Today’s front-line employees have a strong appetite for on-the-job learning and professional development. However, many employers are struggling to meet their needs, leading to lower engagement and increased turnover.
It’s not that organizations aren’t trying to improve. Companies spend an average of $1,500 per employee on training each year, and 66% of employers have an established career development program. But even generous investments in employee development will fail if they go unsupported from an operational standpoint. A training or coaching program won’t get off the ground if the overall function of the business doesn’t allow for professional development to flourish.
Workforce management (WFM), which governs everything from employee schedules to payroll to compliance, is a largely untapped resource when it comes to enabling better training in the front-line workplace. Where WFM is considered an operations responsibility, training is the remit of learning and development (L&D) and human resources (HR). But when learning leaders and operations teams exit their silos and work together, they will see that workforce optimization is far more than a cost control mechanism: it’s the catalyst for satisfied, empowered and competent teams.
Creating Time for Coaching and Training
According to research from Gallup, 37% of leaders see time as the greatest barrier to supporting their employees’ development. The desire is there: as a Legion survey found, 64% of managers would use the time gained from automation to coach and develop their teams. But as that same survey revealed, managers of hourly workers are spending three or more hours a week on scheduling tasks. If a front-line worker training program is stuck on the back burner, inefficient labor operations could be partly to blame.
Learning leaders should collaborate with both individual line managers and the greater operations team to ensure there are no workforce management processes that could be blocking training opportunities. Outdated technology, for example, could be placing an undue administrative burden on managers, rendering them unable to properly train their teams during shifts. The hours that managers spend manually updating schedules and timesheets could be better spent on tasks that actually help them grow, like working with customers, mastering a new tool and helping new team members learn the ropes. In short, increasing task automation is as much a priority for L&D as it is for operations.
Time is not the only barrier: ensuring front-line enablement also requires having the right people on the right shifts. Newer employees should have senior staff on their shifts who they can look to for guidance, and all employees should have the opportunity to cultivate new skills on the job. Therefore, learning leaders should advocate for artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled scheduling that considers these factors in the scheduling matrix, resulting in shifts that are not just optimal from an operations standpoint, but also productive training environments.
Improving Employee Confidence and Competency With AI Assistants
Many front-line professions are considered “low exposure” when it comes to AI, meaning they’re less likely to have their roles entirely automated, but also potentially less likely to reap the benefits of AI technologies. Fortunately, new AI tools are emerging, designed with front-line enablement in mind, and can make a powerful addition to a training program when harmonized with WFM.
AI assistants (or agents) can help employees gain a deeper understanding of their role, provide more informed customer service and become more confident in everyday tasks. AI assistants are especially useful in helping new employees acclimate to the various programs they may be using on the job: think POS systems, inventory management software, WFM platforms and employee communications tools. The assistants’ plain language interfaces allow users to navigate software programs more confidently,
While many assistants give directions and retrieve information, some go a step beyond to execute tasks, providing employees with a model for how tasks should be done — or automate them entirely, freeing up time that can be redirected toward learning. With WFM tasks uniquely suited to AI augmentation, it is a fruitful place to start when looking to empower the workforce with AI agents.
Fostering Workforce Autonomy
Professional development programs often focus on the primary skill set of a given job: technical skills (AI included), customer service, people management and knowledge bases like compliance and company standards. However, micro-skills — like a sense of independence or the ability to take initiative — are equally important to enabling the front-line workforce.
Employee-centric workforce management can provide front-line workers with a critical sense of autonomy. Benefits like gig-like schedule flexibility, which gives employees more control over when they work, and instant access to wages, which puts them in control of their pay, will make employees more productive and engaged, and therefore, more motivated to participate in on-the-job learning initiatives.
Employers will also foster autonomy by improving front-line communication. For example, when employees can quickly access the information they need without going through a manager or combing through lengthy company handbooks, they’ll grow more confident in their roles. Meanwhile, managers can relay important information with ease, so employees never feel in the dark.
AI assistants can also play a role in bolstering communications, especially in training situations. Using an assistant that helps construct messages, managers can ensure they’re conveying critical information in a way that’s understandable and accessible to their broader teams.
Managing Through Enhanced Productivity and Skills Insights
Workforce management is evolving to see the workforce as more than just a nebula of headcount and wages. Artificial intelligence has given employers the tools to design labor strategies on increasingly granular components; even anonymized, today’s employee data profile looks more like a person with unique skills, talents and experience than an item in a labor budget.
When talent development and workforce management exist within the same ecosystem, it’s easier for managers to identify potential talent gaps and work on strategies for improvement. This also increases visibility into skills and productivity for scheduling purposes, so employees who need development can be staffed with more experienced teammates. On an organizational scale, the same skill insights used to create schedules can also help learning leaders structure more impactful training programs.
Managers want to teach, and employees want to learn. The challenge for businesses is to break down the obstacles between ambition and action. This starts by understanding how other operational processes, such as workforce management, can be improved to create an environment conducive to learning, and ensuring that learning leaders are involved at every stage of this transformation.
Labor strategy and front-line enablement are deeply intertwined — strengthening one can help to strengthen the other. But change has to happen on both sides, with L&D and operations working together to create a workforce management strategy that aspires beyond its name: instead of simply managing the front-line workforce, it promotes the conditions for continuous learning and professional empowerment.
