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Optimizing employee experiences for frontline and remote workers

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Optimizing employee experiences for frontline and remote workersThe global workforce, for the most part, can be divided into two parts: knowledge workers and frontline workers. Knowledge workers are, traditionally, your desk-bound team. They have a dedicated workspace (whether in-office or remote), and a machine like a laptop that they use to connect to your internal systems.

Frontline workers, on the other hand, are out in the field all day. They’re the nurses at your local hospital, associates on the sales floor at the retail stores you visit, and machine operators at manufacturing facilities. They might use a dedicated company device, or they might simply use their personal phones, tablets, or wearables to connect to your internal systems.

Each group has its own wants and needs, and organizations who employ them are beginning to shift the way they work with their remote and frontline teams. As expected, technology can play a critical role in creating a comfortable work environment that allows all types of workers to be productive and engaged. Read on to learn how.

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Remote worker challengesWorking remotely can be invaluable to many people. In fact, in an article1 by remote.co, some of the reported benefits of telecommuting include increased productivity and morale, and decreased real estate costs and stress.

On the other hand, remote work makes it all too easy to go days on end without speaking to anyone but your dog. For some, that’s an ideal work environment that lends itself to endless productivity. But many of us need a little human connection to be fully committed to our jobs and our companies overall. For a company with a healthy mix of in-office and remote workers, an important goal is most likely around making remote teammates feel like part of the larger team, helping to build peer-to-peer connections, and providing access to all the resources they would have if they worked in an office.

According to a 2018 survey by TINYPulse2, 52% of employees (the majority of the workforce!) work remotely at least once per week. The same survey found that, while job performance was the most mitigating factor in managers’ decision to allow their employees to work from home, the biggest challenge those managers actually faced was fostering company culture. Missing out on water cooler conversations and team celebrations takes its toll on remote teams, so organizations and remote workers alike are finding the need to actively work on inclusion. In addition, both parties are finding the need to be more proactive about initiating conversations around career progression and growth, discussions that might occur more organically in a face-to-face setting.

1. Bibby, A., & Smith, J. (2018, November 16). 17 Stats About Remote Work in 2018. Retrieved from https://remote.co/10-stats-about-remote-work/

2. Pin, E. (2018, February 23). Our new study takes a deeper look into “the State of Remote Work”. Retrieved from https://www.tinypulse.com/blog/the-state-of-remote-work

52% of employees (the majority of the workforce!) work remotely at least once per week

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Empowering your remote workersWhether you like or dislike remote work, the fact remains that it is a trend that is embraced by more and more people, especially now that millennials have entered the workforce. In our millennial manager survey, we found that 89% of respondents would like to work from home at least one day per week, and 36% would like to work from home three or more days. In essence, remote work is here to stay for the foreseeable future. So how can you support your remote employees?

Here are a few tips for making sure your remote employees feel and are a valued part of your team:

1. Provide IT support. Onsite employees have an IT department at their disposal; remote workers may feel overwhelmed by the technical troubleshooting they need to do on their own. This article3 by Dizzion lists some of the ways IT can help remote employees. Some ideas include providing a timeline for provisioning equipment and communicating best practices for device security.

2. Invest in collaboration. By all accounts, the best thing you can do to empower your work-from-home staff is to invest in technology that helps them to collaborate and make connections with their colleagues. Our millennial manager survey found that email is still a fan favorite, but that millennials also like to use “automated translation tools, seamless document sharing and editing programs, internet-based calling, and customizable intranet platforms like Akumina.”

3. Use the cloud. The ability to work from anywhere is entirely defeated if your remote workers can’t access the tools or documents they need to do their jobs. As noted in this article4 on CMSWire, locating and downloading content is painful and time-consuming. The cloud is a much more user-friendly option.

3. IT Considerations for Supporting Remote Workers. Retrieved from https://www.dizzion.com/resource/blog/it-considerations-for-sup-porting-remote-workers/

4. Lachtanski, K. (2019, June 11). How to Improve Support for Remote Workers. Retrieved from https://www.cmswire.com/digital-work-place/how-to-improve-support-for-remote-workers/

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Frontline worker challengesAccording to Harvard Business Review5, frontline workers are “the people who actually drive customer experience,” and for many companies, especially those in the B2C market, the frontline team is the only team customers ever engage with. For those customers, the frontline workers are the company.

