5 Key Tips for Empowering Your Frontline Employees

Is empowering frontline employees top of mind for your organization? According to Emma Williams, corporate vice president of Modern Work Transformations at Microsoft, 88% of organizations employ people in frontline roles. However, the question remains: are organizations prioritizing the empowerment of their frontlines? In this blog post, we'll delve deeper into the importance of empowering frontline employees and explore some effective strategies for doing so.

In this blog, you will find:

👫 How to engage frontline employees: 5 tips

👓 1. Outline a clear vision for your entire organization

👥 2. Help Frontline employees feel like they belong to your team

💬 3. Empower your frontline employees through effective communication

👨‍💻 4. Provide employees with the right technology

⭐ 5. Provide regular recognition and feedback

👍 Workplace for frontline workers

How to Engage Frontline Employees: 5 tips

How do you empower and engage your frontline employees such as nurses, support staff, teachers, food handlers, sales associates, first responders, flight attendants, electricians, construction workers, store managers, personal trainers, and the list goes on?  

If you oversee an organization with frontline workers, you may have already asked this very question. We are going to give you four tips for empowering your front liners.

1. Empower Frontline Employees By Outlining a Clear Vision for Your Entire Organization 

One of the single most significant failures of any organization's strategy is the failure to understand the broader company vision.

The vision is not the fancy tagline we share with the world. It's the clear objective of who, where, what, and how for our corporate strategy. Your frontline workersare the ones who are in direct contact with your current and potential customers every single day. They need to be able to understand your organization's vision and objectives if your company is going to implement its strategy effectively. However, it's not uncommon for them to feel as though they're disconnected from the rest of the team – especially if there are in a different geographic location from headquarters.

The frontline employee does not always feel as though the corporate understands their role, what they do on a day-to-day basis, or what challenges they face. 

As a result, it's critical to empower and engage your frontline personnel by ensuring they understand your organization's mission, vision and how it connects to their position. They will be able to better match their daily duties and responsibilities with the larger company goals as a consequence, resulting in greater performance and customer satisfaction. To do this, executives must use primary and concise language to convey the company's goal to the frontline employees. Moreover, giving chances for input and cooperation is critical, allowing frontline staff to contribute to the organization's goal and take pride in their part in attaining it. You can develop a more engaged and motivated workforce that is better able to drive your organization's success by empowering your frontline staff in this manner.

Virgin Airlines Case Study

Virgin Airlines had this exact challenge: to unify their team and facilitate open communication between corporate headquarters and all frontline hirelings, they implemented Workplace from Meta.

With Workplace, they were able to share the corporate vision via posts and live monthly CEO video streaming and get real-time feedback on those posts from frontline employees. And, because it's available on multiple devices (including mobile), Workplace provides a secure space to build a collaborative, connected, and engaged frontline workforce.

Virgin Airlines has been able to make a direct connection between Workplace from Meta, Employees, and reduction in material handling costs directly through the implementation of a simple tool with a familiar environment. Read the full story here. 

2. Help Frontline Employees Feel Like They Belong to Your Team

There often seems to be a disconnect between corporate headquarters and frontline employees, which, some might say, is somewhat natural – frontline employees aren’t often located in the same physical vicinity as their corporate headquarters, and often that physical distance can lead to a gap in communication or a feeling of not belonging to the team. When this happens, front liners can feel underappreciated, which can lead to poor motivation or, in some rare cases, subversive (or open) hostility between frontline workers and corporate workers.

Your frontline workers are directly interacting with your customers – they’re the face of your organization and the first point of contact between you and your potential customer. Ignoring the disconnect is a major strategic error many organizations, unfortunately, seem to make.

Creating a culture that supports and recognizes frontline staff's contributions helps them feel like they belong. Communication and encouragement can do this. Training and development can also make them feel like they're part of a bigger team and vital to the company's success. When teams and departments collaborate, employees feel part of a broader team with the same goal. You can foster loyalty, motivation, and pride in your organization by prioritizing the well-being and success of frontline personnel.

*Screenshot of LineZero's CTO as he goes live on Workplace from Meta to connect with the entire team!

