Frontline personnel are frequently undervalued because their jobs are seen as routine and low-skilled, yet if we look at the true sustainability of a company, it rests upon the frontline staff. This was the message from the Singapore University of Social Sciences’ Institute for Adult Learning on Monday.

“The key to success lies in employees, especially the frontline employees,” said Professor Lee Wing On, the executive director of IAL. Speaking at an IAL event to welcome new members of the Learning Enterprise Alliance—a network for supporting enterprises in business improvement projects that focus on employee learning—he pointed out that although many people look down on frontline jobs, these are the most challenging roles in an organization.

“They are the ones who face the most difficult tasks in facing the customer, in selling the product, in presenting the product,” he said. “They are actually the most innovative people!”

Appropriately, the stories shared at the event centered on learning initiatives that benefited frontline people.

Training managers to manage their teams better

Bernadette Giam, Director, HR, Creative Eateries, described how the company trained its 40 or so outlet managers to be more effective. Creative Eateries has some 350 employees across its 30 Singapore outlets, coming from a huge diversity of nationalities and age groups, and one major problem was that the managers in many outlets did not have the knowledge and skills to actually manage their teams.

“There was a huge gap in empowering the outlet managers to lead a very diverse staff,” she said, explaining that many of these managers had never been formally trained before being put in charge of outlets, and their only role models were top management, whose approach was more command-centric and not suited to running a team of 10-15 people from different backgrounds who spoke different languages. “There was not enough attention paid to nurturing talent, to grooming their skills and strengths.”

Because the F&B industry is very operationally demanding and frequently understaffed, the firm lacked the capacity to send employees for classroom training. So they adopted a model where managers were given simple, easily-applied training as part of the job. During operations meetings, they set aside 30-minute sessions facilitated by the operations manager or HR personnel, where the outlet managers were introduced to basic management methodologies such as communication, goal-oriented thinking, or prioritisation. Then they were tasked to apply these methodologies in their daily work and share, on a Facebook group created specially for training, what they had done and the results.

“These are very simple concepts to us, but perhaps a lot of our managers, who started their careers as waitstaff, did not have the opportunity to encounter these skills before,” Giam said. And the approach worked, she added: “Everyone started to take pride in applying the lessons to their workplace.”

Supporting customer service staff

Another company, construction firm Pan-United Corporation, found that its customer service staff were facing a very difficult workload due to a congested peak period and insufficient manpower: just 20 staff had to field over 300 customers per day, some with multiple projects, mostly crammed into a short window period. Customer dissatisfaction was high; a quarter of callers would get tired of waiting, hang up, and take their orders elsewhere. Staff were stressed; they had to deal with angry customers all day, mainly construction site personnel who did not hesitate to hurl abuse into the phone if they were unhappy about the service.

“The customers come from all over: different countries, different languages,” said Pan-United command centre head Gui Hian Yong. “They might be the foreman, the site supervisor, even a regular worker, and the way they will speak to the staff—you know.”

Although the workload was beyond the firm’s control, they could and did introduce training programs to help the customer service team cope better. These included teaching staff simple tricks to optimize the call system, regular one-on-one coaching with managers, and even emotional support in the form of positive feedback and frequent encouragement from managers. Within less than six months, Gui said, the team’s performance had shot up by 300 percent, measured in the number of callers who stayed on the line. And the effect on the team culture was even better, he added: “We created very strong teamwork and trust, a very healthy environment.”

Happy frontline personnel are an asset to the company

Professor Lee encouraged companies to pay more attention to their front-line personnel, including investing time, money, and effort into their training; helping them to do their work better and advance their careers. Ultimately, he pointed out, this benefits the company.

“Imagine if all your front-line people smile at your customers: the effect it will have on the image of your company,” he said. “Imagine if they are all able to make your customers happy: your business will prosper.”