But while many companies recognize the importance of their frontline workers, those same employees are often left out of the strategizing and planning conversations. As a result, the challenge most companies see when working with deskless, frontline employees is helping them feel like they’re being heard and, more importantly, actually hearing them.

As we learned in our white paper 5 Key Elements to Drive Employee Satisfaction: Recognizing the Moments that Matter, regular contact in which a company solicits feedback from its employees is key to increasing engagement and productivity. Whether that means sending out frequent satisfaction surveys, or having casual, impromptu conversations, these touchpoints to a long way toward showing frontline workers that they’re appreciated and cared for. To continue that positive interaction, another best practice we learned from the same white paper is to continuously recognize and reward achievements. While this practice can and should be applied to all employees, it’s especially relevant to frontline employees.

5. Doshi, L. M. G. N. (2019, March 14). How to Motivate Frontline Employees. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2018/08/how-to-moti-vate-frontline-employees

Frontline workers are “the people who actually drive customer experience”

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Empowering your frontline workersThose on the front line are often very task-oriented; focused on getting their day-to-day work done, frequently in a fast-moving environment (picture an ER nurse tending to several patients at a time). For frontline workers, mobile devices and wearables paired with supported software are extremely important. For example, according to COMPUTERWORLD from IDG6, frontline workers at Ferguson, a Virginia-based plumbing supply distributor, improved customer service at their showrooms by implementing Microsoft Teams. According to the article, “With the introduction of chat rooms in Teams – known as channels – sales staffers at Ferguson can now find the information they need by posting a request to back office workers using their mobile device. As a result, showroom sales assistants can interact with customers from the showroom floor with less distraction.” The benefits of using Teams over mobile apps like iMessage or WhatsApp include the ability to send a message to a group without having to know exactly who is on duty at the time and removing the need to exchange personal contact information with colleagues.

Given the popularity of mobile devices like cellphones and smart watches, it makes sense to communicate with frontline employees on their personal devices. However, security remains top of mind for enterprise IT departments. Granting access to an application via a secure channel such as company email/password verification adds a layer of protection between user and business, and user and peer.

To further secure transactions on an employee’s personal device, a product like the Akumina EXP provides a native mobile app that allows users to log in to the company intranet securely from anywhere on any device. Customers like the Boston Red Sox and Big Lots! have leveraged the Akumina system to create state-of-the-art employee experiences that have drastically improved customer experiences. Big Lots!, in particular, implemented an employee hub built on Akumina to improve employee engagement and unite the team in the company’s mission and vision. They report significant increases in employee motivation and engagement since the implementation.

6. Finnegan, M. (2019, July 15). How Teams is helping frontline workers at Ferguson. Retrieved from https://www.computerworld.com/article/3408909/how-teams-is-helping-frontline-workers-at-ferguson.html

For frontline workers, mobile devices and wearables paired with supported software are extremely important

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Interested in learning more? Visit Akumina.com to learn more today and schedule a demo.

ConclusionThe modern workplace is changing day by day, and will continue to do so as more digital natives enter the workforce (hello, Gen Z). Supporting remote and frontline workers is and will continue to be in every organization’s best interest. When your frontline workers are hap-py, the customers who work with them are happy too. When you support your remote work-force just as you support your onsite workforce, your team is stronger, more engaged, and more productive. To learn more about how Akumina can help you support your employees, request a demo.

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About Akumina

Akumina is the employee experience platform that empowers global enterprises to quickly create personalized digital experiences that help every employee in every role work smarter, not harder. By offering a customizable, brandable and multilingual platform that seamlessly integrates with leading enterprise cloud applications, Akumina delivers a contextual, collaborative and engaging workplace experience to every user on any device. Akumina’s customers include the Whole Foods Market, GlaxoSmithKline, Vodafone, the Boston Red Sox and the Department of Defense. To learn more visit www.akumina.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.