blog.frederique.harmsze.nl my world of work and user experiences

July 31, 2021

What about the firstline workers?

Filed under: Digital Workplace,Microsoft 365 — Tags: , — frederique @ 22:40

These days, we are all doing our best to provide employees with a great digital workplace, so that they can work from anywhere. This has been particularly important during the pandemic, when many of us worked from home. But of course this is only true for the knowledge workers or office employees. Firstline workers or frontline workers do real life jobs, which they cannot do from home. And they hardly get any attention when it comes to the digital transformation.

What do we mean by firstline workers

I am not trying to give a watertight definition of firstline workers, or frontline workers as they are also called. But basically, they are the people who in many organizations do the real work, in the real world. As opposed to the people who work on a computer all day.

Microsoft says: “Frontline workers are employees whose primary function is to work directly with customers or the general public providing services, support, and selling products, or employees directly involved in the manufacturing and distribution of products or services.”

So firstline workers are, for example:

  • In retail, the cashiers and people on the shop floor, whose job it is to help the customers.
  • In hospitals, the nurses who spend most of their days taking care of patients.
  • In a construction company, the carpenters and other people who actually construct the houses.
  • In maintenance organizations, the mechanics who go out and fix machines.

As opposed to the people who mostly work on a computer:

  • Staff in HR, Finance and of course IT who support the business
  • People like managers, project leaders, planners, calculators, coordinators who need to make sure that they firstline workers can do their job helping customers or patients in the real world, or building and maintaining real world things.

Ok, of course in other organizations – like the consultancy company where I work – just about everybody is an office worker. We all work on a computer most of the day. Many of us work with our clients a lot, but as far as I am concerned that does not make use firstline workers. Why do I say that? Because it would confuse the issue.

Why am I talking about the firstline workers now

In domains like retail, manufacturing and construction, about 70-80% of the employees are ‘real life’ firstline workers. And about 70-90% of the digital transformation efforts focus on the few office workers. The firstline workers are left out.

Of course, if your main tool is for instance a hammer, rather than a computer, a digital transformation would impact you less. But if you are passed over entirely, you will miss out. For example:

  • You may miss essential communication and be left out of the loop when the office workers are engaged.
  • You may not get staff support quickly and easily.
  • You may not have the right and up-to-date information at your fingertips, which you need to do your job.

Some lessons I learned

While I was working for a construction and maintenance company, I mostly worked for and interacted with office workers. Of course. But I did talk to some firstline workers and office workers who were the first line behind the firstline workers. So here the firstline workers are not the ones who are in direct contact with the customer, but the people who build the product. Their primary tool is, for example, a hammer. Not a computer, although some had an account and a computer or smartphone.

Here are some things I learned. Of course these also apply to office workers, and there are some very computer savvy hobbyist firstline workers. But nevertheless, you need to introduce new digital offerings even more carefully to your firstline workers.

  • Think carefully what the different groups of firstline workers need
    For example, the carpenters working at the construction site for a new building will get their news in the shed from the bulletin board pinned to the wall and from their foreman, so they may not want a digital news channel. But maintenance engineers who drive all over the country by themselves need to get their news in another way. Some carpenters like to consult the plans on an iPad, because then they can zoom in. But they find it easier to compare plans on paper, because that does not work on the small tablet screen.
    So find out what the firstline workers need and how digital tools could help. If an app can help them, develop it. If the old-school paper & word of mouth solution works best, fine.
  • Don’t offer digital stuff as an added burden. Make it useful for them
    I talked to a carpenter who had a laptop just for his timesheets. He did not want to fill in his timesheets anyway – nobody likes that – and now he got this annoying laptop to make it even worse than it was when he did it on paper. A maintenance engineer was grumbling that he got a new app to administer the work he did for each client. The administration was getting more extensive and complicated and he just wanted to fix the machines he was assigned. Then what’s in it for them?
    So if you give firstline workers digital tools, make sure you are not burdening them with additional administration and complications just to make the lives of others easier. Something needs to be in it for them too.
  • Do not assume that they will understand the digital stuff you offer.
    In that organization, IT decided everybody had to install Office Pro Plus on their computers themselves and activate Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), based on a few instructions. This caused problems for many office workers, but the firstline workers I talked to were completely at a loss. One guy was a great carpenter, but he got stuck when he had to set up MFA and I tried to help him out. First of all, I called him back in the evening, when he could use the computer his wife has for Facetiming with the grandchildren, so that he could see the screen with the settings properly. And then it turned out he did not know his Office 365 password. Oops…
    So if the firstline workers have to do something digital, make sure they get adequate help, as in: help that really helps them and not a document with some complicated instructions.
  • Make the digital stuff as easy as possible
    The firstline workers are outside in the rain at a construction site, in the bowels of some big machine covered in grease, on the shop floor with their hands full. And they want to get on with building the house, fixing the machine or stacking the shelves. Not necessarily optimal circumstances to fiddle with digital tools.  
    So don’t make them install things that can be installed automatically, make apps super user-friendly and optimize them for the devices and network conditions they have at their disposal.

I am glad that we start looking at and talking about the needs of the firstline workers. I am very much a knowledge worker myself – don’t give me a hammer, as I will probably hit my thumb. But talking to firstline workers who got mangled under IT’s rollout of Office 365 made it clear to me that we can’t just ignore their needs. Microsoft has also made this step: see Microsoft 365 for frontline workers. Now let’s see what we can do to make their jobs easier, safer and more pleasant.

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