Unlocking The Future Potential of Frontline Workers

		Geoff Grateley Grateley Consulting Founder Unlock the Future Conference 2025 Conference Chair See Geoff on LinkedIn

As the Unlock The Future Conference 2025 approaches on 2 April, Geoff Grateley, chairperson for the event’s organising committee, looks at how frontline teams unlock the future of property operations and facilities management (FM) when empowered by smart technology.

Frontline teams are at the heart of operations and FM services - cleaning to catering, maintenance to helpdesk. All sectors, from retail and hospitality to education and healthcare, depend upon skilled and engaged frontline teams to ensure safety and customer service excellence.

And yet, in the last quarter of 2024, the FM press have featured a range of articles focusing on the challenge of frontline team engagement.

Publications have highlighted research which reveals that the majority of frontline workers feel overlooked, underappreciated and expendable.

Articles have identified a growing technology gap - globally, frontline workers, which represent 80 percent of the global workforce, receive only one percent of the available software and technology investment. This lack of investment inhibits effective training solutions, impedes productivity and efficiency (which can be unlocked through digitisation of processes and procedures), exacerbates communication challenges and undermines employee retention.

Better software and learning experiences lead to improved staff engagement and reduced staff turnover by up to 95 per cent, according to McKinsey (Webinar, 11 September 2024 – “Using AI learning to improve frontline engagement”).

Many property and FM organisations are (still) not listening to their frontline teams or investing in solutions, innovation and technology that empower, engage and harness the frontline team potential.

If we accept that frontline teams are key and critical to customer service, experience and brand loyalty, then we understand how fundamental they are to business success. Starved of investment in the right technology solutions, we will never place the right people in the right place at the right time.

As we enter 2025, how can property and FM organisations do better, to unlock the future potential of frontline workers?

To answer that we need to look at the key challenges and how can leaders uncover smarter, more proactive solutions.

Understanding The Challenges

Property and FM leaders are charged with a typical set of strategic objectives:

• Improve productivity and reduce costs
• Ensure business continuity and compliance
• Enhance employee experience to improve customer experience.

However, impeding progress, FM faces a number of connected challenges:

• Poor or generic engagement of frontline teams leading to poor retention
• Inconsistency in communication with frontline teams
• Ineffective approaches to diversity and inclusion
• Variable access to technology
• Organisations which struggle to accommodate people lifestyle requirements and aspirations
• Time constraints for quality learning and development according to varied shift patterns.

In order to fulfil these objectives, leaders need to harness FM and real estate information. In doing so, they often encounter a set of challenges leading to compliance and commercial risks with potential assurance gaps:

• Data out of date, incomplete, wrong, in differing formats
• Lack of transparency, unable to easily access data held by others (third-party providers)
• Not knowing how to analyse and make sense of data.

If you consider that turning data into real, meaningful management information is the key to genuine measurement of performance and customer experience, it follows that engaging and developing frontline employees to understand a system and the importance of data accuracy, empowers those employees to add most value to the solution.

Digitally empowered teams make smarter, faster decisions from technology driven insights and analytics. Employees can then spend less time ploughing through data and more time acting on those insights. Collaboration capabilities increase engagement and accountability.

Transparency and engagement overcome the likelihood of issues being overlooked or misplaced through human error. The team see the value of being able to monitor real-time collective performance. They have confidence in data accuracy, they support each other, and promote a genuine one-team approach, irrespective of who they are employed by.

Armed with an understanding of challenges and opportunities, the second part of this article endeavours to focus on solutions to unlock the future potential of frontline teams.

Geoff will be attending the Unlock the Future Conference on 2 April and welcomes the opportunity to network with fellow industry professionals.

Find out more and book your tickets here.

Continue to Part 2		Unlock The Future Conference