Putting Employees at the Heart of Frontline Communication
Frontline Communication: The Overlooked Factor in Organisational Success
Investing in frontline communication yields measurable returns in terms of cost savings, employee retention, and revenue growth.
Access to reliable internal employee communication mediums is essential to creating and maintaining a competitive edge within industries that with frontline workers.
Despite the widespread recognition and acknowledgement of this important business element, oftentimes organisations are still failing to implement effective communication systems for their most active staff – those working in frontline environments.
Representing the ‘first line of interaction’ for any business, frontline workers serve as the customer’s introduction to a company. In many cases this interaction is where the customer gets to experience how a company’s values are translated into action by its workers. As a result, successful ongoing communication with frontline workers is a critical component of ensuring a company is able to deliver on its core values and objectives in the marketplace.
Employee-Centric Frontline Communication
Traditionally, businesses have had a near tunnel vision focus on their customers and financial performance. Driven by changes in worker attitude and the entry of new generations of workers into the workplace, this approach has shifted to include a greater appreciation of the role workers play in company success. Key to this shift has been an emphasis on improving communication with workers at all levels of the organisation.
An employee-centric communication approach promotes the creation of a company culture based around its workers. A focus on addressing their communications expectations is beneficial for the organisation as a whole, as fostering an employee-centric communication culture promotes wide-spread collaboration and idea sharing.
Notable benefits can include:
• Improved Job Satisfaction
Increased levels of contentment by workers can create a positive reputation for their organisation and promote greater employee retention.
• Boosted Engagement
Effective communication enables managers to more appropriately assign tasks to their workers, based on displayed qualities and strengths. This helps them to be more efficient within the workplace as they are better matched to their specific assignments or tasks.
• Productivity Increases
Being connected to their organisation through both communication and commitment factors goes a long way in encouraging staff to be more effective in their duties.
Building Trust and Rapport with Frontline Communication
Beyond the Boardroom: Understanding the Frontline Experience
The duties of frontline employees place them in situations where they are often disconnected from their organisation, in comparison to more traditional office or production environments. This disconnect can often lead to workers feeling undervalued and isolated.
As part of the employee-centric approach, business leaders have a number of options to strengthen connections with frontline staff. Primary strategies to achieve this include:
Active Listening
While it is widely accepted that employee feedback must be taken into consideration at all times and concrete steps must be taken to address any concerns raised, there is also an opportunity for leaders to take it a step further. By utilising centralised platforms (like Wyzetalk) to create virtual feedback avenues companies are enabled to undertake data analysis of worker communication for a better understanding of employee needs.
Empathy & Transparency
Combatting distrust between management and frontline workers is linked to corporate citizenship. By actively addressing internal and external situations that cause concerns, businesses can reduce burnout, better manage workplace stresses and promote a culture of openness for both employees and customers.
Effective Frontline Communication Channels
Tailoring Frontline Connectivity
Ensuring that effective communication can take place within a company is largely down to the functionality provided by a company’s digital systems. As such, it is vital to deploy solutions that enable organisational leaders to efficiently connect with frontline employees.
Dependant on the particular industry, workers’ duties may place them in isolated, high-pressure situations where effective communication channels are essential to both safety and productivity.
Our centralised employee engagement platform creates these channels for those active in remote environments by providing managers with ways to quickly distribute necessary information to a wide array of devices.
Some frontline crisis situation scenarios can include strikes, disease outbreaks, system failures and weather events. These are all potential occurrences that need immediate attention, where clear communication is crucial to ensuring that potential negative outcomes are as limited as much as possible.
Wyzetalk isn’t limited to just emergency scenarios, with features that also promote operational efficiency. Particularly applicable to frontline employees is its ability to assist both leaders and workers with effective schedule management, thereby promoting efficiency in resource allocation.
Real-world Case Studies
Measuring the Impact of Employee-Centric Communication
Several major brands have focused on creating an internal culture centred around addressing worker needs – with specific emphasis on communication.
- Tech giant Google, publicly identified that internal communication is an area of extreme importance within their organisation. By leveraging their proprietary software solutions, Google leaders encourage clear communication and collaboration across their internal environments. Not only does the company believe this approach help its employees perform at an optimum, it also helps the company clearly communicate customer expectations internally, ultimately helping it to deliver world-class solutions to its clients.
- Outside of the technology sphere, the Dippin’ Dots franchise has also successfully utilised an employee-centric approach by promoting communication and problem solving between different franchise locations.
Executives at the snack company believe, facilitating communications connections between their staff members across their national business footprint, lead to increased productivity as well as improved problem solving – leading to a decrease in workplace burnout. - PepsiCo., with over 300,000 employees around the globe, chose to focus on creating an accessible and effective intranet to maintain a connected and communication driven internal culture across their various business outlets. This approach was taken to underscore one of the company’s core business principles – Work that Works – and highlighted the critical role that effective communication amongst its workers plays in the company.
Key Takeaways
Adopting an employee-centric approach by addressing employee concerns, needs and other issues through constructive communication and collaboration is key to creating a successful company culture.
Furthermore, by bolstering internal worker engagement, business managers are better able to maintain established marketplace advantages while continuing to create opportunities for the future.
Let’s connect to explore the power of employee-centric approaches in your organisation.