitment to the community through:
- Improved brand reputation for the organization, with implications for employee and customer loyalty.
- Increased revenue and employee retention, and in some cases increased trust between the organization and the community.
- More influence for the organization (and franchise owners) within the community, for example with local legislators.
- Economic advancement for employees and the community.
Leaders were building on this existing strength by continuing to support education in various communities (not just for employees), sponsoring and donating to events, participating in local events and even providing free services to community members (for example, many community health centers do this as part of their mission). Some leaders were also thinking about how to spread the good ideas they’d found on the front line to other areas of their organizations.
As organizations continue to investigate how to better enable frontline workers, they'll need to not only address unique frontline challenges and differences, but also build on what’s going well, keeping in mind that all employees have similar foundational needs.
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