It might come as a surprise to learn that frontline workers make up the majority of the U.S. workforce. But it shouldn’t.
Consider the number of frontline—sometimes called “deskless”—workers you encounter on a daily basis: baristas, retail sales associates, customer support representatives, healthcare workers, security guards, flight attendants, teachers, bus drivers, cashiers, hair stylists, custodians. The list goes on. In fact it doesn’t even include the legions staffing distribution centers and manufacturing plants, the truck drivers and construction workers. The BLS estimates that nearly 60% of the U.S. workforce falls into this category, and without them, our society would quite literally cease to function.
However in spite of their necessity and their majority status, frontline workers are frequently misunderstood and often wholly ignored by the leaders who employ them.
It can be easy to see why. HBR reports that frontline workers as a category exhibit among the very lowest levels of motivation among all categories of U.S. workers. 85% of frontline workers report not being engaged at work. And the result of all of this is that frontline workers turn over at a rate of 67% per year on average—a number that can climb above 100% in some industries.
This amounts to a segment of the workforce looked upon by their employers as more of a liability than as an asset. Mature employers of frontline teams, long burned by failed attempts at inspiring and motivating great work from a generation of workers who are purely in it for the paycheck.
This climate makes it difficult for employers to justify investment in frontline technology. For example, 9 in 10 retailers cite inability to measure ROI as a reason not to invest in technology to better enable the frontline workforce. Why invest in training and motivating people when most of them are expected to leave their jobs within the year?
To answer this question, it’s important to understand how much impact an engaged and motivated employee can have on a business as opposed to a disengaged and demotivated employee. Incisiv recently found that employers who make it a priority to enable their frontline workforce with technology see an average 26% improvement in employee retention. This change alone could increase a retailer’s profitability by as much as 10% depending on margins and the cost of replacement.
These employers also observed a 12% improvement in customer satisfaction and a 16% improvement in in-store sales conversion. In other words, investing in technology for the frontline has been show to improve customer loyalty and increase revenue.
But how can this be? Are we really supposed to believe that technology can transform the frontline from a cost center to a profit center?
In 2015, a group of researchers at Harvard Business School conducted an extensive exploration into the drivers of motivation in the workplace. What they found was that, regardless of role, the following tends to hold true: “that why people work determines how well they work — that someone’s motive for doing a task determines their performance.” They also identified a set of “motives” for doing work, which tend to have a consistently positive or negative impact on motivation and performance.
Positive Motives:
Play (novelty, curiosity, experimentation)
Purpose (the work matters)
Potential (they are improved by the work)
Negative Motives:
Emotional Pressure (shame, guilt, insecurity)
Economic Pressure (mercenary behavior)
Inertia (no motive)
For a frontline worker, the motives one has for doing work are not driven from the top down through an organization. Rather, motives are driven by employees’ direct supervisors and immediate teams. But as observed in McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index, senior leaders are more positive than frontline workers about the ability of their organizations to perform over the long term:
The biggest discrepancies concern perceptions of whether organizations have the ability to motivate their employees—to engender the enthusiasm that propels extraordinary effort and delivers great results—and assessments of whether their leaders can inspire action by others. Not surprisingly, top managers also overestimate their visibility: for example, separate McKinsey research shows that during transformations, 86 percent of senior executives believe that they are actively demonstrating the change they want employees to make, but only 53 percent of employees do.
On average, frontline workers make up about 80% of a company’s total workforce. It would startle many senior leaders to learn that the majority of their employees hold such different views regarding the company’s future success. But such a disconnect shouldn’t be surprising when you consider just how dysfunctional large, hierarchical organizations can become over time.
An Edison Research study found that 79% of frontline workers say they receive company communications via in-person communication and 52% via written memo. However, the landscape has changed and today 82% of workers under the age of 34 say that technology is an important factor in helping them determine whether they want to take a job.
Over the past 20 years, technology has become ubiquitous in our lives, both personally and professionally. But for frontline workers, little has changed. The retailers and other large frontline employers investing in their workers are the ones with the highest customer satisfaction and the lowest employee turnover. These are the places people want to work, not because of the paycheck, but because of the purpose they feel as a valued member of a team.
By Sean Oliver, Director of Marketing at Crew
Crew helps businesses drive productivity and improve employee engagement & retention through real-time communication, mobile calendaring, shift coverage, and instant access to company information.