The cashier at your local grocery store. The person who makes your toilet paper. The driver who just delivered your 12,347th online order. The technician who makes sure your internet connection works. The people who make sure you can get fresh produce at your local grocery store. Basically, all the people who make life as you know it possible.
What do they have in common?
They are frontline workers, part of a group of nearly 3 billion people around the globe. Despite their large numbers, they’ve been massively underserved by technology and by their employers over the past few decades. That’s all changing, and the impact it’s having on businesses is huge.
If you haven’t kept up, you’re probably asking yourself questions like “Why can’t I find candidates for all these open jobs?” or “Why are all my employees leaving?”. It probably feels like you’re losing the war for talent.
Read on to find out more about the makeup of this critical part of the world’s workforce and to see how paying more attention to frontline workers can have a dramatic effect on your organization.
What is a frontline worker?
Frontline (or deskless) workers are employees whose core job responsibilities take place away from a desk and a computer.
These workers don’t typically work at your company’s headquarters, but they also aren’t “remote workers” in the popular sense. That’s an important clarification, because while the pandemic (and post pandemic) has driven a big increase in the number of people working away from company offices, “remote workers” usually still refers to employees who sit in front of a computer all day.
Here’s a simple way to think about it: Frontline workers are basically the opposite of ‘office workers’.
They may still do complicated tasks that require advanced education and skills, but frontline workers are often on-the-go, working with their hands, or interacting directly with your customers.
Understanding the typical frontline employee’s experience
Do you know how many frontline employees work in your organization?
While it might seem like a simple question, it’s not uncommon for HR or operations professionals to have a hard time answering it. This simple question underscores the reality that many companies aren’t focusing enough attention on the experience of their frontline employees.
Studies have shown that around 80% of the global workforce can be considered frontline (or deskless). As that includes a majority of the world’s workforce and covers many different industries, it can be difficult to describe the experience of a ‘typical’ frontline worker (which is why it’s important for every company to survey and listen to their own frontline/deskless employees).
While a detailed picture is hard to paint, many studies have been done on frontline employees in recent years, which means it’s possible to identify broad trends to better understand the general experience of deskless workers:
- According to research done by Quinyx, nearly three-quarters of frontline employees still go to work while being sick, often due to fear of losing pay or their jobs. They also found that across industries more than half of frontline workers have considered leaving their jobs recently, along with nearly half of frontline workers reporting not feeling valued.
- SAP’s research shows that frontline workers rank their top challenges as rewards (salary and benefits), hiring and onboarding, training, career growth, and communicating with their employer.
- 60% of frontline workers are unhappy or frustrated with the technology they’re given to do their jobs
- 83% of frontline employees don’t have a company email address, and nearly half report not knowing the vision of their company’s leadership team
- About three-quarters of frontline employees think that consistent messages from senior management are important, but 84% don’t believe they get enough info from their company’s top leaders.
It’s not a pretty picture, is it?
Add up all of these factors together — along with the impact of pandemic, which had a strong impact on frontline roles in healthcare, retail, and logistics — and it really shouldn’t be surprising that we’re experiencing the great resignation across many industries which have large frontline worker populations.
Impact stories of investing in frontline workers
While it’s not always easy to engage frontline workers, it’s worth the effort.
Many organizations are waking up to the fact that frontline workers are a vital piece of their success. These companies are making strategic investments in technology, HR or operations personnel, and training, and they’re seeing positive impacts across the board. Impacts like more ROI from existing investments, higher levels of involvement in company benefit plans, less turnover, and more employee satisfaction.
Here are a few short stories showing what that looks like
Lack of benefit and service adoption
One of our customers at Anthill offered many services to support employees, including unique health benefits and a transportation service. These programs were costly for the company, but they wanted to take care of their employees. Unfortunately, adoption of these services was super low.
The problem?
Although the company had sent out emails about the services, their frontline workers didn’t use email. Once the company shifted and made info available via text messages with AI-powered automated system, adoption quickly rose and they started seeing value from their investments.
Death by a thousand paper cuts
While employers are often looking for huge problems to fix, we’ve learned that the best opportunities for improvement are often smaller in nature. For example:
- Adjusting the thermostat. On a hot summer day, conditions inside a factory became unbearable. Management didn’t want to turn on the A/C because it was expensive. Workers were on the verge of staging a walkout, but then text messages started pouring in with complaints. Automatically the sentiment of the context was analyzed by the system and were escalated to senior leadership, who quickly decided to lower the thermostat. This avoided the walkout, kept production going, and kept their employees safe.
- Fired or No-showed? We’ve seen several situations where employees didn’t show up to work because schedules weren’t communicated clearly. This led to management thinking they were “no call, no shows” (which there was a clear policy against), causing employees to think they’d been fired without cause.This huge disconnect caused stress for employees and work for HR and management teams, but the root issue was a communication problem. Once these companies adapted their approach to make schedule info available via automatic communication platform, the problems disappeared.
These seemingly small changes both had outsized impacts on the companies implementing them and on their employees. And there are many, many more stories like this.
They all illustrate this one important point: as organizations find ways to include frontline workers in conversations about how to work better together, benefits multiply at both the employee and company levels.
