5 Winning Strategies to Engage Frontline Workers

Not all employees in a company are treated the same way. This is certainly true for the frontline workers, who often work away from a desk or contact with the rest of the team.

A recent Forbes survey says that only 41% of frontline workers are actually engaged at work. And only 55% of them are satisfied with the conditions in their workplace. So why is it that boosting frontline workers’ integration into a company is so important?

Reasons Why Frontline Worker Engagement is Important

1. They Represent Your Brand to Your Customers

Frontline workers are most likely to represent the company’s values and image, since they are the ones that are directly interacting with the customers first. It’s why you’d want to keep these workers as engaged and productive as possible, as it can impact your brand image.

2. Key Metrics

Since your frontline workers are directly engaging with customers daily, they can provide you with some key insights that are much more detailed and relevant to the real lives of customers.

These can help you:

• Optimise the product or service based on the feedback that customers are providing through word of mouth to workers.
• Be aware of the problems that the clients are facing, so that you can plan and develop solutions accordingly.
• Gather general data about your customers so that you can target marketing content relevant to their needs.

Frontline workers can be responsible for feeding in all this information that you can use to build your brand. And for the process of reporting back to be as efficient as possible, it is very important that they are satisfied with their work experience.

3. Work Environment

Although they might not be working from behind the desk, frontline workers are an indispensable part of the workforce.

Having a team that is on the same page can work wonders for overall productivity. This is because there is increased motivation in working towards a common goal. Maintaining team morale and boosting employee engagement can directly lead to a better work environment. And in turn, this will lead to better performance from all team members.

Challenges to Employee Engagement

1. Lack of Communication

As many as 60% of companies don’t have a communications strategy, which is alarming considering that a team is expected to be a cohesive unit at work.

Can a frontline worker communicate with the rest of the company, especially the upper management?

2. Lack of Proper Technology

Are you onboarding new employees the right way? Without using the right tech, things can become difficult.

The training material can be too difficult to understand, not readily available, or simply incoherent with their role in the company. Delivering the training material in a digestible manner is essential for seamless integration of frontline workers.

A Workplace Research Foundation study revealed that 38% of engaged workers show increased productivity. Without the right onboarding, you may be missing out on an efficient and productive workforce. But, there are measures you can put into place to eliminate this problem starting today.

Here are some of the winning strategies that companies can use to engage their frontline workers to the optimal degree.

5 Key Strategies to Engage Frontline Workers

1. Take Employees Feedback

To solve the problem of employee engagement, first know about current workplace issues. Have your employees answer questions on a survey, where they can rate their degree of satisfaction or engagement with the company. This will provide you with a detailed picture of how things currently are, and how much things need to change.

2. Act on the Feedback

The best thing that you can do after collecting information about your employees is to actually act on it. This way, there is a genuine feeling of togetherness that is fostered throughout all the levels of the company and engagement is boosted naturally. Collecting information about employees is of no use if you don’t use it to build a better workforce.

3. Use the Right Technology to Keep Frontline Workers Connected

Most companies lack the tech required to keep employees connected and integrated. Employee management systems are a great solution to tackle the problem of low engagement. In addition, you can also stop this problem from ever coming up by leveraging the benefits of microlearning, which we will discuss later on.

• An in-app directory which gives employees access to one another, for instance, can generate one-to-one relationships much better.
• An in-app group chat, where people can communicate with one another directly is also a great communication option. However, this must be separate from other messaging apps to avoid the risk of work and life coming together, and the former being ignored.

4. Have Mentors for New Employees

For your employees, making a good first impression goes a long way in boosting work experience. So, having someone that can show them the ropes is a great way to integrate them into the fold.

This way, they no longer end up feeling ‘lost’ or overwhelming pressure due to an unfamiliar environment. Problems specific to the role that they have taken up can also be softened if they have a senior member of the team to help them out initially.

5. Make the Best Use of Training Material

It is no secret that people’s attention span is on a serious decline, and so, it is more important than ever to deliver digestible training programs that can help simplify complex issues to new employees so that they aren’t overwhelmed.

Mobile learning should be empowered, and training material should be made available from any device. This way, new employees can study the training material in a way that works for them and their working process, even if it is from their phone.

Moreover, microlearning is now becoming very prevalent in training programs. This means delivering content in small quantities, so that they can be easily absorbed and recalled by trainees.

How Can Microlearning Help?

93% of employees say that a great training program can maximize their engagement, according to Axonify.

By using the principle of micro-learning, you can deliver the training content in small amounts. For instance, have only one major objective of every training module so that the learner can maximize their absorption of that one big idea that they are exposed to.

While it may be tempting to include stats and research in your training modules, it is best to avoid it. This is because the numbers do very little in terms of educating people about the intricacies of their work. Instead, keep the content informative, short and concise to maximize the benefits of microlearning.

• People respond better to visual content such as videos, images and infographics than text.
• Creating short videos that explain training modules in a brief manner is the best way to go forward.
• The popularity of short-form videos on social media can be translated into your training modules as well.

Through this, employees can learn quickly from a familiar form of content and will be better equipped to retain and apply the information too.

Making Communication with Employees a Two-Way Street

Did you ever doze off during school lectures?

If so, you know exactly how it feels when someone goes on about a topic needlessly. The one-sided communication from the instructor also contributes to the module being boring. As a result, two-way communication should be the aim of training modules.

On a microlearning platform, you can ask them quick questions about the information that they just received, or you can have a problem-solving activity where they have to use the skill that they learned.

Having a mentor that new employees can reach out to alongside the training module is also beneficial so that they don’t feel isolated and can ask any questions they might have.

Asking for the student’s input can go a long way to make the training look more like a discussion and less of a lecture. By actively participating, the students are more likely to take away key concepts and skills than forget them right after.

Maximize Frontline Worker Engagement Right from the Beginning

The frontline workers of a company are the backbone for success. And you can avoid a lack of engagement from the beginning with a quick and effective training process that can help make employee integration much easier.

Bites offers you the perfect solution to deliver training in short and concise modules. By using only bits of information at a time, you can help break down complex ideas for new employees to help them learn faster.

Make employee training a breeze. Contact us to get started now.