Frontline Employee Engagement: Five Ways to Engage and Retain

Although talk of the Great Resignation and quiet quitting have died down, employee engagement remains HR’s hot topic this year.

In fact, in a recent Flip survey of business leaders across industries and geographies, four out of five said employee engagement was a top strategic priority for them this year. G2 aptly anticipated this trend last year, predicting that employee engagement and experience would take center stage in 2024.

Now, it seems like everyone understands its importance, yet very few businesses are getting it right — least of all on the frontlines.

So, it’s time to dig a little deeper. In this guide to frontline employee engagement, we’ll explore the key factors draining frontline morale and productivity and what low engagement is costing employers. And to help you turn the tide, we’ll share five practical ways you can engage and retain your frontline workers.

A quick primer on employee experience versus employee engagement

In this article, we’ll be talking a lot about the employee experience. Employee experience encompasses just about every touchpoint a worker has within their role and the company they work for — all the way from hire to retire, fire, or resign. It’s influenced by not just the material conditions of their job but by their employer’s goals and values, management behavior, the tools they are given, and much more.

And why does the employee experience matter? Because it directly impacts employee engagement. Employee engagement, in turn, is a way to understand how employees feel and behave on the job. It combines two characteristics: morale and energy.

These characteristics together signal a highly engaged employee who is much more likely to feel committed and motivated to perform at a consistent, high level for their employer. Basically, engaged employees are the types of employees any business would want to hire and keep around.

How engaged are UK and European employees?

Ok, we know we want engaged employees. So, what’s the current state of play?

Well, to put it bluntly, things aren’t so peachy — especially in the UK and Europe. Amongst employees of all types, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report shows that engaged employees make up just 13% of the European workforce (and just 10% of workers in the UK!).

We need to talk about frontline employee engagement

While current engagement levels isn't great amongst any of the working population, the outlook is even worse on the frontline. The same Gallup report, for example, found lower engagement amongst on-site workers (which includes frontline workers) than for hybrid or remote employees.

Frontline workers (also known as deskless workers, operational employees, and many more) make up the bulk of the world’s workforce. While some of us sit behind computers doing back office roles, email jobs, or knowledge work, frontline workers stand on shop floors and factory floors. They serve food, man machinery, or do the delivery rounds.

Their work is vital to everything from our next-day deliveries and snazzy electronics to our leisure time, food supply, and even our health. Yet despite their critical importance, they’re even less engaged than office workers.

Why? Because as mind-numbing as some conference calls might be, the frontline employee experience is significantly worse.

What makes the frontline employee experience different from that of desk-based workers?

As anyone who worked in hospitality or retail before embracing the nine-to-five life knows, frontline labor is demonstrably different from back-office work.

For starters, there are inherent limits on flexibility — you can’t exactly deliver parcels from your kitchen table or man the tills from another time zone. Combine that with comparatively more hazards, higher physical demands, lower pay and job security, more limited career opportunities, and less social status in many cultures, and we start to build up a picture of why keeping frontline workers satisfied and motivated might need a bit more elbow grease.

Worse, as frontline work is frequently seen as low-skilled or temporary (the stereotype of a teenager flipping burgers), these employees are frequently underserved by the companies they work for. Their needs aren’t fully understood, and so they’re not met.

This is especially true when it comes to technology; where many back-office workers get snazzy new communication tools or a work-from-home stipend to get the best out of them, frontline workers are forced to make do with what they’ve always had. The same logic applies to their perks, career development opportunities, and even their working environment.

Giving frontline workers the bare minimum might seem like the cheaper option, sure. But, neglecting frontline engagement comes with a seismic impact and eye-wateringly high costs.

What is the link between employee engagement and business success?

If you somehow hadn’t noticed…times are tough.

The impact of multiple unprecedented events in recent years continues to send shockwaves across the globe, and businesses have not emerged unscathed.

While low employee engagement is a risk even in boom times, it’s pretty perilous when things have gone pear-shaped. Dissatisfied, unmotivated employees make difficult circumstances yet more difficult, making it even more challenging to run a successful business.

With these current economic and labor market conditions, high engagement is essential — especially among frontline workers. It presents businesses with a competitive advantage, which is especially crucial during challenging and unpredictable times.

The impacts of low frontline employee engagement on business

So why the focus on frontline workers?

Put simply, because disproportionately high value is created at the frontline. So, while it might seem common sense to prioritize keeping HQ happy, it makes better business sense to prioritize engagement rates amongst workers in these deskless roles.

