Frontline workers are the backbone of many organizations, and their learning needs require approaches that are both flexible and job-relevant. With limited time, inconsistent access to technology and constantly shifting demands, traditional training approaches don’t always stick. So, how can L&D better support this critical audience?

In this episode of The Business of Learning, we spoke with JD Dillon, advisor, speaker and author of “The Frontline Enablement Playbook” and “The Modern Learning Ecosystem,” to explore how organizations can rethink training for front-line employees and embed learning into the flow of work.

Tune in now for insights on:

• Why traditional training often fails front-line workers — and what to do instead
• How to design learning that fits seamlessly into the flow of work
• The critical role managers play in reinforcing learning and driving real behavior change

More Resources:

• [Article] Skills Are Powering the Future of Work
• [E-Book] Empowering the Modern Workforce: Rethinking the Learner Experience in Training
• [Article] Supporting Front-line Workers’ Productivity With Learning in the Flow of Work

The transcript for this episode follows:

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Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Hi, and welcome back to The Business of Learning. I’m Michelle Eggleston Schwartz, editor in chief here at Training Industry.

Sarah Gallo: And I’m Sarah Gallo, a senior editor. Frontline employees play a critical role in daily operations and customer experience, but their learning environments often look different from those of desk-based workers, from limited time and access to technology, high turnover, and rapidly changing job demands.  Designing frontline training that is practical and easy to apply back on the job can be a challenge. So to learn more about what this effective frontline training really looks like, we’re joined today by JD Dillon. JD Dillon is a respected advisor, speaker, and author of “The Frontline Enablement Playbook” and “The Modern Learning Ecosystem.” So with that, JD, welcome to the podcast.

JD Dillon: Thanks for having.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Yes. Thank you so much for joining us today. to kind of get us started with the conversation, when we talk about frontline workers, who are, who are we typically referring to and how are their learning needs unique?

JD Dillon: I’d actually like to flip the question to anyone listening right now. Assuming you’re not in a car, if you’re driving a car right now, don’t do what I’m about to say. Pull over first. If you’re safe, close your eyes and think of a frontline worker  and who do you see? And what I find to be the case is that people often think about the stereotypical young person  who’s just starting first, first job,  right? high school, maybe in college, working in the low grocery store, bagging groceries, or working in a restaurant when in reality, we’re talking about 80% of the global workforce. People who work directly with your company’s products and services and customers every day as the core responsibility of what they do. Oftentimes, they’re hourly. They clock in and clock out for their shifts. Most people have to be  physically on site to do these types of jobs. They don’t have hybrid or remote work options, and they work in almost every industry. So retail associates, healthcare workers, delivery drivers, the front desk clerk at the hotel. The people who not only drive results for, for our organizations, but also move community forward in our everyday lives. And that’s why I’m always especially excited to talk about the frontline workforce and why I think we have a significant opportunity to support the frontline, [which is] part of all of our lives, right? You don’t have to actually be in a role supporting a specific frontline audience to advocate for the frontline workforce because they’re part of everyone’s everyday life. So we all have an opportunity but to take advantage of that opportunity and help people do their best every day. We have to acknowledge a couple of key factors. One, the frontline workforce is not one thing. a lot of different people in different types of environments doing different types of jobs. But across those jobs, there’s a set of shared concepts or shared attributes. Bring the conversation together and allow us to talk across industries and share ideas and proven practices, even outside of certain types of work. So in a large part, frontline work is very structured.  They’re operational focused, again, focused on your products and customers every day working in shifts, often micromanaged with very limited autonomy. Frontline employees can’t just make decisions about what they’re going to do with their day. They can’t just end up and say, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go take some additional training. That’s not a thing people can do. They often have to ask permission to take a break or even to use the restroom as part of their job. Most of these folks are mobile. They don’t work from behind a desk. They have varying access to technology. So their relationship to both hardware and software is meaningfully different. They people who work in a corporate environment, um, they work physically and emotionally demanding jobs with high risk and high compliance requirements. And then everyone brings something different to the table in the conversation, which again is unique in the fact that in an onboarding session right now, there’s a 17-year-old whose first job has no idea what work is yet alone, what this company does, and how to work with these customers, and they’re sitting right next to somebody who’s worked in that industry for 30 years. Maybe even worked for this company multiple times before. if you are in learning and development, you’re an enablement professional. It’s your job to figure out, well, how do we elevate the capability of each of these individuals, provide them with the support they need to be successful and show them what opportunity looks like within this organization. So I think that story begins with really understanding an audience, what their day to day experience is like. How we can support that day-to-day experience because it’s meaningfully different than the experience that you or I have in our jobs.

