Employee experience (EX) is how your organization makes workers feel at every stage of the employee journey. EX impacts employee engagement, employee productivity, and retention — which means that building a consistently positive employee experience makes a big difference to your business.
Positive EX is particularly important for frontline employees. These people are the face of your organization. The frontline experience directly affects product quality and customer satisfaction.
But the frontline employee experience is falling short:
- A recent Quinyx report found that 1 in 2 frontline workers have thought about quitting their jobs in the past year due to low pay, stress, and irregular working hours.
- O.C. Tanner research reveals that 2 in 5 frontline employees say they’re viewed as inferior by employees in the office, and more than a third say their work is not valued as highly as office work.
- Frontline employees are hard to reach. Working in isolation, away from HQ, they often feel disconnected from company culture and comms — and don’t get access to the same tech tools as their desk-based peers.
The demands of shift work. A sense of inequality. A feeling of disconnection. There are lots of barriers getting in the way of a positive frontline employee experience. To overcome these barriers, you need a targeted approach that keeps frontline needs front of mind.
The good news is that there are actionable steps you can begin taking today to create a positive employee experience across your frontline — ultimately helping your organization boost employee engagement, productivity, and retention.
8 steps to building a positive employee experience for your frontline workforce
To create a positive employee experience for frontline workers, consider these eight areas of opportunity:
- Develop an employee experience strategy
- Create a positive company culture
- Give employees development and growth opportunities
- Establish effective communication channels
- Recognize employee achievements
- Improve the physical and digital work environment
- Hone onboarding and offboarding
- Ask for employee feedback
Let’s take a closer look at each of these actions.
Step 1: Develop an employee experience strategy
Gallup looked at companies with a strong workplace culture to find out what they had in common. They found that companies with the best culture were committed to developing a positive employee experience across the whole employee life cycle.
In the most successful organizations, employee experience and employee engagement sit at the center of company strategy, informing how they hire, onboard, and develop talent. It also informs how they motivate their teams, set goals, and communicate to their employees.
Achieving this holistic approach is easier when you have a thoughtfully crafted employee experience strategy — one that tackles all five stages of the employee lifecycle:
- Attraction
- Recruitment
- Onboarding
- Development
- Separation
To create a strategy suited to each of these employee journey stages, use employee feedback to help you uncover weaknesses at each stage. You can then set EX goals that align with organizational goals — and develop initiatives that will help you achieve them.
Step 2: Create a more positive company culture
A positive company culture supports a positive employee experience. So what can you do to improve the culture within your organization?
Define core values and incorporate them into the workplace
When you get clear on your company’s core values, you unite employees behind one definitive version of company culture and establish how people should work together and the goals you’re all working towards.
Once you’ve defined your values, think about how you’ll express them across every stage of your employee journey. Also, weave them into your internal communications regularly to reinforce their importance.
Foster a supportive and inclusive environment
Employees who feel that they belong at an organization are 5.3 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work. So to build a positive and productive workplace culture, you need to ensure that everyone feels supported and included.
That might mean taking an in-depth look at your diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and how they are lived across the employee journey. It might mean working to create a culture of psychological safety and open communication, where everyone feels able to share their ideas and concerns.
For frontline teams, it could mean ensuring employees get opportunities to build relationships with co-workers — and that they get access to the same tools and resources as their desk-based peers.
Promote wellbeing and work-life balance
Another characteristic of strong and resilient workplace cultures is an emphasis on wellbeing in work and in life. Companies that show concern for the holistic wellbeing of employees — caring about them as people, not just workers — are more likely to create a more engaging employee experience.
Gym memberships, mental health support, financial planning, and volunteer days can all improve the physical and mental wellbeing of employees. For many employees, work-life balance is another key factor — and there are various strategies you can use to bring flexibility to frontline work.
You can share frontline worker shifts at least two weeks in advance, giving them more time to plan their out-of-work lives. You can give them access to shift-swapping tools so they can exchange shifts with co-workers without manager involvement.
Or follow the example of the Principality Building Society, which made the decision to shut their branches half an hour before the end of retail employee shifts. This allows employees to finish tasks and leave on time, without having to serve customers for those last minutes of the day.
Step 3: Give employees development and growth opportunities
Frontline workers are often overlooked when it comes to training and career progression. McKinsey research shows that 65% of frontline workers are unaware or unsure of how to achieve advancement. Only 32% say that they receive education or training in the workplace.
But training and development can have a big impact on the employee experience. McKinsey also revealed that frontline employees rank job growth or promotion above pay and benefits. In fact, it’s their top priority in the workplace.
Make it easy for frontline employees to access development resources by choosing training programs that can be accessed via mobile devices. Micro-learning features are also a good idea, allowing employees to complete short lessons, fitting learning around their busy schedules.
Communication is key, too. The connection between a frontline role and opportunities elsewhere in the organization isn’t always clear. Managers need to make employees aware — very early in the employee journey — of the career progression options available to them.
Step 4: Establish effective communication channels
Good internal communication is the foundation of employee engagement and any successful employee experience strategy. But frontline employees are more likely to miss out on vital and culture-building communications if they’re put on a noticeboard or sent via email.
Frontline workers need communication channels that they can access on the go, on their smartphones. They need streamlined channels, so they know exactly where to find the information they’re looking for. To ensure engagement, they should also only receive content that is relevant to them.
Communication channels should allow frontline workers to connect with co-workers, too. The 32,000 frontline care workers at Elara Caring, working alone in clients’ homes, often felt isolated and lonely. This harmed employee satisfaction.
Now, with the help of Blink, the team can communicate easily over a dedicated company app. This means more knowledge sharing, stronger co-worker relationships, and a more positive employee experience.
