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Why frontline onboarding matters
Frontline workers are responsible for bringing your product to life, delivering great customer experience, and being the face of your brand. In many ways, they’re at the heartbeat of business operations.
For this reason, frontline onboarding shouldn’t be seen as a compliance checkbox – it’s an opportunity to make sure there’s complete alignment between your company strategy and the people who are asked to deliver it. Without this alignment, you’re essentially asking frontline workers to navigate with no map.
Not only does this increase disengagement (and therefore employee churn!) but it prevents you from achieving organizational goals with the speed that’s required.
Put simply, effective onboarding of frontline workers isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the first step to ensuring they have the information and tools they need to deliver on corporate priorities.
The unique context of onboarding frontline workers
Unlike desk-based staff, frontline workers have unique challenges and requirements. Here are some of the things organizations need to consider when putting together employee onboarding plans.
Any organization that wants to stay aligned to customer and market shifts needs agile insights that only the frontline can provide. All of this means that effective frontline management and frontline communication aren’t optional – they’re mission-critical.
Limited digital access
Frontline workers often don’t have a company email address or regular access to a desktop computer. This means standard onboarding tools like email-based training modules and HR portals can be ineffective. It also has an impact further down the line in terms of people’s ability to upskill. Unily’s study showed that:
55% of frontline workers are unaware of the training opportunities available to them, and 56% think the communication they receive about training is inadequate.
This is why enterprises need to think differently about communication across the frontline employee lifecycle.
Disconnected and disengaged:
The economic cost of frontline friction
Less facetime with corporate colleagues
Many frontline employees begin their job without ever stepping foot in headquarters or interacting with corporate leadership. As a result, they may feel disconnected from the broader company culture or mission. Onboarding needs to be seen as a key opportunity to bridge that gap and establish a sense of belonging.
Variable shift patterns
One of the biggest challenges in frontline onboarding is the nature of working hours. Unlike standard 9-5 employees, frontline workers often start jobs on rotating, night, weekend, or part-time shifts. Onboarding needs to be flexible enough to accommodate this variability without creating inconsistency.
Safety is paramount
Frontline roles often involve complex tasks and strict safety procedures. Workers need to know not only what is expected of them, but how to perform those duties safely and correctly from day one. Compared to safety training for desk-based workers, these instructions need to be more visual.
A bite-sized approach is needed
Frontline roles often require employees to hit the ground running. It may not be practical to have extensive frontline onboarding schedules, especially in high-turnover or seasonal roles. But the alternative – compressing everything into a few days – can lead to information overload. This means organizations need to think of ways to deliver onboarding content in manageable, actionable segments.
Unily ranks first for Frontline Worker Support in the 2024 Gartner® Critical Capabilities™ for Intranet Packaged Solutions.
Building a connected frontline from Day 1
With those unique needs of frontline workers in mind, enterprises should create a tailored frontline onboarding strategy. Here are some of the key elements to prioritize.
Mobile-first access
This is a non-negotiable. Organizations must embrace mobile-first onboarding experiences that can reach workers where they are. Key considerations include:
- Employee apps that integrate with your knowledge sharing system
- Push notifications to share updates and deadlines
- Offline functionality for areas with limited connectivity
- Secure instant messaging tools that integrate with your people directory
- QR codes on digital and physical signage for easy access
Cultural reinforcement
Aligning your people with your purpose is important, but it can be difficult to do this with frontline workers who have limited contact with corporate. Use onboarding as a way to reinforce company culture – this should be given the same importance as any job-specific training.
Explain why their work matters, exactly what the company goals are that they’re executing on, and what your company values are. It’s also a good idea to showcase how frontline roles contribute to success.
Other ways to bring them into the fold from a cultural perspective include:
- Welcome messages from senior leaders (via video or app)
- Team introductions via instant messaging or enterprise social forums
- Recognition of new hires in company-wide communications
- Sharing Employee Resource Groups and encouraging workers to create their own if necessary
Tailoring frontline onboarding content
Whilst the cultural elements apply for workers across the board, it’s worth tailoring a lot of your other onboarding content. A one-size-fits-all approach is both impersonal and ineffective. Personalization gives you the opportunity to make onboarding more relevant, and boost engagement at the same time.
For enterprises with global workforces, this means looking at regional differences – such as laws, customer expectations, or languages – and tailoring accordingly. In some cases, a new starter may not be a brand-new hire in the technical sense – they could be someone that’s been transferred across as the result of a merger. In this case, you’d want to tailor your onboarding based on the experience they already have.