Sarah Gallo: Definitely. I love what you mentioned about how frontline workers really just impact all of our daily lives. You know, it’s something a lot of people don’t realize. It’s also interesting, it’s such this broad spectrum of roles here, right? There’s so many different frontline roles and they may all look slightly different. You’ve touched a little bit on some challenges, but I’d love if you could dive deeper into kind of common challenges that frontline workers face, and how training can help support them.

JD Dillon: I’m curious to hear your thoughts if you had to guess. If we did a survey, because I did, of frontline employees, and you ask them, what is the biggest challenge you face day to day in your job? What do you think the answer would be?

Sarah Gallo: That’s a great question. I’d say maybe you mentioned lack of autonomy. I feel like that could be a common challenge or that lack of access to technology.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: I may also say maybe time, like you said, to dedicate to learning something. Like it’s very almost systematic what they need to do.

JD Dillon: So those are all factors. There are three other things that rank higher on the list when you ask employees just what, what makes your job difficult or more difficult than it has to be. Pay is on that list in terms of their ability to take care of themselves and their family, the quality of their manager. And the support they get from the manager is high on that list as well. number one challenge facing frontline workers today customer incivility. It’s how they’re treated. It’s why I keep coming back to that idea that we all have a role to play in the story. It just keeps getting worse. Frontline work has always been a challenge in the environment. You’ve always had to deal with people who quote-unquote “ask for the manager” a lot. It’s just a lot harder now and even was when I worked in frontline operational roles and then you kind bind that factor and how emotionally demanding mental and physically demanding  the work is. With the stability challenge of, well, am I going to get my hours this week? Right? Last week I’m scheduled for 36 hours this week I’m only scheduled for 12. What do I do with that? How do I pick up additional hours around this other job? And then just the sheer volume of change. Again, I think we underestimate the complexity of frontline work. Anyone who says is unskilled, I would love to throw into a restaurant for one day and say, you deal with this and tell me how unskilled people are who do these jobs, but just the volume of constantly shifting requirements, operational processes, change. There’s always new products dropping, there’s always new promotions, incredibly demanding customers with high levels of expectations, who you’re probably like this walking into the store. You did your research already. You know exactly what you’re looking for. So a different level of customer experience alongside all of that kind of operational instability that exists. And you already mentioned how do we fit that constant change alongside the fact that people just don’t have time? Because the number one lever that a lot of frontline operations have control costs is their labor budget. So you only schedule the number of people you need or to meet operational demand, and everything   else becomes secondary. So the ability to access the employee for anything that is not an operational task, whether that be training, whether that be compliance related activity, whether that be communication or coaching. It’s just getting harder and harder to get that attention alone, that time from people who are again, working highly distributed roles, you may not often  see the people that you’re trying to support and they’re doing their best. Because that’s one other thing I like asking frontline employees is, you know, what’s a good day at work look like for you? What’s a successful day? And the number one thing people come back with, it’s got all my work done today, right? They want to have fun on job. They want to make the money that they’re looking to make. They want to be successful as a team, but they’re also professionals who want to  do a good job. I’ve never met a frontline worker who said, you know what I want to do today? I want to get yelled at. As many people as possible, or I want to get hurt on the job today. No one says these things everyone wants to do. Well, just they’re up against the realities of the workplace at this point. And then we have a hard time reaching people with support, given the limited time and autonomy that they have.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Definitely, kind of drawing back from my own experience like I worked in in fast food and kind of those changing conditions of the customer and, how quickly situations can escalate to having a customer, like throw a sandwich at a worker. And just how quickly those situations can change, and workers needing to react to that.

