During the COVID-19 pandemic, the nation depended on frontline workers for their essential contributions to public safety and the economy in general. Today, however, organizations are currently facing significant challenges in both hiring and retaining frontline workers as well as in improving their productivity.
The Brookings Institution has defined frontline employees as “the subset of essential workers who must physically report to their jobs” and estimated that they number about 50 million—a majority of the 90 million people employed in America’s essential industries.1 This group of employees draws heavily from “low-income families . . . [and] are disproportionately women, people of color, and older than 50.”2
Recent research by McKinsey revealed an ironic reality: despite diverse representation in their ranks, “frontline hourly employees are nearly 20 percent less likely than corporate employees to believe that DEI policies are effective.”3 The same study also found that “three of four frontline workers want to be promoted, but less than one in four achieves it.”
Why is there a disconnect in opportunity and advancement for this workforce? For many frontline employees, this disconnect results from a lack of on-the-job development and advancement potential in employment organizations themselves, not from the workers’ lack of potential.
Organizations can take specific targeted actions to address this disconnect:
- Formalizing paths for advancement
- Defining the skills frontline workers need for higher level roles
- Overhauling the frontline talent management system
- Giving a voice to frontline workers (that is, being in tune with what they want and need)
To advance careers beyond frontline roles, workers need to develop their skills (particularly soft skills) through both on-the-job experience and continuous coaching. But many companies are failing to help them with this. One recent study by researchers at Harvard Business School found that “when asked who was responsible for the upward mobility of low-wage employees, 53 percent of employers pointed to the employees themselves” and “only 32 percent said their company had that responsibility.”4 One-third of the employees interviewed for that study “reported that they were unaware of any opportunity to progress in their organization.” Clearly, organizations need to do a much better job matching aspiration to opportunity.
Better scheduling practices can help improve this situation. Getting the right people in the right place at the right time benefits both the employees and their employers by matching skills to tasks that need to be completed, helping to achieve personal goals and opportunities for growth, and meeting business objectives. Implementing “responsible” scheduling practices—”those that attend to the well-being of both business and employees”—can increase productivity while improving employee experience.5 (By improving the consistency and regularity of work schedules and including employee input in them, for example, Gap Inc. saw increased sales and decreased labor costs in several stores.6) This responsible scheduling approach is more important than ever, because even after the pandemic “unstable and unpredictable work schedules continue to be the norm for service sector workers—especially for workers of color, and for women of color in particular.”7
Instead of waiting for more regulations to address irresponsible frontline scheduling, organizations that largely employ frontline workers have the opportunity to explore the powerful effect time management and scheduling have on personal satisfaction, mental health, and employee engagement. They can also increase career development opportunities and advancement, as well as optimize work output.
The nature of their work puts frontline workers in the best position to identify how to solve problems, find new opportunities to serve the customer, and drive innovation. Additionally, the diversity of this employee population means these workers bring both more empathy to the customer and more ingenuity to problem solving. It’s clear that organizations that pay closer attention to and give more support to their frontline workers will be better able to serve their customers.
1 Adie Tomer and Joseph W. Kane. 2020. “To Protect Frontline Workers During and After COVID-19, We Must Define Who They Are.” Brookings Institution website, July 10, www.brookings.edu/articles/to-protect-frontline-workers-during-and-after-covid-19-we-must-define-who-they-are.
2 Matt Gonzalez. 2023. “The Plight of Frontline Workers.” SHRM website, January 14, www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/all-things-work/pages/the-plight-of-front-line-workers.aspx.
3 Chris Copeland et al. 2022. “Race in the workplace: The frontline experience.” McKinsey website, July, www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/race-in-the-workplace-the-frontline-experience#.
4 Joseph Fuller and Manjari Raman. 2023. “The High Cost of Neglecting Low-Wage Workers.” Harvard Business Review online, May–June, hbr.org/2023/05/the-high-cost-of-neglecting-low-wage-workers.
5 Saravanan Kesavan. 2022. “Doing Well By Doing Good: Improving Store Performance with Responsible Scheduling Practices at the Gap, Inc.” Management Science, 68 (11): 7818–7836, doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4291.
6 Ibid.
7 Elaine Zundl, Daniel Schneider, Kristen Harknett, and Evelyn Bellew. 2022. “Still Unstable: The Persistence of Schedule Uncertainty During the Pandemic.” Shift Project website, shift.hks.harvard.edu/still-unstable.
