The Frontline Employee Engagement Toolkit

Transform your organization’s frontline employee experience

In today’s competitive business landscape, it’s paramount to engage and retain your critical workforce. As HR and Operations leaders, you understand the impact that motivated and satisfied employees have on your organization’s success. Our Frontline Engagement Toolkit is designed to help you build and implement an effective frontline employee engagement strategy for your workforce and is specifically tailored to address the unique challenges faced by workers in industries including:

Throughout this toolkit, you’ll gain access to carefully curated resources, including strategies for transparent communication, tools for measuring frontline engagement and turnover costs, and more. These resources will empower you to create a workplace culture that values and supports your frontline employees, boosts employee morale, and ultimately improves customer experience. Don’t forget to bookmark this page and download the toolkit’s resources for future use.

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The unique needs of your frontline workforce

Engaging and retaining a large frontline workforce is complex and challenging. There are global factors like continuous market alterations, supply chain disruptions, and evolving customer needs at play. Then, there are recruitment, engagement, and retainment factors to consider, like workforce productivity, risk management, and labor relations. Every industry experiences its own unique set of challenges, further limiting the solutions that may be available to tackle these distinct needs.

Let’s break down the factors presenting the unique needs of a frontline workforce.

Understanding these needs is step one in addressing them. Next, we will talk about strategies to address these needs through a frontline employee engagement program.

4 strategies to engage your frontline workforce

Implement the strategies below to address your workers’ unique needs and increase your frontline employee engagement.

Step 1: Invest in your frontline workers

In order to engage your frontline workers, you need to commit to investing in them and making an effort to improve their quality of life.

At WorkStep, we’ve identified the top 9 drivers of employee engagement. Master those drivers and you’ll have a positive company culture that engages frontline employees, fosters loyalty, drives satisfaction, and increases employee retention.

Step 2: Collect and listen to employee feedback

A key part of frontline employee engagement is making your workforce feel heard and valued. You should utilize real-time, always-on employee feedback tools to implement a continuous listening strategy to collect feedback, gain valuable insights, and learn what matters most to your workers.

Step 3: Find the right feedback tool

Continuous listening starts with an organization-wide willingness to embrace employee feedback as a positive part of the culture. Second, you’ll need to invest in employee feedback solutions that offer different mechanisms for collecting feedback, including a bi-directional feedback loop functionality so employees and managers can easily communicate back and forth in confidence.

Employee feedback tools are an efficient and cost-effective way to capture and measure employee sentiment and then act on the feedback. These tools can help:

• Aggregate the data into easy-to-understand analytics
• Create real-time reports that identify areas of concern or improvement
• Track the progress of employee engagement programs and initiatives over time
• Reveal imminent signs of low frontline employee engagement and
• Allow employers to resolve potential turnover issues in real-time

Both HR and Operations teams can utilize these reports for data-driven decision-making purposes that support the frontline workers and boost the bottom line.

Step 4: Act on employee feedback

You’ve implemented the employee feedback tool and set the trigger events. Now it’s time to act on the feedback. Whether it’s simple (like adding a fan to the break room) or dramatic (like increasing global pay scales), every act can make a difference in your employees’ perception of the company and its leadership, build trust and loyalty, and help with turnover reduction. Make sure you close the feedback loop with employees and that your leaders and managers are trained on how to close the loop.

Once you start to execute your program, you will start to recognize the benefits and improve business outcomes.

Measuring the impact of employee engagement strategies

Once you implement your strategies, you’ll need a way of measuring the success and impact of your efforts. Having reliable metrics that measure frontline employee engagement and track workforce performance, and understanding how these metrics change over time can help you identify areas of improvement, see where high engagement already exists within the workplace environment, and determine the program’s success.

How to calculate your retention and turnover costs

Without knowing your true turnover cost, you can’t accurately measure the difference that your frontline employee engagement program makes. Turnover reduction should be the main goal of your strategies as it’s much more costly (and time-consuming) to recruit and onboard new hires than it is to improve the employee experience for the frontline and retain them in your workforce.

Key retention and turnover KPIs to measure

In addition to understanding your turnover cost, there are other people analytics key performance indicators that should be measured to gauge the true impact of employee turnover and employee engagement:

1. Overall retention rate

A critical gauge of baseline workforce stability, the retention rate shows the percentage of employees who stay with you during a specified period.

2. Milestone retention

The number of new hires who remained employed during a specific measurement period.

3. Average employee length

Measures the tenure of your entire workforce.

4. New workforce tenure

Measures the average tenure of new hires from the last 90 days.

5. Standard turnover

The rate at which employees move in and out of a company.

6. Annualized turnover

A projected turnover rate is an estimate of how many employees you could lose in the next year if your current turnover rates stay on trend.

7. Voluntary turnover rate

This is the percentage of employees who leave your organization by choice.

8. Involuntary turnover rate

This is the employee who leaves a company for reasons beyond their control (e.g. layoffs or termination).

9. Cost per hire

The cost per hire for a frontline worker takes into consideration both the direct and indirect costs associated with the hiring process. Direct costs might include advertising fees, agency fees, background checks, job fairs, relocation and travel expenses, technology, or testing. Indirect costs might include the time to onboard and train, interviewer time, and internal recruiter salaries.

Get started with WorkStep

You understand the benefits of implementing strategies and tools (like the ones in this toolkit) that prioritize frontline employee engagement and create a positive work environment for your critical workforce. Ready to take the next step in the journey of transforming your organization’s employee experience?

Request a demo of WorkStep’s employee engagement platform.