JD Dillon: I have a scar on my hand that I talk about in my new book. Writing this book has been an interesting reflection on both my own experience as a frontline employee and manager in different environments, and then the opportunity to talk to more than a hundred people who are doing different jobs in this space and kind of reflect on our shared experience as well as the unique challenges people around the world have both in these jobs and then enabling people in these jobs. But this, I reflected at one point while I was writing, I was like, I do have a scar on my hand from my frontline experience and. It’s not because I got into a fist fight. It’s because I got yelled at for 25 minutes by a customer who had no idea what they were talking about. I was definitely not wrong, but I was management. So it was my job [to] kind of take that abuse and then make sure everyone was okay. And then when that conversation was over, I walked away, went to the office and punched a metal door and my hand… [I was] 22 years old. It wasn’t the greatest showing of kind of emotional maturity, but it’s my example of one of the many moments where, you know, you just kind of get overwhelmed by the job. At no point did anyone try to teach me how to handle that as a 22-year-old who was, you know, real good at the job and now suddenly in charge of people doing the job, which is what happens to a lot of people who are in managerial roles. And it’s just interesting metaphor of the fact that you carry both of the physical and emotional scars of this type of work, especially jobs that are incredibly challenging. I tell a story in the book about a gentleman who’s a flight attendant the past 10 years on his first day out of training. He had to physically tackle a passenger on the airplane because the passenger was going for the door. I won’t spoil how the story ends. You have to read the book for that. They don’t teach you how to [navigate] fist fights at 35,000 feet in training. What they do teach you to do is prioritize the safety of the airplane over everything else.  So. It’s this interesting world where there is no average day. The SOP is never quite enough to meet the expectations of what’s going to happen. You walk in with a plan, the plan’s gone after five people call in sick, and then customer volume spikes and the weather changes and all of these different things that just influence your day to day. And then the challenge for us as enabling professionals is figuring out how do we kind of   go from a programmatic world where we have to ask people to come to us for any type of development or support opportunity to a world where we. Build systems of work and support that wrap around the reality of how these jobs are done day to day. Yeah, but getting someone out  of the operation for a one hour instructor led session is any, is almost impossible in frontline operations. I. We can do a lot when you can access people or get   their attention for a couple of minutes every shift. And it’s that more of a kind of targeted approach that I’ve found to be successful. Because it fits into the existence of these folks in their everyday shift as opposed to trying to get people to bend to me because I’m not going to be the priority. Right? Got jobs to do and customers to serve. I’ve got to come to them.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Definitely. Yeah. That, that kind of leads into my next question of what learning modalities tend to work best for frontline workers? Kind of what, are your thoughts there?

JD Dillon: Well, hands-on training is the non-negotiable. You don’t learn how to weld on the internet, You don’t learn how to use a deli. Slicer and e-learning hands-on job training is by far the most heavily used practice, and it should be the opportunity there is how can we improve the outcomes of instructor led or a kind of. A peer-to-peer training or manager-led training in too many instances there’s just kind of this natural handoff. It’s like, hi, welcome to the company. This is Bill. He’ll show you how it works here. We don’t know if Bill actually knows how it works here,  and Bill might not be very good at showing other people how it works here and there’s a lot of shortcuts and this is how it really happens. And those types of things get unleashed when we don’t kind of set the proper expectations. Make sure that we’re level up the people who rely on as trainers properly recognizing and compensating them for their. to be effective trainers, the fact that they’re informal leaders of operation and respecting them as such. And one of the tactics we talk about in the book is making sure that it’s not just the trainer who has a guideline for what they’re supposed to do. The trainee also has a guideline of what’s supposed to happen here so they can hold. The manager and their trainer accountable and say, did, didn’t cover all of the things I’m supposed to know, I go out and try to do this job on my own. So really taking a hard look at what are the hands-on training practices and how can we use different tools to support and augment it. One of those tools could be better on demand support. Because you walk into a new job, especially if you’re newer to the workplace, standard operating procedures and compliance is usually not the first thing on your mind, right? You’re thinking, am I going to like the people here? Is this manager going to be a jerk? What shoes  do I have to wear? When do we get paid again? There’s so many other things going on. to the fact that like in my first, I was just scared. I’d never worked with people before, counted money, made food, any of the different things I had to do as a movie theater employee. So how do we make sure they’re scaffolded and support a way for someone to get answers without having to ask the person next to them who may not know or may provide varying, consistent information or wait for the manager to be available when managers, about 50% of frontline managers are burned out on a daily basis, so ask your manager can’t be the answer for everything. So that’s where I see tools like digital assistance and mobile knowledge bases and just the ability to kind of take some of the edge of, or kind of sand the edges off of these points of friction. So I have a very base question about when, when does payday, or what the uniform policy is, or what day off requests look like, I should have to go to the manager for that. I definitely shouldn’t have to ask Reddit. That there’s an awkward amount of conversation on Reddit. Employees from companies are asking other employees from that company how things work, and you have to sit there and wonder  … Reddit? Why have we not taking care of this internally and how do we know this is the correct information that we’re not sharing things we should be sharing outside of school? Um, and the other factor I think is important when we think about trained frontline workers is it’s important to move beyond this idea of kind of concepts or subjects or competencies or skills and focus more on tasks. I don’t need you to become an exceptional customer service professional. In your first week. Because you’re not going to, I do need you to be able to execute certain key customer service practices, processes, or tactics. Because that’s part of your job. A job is a combination of different, uh, tasks that I need you to complete. So, our learning and support model should be wrapped around those tasks and over the course of helping people and enabling people to complete those tasks. They’re going to build competencies and skills that will be naturally transferable both in this job and into the future. And I think we get in trouble. We focus on vague concepts like safety is a vague concept.  How to specifically do the things that you’re doing on the job safely. Much more tactical. I can show you exactly how to do it, document it, make sure you know how to raise your hand, answer questions about it. I measure it. Everything becomes much more tangible and concrete when you focus on the task side of enabling people versus competencies or skills become inherently fluffy and consistent and execution. I think those are, those are key ways to think about enabling people within the kind of constraints environments that they play in in frontline work.