Microlearning methods
This tailors the onboarding process to the variable shift patterns frontline workers have. Microlearning breaks everything down into short, focused bursts – empowering workers to learn at their own pace, while also absorbing the critical information. Consider creating tailored employee journeys with bite-sized learning modules of 5 minutes, along with step-by-step guides for daily tasks. You can also provide interactive checklists so they can track their progress.
Whether it's a tutorial on using a POS system, or a short video on safety protocols, microlearning can be highly effective for frontline onboarding.
On-demand information
From SOPs to KPIs, HR policies to technical training – there’s lots of things frontline workers will need to reference during their opening weeks. Make these easily available, so they can access them at any time. Avoid physical documents where possible, as this increases the risk of information being lost.
Utilizing a centralized employee experience platform provides the single source of truth frontline workers need, and also ensures relevant stakeholders can update materials when needed without any issues for the workforce.
New starter feedback
Start engagement by listening from the beginning. Pulse surveys or even a simple feedback form after the first week are useful. These show employees that their voices matter – building a level of trust from the start. It also helps the organization refine the onboarding process, which is key at a time when employee wants and needs are rapidly evolving.
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Measuring and optimizing frontline onboarding
Measuring the success of your frontline onboarding process is essential – and not just for compliance or completion rates. It helps key stakeholders – such as those in HR or IC teams – to understand whether new hires are truly connected to the business goals, properly equipped to do their jobs, and likely to stay at the company.
Optimizing frontline onboarding based on insights ensures the process can evolve through time.
Here’s how to take a strategic approach to measuring and improving frontline onboarding.
Define success
Before you can measure onboarding, you need to be clear about what success looks like. For frontline roles, keep the following questions in mind:
- Connection: Is the employee aligned with the company’s mission, values, and strategic goals? Do they feel a sense of belonging?
- Competence: Does the employee feel confident in their role and can they effectively contribute to business goals?
- Commitment: Is the employee likely to stay and grow within the company?
You can then identify metrics that reflect those categories.
Track key frontline onboarding metrics
There are a range of KPIs that organizations can use to evaluate how effective their onboarding for frontline workers is. These can be tracked at different stages through the process.
Quantitative Metrics:
- Time-to-productivity: How long does it take for a new hire to independently perform their job duties?
- Training completion rates: Are new hires finishing training modules on time?
- Knowledge retention scores: Are they retaining key information when you ask them to do assessments or quizzes?
- Early turnover rates: How many employees leave within the first 30, 60, or 90 days?
- Attendance: Are new employees showing up consistently?
Qualitative Metrics:
- Just-in-time onboarding feedback: Embed quick feedback prompts after each onboarding milestone, asking employees whether the module they completed was useful.
- Onboarding satisfaction surveys: At the end of the initial onboarding, ask employees to rate their onboarding experience.
- Manager feedback: Do supervisors believe new hires are prepared and engaged?
- Pulse surveys: How do frontline workers feel about their role and the company?
A robust Employee Experience Platform can help both centralize data, and track employee sentiment. This allows you to get faster insights and be more agile in your decision-making.
Use data to identify gaps
Once you've gathered the data, the next step is to identify patterns and pain points. For example:
- Are certain roles or regions showing higher early attrition?
- Is training content more frequently skipped by night shift workers?
- Are new hires consistently scoring low on certain modules?
Benchmarking across different frontline groups (such as stores or sites) also brings high-performing teams to light. Their onboarding practices can then potentially be scaled across the business.
Iterate, evolve, and repeat
The best onboarding programs are never static. Use frontline feedback to continuously improve the experience, test new approaches, and refine content. These might include:
- Replacing long-form PDFs with short videos
- Creating location-specific onboarding flows
- Launching peer mentoring programs for new hires
- Improving onboarding for non-traditional schedules, such as those on night shifts
Establish a regular onboarding review process that includes HR, Internal Comms, and frontline managers, to monitor progress and make improvements.
For enterprises with large workforces, it’s also key to create processes that are easily scalable and repeatable. For example, Elia Group is one of Europe’s biggest electricity transmission system operators, and in 2024 alone welcomed over 400 new employees on board.
The existing onboarding program was leading to information overload for new starters, but with Unily’s Employee Journeys capabilities, Elia Group could create a more tailored and meaningful onboarding which lasted 19 days. This enabled the business to see vast improvements, with 98% of new starters completing their journeys. Meanwhile, implementing a checklist-style Milestones feature helped average goals achievement went up by 10%.
The key takeaway
For enterprises wanting to stay agile in an era of change and volatility, onboarding frontline workers needs to be seen as more than just a series of tasks. Think of it as a strategic lever that can have a significant impact on company performance and productivity.
By ensuring your frontline onboarding is personalized, aligning it with company goals and values, and leveraging technology for consistent information sharing – you can transform the experience frontline workers get in those crucial early days.
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