How do Frontline Teams Learn?

A huge part of your business’s success depends on your frontline teams: your ground staff and your brands’ flag bearers who play a vital role in delivering the best customer experience. To help frontline teams do better, organisations are increasingly investing in learning initiatives specifically tailored for frontline teams. 

In this article, we explore how frontline teams learn:

1. Importance of frontline learning
2. What are the challenges in frontline learning
3. Technology in Frontline Learning and Training
4. Personalised Learning for Frontline Teams
5. Measuring the Impact of Frontline Learning
6. Future Trends in Frontline Learning

1. Importance of frontline learning:

A large part of customer service experience depends on how your frontline teams interact with your customers. A well-informed employee is one who can deliver customer excellence. As an organisation, it then becomes your priority to create an environment where your frontline employees evolve into skilled, informed and engaged professionals.

Your Frontline workforce needs to be informed, educated and updated about the 3 Ps that help them do their job the best they can: Product, Process and People. Additionally, studies also prove that companies that provide learning and upskilling opportunities cultivate better brand loyalty from employees with reduced attrition rates.

A lack of career growth is one of the biggest reasons workers leave their jobs, second only to low pay, according to a survey from Instructure and The Harris Poll.

2. What are the main challenges in frontline learning?

Learning in frontline comes with a unique set of challenges that needs to be addressed to create a successful and effective learning strategy.

• Time Constraint: Frontline employees usually have a hectic schedule making it difficult to dedicate long hours to improving their knowledge base. This calls for learning tools that are easy to use and learning content that is interactive and most importantly bite-sized, to allow them to learn better. 

• Accessibility: Given the time constraints and the diverse learning preferences of employees, it is important to keep learning as effective and simplified as possible. Your content should be accessible to each employee at their fingertips and it helps if learning can be conducted in languages your teams are comfortable with. This is where easy-to-use mobile applications with auto-translate features help make a difference.

• Cost of learning: When frontline learning is offline and tied up in manual processes, execution and managing learning initiatives become a tedious and expensive task for both organisations and employees. This makes it important to have learning as a self-learning, digitised and automated process to save both time and money. 

• Measuring ROI: A common organisational challenge when it comes to L&D is understanding the effectiveness of their learning programs. Carefully devised assessments and training help you connect efforts with results. ‍

3. Technology in Frontline Learning and Training

A quick and effective way to address the above challenges in the frontline learning space is by embracing technology. Learning materials that are manually managed, training planned, conducted and tracked offline, requiring teams to download and use multiple applications, content that is not engaging etc are some of the main reasons learning and training programs lose their effectiveness. L&D and HR heads need to focus their time and resources on creating and executing plans instead of spending their efforts in doing manual tasks. 

It is also important that learning is made fun, engaging and easy for frontline employees. In today’s age of Instagram reels, YouTube Shorts and other engaging social media platforms, expecting teams to go through long, boring lessons is a sure way to fail. Instead, it helps to ride the wave and create bite-sized, engaging content that learners are keen to come back to. This also helps make learning a pull instead of a push experience. 

The average human attention span now is about 8.25 seconds. We have seen organisations use social media trends in their learning modules to drive better engagement and results.

4. Personalised Learning for Frontline Teams

In a constantly evolving landscape of frontline workforce, one one-size learning approach does not fit. A strategic approach that caters to the unique needs, preferences and skills of frontline teams is what personalised learning entails. This recognises and addresses the truth that every individual has distinct learning needs, styles, strengths and areas of improvement. 

How you can create personalised learning experiences is through:

• Assessments & Individualised Plans: Personalised learning begins with thoroughly assessing each team member's skills, knowledge, and learning preferences. This data forms the foundation for crafting individualised learning plans that address specific gaps and capitalize on existing strengths.‍

• Adaptive Learning Platforms: Using algorithms and data analytics you can easily customise personalised frontline learning. As individuals progress through modules, the platform adapts, offering targeted content to reinforce learning and challenge individuals at their own pace. Initiatives driven by technology make it easy to scale and address multiple teams’ requirements with the least effort.

‍5. Measuring the Impact of Frontline Learning

Being able to show the results of learning and training is what helps keep up the momentum of learning initiatives. Robust assessment tools and feedback mechanisms help in understanding the tangible outcomes of frontline learning investments. Additionally, when implemented regularly, it is also what helps you gauge the effectiveness of your programs. 

6. Future Trends in Frontline Learning

Predictions today are that AI will take over learning in the future. What it also indicates is that personalised learning experiences, people getting comfortable with applications, and continuous learning platforms are what will redefine the learning landscape for frontline employees. 

Quick Takeaway: Here is how you can drive effective learning programs in your organisation:

1. Deciding to invest in learning and development for your frontline workforce
2. Leaders influencing and encouraging learning with policy changes
3. Ride the social media wave: make content easy, fun and memorable
4. Embrace technology to make learning initiatives easy to implement and track
5. Create a rewarding system that creates a pull instead of a push in your organisation