One solution to bridging the gap between headquarters and frontline employees is to leverage Meta's workplace communication and collaboration platform. Workplace from Meta provides a single platform for employees to connect, communicate, and collaborate, regardless of their physical location. This can help to facilitate internal communication between corporate teams and frontline employees, allowing for the exchange of ideas and feedback in real time. Workplace also offers features such as live video streaming and virtual rooms for team meetings, which can help create a sense of community and collaboration among physically separated employees.

3. Empower Your Frontline Employees THROUGH EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

Giving frontline workers a communication tool can be a powerful way to empower them and make them feel valued. By having a platform where they can share their ideas, feedback, and concerns with the corporate team, frontline workers can feel like they are part of the decision-making process. This can be especially important for employees who are often on the front lines of customer interactions and have valuable insights into customer needs and preferences. By providing them with a direct line of communication to the back office, companies can tap into this knowledge and make more informed business decisions.

Companies like Campbell Soup, Columbia, and Tim Horton's Foundation Camp have seen the benefits of empowering their frontline workers with communication tools.

4. Provide employees with the right technology to do their jobs!

It’s essential to make it easy for employees to collaborate with those outside of their immediate vicinity, so they can share their feedback and ideas that, in many cases, come directly from the relationships they’re building with your customers.

Providing your them with the right technology to do their jobs better and more efficiently. You need to give them the tools to help them communicate with corporate.

However, because of the nature of their work, many frontline employees don’t have regular access to a computer – they’re either too busy to look at one or don’t have one on the job site where they are.

Nowadays, 87% of businesses rely on their employees to use their personal mobile devices to access company apps. Workplace has identical functionality. Regardless of whether you’re using a computer, a phone, or a tablet, frontline workers can easily access the platform on whatever device they have handy.

5. Provide regular recognition and feedback 

Studies have shown that today’s employees aren’t looking to wait for annual, quarterly, or even monthly reviews – they want guidance and feedback on a much more frequent basis so that they can continuously improve their performance.

This can be difficult when you have frontline employees, especially given the different locations that might be in play. Still, you must provide effective feedback and recognition on a regular basis, even if that feedback is negative.

Technological systems that allow for real-time communication and feedback are one way to deliver regular appreciation and feedback to frontline personnel. This can include technologies like chat or message platforms and more formal performance management software that allows managers to analyze and evaluate employee performance continuously. These solutions can give a consolidated site for feedback and recognition, allowing managers to provide input quickly and easily, even if they are not physically present with their staff. Furthermore, managers must proactively recognize and thank their frontline personnel, especially when they go above and beyond their job requirements. Regular acknowledgment and feedback not only help employees improve their performance but also shows that their contributions are respected and appreciated, which can raise morale and contribute to increased job satisfaction.

Workplace for Frontline Workers:

With Workplace, you can engage your workforce by sharing and collaborating on documents, viewing training and onboarding resources, and discussing the latest corporate documents, policies, and procedures. You can even create bots that can assist with scheduling needs. And, since Workplace is built off Facebook’s familiar platform (although kept entirely separate from personal Facebook accounts), its rate of adoption is much higher than other collaboration tools on the market today. 

How does workplace from Meta help you communicate with frontline workers?

Workplace from Meta is the perfect platform to help provide regular recognition and feedback for all your employees, including your frontline workers. Whether it’s using Workplace Video Chat to connect one-on-one with a manager or mentor, making use of private Workplace Groups to provide weekly, monthly, or quarterly updates to each employee that you interact with, or providing company-wide Kudos to those workers who are going above and beyond, physical location is no longer a barrier to providing your employees with feedback and recognition.  

Empowering Frontline Employees – Let’s Get Started!

There’s no denying the fact that frontline employees form the backbone of your organization and ensure that your organization’s ambitions and goals are brought to life. These employees are the direct connection to your customers that you rely on so much. So, it’s essential to ensure that we empower frontline employees by making them feel that they are valued members of our organization. These five tips we’ve mentioned above are a good start.

As a team of security-obsessed communication and technology experts, Workplace from Meta has partnered with LineZero to bring exceptional service to prospective and existing clients using Workplace from Meta. We understand with any new tools, you want to ensure it's suitable for your team.