Step 5: Recognize employee achievements
Employees experience more job satisfaction when they receive recognition from managers and peers. The act of giving recognition is also good for staff morale.
You can recognize an employee on their birthday or a work anniversary. You can highlight project success or how an employee has demonstrated company values.
But giving rewards and recognition to frontline workers requires more intention: Because frontline employees don’t work in the office, there’s less opportunity for informal thanks.
This is where digital recognition tools can help. By sharing praise and rewards on your digital communication channels, you make recognition a more visible part of company culture — even for your frontline. So you get to boost employee productivity, motivation, and satisfaction across the board.
Step 6: Improve the physical and digital work environment
Design a safe and comfortable workplace
The physical work environment has a big impact on employee wellbeing and productivity. You need to ensure the workplace is safe and comfortable and doesn’t put undue physical strain on your workers.
To improve frontline workplace safety and comfort, you should:
- Provide the necessary personal protective equipment
- Conduct regular mandatory training so everyone knows safety protocols
- Provide channels where employees can communicate safety concerns quickly
- Run regular safety audits
A well-designed work environment prevents accidents and injuries, reduces stress, and improves job satisfaction.
Use tools to streamline processes and improve efficiency
Only 10% of frontline workers say they have high access to the tools, tech, and opportunities they need to connect and advance in their workplace. But the digital employee experience is crucial to your overall EX.
Give employees too many tools — or tools that add friction to their workday — and you risk creating frustration and disengagement. Avoid using any tech tools and you’re left with inefficient paper processes. Either way, you end up harming employee satisfaction.
When choosing tools for a frontline workforce, look for:
- Mobile-first tools, that don’t require a company email address and are available on employee smartphones
- A tool that brings all company software into one hub, so employees don’t have to remember lots of logins and passwords
The best employee apps are built with the frontline in mind. They’re intuitive to use and offer a host of useful features. They allow workers to chat with co-workers, get company updates, select their benefits, view pay slips, complete the onboarding process, and sign up for shifts — all via their mobile device.
Step 7: Hone onboarding and offboarding
To build a better employee experience for your frontline, you need to consider every stage of the employee journey:
Craft an effective onboarding process for new employees
Onboarding is a process that should start before an employee’s first day at your organization and last for at least three months. It should incorporate regular recognition and two-way feedback, along with goal setting, team building, and skills development.
For frontline employees, it makes sense to make onboarding resources available via smartphone. That way, they can read FAQs, complete mandatory training, and learn about company policies at a time and place that suits them.
Conduct exit interviews
Exit interviews are another integral part of any employee experience strategy.
First, because when you treat employees fairly and positively even as they leave your organization, you show other employees that you value the person, not just the worker.
Second, because exit interviews can reveal areas for employee experience improvement. Whether it’s progression opportunities, pay and benefits, company culture, or internal communication, finding out what prompted an employee to leave can give you lots of food for thought.
Step 8: Ask for employee feedback
Offboarding feedback is important. But don’t wait until employees are leaving your organization to ask what they think of their employee experience. Schedule regular employee surveys to get feedback and learn t how they think and feel about your organization.
Use employee surveys
You can use quarterly employee experience surveys to assess employee sentiment. By asking the same employee survey questions every quarter, you can benchmark your performance and see which of your employee experience initiatives are making the most difference. You can then update goals in your employee experience strategy.
You can also use pulse surveys to get a snapshot of your employee experience at any given moment. This helps to ensure any employee experience issues are identified and dealt with promptly.
For either type of survey, be sure to ask demographic questions. These allow you to segment survey responses by employee journey stage, department, or team — revealing more detailed insights without compromising employee anonymity.
Follow survey best practices
To get the most from your employee surveys, follow survey best practices by:
- Allowing employees to respond to surveys anonymously. That way, you get honest and valuable answers.
- Sending employee surveys in a format that’s accessible to everyone. Mobile-first survey software ensures every member of staff — whether they’re working in the office, at home, or on the frontline of your organization — gets to give their opinion.
- Developing a survey communication strategy. Keep employees in the loop, thanking them for their feedback and clearly communicating how you plan to act upon it. This ensures ongoing engagement with the feedback process.
The role of technology in the frontline employee experience
The digital employee experience is a big part of the employee experience. But it’s particularly important for frontline workers who don’t spend their days at a desk.
With the right technology, you connect everyone — including hard-to-reach frontline employees — to internal communication, co-workers, and vital workplace resources. This helps improve EX, boosting employee productivity and retention in the process.
Many workplace tech tools are designed for office staff. They work beautifully for your team at HQ. But don’t provide the same features and level of functionality for your frontline workers.
To prevent tech from widening the gap between the frontline and desk-based worker experience, you need tech tools and employee experience software with the following features:
- An easy-to-use, intuitive interface with a minimal learning curve
- A mobile-first design, so all features are accessible via an employee’s smartphone
- Single sign-on security, so employees can log into all workplace software with one set of login details
- No email required — some frontline workers don’t have a company email address so it’s important that workplace tech works without them
Blink’s employee app ticks all these boxes and more.
It provides a news feed, group chat, and 1:1 messaging for easy communication. It gives managers EX-boosting tools, like recognition and employee surveys. Blink also integrates with other workplace tech, creating a one-stop shop for your frontline team.
But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what Lorna Murphy, Operations and HR Manager at transit company Abellio had to say about the Blink experience:
“Using Blink, Abellio bus drivers can access a system of simple pathways that makes it easy for them to report issues, start a conversation with management or colleagues, or go about their day-to-day tasks such as checking shifts and accessing payslips, reconnecting them back to the organization they work for via one simple, easy-to-use app.”
Use Blink to create a positive employee experience across your frontline. Schedule your personalized demo today.
