Frontline capability building is emerging as one of the key growth levers of global companies. They all realize that it is through every transaction carried out by their frontline – where the company meets the customer – that their strategies are primarily executed, values personified and brand image established. According to Chris Zook, a partner in Bain & Company, the secret of “some of the greatest founders of our time” is “the extreme degree to which great founders are obsessed with the front line.”
Yet, a huge gap between intent and implementation exists. In a 2015 survey conducted by McKinsey & Co., only 33 percent of learning and skill development resources are spent on frontline worldwide. The good news is that this percentage is on the upswing and grew from 22 percent in 2010.
While the growth is an acknowledgement of the importance, frontline training remains a challenge for both L&D professionals and content developers.
CHALLENGES
Degrees of separation. In large organizations that have national, regional and international footprints, frontline resides at several degrees of separation from even the L&D departments, not to mention top management/decision makers. Often, frontline also belongs to vendor/partner organizations. It is difficult to cut through the operations organization to reach or influence the frontline directly.
Scale of operations. Even for the well-intentioned training organization, reaching the frontline is made logistically impossible by the sheer scale of operations. Frontline belonging to call centers, back offices, channel partners, feet-on-street and work floor usually is a veritable army running into tens of thousands in numbers in large organizations. How to reach them in a sustained and meaningful manner is a challenge.
Frontline turnover. Turnover makes the task even more daunting. In many industries, frontline stays on for barely long enough to acquire basic skills. By the time they go over their learning curve, they are already on the move. Motivation, engagement and emotional investment seem to be the lowest in this group. This is ironic considering this is the group that personifies the organization to customers.
Technology enablement and training infrastructure. This is another big obstacle. Interoperable, mobile enabled, and state-of-the-art learning technology may well be a pipe dream for this learner group. We are also noticing that a key issue in mobile-enabling learning is the confusion of who will pay for the device and data plans. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) might hold some of the answers, but it still seems to be at a conceptual stage.
Return on Investment. ROI of training remains a problematic entity to establish. The debate of what delivers frontline performance—operational controls (KPIs, SLAs, on-the-floor-supervision, etc.) or training—rages on and is a difficult one to decide. What we do know is that as long as training interventions are treated as discrete events (induction, refresher, mandatory programs) and not as a lifelong employee capability building endeavor, it would be difficult to establish tangible impact. Capability building needs to be viewed as a system and designed as one for sustained and measurable results.
While all these remain largely operational challenges, there are specific challenges faced by content developers as well.
WHAT MAKES STICKY CONTENT?
One of the dangers of frontline content development is the temptation of defining the target audience in the broadest of terms—we often design for a “typical” profile: certain educational profile, background, experience and job role. Considering a lot of this content (in global organizations) is used by frontline in different countries, such “typical” approximations are probably incorrect.
Given these challenges, let’ look at some tips that can make training design and implementation achievable and meaningful for frontline.
Think outside-in. Any consideration of frontline capability building should probably start with the customer experience/journey that you want to offer. When the job description changes from “answering queries” to “giving meaningful brand experience,” the knowledge-skills-attitude matrix changes too. The former requires basic intelligence and communication skills. The latter would include empathy and empowerment. As the world has seen with Zappos, that makes a lot of difference! Thinking outside-in also impacts the entire value chain—from screening, hiring, training, enablement to rewards and career growth. L&D cannot work in isolation—HR, brand and business need to integrate in this process.
Think learning curve. Many organizations think of training as events. They happen discretely with varying frequencies for different audience. There is no connectivity between these events and no after-training support. This leads to either partial learning or complete forgetting. Instead, organizations can think of learning curves. Use a blend of formal learning and knowledge management to have training and information at arm’s reach for the frontline. Support them with the right information while they are executing. Build an expert system; create decision trees. Put them through regular refreshers and knowledge top-ups. Hand hold them up their learning curve by creating learning and career paths.
Think personas. One size does not fit all. It never has—a median, “typical” profile is a fallacy. It makes more sense to do periodic frontline surveys/focus groups with supervisors to understand what are the four or five personas that comprise the organization’s frontline. If these personas are categorized by departments/desks/processes, it becomes more useful. Then design content for these personas—you will probably cover a wider swathe of your audience. Try and include different styles of learning, such as visual, auditory and kinesthetic (VAK), as much as time and budgets would allow.
Think emotional connect. Given the degrees of separation, scale and rapid turnover, it often becomes difficult to establish a sense of belonging with the frontline. However, this becomes a critical element in creating an engaged, capable frontline. While the organization can take many steps to create this, training plays an important role too. Reserve some part of the induction training to establish brand connect. Deconstruct brand position, emotion and values for the frontline by giving them training on how this can be brought to life by their actions. Collect stories of best practices and make them available on the knowledge management network.
Think social. People usually only think of leaderboards and discussion boards when they say social learning. But that is just scratching the surface of social learning. L&D departments can reduce a great deal of burden on themselves by promoting crowdsourcing content. Help your frontline share thoughts and tips through videos. Put them through a workflow to check for content appropriateness and put them up on your internal social network. Gamify the experience by giving badges and points.
Frontline capability building is tough, but some creative thinking can make it meaningful and useful.