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Sarah Gallo: Definitely kind of leads into my next question, I wanted to talk a little bit about on the job application, since we know that making training job applicable can really be a challenge really for all training, but I can imagine, especially in frontline environments. Do you have any insights on how L&D professionals can make sure that their training is actually applicable in the flow of work?

JD Dillon: That task orientation I just mentioned and then get straight to the points. I make a joke about the idea of deleting slide two in whatever content you have, because slide two tends to be the one that says things at company X, Y, Z. We believe I’m gone at this point, because I have so many other things going on, I barely have time to engage with whatever this experience is, whether it’s a classroom based experience or an online experience, and I’m just used to digital content that gets to the point. So it’s not that we take full inspiration, try to make everything YouTube and TikTok, but what does YouTube and TikTok do really well on? Creators do really well there. They just get to the point because they know they need to hook you quickly or you’re going to click the next thing and move on. And I have stood physically behind frontline workers who are completing required e-learning and staring at their phone the whole time waiting for the audio to stop on the computer, and then they click next and keep going. That’s just reality and we need to build for it. So we need to demonstrate  in any activity or any resource, the immediate applicability,  why this is relevant, why it’s going to help you do something that you care about on the job. I’ll, I’ll end with this. That should not be something about company goals. workers are not here to help the business achieve its KPIs. They don’t celebrate in that success. That’s not their purpose. They are here to do good work. They’re here  to be successful as a team, to work with one another and to be proud of what we do. on the direction of things that are going to clearly help me. Have a better experience on the job versus trying to frame that in some type of kind of general corporate mission, vision, success story that’s fully disconnected from the experience I have every day. Because  frontline employees don’t really work for your company. They don’t see the broader company where the logo on their chest, but they work for their manager because that’s the person who hired them, trains them, coaches them, pays them, schedules them and knows their name. And they don’t work for the success of the business. They work for the success of the team. And in my experience, both as an operation and professional, the most successful frontline teams I’ve ever seen are so tightly connected and working in service of one another. That’s why people go the extra distance. That’s why they come in early, that’s why they stay late. It’s because they’re trying to help one another out or because the manager has their back and they’re willing to do what the manager needs them to do. And the manager is the person that’s held responsible for numbers and gets a phone call if you miss, right? So if you build a connected team that’s capable and confident in what they do and they act in service of one another at that unit that they’re working with, that enables you to drive the business results that aren’t necessarily the key motivators in their day-today, experience.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: That’s such a good point, because there is so much comradery and teamwork that goes into frontline work because you are working in the best interest of the team and helping each other out. The manager who’s scheduling you, like you are very much focused on the unit that you are and you’re not really. You are disconnected from corporate in what’s going on there, but you, are essentially the face the company,   representing the company. So that’s a really good point. I would like to touch on the role of frontline managers and supervisors specifically with how they can reinforce and sustain learning for their employees because after all, they’re very busy and stressed out and, what is their role there?

