Despite having more technology than ever before, the modern workforce is largely disconnected and divided. We’re working across different locations and juggling with more platforms and logins than ever. These challenges, already hard on desk-based, computer-connected office workers, are amplified for the frontline workforce.
Frontline employees tend to spend their days isolated from both their desk-based coworkers and other frontline colleagues. They don’t always have access to the same communication channels or tech tools as their office-based peers — and even if they do, they have minimal time to check on these platforms in between shifts, travels, and on-the-job work.
This means that the concept of the employee experience varies dramatically from team to team, and sometimes from worker to worker, across the same organization. It makes it harder for HR teams to keep a handle on overall employee engagement and satisfaction — and often inadvertently creates gaps in the workforce culture in different pockets of the company.
Just look at a recent Axios report to see this discrepancy in action: Deskless employees are less trusting of their managers and people leaders, less engaged in general, and more likely to experience burnout than their desk-based coworkers.
Bringing your employees together through a unified frontline workforce experience helps to close and mitigate these experience gaps. And by improving employee engagement, you can also make a positive impact on:
- Company culture
- Workplace communication and collaboration
- Productivity and customer service
- Employee satisfaction and retention
Here, we take a look at three primary strategies you can use to build connections between employees and create a unified employee experience.
3 ways to unify your frontline employee experience
To unify the frontline employee experience, you need to:
- Provide frontline-facing technology
- Communicate over one cohesive channel
- Conduct regular employee surveys
1. Provide frontline-facing technology
Bad tech adds friction to the work day. It causes headaches and slows your teams down. This is true for any of your employees — but it’s particularly relevant to the frontline.
Frontline workers need fast, easy, streamlined tech solutions that fit into their busy work days. They shouldn’t have to remember lots of different sets of login details and shouldn’t need a company email address to access essential tech tools.
In instances where your desk-based and frontline staff use the same tech tools — which is an excellent logistical way to unify your workforce — everyone should enjoy the same great digital experience. The same features and functionality should be available on both desktop and mobile devices.
But this isn’t the current reality. Just 10% of frontline employees say they have enough access to the tools, tech, and opportunities they need to connect and advance in their workplace.
The most effective frontline-facing technologies are the ones that have been designed for and with the frontline workforce. Rather than trying to modify the desk-based experience, purpose-built technology can make a huge difference to the employee experience. It brings desk-based and frontline staff onto the same (digital) page and ensures everyone feels valued.
2. Communicate over one cohesive channel
Communicating with frontline employees can be a challenge because they don’t tend to spend a lot of time in the office or working alongside managers.
Frontline organizations have usually tried various methods of internal communications. Paper notices on a board in the break room. Posters left on the seat of every bus driver. Overstretched frontline managers sending messages individually to every employee smartphone.
But they all reach the conclusion that these communication channels are inefficient and ineffective. A piecemeal approach makes it easy for important messages to get missed, messaging to become confused, and conversations to remain one-sided.
Communicating over one cohesive communication channel helps to unify your workforce and improve the frontline employee experience. As well as ensuring relevant communications reach your entire workforce, a workforce engagement app can allow you to:
- Engage in two-way communication with frontline employees, with the help of features like a news feed and group chats
- Target and tailor communications to specific teams, departments, and locations, ensuring that messages are always relevant
- Create mandatory reads that necessitate employee acknowledgment so you know that important messages are being read
3. Conduct regular employee surveys
Top-down communication is essential for company-wide updates and culture-building. But if you want to improve the employee experience and bring your workforce together, you need to truly understand what’s going well — and what isn’t — by giving employees a voice.
For many, that might mean conducting regular employee surveys, including:
- Quarterly surveys: More regular than the annual survey, quarterly surveys help you to benchmark and track progress in key areas of the employee experience
- Pulse surveys: To ensure employee engagement issues don’t sneak up on your HR team, pulse surveys offer a snapshot of employee sentiment, right here, right now
By using a combination of employee surveys, you can seek employee input on corporate policies and initiatives as well as gauge how loyal employees feel toward your company in order to improve retention, engagement, and professional development.
Having an all-in-one internal communications tool to support this process makes things simple. Built-in feedback tools makes it easier for your HR and communications teams to launch surveys — and it makes it a streamlined process for employees, too. No more long-winded paper process. No logging into a communal computer. Workers can simply open the app on their smartphone, get an alert for the survey, and fill it out on their break.
The valuable data you get from your whole organization — and the reporting and analytics tools that analyze it — gives you the information you need to make targeted improvements to the employee experience.
In summary
When you unify your frontline employee experience, you create a work environment where all workers have the channels and technologies they need to come together. They can share their successes, voice their concerns, and experience a sense of camaraderie.
Create the best workplace experience for your entire employee base, and get their best work — and enhanced engagement and loyalty — in return.
With an employee super-app like Blink, you have everything you need to improve the employee experience for frontline and desk-based workers alike. To see what Blink can do for your organization, schedule a personalized demo today.