There’s a lot on the line here — poor frontline engagement is costing businesses big bucks. Why? Because low engagement does two key things:

• It increases the probability that employees will leave.
• It decreases the performance of the employees who stay.

As you can imagine, that has far-reaching consequences across the entire business. Think dwindling productivity, constant recruitment cycles, compliance issues, declining customer satisfaction, and general firefighting costs.

With poorly engaged employees, businesses are forced to be reactive, not proactive. This means resources are not allocated to value-driven, growth-oriented projects, resulting in a vicious cycle affecting both the top and the bottom line.

Let’s take a look at each of these points in finer detail to see what’s really happening.

The true costs of high worker turnover

First, let’s discuss the real cost of high-employee churn. Based on existing research, conversations with analysts, and input from Flip's customers across industries, we estimate that it costs, on average, £10,360 to replace one frontline employee. This is around 40% of the outgoing worker’s annual salary.

Combine that figure with the voluntary turnover rate for UK workers — around 27% annually, according to CIPD data — and things really start to add up. Businesses that can reduce frontline churn can make huge cost savings.

Luckily, high engagement provides a path forward — according to a Gallup meta-analysis, there’s a 18-43% difference in staff turnover between high-engagement and low-engagement teams.

Low employee engagement hits the bottom line hard

Next, let’s look at the costs of low engagement in terms of productivity, performance, and resources.

Unsurprisingly, given their lower motivation, lower satisfaction, and higher risk of burnout, disengaged employees take more sick leave than their engaged counterparts. Though the lasting effects of the pandemic shoulder much of the blame, UK absenteeism rates hit their highest levels in over a decade in late 2023.

This doesn’t just mean coughing up for sick pay where provided; it also means a reduced workforce that will struggle to hit productivity and performance targets. Further Gallup analysis finds that employers face up to double the costs of sickness-related productivity losses amongst actively disengaged employees compared to their engaged counterparts. 

High engagement can, again, turn the tide. Gallup research, for example, has found that there’s an 81% difference in absenteeism between highly engaged and disengaged teams, while McKinsey research shows high performers are 50% more productive in low complexity roles, 85% more productive in medium complexity roles, and a whopping 125% more productive when it comes to more complex work.

If that weren’t enough, Gallup meta-analysis data finds that highly engaged business units are 23% more profitable than their low-engagement counterparts.

To sum up, enormous value can be created at the frontline. But if the workers aren’t engaged, businesses suffer from a constant cycle of value leakage and firefighting costs across the business.

What can be done to improve frontline employee engagement?

That’s enough doom and gloom — it’s time for some good news.

While engagement may be startlingly low across the UK and Europe, it’s a manageable risk with the right approach. Businesses that can successfully engage frontline workers will rise above the competition.

However, the success of any engagement strategy depends on its ability to understand and meet the needs of its audience. In our case, that means focusing on improving the frontline employee experience.

A one-size-fits-all solution won’t cut it here. Your engagement strategy must carefully consider the realities and pain points of general frontline work and your frontline workers specifically. The goal should be to alleviate problems and empower workers.

While these tactics should be adapted to your specific circumstances, here are five ideas to get you thinking about how you can engage and retain your frontline employees.

1. Set up clear communication channels

Communication is the foundation of effective frontline engagement. Without it, workers feel disconnected from the broader culture.

It’s a major sticking point for their engagement. But worse, poor communication drains operations — when Flip surveyed 500 UK frontline workers, more than half said that communication at their company negatively impacts productivity.

Addressing these communication barriers requires a tailored approach that takes into consideration the very specific communication needs of your deskless workers. Any frontline employee experience strategy should prioritize facilitating communication in an easy, accessible way.

Communication channels should always include top-down forums so frontline workers are kept up-to-date with important company news and information. But often neglected are peer-to-peer communications, which allow workers to easily and securely contact their managers or communicate and collaborate with their colleagues — sometimes the answer to a question is only one message away.

2. Improve morale through recognition and appreciation

Everybody wants to feel valued at work, so it’s no surprise that building a culture of recognition, appreciation, and praise is great for morale.

Nowhere is this more important than on the frontline. These employees work at the coalface of businesses and frequently have to handle challenging situations. Think wrangling difficult customers or technology that’s throwing a temper tantrum.

In the above-mentioned survey of frontline workers, "lack of recognition or appreciation" topped the list of factors that demotivate employees — beating poor management, uninteresting work, and even insufficient salary to the top spot.