JD Dillon: We can’t add to manager’s plate unless we take something off. They just don’t have additional time and capacity. And I always make the comment that when I was the frontline manager, because the first half of my career was spent in operational management role, I managed movie theaters and theme parks. And I usually spent at least the first 50 hours of my week the job done, doing the things that were required to meet my goals, satisfy customers, was asked of me in that particular day or week after hour 50, when I got to focus on the team. And have additional conversations about development and those types of ideas, and we just can’t expect managers to be able to fit more when they’re being asked to do so much. And they have so many competing priorities coming from different players, and they’re measured on not even a daily basis, an hourly basis. In the cases, and I always say, frontline managers prioritize what’s necessary, did not get a phone call. And it’s usually not, did you coach that employee? That’s not what they get a phone call from corporate for. They get phone calls for other reasons, so that’s what they’ll naturally prioritize. So one, in order to integrate managers who are the most important part of frontline enablement, because they are the link between corporate strategy and frontline execution. They’re the single point of failure for the entire story, but they’re overwhelmed and overburdened and undersupported. So what can we do to improve the way that we support them, and how can we help them simplify  the job and do their jobs easier or make the job easier, do their jobs more effectively? It can come down to simple things. One of my favorite tactics to talk about with managers is just connecting managers with other managers. Because people tend to learn really well from people who understand and have been there before. And it’s not about structured leadership development, it’s just about fostering connection and cohort amongst people who are trying to solve problems and often trying to do it on an island, right? You may be the only manager in your location. The next location may be in a different state. How do you know who to go to? And you usually can’t go up the chain to ask questions, because you can’t necessarily admit to your boss that you don’t know how to do your job. There’s politics involved with that conversation. But if you can be connected to other people like you or people who are maybe more experienced. I talk a lot about the managers that I worked with over the years in the book; that’s I learned how to become an effective manager, was from people like me who just had more experience and more perspective than I did, and all of that was absorbed over time and I became a hybrid of these different people that I worked with over the years. So as l and d and enablement professionals, can connect managers with others who can help them make the job simpler. Also, provide tools and support resources and the types of things that are going to help someone do the job more effectively day to day, demonstrate that we’re there to help. We’re not just there to ask. We’re not just there to add. And then on top of that, start to come in with solutions to say, Hey, I can help your team too, and be viewed not as the training department who always has boxes to check. The enablement team who’s here to help them successful, help their frontline be successful overall, help drive the results they’re accountable for. So I think it’s a combination of help the manager do their job effectively, build that relationship and trust with frontline managers who are critical to making any of this work. If we don’t have the frontline managers bought in, we don’t have anybody because they control everything about the frontline employee experience, including excess and time. So we need them to be able to do anything that includes checkbox compliance training, which is still part of the story has to happen, but we need the managers on side to do that. So to prioritize the managers first, I think if you’re going to invest in one place to improve frontline experience, it’s the management team, and then go from there after we build those relationships and establish that trust.

Sarah Gallo: Definitely, equipping frontline managers is so, so huge and I love the point you made about the importance of connections and those relationships and making sure they have those as well. I can imagine a common challenge frontline managers also face is turnover on their teams, and kind of navigating that. How should that reality influence the design of onboarding and ongoing development programs?

