The two billion frontline workers worldwide have had their tough moments, but the pandemic has put even more burden on them. They perform their jobs despite the risks. And your company can’t run without them.
So if you want to keep them engaged and productive, now is the time to implement new strategies that improve their overall well-being and efficiency.
You can’t afford to keep them on the sidelines anymore. In fact, many organizations have already included frontline workers in their digital transformation efforts.
Don’t want to be left behind? Worry not! In this post, we’ll share the best practices you can implement for optimizing frontline work. These tips will make things easier for not just frontline workers, but also their supervisors and people in your IT department.
Tips to optimize frontline work
Whether in retail, healthcare, or hospitality, we have your frontline workers covered with these strategies to enhance their workflows.
Provide a single sign-on experience that supports SMS, not just email.
In a survey of 10,624 employees worldwide, more than a quarter said they miss critical actions and messages due to the hassle of switching between different work apps.
Different apps may also have different login credentials (usernames and passwords). So you can imagine how hard it can be for frontline workers to keep up, who typically don’t even have emails.
But what most of them have these days are mobile phones. So with an SSO that supports SMS, you can let them sign in to the tools provided by your company using one-time SMS codes.
Blink, for example, is an employee app that supports a single sign-on (SSO) experience and plenty of integrations. And you can use it to allow frontline workers to seamlessly access all the tools, information, and other material they’re authorized for.
An SSO experience doesn’t just make your frontline more productive but also frees up IT resources to focus on other critical projects.
Frontline Employee Engagement in 2023
Blink created this guide after working with hundreds of frontline organizations. Now, these insights can help other leaders prepare for a year that promises both challenge and opportunity.
Download to learn: The top eight frontline engagement trends to watch out for and the six key strategies for success
Digitize manual processes with micro-apps.
A study shows that the time employees spend on HR-related tasks adds up to 40 million hours each month. And it’s equivalent to $8.15 billion in lost productivity across large companies in the US and the UK.
Not to mention how frustrating such tasks are. For example, 37% of employees find approving or submitting PTO requests more annoying than doing the dishes!
A big reason for all this is that HR-related tasks mostly rely on paper-based processes. And they involve steps that workers have to carry out in person or over the phone.
One of the best ways to address this problem is to reduce the lengthy HR processes to just a few taps of a smartphone screen.
With Blink, for example, you can make the time-off request process simple and accessible with one of its micro-apps. This saves a tone of time for both the workers and the management.
Move all your internal communication to one channel
Sending the employee newsletter. Updating the intranet. Asking managers to pin on local notice boards. Is this what communicating a critical message looks like in your organization?
There is no HR or internal comms department in the world that relishes the thought of sending the same message repeatedly over multiple channels, hoping for at least one to get through.
It’s not just time-consuming for management, but also confusing for workers when there is no single source of information they can go to by default. Documents are uploaded in one app, group chats are in another, and forms are in yet another place.
In contrast, Blink puts most of the tools required by frontline workers in one convenient place.
Plus, you can take advantage of its integration with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, SAP, Dropbox, Oracle, and several other systems to bring their experience to the same place.
Make employee communication instant.
Your frontline employees don’t sit with a computer all day. So you probably rely on non-electronic ways to communicate with them, such as notice boards and word-of-mouth. But these are slow and unreliable, especially for urgent or important updates.
To make frontline teams more efficient, you need something faster. Blink is designed as a social media feed that employees can view on their mobile phones. So updates are instant.
Not just that. Blink comes with instant messaging (combined with an employee directory) that makes it easy for workers to contact other people in the company in real time, share attachments, search for previous messages, and get things done.
The result? Your organization feels closer to your workforce, and your workforce is closer than ever to your organization.
Prioritize and modernize training.
More than 50% of workers say their organization hasn’t provided the training needed to carry out their jobs effectively. And without adequate training, no worker can realize his or her true potential.
But training frontline workers is hard without an easy way to share lessons and documents. That’s where Blink’s Content Management Hub comes in.
It lets admins upload documents and create pages to be shared with people in your organization. So frontline workers can find and access the right content without any hassles.
With this feature, your company can quickly onboard new frontline workers and turn them into productive contributors from day one.
Amplify frontline workers’ voices.
According to Anthony Cahill, a manufacturing operations expert:
“Frontline workers such as production operators live and breathe the problems on the floor every day. And not only that, they have a wealth of knowledge when it comes to potential solutions.”
Even acting on small solutions suggested by them can lead to considerable improvement in day-to-day operations. In fact, you can also empower frontline workers by letting them take ownership of implementing their recommendations.
By letting them contribute to your company’s internal communication, you can include them in decision-making, make them feel valued, and turn improvement opportunities into sustainable success.
The right communication platform can give you several ways to make this happen. For example, instead of using email to send a clunky form, Blink lets you create quick, anonymous polls that can be shared on the company’s social-media-style newsfeed or a central content repository.
Final thoughts on optimizing frontline work
In an environment where many organizations are facing labor shortages and other disruptions on the frontline, you need technology that can save time, help workers communicate effectively, and maximize their productivity.
And that means investing in the right tools, processes, and best practices that can automate tasks and create a strong, inclusive culture for frontline employees. The strategies covered above can help you do the same.
So go ahead and pick the ones you want to start with. As you start seeing positive results from them, you can begin implementing the rest. And if you’re considering a new internal communication platform, look no further than Blink. Get a free demo today.