On the other hand, the frontline employees who felt recognized and appreciated at work were 8.5 times more likely to say they were satisfied with their jobs than their colleagues who did not feel valued by their employers.

As such, recognition and reward programs are a hugely important lever for improving frontline engagement.

Here are some ideas of what this could look like in your business:

• Publicly acknowledging employees who show strong collaboration, which in turn encourages teamwork (which, as we all know, makes the dream work).
• Introducing a peer recognition system, allowing staff to highlight significant contributions from their colleagues.
• Sharing customer testimonials or stories showcasing the impact of the team's efforts and celebrating notable individual achievements — in a channel the whole company can access.

3. Invest in job development opportunities

Many frontline workers want to develop their skill set. In fact, recent McKinsey research found that 70% of frontline workers have applied for career advancement opportunities.

Yet frontline development opportunities are frequently lacking. The same McKinsey research found that of those who applied for growth opportunities, only 40% received a raise or increased responsibility, and fewer than a quarter ended up with a new role.

The employers who can deliver the advancement opportunities that frontline workers are crying out for will secure themselves a great engagement boost. That’s before we mention that it just makes fiscal sense to invest in the talent you already have in-house.

Formal training programs targeted at specific skills or career goals are a great way to motivate your frontline team. These can be supported by regular one-on-one meetings between managers and employees to discuss growth opportunities specific to them.

It’s important that any relevant opportunities are readily available to all employees regardless of what shifts they work or which location they’re based in. Here, providing online training courses that are easily accessible to frontline workers in their employee platform is key.

4. Empower frontline workers to give feedback

In the same survey of UK frontline workers, only 3 in 10 had ways to share knowledge and feedback amongst colleagues and with the wider business.

This has two key negative impacts:

• Engagement suffers as frontline workers feel frustrated, voiceless, and undervalued.
• Business performance is put at risk as it misses out on the intel required to effectively improve processes and motivate workers. 

New initiatives are frequently decided on the fly. But who better to comment on the day-to-day bottlenecks or inefficiencies than frontline workers themselves? By inviting them to offer feedback and suggestions, your business can give frontline workers a voice while exploring previously untapped know-how.

This, however, comes with a caveat. It’s essential not only to collect feedback but also to act on it. Otherwise, you’ll find your shiny new feedback channels are seldom used.

5. Implement the right technology

Although many businesses know that employee engagement is crucial to their success, they fail to take a systematic approach that is standardized across the business. For any strategy to succeed, people, processes, and technology all play a part.

On the frontlines, technology is lacking. In the same survey of UK frontline workers, we found that less than a quarter of them can call in sick digitally, while 24% rely on notice boards to receive company news.

Even when frontline workers are given company technology, they frequently don’t use it. Instead, they expose the business to security risks by turning to shadow tech to get the job done. Almost a third, for example, stated they use social media and consumer messaging apps for work-related communications.

Why? Well, we’ll let the frontline workers speak for themselves:

"Too complicated — you have to enter passwords every time."

"I have no need for [Microsoft] Teams in my role."

And as one particularly memorable response put it: "In all honesty, it's such a rat system, it takes forever to load. A potato has better processing power than the digital trash cans we have at work."

So, while the research found that 79% of business leaders want frontline workers to have the same experience of workforce and engagement solutions as office-based workers, it’s clear that frontline workers are not getting the seamless employee experience that the digital revolution promised.

To ensure that your frontline solution budget is helping rather than harming, it’s important to remember the realities of frontline work. That means prioritizing technology that’s accessible from anywhere without complex log-in requirements, prioritizes mobile functionality, and is as easy and intuitive to use as social media.

Working towards a better frontline worker experience

There’s enormous potential for value creation on the frontline, but it isn’t being harnessed.

While that’s bad news for most, it does mean significant competitive advantage is there for the taking. And that’s great news for those who are willing to make a change.

Whether it’s retention, productivity, or growth, businesses that can successfully satisfy and motivate their disproportionately disengaged deskless workers will secure significant competitive advantage. And while the strategy to do just that will look different for every employer, the basic "how" is always the same.

Any employee engagement strategy should be centered on improving the employee experience. When it comes to deskless workers, that means making a real effort to understand the needs of employees and the realities of frontline work. With that knowledge, employers can make more informed choices about the tactics, tools, and technology they select for their engagement program, increasing its chances of success.

Take your frontline team to the next level! Dive into actionable tips for implementing impactful ongoing frontline training programs.

Edited by Jigmee Bhutia