JD Dillon: I once met a frontline manager with 70% turnover. That’s a lot. That’s a challenging environment. They’re doing their best to just put hands in place. You alone have capable, confident experience and people that they can rely on, and that immediately burns the manager who has to close those gaps because they just don’t have staff [or] can’t retain the staff for various reasons.  What’s interesting and different again about the frontline workforce, when you think about things like turnover is, is in a corporate job it often takes weeks to months. To find and get an opportunity. And if you’ve gone through processes and interviews and projects and all the silly things that people get put through the rounds for to get a corporate job, you’re going to hang on for a bit. It’s unlikely you’re gonna walk away. You’re going to spend six months to a year at least. Before we start to kick off another process and try to find another opportunity.  Frontline employees have options in a lot of cases, especially in the cases of skilled trade workers or areas where there are labor shortages. The broader conversation around staffing shortages, that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s more about how labor hours are being matched. But there are environments like nursing, air traffic controllers, long haul truckers that have the people that they need or have people with the sales required to do those types of jobs. But there’s a, a reality of frontline work because of those options that exist and because there’s another across the street who might pay slightly higher people leave in the middle of their first day. The quick quit is a, is a true challenge when it comes to frontline work. So it’s not just retaining people for 30, 60, 90 days, it’s retaining people for the  first day, get them to come back the second day and to have them hold on. And there’s a lot that goes into it. There’s factors like livelihood, which is foundational to work. Do I have a living wage and benefits that’ll help me support myself and my family? There’s a lot of different factors that go into turnover and and retention. But when I visit frontline teams and I talk to people who are doing their jobs, especially when there’s competition nearby and people have those choices, I like to ask people, why do you stay here? Like, I know the guy across the street pays more. Why are you still here? Rarely do they  talk about the job itself. They immediately jump to the people side of things. They immediately say, the manager here is good. Like my previous company wasn’t a very good manager. This manager takes care of me. Or, I really like the people here. I, I got this job to work with my friends. I’ve built relationships. I’m not willing to sacrifice that for 25 or 50 cents more an hour  down the street. So how do we lean into actually retains people, especially early on, and build that into our enablement strategy? Because I think a lot of times we don’t think about the community element of what we do. When frontline teams working in service of the team, community is a driver of performance in a very unique and meaningful way. The one example I share in my book is from a retailer who’s decided to, on day one, they gate deep. How much training can be completed. You can spend two hours on required training on the first shift. The rest of that time has to be spent on the floor working alongside your trainer. Your manager and the customers because they want people to feel of what the workplace will be and to start building those connections. Because they know that’s what brings people back for day two. Not sticking them in a back room to click next to continue for eight hours, and then the person just vanishes on you. So they  prioritize that connection. And there’s another example from the food manufacturing industry where they have significant turnover challenges, a large employment population that speaks a lot of different languages. When they dug into why people were leaving, they figured out that it wasn’t necessarily the work itself. It was the fact that they’re going from training in a classroom for several  days to immediately jumping into these facilities that are  allowed challenging environments, and people were getting scared off by the environment itself. So they restructured the onboard path to introduce them incrementally to the workplace starting on day one. So take a facility tour on day one. Spend some time doing training on day two, some time inside the facility, and to get used to that environment and start to make those connections that are going to keep bringing people back. So it, it comes down to restructuring the way we look at development, especially early on, to consider these other factors that influence people’s decision to stay early leave. So they start to make those connections. And then of course we have to continue to support people, enable them to do good work, to be safe on the job.  That will keep people longer term, but instead of, of thinking that people enter these jobs, and it’s all about career development early on, and people want to be here for a long time, most people don’t. We should accept that. people do. Everyone deserves a chance to understand what opportunities exist here, on day one, it’s often about different motivations. I’m here because I need a paycheck. I’m here because I need to take care of people. I’m here because it sounds fun. I’m here because my friends work here and lean in to those realities and start to build up opportunity and support over time.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Definitely, taking all that into consideration to really build your training and enablement plan is so critical for frontline work. So as we’re kind of looking ahead, how has training for frontline workers evolving from your perspective and what should L&D leaders be doing now to prepare?

