Frontline Onboarding Tips To Improve Worker Productivity

Proficient frontline workers are truly a rare gem; once frontline onboarding has taken place, you cannot afford to lose your new hire. Especially amidst the “Great Attrition” where the frontline workers are quitting jobs at record-breaking numbers. 

Most of the new frontline employees get frustrated in the first few months without clear guidance through the onboarding process. This leads to their quick decision to leave. Moreover, the frontline workforce shortage has resulted in fierce competition for talent in the market. 

In the midst of talent turbulence, improving your frontline onboarding process can help set a positive tone from the time a frontline worker enters the company. It ensures the new hire has all the necessary resources to work efficiently in a fast-paced environment. 

What is Frontline Onboarding and Why is it Important? 

Frontline onboarding is the process of helping new frontline workers adjust to the company culture and understand all aspects of the job to deliver productive results quickly. The frontline onboarding process involves everything from knowledge dissemination to creating an environment where the new team member can be comfortable and interact freely with colleagues. 

Frontline workers are the face of the company. A well-planned onboarding process can help the frontline gain the confidence and knowledge needed to serve clients efficiently. In addition to improving productivity, research has found that a well-planned onboarding process improves employee retention by 82%

5 Tips to Enhance Your Frontline Onboarding Process

An unsatisfactory customer experience often leads to negative reviews that affect the company’s reputation. That’s why it’s important for all new frontline employees to be onboarded effectively. This ensures that they have the necessary knowledge to offer great service and customer satisfaction.

Here are 5 tips to successfully onboard frontline employees. 

1. Build a comprehensive frontline onboarding plan

An onboarding plan can help simplify the frontline onboarding process. It helps maintain uniformity while providing the best employee onboarding experience for your frontline workers. This is especially important if you are onboarding a distributed workforce. You must ensure that the distributed workforce in all locations receives the same onboarding experience.

To achieve this, you must create a detailed and effective onboarding process to offer a consistent experience for all your frontline workers. To create the best frontline onboarding plan, follow these steps:

• Set goals and define the timeline for the onboarding process (for instance, 30, 60, or 90 days long) 
• Determine the needs and responsibilities of the role
• Determine the platform that you will use to onboard the frontline staff 
• Create a checklist of the pre-hire items 
• Make a checklist of information, resources, and product/process knowledge that needs to be covered during the onboarding process 
• Plan the assessment during the onboarding 

2. Welcome the frontline before they join through pre-onboarding 

Pre-onboarding gives you an opportunity to connect with the frontline employees before they join the company. With the right communication, you can create a good rapport with the new hires. 

You can engage the employees even before they begin the official frontline onboarding process. Here are a few ways to do this:

• Congratulate the new employee for accepting the offer and becoming a part of the company
• Send the new hire a welcome email where information like the joining date, time, address, and first-week agenda is mentioned 
• Ask them to provide feedback on the hiring process by filling out a survey
• Send a quiz to find out how much the frontline knows about the company
• Share vital information that will impact the first few weeks of the new hire 
• Share resources that will help the new hire understand the culture and values of the organization 
• Share the paperwork to ensure it is completed before the employee joins the company

3. Create a frontline onboarding journey that’s easy to follow 

An onboarding process normally consists of three phases – orientation, training, and development.  That means that frontline onboarding doesn’t end with product introduction and knowledge transfer in a week. Through deep analysis of on-the-job performance, you can find out the areas for improvement and provide development opportunities to your frontline employees. 

To make your work easier, Disprz LMS enables you to create a customized onboarding program. 

For example:

Day 1- Induction kit and details on roles and responsibilities 

Day 2 – Live session to get acquainted with the teammates 

Day 3 – Blogs on various customer uses case 

Day 4 – Quiz

Day 5 – Mock call to prepare the new employee to handle challenging situations 

Day 6 – Graded assessment 

4. Leverage microlearning to drive onboarding engagement 

Microlearning on mobile is a power-packed strategy that helps enhance frontline onboarding. You can effortlessly engage the busy frontline employees through small nuggets of information. 

Flashcards in multiple languages can help capture the attention of your distributed workforce. For instance, you have frontline employees in different cities, so you can present the content and assessment in their preferred languages and drive engagement during onboarding.  

5. Touch base and follow-up frequently 

Regular check-in is crucial to make the frontline onboarding process successful. It is important to follow up frequently and analyze to find out how much knowledge the employees are absorbing through the onboarding sessions. Based on the analysis, you can create a drip journey to bridge the skill gaps. 

A strong onboarding process can boost productivity and reduce employee turnover. Hence focus on building a strong onboarding process using the right platform. With an advanced frontline enablement solution, you can effortlessly build an onboarding journey and track the progress to take real-time action.