This is the third in a series of articles about frontline workers. This series explores the roles and challenges of these vital employees and how businesses can support their success.  

Frontline workers are the first point of contact between your company and the outside world. Cashiers, sales staff, or your customer service team are the face of your business. It’s important to ensure they feel like empowered and productive team members.

As frontline workers are often far from management in seniority and geography. As a result, it’s easy for frontline workers to feel like the decisions taken by head office don’t affect them. Employee apps makes empowering your frontline workers easy. Let’s explore how.

The challenge of empowering frontline workers

78% of companies strongly agree that “to be successful in the future, our organization must connect and empower its frontline workers with technology and information”.

That’s where employee apps come in. This could be a company branded intranet, or a Microsoft Teams chat. The point is to use technology to bring employees together.

Here’s what a great employee app might include

• Company news and communications
• HR guidance
• Feedback and surveys
• Instant messaging
• Company events
• Content sharing
• People directory

These are just a few of the potential features an employee app can have. The key is to create a space where every employee can access important information, and connect with colleagues. This will make your frontline staff happier, more engaged and more likely to stay with the company in the long term. It gives them the tools to proactively source information about how the company works, who’s who, and how to solve problems. They should be able to do this from any device and location. Mobility and flexibility are key parts of empowering your frontline employees.

1. Making employee apps work for frontline workers

There are several features that will make an employee app more useful for your frontline workers. Let’s take a look at a few of these.

2. Multi-language

Do you have employees fluent in multiple languages? Ensuring your employee apps can target the content to those languages helps everyone feel connected and valued.

3. Mobile first

Your customer-facing employees may be working in the field – potentially scattered across different remote locations. It’s important for them to be able to log into the company app via their mobile device. That’s why mobile-first compatibility is a vital part of giving frontline workers the freedom to access the right information and receive updates wherever they are.

4. Targeting

Targeting is fundamental to an effective employee app. Workers won’t feel encouraged to check the app if they’re constantly barraged by updates that aren’t relevant to them. It’s vital to make sure the content you create can be targeted by location and department at the very least. That means all the content is directly relevant to the person reading it – wherever they’re working.

5. Promoting events

Events are a great way to bring people together in an organization, in person or digitally. Your employee apps have an important role to play in promoting and encouraging attendance at these company events.

6. Simple content creation

The best employee apps let anybody create and share content. That could be something as simple as a poll, or a morale-boosting success story about a satisfied customer. By giving end users the ability to easily create content, you can empower your frontline workers to inspire, motivate and educate each other.  

Find out more about how employee apps can engage your frontline workers on our recent webinar. Or sign up for our upcoming event about the future of frontline work.

Getting started with your employee apps

Employee engagement apps have vast potential to improve working life for your frontline workers.

Check out LiveTiles Reach. With over 300,000 registered users, wide functionality, and over 60 languages, it comes with all the features you need to make your frontline workers feel happy, productive and engaged.

If you want to find out more about LiveTiles Reach, or employee apps, get in touch with our team today.