JD Dillon: An important thing you can do to prepare to better enable frontline team members is get closer to the work. Understand how the job is done and how the job is evolving and be part of that conversation and not just kind of a reactionary part when there’s a new pro, a project or a initiative or technology rollout and we come alongside it. Provide resources that may or may not actually fit the particular need.  So I always talk about getting in and doing the work where if you can’t do the job yourself,  getting closer to the people who are involving frontline team members in our processes. We shouldn’t be designing solutions without the people who do the job every day who can tell us if this will or will not actually be helpful. And then I always recommend never go to management to ask for people to participate in your work as enablement team. to the frontline directly, build relationships and ask people on here, who are the go-to people that you ask questions of. Those are the people that we want be involved with as champions to make sure that we’re providing right fit support. and those champions tend to be a bit of a pain to the corporate players because they’re, the people care a lot and they push and they have opinions they want things to improve. And I want to be champions alongside those folks, even if sometimes [it’s] a bit of a challenge for the management team, which is great. In terms of tactical improvements and technology improvements, I think the last couple of years has really opened a bunch of doors when it comes to can use different tools to enable frontline work. Devices have become much more ubiquitous on the frontline, and the conversation around using personal devices has opened up considerably in the last couple of years. So in 2019, I had a lot harder time finding screens in frontline operations than I do in 2026. Business processes have changed, mobile ordering, curbside pickup, just people have become more comfortable with the idea of people using phones on the job, and they’re less distracted by the notion that like customers will think they’re not  paying attention. Well, if they’re not paying attention, they’ll think they’re not paying attention. Everyone else is holding a mobile device in this place. Why do the employees not use it effectively? So the hardware side of the conversation has shifted meaningfully, which again is one of those things we have to think about meaningfully with frontline worker. Corporate team members don’t really  have a lot of hardware conversations because it’s, the answer is desktop, laptop, computer, mobile phone, in a frontline environment might be of risk. Wrist mounted mobile screen. It might be the back of the deli scale, which is a big touchscreen device on it. It might be a personal smartphone. So thinking about kind of the choose your own device reality of frontline workplaces. How can we activate as many screens as we can to reach people with support? And then I believe that a lot of AI use cases. Are helping people do jobs more effectively and develop in their roles now as opposed to, I think a lot of the AI conversation in the workplace is still very to be determined, like where is there actual  meaningful uses that will increase productivity and efficiency,  actually increase or improve the employee experience on the frontline that’s happening now, simple examples include language translation. Language translations a meaningful hurdle in frontline spaces. That’s historically taken a lot of time and a lot of expense  to handle, and even then, most companies default  to the most popular languages spoken in the workplace, not knowing who they’re leaving behind. Then you have frontline employees who struggle to understand yet alone, apply information. That wall is falling fast to the point where now if it’s informal information, AI can handle it in a vast array of languages. If it’s compliance information, something that is, uh, requires rigor, you still need a person to follow up behind the technology in that case. But I use AI based translations with almost perfect quality in a wide variety of languages in my work now, and it’s just getting better.  You can take that to the next level and say, some people might need language translation to understand the information you’re putting across. But is the information even written for this audience how many standard operating procedure documents are written for frontline employees as opposed to the lawyers who wrote it because they’re writing it in order to avoid risk and to kind of cover all the bases? Well,  now we can use AI to reinterpret information to explain it. Say, this is what you need to know because this is your job, or this is the task that you’re completing right now. This is how this information applies to you, and take it one step further. Maybe you’re just not a great reader. Well now the machine can talk to you and you can talk back.  So instead of you having to figure out information that just doesn’t make sense for whatever reason, it can be articulated in a conversation without you having to looking for help every time. So there’s these kind of very tactical uses of technology, hardware, and software that are being embedded inside of the frontline experience to help again, kind of reduce those points of friction and that allow employees focus on what matters most. That’s, you know, that work with your customers and your products and services every day, rather than trying to overcome basic understanding of information, communication, the ability to engage in conversation. I’m really excited to see how that continues to evolve.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Definitely, it’s exciting to see how AI and other technologies are helping the field evolve. Well, JD with that, I really enjoyed our conversation today. Thanks so much for speaking with us. And how can our listeners get in touch if they’d like to reach out?

JD Dillon: Sure thing. So if you want to check out the new book, “The Frontline Enablement Playbook,” it drops on May 5, 2026. All the information, including links to pre-order is available online at frontlineplaybook.com. You can also find me upcoming speaking activities, everything that I’m up to on my website at https://jddillon.com/. I’ll be appearing at a variety of different events. So Learning Technologies in London, at ATD26 Conference in L.A., Training Industry [Conference & Expo] in Raleigh, coming up soon, telling frontline stories all along the way. I’m also starting to kick-start a new initiative. It’s called Every Shift Counts,  with the goal of elevating the frontline conversation within the professional space. So if you support frontline team members, or as we started at this conversation with the idea of just interest in advocating for the frontline workforce and you have a story to share interesting ideas or things you’re doing in your organization, feel free to reach out. Happy to chat and happy to elevate the story along with you. So reach out anytime. Connect on LinkedIn, and again, thank you for your attention and everything that you do to enable your frontline teams.

Sarah Gallo: For more resources on topics like this one, check out the episode description or visit the shownotes on our website. At TrainingIndustry.com/podcast  and don’t forget to rate and review us wherever you tune into The Business of Learning. Until next time.