Frontline: The Inside Scoop
Bringing community to work means connecting everybody inside organizations — including people who don’t sit behind a desk, have a corporate device or even an email address.
These are the frontline workers — store assistants, truck drivers, factory employees, nurses, teachers and others — that make up 80% of the world’s workforce.
Workplace is already the market leader when it comes to connecting the frontline because it’s familiar, intuitive and designed for mobile. Today, we’re serving thousands of frontline workers at companies like Starbucks, Walmart, Chevron and Petco. But we know we can do more.
Tara McQuillian is a Frontline UX Researcher at Workplace. Her job is to deliver the insights that inspire new feature development. We asked Tara to take us behind the scenes and give us a glimpse into the research that’s powering our understanding of the frontline workforce.
What’s the role of a UX researcher in empowering frontline workers?
Broadly speaking, my job revolves around understanding frontline workers in all their shapes and sizes, and ensuring their needs are at the core of the products we build. Frontline workers have some specific needs and challenges, so I spend the majority of my time trying to dig deeper into the challenges they face, and thinking about how we can help overcome them.
My role varies day-to-day but I spend a lot of my time designing research plans, conducting interviews with frontline workers and their managers, examining how and why we make the assumptions and hypotheses that we do, and testing them in the market.
Once research is completed, it’s my job to analyze and share findings, and work with product managers, designers and engineers to build intuitive, useful features. We often partner with some of our customers to understand how our current frontline workers are using the platform, and learn more about their needs from online tools.
You’ve said that frontline workers come in various shapes and sizes. Is there anything that’s common to all frontline employees?
One thing that I’m always struck by is how varied frontline workers are. We tend to think frontline equals retail or customer service but doctors and nurses are equally frontline workers. That being said, there are a few things that characterize the majority.
The key identifiers of a frontline worker are being predominantly deskless or having a shared desk space. Frontline workers are also generally emailless, tend to use their personal phones for work purposes, and most often are customer-facing.
The lack of a work phone and associated email creates myriad complications for both employers and employees, and was the root cause for us creating [Access Codes], which enables frontline workers to register for Workplace without an email address. Not only do these codes protect them and their employers, they also just make life faster and simpler.
What are the key challenges you’ve identified?
First and foremost, frontline workers are much more likely to feel disconnected from their organizations and peers than people working in an office. Why?
The overwhelming majority of online tools that exist today have been built for knowledge workers: the people that sit at a designated desk in close proximity to their coworkers and managers.
Frontline workers tend to work shifts and spend most of their time in customer-facing settings. They don’t generally get very much ‘down time’ so their needs from a work communication tool are very different to a knowledge worker’s — something that’s remained largely unaddressed until recently.
How did you begin the research process?
We of course knew that these folks existed, but didn’t know much about them. When we committed to making frontline workers central to Workplace’s mission, we conducted international research spanning the US, UK, Brazil, India and Japan, because we wanted and needed to cater to universal and regional challenges and specifications. Teams of researchers shadowed frontline workers on the floors of manufacturing plants, restaurants, hospitals and more to gain a better understanding of their behaviors and needs, as a starting point.
What did you find?
Aside from the immense amount of walking, what really stuck out to me was the extent to which frontline workers are disconnected from each other, especially between branches. We knew that frontline workers felt distant from knowledge workers, but had no idea how disconnected they were from other people with the same job titles.
What’s come out of that realization is [Goals], a forum that allows frontline workers to see how they’re performing in comparison to their peers. The goal is for them to engage with each other and build camaraderie and community, something our current customers have expressed they’d like to see more of.
Now a pizza cutter in Rio de Janeiro can check in and compare their rate of pizza cutting to that of a colleague in Sao Paulo.
Aside from that, there are all sorts of small things that structure a frontline worker’s day that we don’t see from the outside. One example is daily morning meetings, which we saw across industries. Frontline workers orient their days around these briefings, which provided useful insight into what features would be most useful to them.
What are some of their key tech needs?
Most crucially, the solution needs to be real-time and easily digestible. Some of our retail-based research revealed that today’s consumers want to know whether or not a pair of shoes is vegan before buying them. So, store representatives need a quick and easy way to search for that information to serve the customer in-store at the time.
By virtue of the fact that their roles are so fast-paced, frontline workers need a tech solution that’s easily digestible. One of the things we worked on was rethinking notifications to accommodate that specification. In the instance we just talked about, the store representative would need to sift through a vast amount of notifications when trying to quickly search for a shoe’s material composition — overwhelming to say the least. Soon, that same rep will be able to access our [Content Digest], which will enable people to access their most important posts in under a few minutes.
Are there any key ways that frontline workers are sidelined in comparison to their knowledge worker counterparts?
In addition to being less connected, frontline workers often receive fewer opportunities to upskill, according to our research. That’s where our new [Learning] feature comes in. Before, a barista wanting to learn about how to make a seasonal hot drink would have to consult a public forum. Soon, they’ll be able to head to our Learning tab and learn the ins and outs of creating new drinks in store from one of their peers.
Not only are they upskilling, they’re doing so in a way that’s inherently more connected.
Is there anything you’ve found surprising in your research?
The extent to which frontline workers globally rely on consumer messaging apps to get their jobs done was astounding to me. Tigertext, Whatsapp and Messenger are incredibly prevalent in the average frontline worker’s day, in every region covered, which is just a testament to the fact that being mobile-first is no longer optional.
