Frontline Employees and Workforce Development

In general, frontline employees represent those roles that directly deliver services or produce products for a customer. Frontline employees are closest in proximity to an organization’s customers in a relative sense. Examples of frontline employees include the most obvious positions such as customer service representatives, retail positions, and even skilled trades. Conceptually, frontline employees might serve customers outside the organization, such as serving consumers, or inside the organization, such as serving the next group that receives what was done before them. Interestingly, I suggest that most apprenticeships in fact prepare individuals for frontline roles.

Today, identifying frontline roles has become increasingly difficult. In the past, we’d kiddingly say that frontline employees were simply those workers who got their hands dirty. Or another informal identifier was what people wore to work. Frontline employees typically wore non-collared shirts, while supervisors and managers wore collared shirts and thus were not considered frontline employees.  

Perhaps using these simple attributes might have worked in the past, but today the broadening range of job responsibilities challenges most definitions. And it’s possible for some jobs to have blended frontline and supervisory expectations. Could a university faculty member be considered a frontline employee? Frontline employee roles have typically been viewed as being semi-skilled in nature. The amount of training or education seems not to matter much anymore. More important is proximity to those being served. Regardless of the business sector or job responsibilities, frontline employees seem subject to two major related challenges.  

Frontline employees bear the brunt of most organizational change efforts, especially in terms of disrupting the work that they do. When change occurs, such as implementing AI, the work of frontline employees invariably undergoes the most change relative to other roles in the organization.  Interestingly, when conducting our skills gap analysis process in a client’s work setting, I observed this point demonstrated repeatedly. Regardless of the nature of the change effort, the results of the process invariably show that skills gaps occur most often among the frontline employees of the organization.

The influence of organizational change on frontline employee expectations began in earnest in the 1980s when global competition threatened the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing industries. At the time, some observers simply blamed our national lack of competitiveness squarely on frontline production workers who were perceived to be overpaid and non-productive, all the while being protected by overzealous unions. In fact, global competition was a wake-up call for change in all aspects of organizations, including management and engineering, jolting everyone’s assumptions to the core.

I first observed the powerful influence of change on frontline employee expectations in the early 1990s, when helping to implement a quality management system in a GM plant. Survival of the plant depended on improving quality and reducing costs, two difficult goals to achieve at once. GM had adopted a system-wide work design called synchronous work groups, which was based on the Toyota Production System. In the new work design, production employees were expected to work cooperatively as a team member with the expectation that each person could eventually operate all the equipment in their sub-assembly area. Production workers would now become multi-skilled instead of each worker basically operating one piece of equipment without much awareness of what came before or after their actions.  

Not unexpectedly, many workers faced immense challenges when adapting to the new synchronous work design, especially those with many years of service. They were required to learn about the new work design, work effectively with others, and operate the equipment in their work areas.

In summary, the first challenge described recognizes that when change occurs, the work of frontline employees is disrupted as much or more than any other role. This understanding leads to the second major challenge facing frontline employees. That is, the second challenge is dealing with the personal anxiety and emotions when others suddenly dictate changes in work life along with potential job loss. Many workforce development professionals may include similar information in their current programs already. Understanding the role of frontline employees seems to be an additional idea of importance when communicating with students about their future in the workforce.