Don’t forget frontline workers count too…..

How do we change perceptions of how we recruit and manage these essential workers?

Somehow recruiting and managing shop workers, call centre agents, restaurant workers and care assistants is often the poor relation of the HR industry. Given the comparatively low investment in either of these activities get compared to the rest of HR activities, this might suggest that we treat these potential hires as somehow less important than the rest of the workforce.

These types of role are often deemed as ‘easy to fill and candidates are labelled fickle. Eg ‘They move for another 50p an hour’ I have heard quoted. However, these people (let’s treat as people rather than numbers have huge impacts on our customers, revenue and bottom line. Companies enhance or lose reputations based on interactions with their customer facing staff.

Let’s remember these key workers care for our elderly parents or relatives, interact with us at times of stress. (Think, moving house, bereavement or your child’s first day at nursery). However, it appears that candidate/employee experience is mostly ignored for this section of the workforce in many companies. It appears the more senior or professional the role, the more important engagement, experience and training is but the more junior the less important.

Anyone who works in this space understand turnover and absenteeism is a challenge, and recruiting is challenging. The focus for many organisations is optimising process and cost rather than experience. Assumptions are made by management that people in these roles are somehow to blame when they want to move roles for progression, salary increases or better conditions. Accountability, is not a phrase familiar to some leaders and organisations for this deficit.

Much has been written about the need for purpose in work. Mazlow is back in fashion, unless it seems, you work in a front-line role. A more fundamental question happens, why do organisations lose their humanity when recruiting low paid staff but think it is essential when it comes to experienced hires? Perhaps HIPPOS (highest paid peoples’ opinion) count more than those who deliver the actual services?

The Guardian recently highlighted new technology for employee surveillance. Now we are in an age of hybrid working, it appears that some leaders that have no way of understanding what motivates the workforce, and are prepared to deploy ethically questionable technology. There maybe some short-term advantage but in the longer term what damage are they doing to the reputation of their companies and I might add their own wellbeing. Policing colleagues seems Orwellian, cruel and cuts deep into what you may or may not believe about fellow human beings.

To hire and give just a reasonable experience to these candidates takes a bit of thought and maybe some monetary investment. Why this seems to be alien to most companies is a mystery. However, the costs of assessment tools and methods is becoming more accessible for more businesses. In fact, it seems a better investment to look at ways of hiring the right people for these roles rather than technology on trying to catch them out.  

At Nationwide we faced into these issues sometime ago and it was useful to get a finance lens on the problem. Talking hard cash focusses minds. The conclusion was that for every percentage point of early attrition ( first 12 months) cost the business ￡100k on the bottom line. It would be easy to say as a resourcing function, that attrition isn’t our problem but about management. In fairness, you have to give Managers a fighting chance.

Through much soul searching (from both sides) and ultimately collaboration, we set about improving the situation. The imperative was clear – the overall mission was about the service to our members and ensuring that our people were at the centre of this change.

We go into a lot of detail about how this was achieved but in summary there were 4 buckets of activity the ultimately defined success:

·     Candidate journey – Attraction, assessing and describing the realities of working at Nationwide. Really important to be clear and set standards of the type of behaviours and attitudes, defined in part by the hiring managers, and individuals doing the work. We found interesting insight into what really matters in what it takes to be successful in role, sometimes different from what managers thought or believed.

·     Communication of opportunity – guess what? People who apply for these roles are interested in development and progression too. (Remember Mazlow) After all the data suggests that most people won’t stay in that particular role for more than about 2 years but will have built up useful skills and experience.

·     Embedding Empowerment – At this time the operation were undergoing a cultural change programme at this time – encouraging and empowering consultants to ‘Do What Matters’ fixing the customer problem (where possible at that time) by being empowered to make judgements rather than follow policies blindly and making suggestions to fix poor processes or practice. In a word, trust.

·     Feedback – A constant feedback loop on what was going well and what wasn’t between operations, training and recruitment. In this loop we were able to pick up signs of where process wasn’t working and fixing it quickly.

 In many ways, this stuff isn’t rocket science, but in so many situations these positions and people are treated with so little respect and courtesy, is it any wonder they aren’t loyal or committed to organisations?

‘An exceptional company is the one that gets all the little details right. And the people out on the front line, they know when things aren’t going right, and they know when things need to be improved. And if you listen to them, you can soon improve all those niggly things which turns an average company into an exceptional company’ Richard Branson.