A young relative of mine works in a service industry. He and his other frontline colleagues were at a meeting where their new line manager was introducing themselves. The manager took a very aggressive stance and ranted that “Every one of you is expendable. If you don’t do a good job, you will be gone!” A fine motivational speech.
Obviously, this manager thought they were doing the right thing and this was the way to guarantee improved performance. But why did they think this?
I think the answer has to do with the amount companies invest in their frontline managers, teaching them about the role and giving them the skills to succeed.
Companies in the service industries rely on frontline employees to deliver a quality experience for their customers so that they are satisfied, want to return, spend more and are more likely to recommend the experience to others.
But the role of the frontline worker is “atomised”, reduced to a single task which they repeat hundreds of times during their time on the job, scanning barcodes and handing out receipts, making coffee, etc, etc. Have you ever sat and watched what a barista in a busy store actually does?
This “atomisation” is a hangover from the industrial revolution where manufacturing was broken down into single tasks. At a recent visit to the Titanic Museum in Belfast, we were shown how one person heated a rivet until it was red hot, tossed it to another who caught it with tongs and pushed it through a hole in two sheets of steel and a person on the other side hammered the rivet until the joint was fast. That is all they did for 10 hours a day. Each person carried out a single monotonous task, becoming quick and skilled in that particular task. This may lead to consistency, but it does not guarantee quality.
Too often, frontline managers are expected to act solely as a one-way street for information to be passed from executives to the frontline staff. They are supposed to make sure all is running as expected, quickly inform line managers of problems they are encountering, and ensure policies and procedures are being followed.
In other words, a frontline manager is meant to inform the frontline employee of decisions that have been made, not to make them; to make sure policies are adhered to, not to use their own judgement or discretion (and certainly not to develop policies); and to oversee the implementation of improvements, not to contribute ideas or even introduce improvements, that is what frontline employees do.
The workers that interface directly with customers are told what to do and chastised when they do not follow the rules. The frontline manager may listen to ideas for improvement but does not see that it is part of their job to pass it up line, and certainly not to develop the ideas and become a champion of them. Sometimes they think it too risky to their own careers to do so.
Both the manager and the frontline team become frustrated that nothing changes and ultimately dissatisfied with their jobs. The team’s performance deteriorates, and the experience becomes ho-hum for customers, certainly not one that they would recommend to a friend or colleague. If their dissatisfaction becomes too much, they leave the company.
So, what can we do to change that? Firstly, the manager needs to be given the responsibility to make decisions and become a two-way street, listening to the frontline acting on what they hear and passing on and supporting what they have heard.
Secondly, administrative tasks need to be reduced. Too many times I walk across the casino floor and I see people writing things down, punching something into a keyboard. Time spent on administrative tasks is time spent away from communicating with, training and motivating the frontline employees. Invest in automating these tasks. Give your managers the freedom to manage.
But this gives too much permission to get things wrong and things can quickly get out of hand, I hear you say. The second pillar is training. For too long managers have been selected from the frontline because they were good at their frontline job and not because they have or could have the qualities to make a good manager.
Managers need to be trained how to coach and in the importance of coaching to motivating and optimising performance. Coaching team members, one on one and/or in a group to optimise performance, is not something that should be a tick box exercise and take up an hour a week. Teams can’t operate at peak performance without a significant amount of high-quality coaching.
Jobs will need to be restructured to allow frontline managers to spend more time with frontline employees and the customers. Interaction with customers is critical if the customer experience and their concerns are to be understood and acted upon.
Taking consuming administrative tasks away from managers will free them up to have discussions with team members about the direction of the company, the role they can play, the metrics used to measure performance (how they might be improved), why certain policies are what they are and listening to their team’s ideas or concerns.
Management’s idea of the month needs doing away with. Often these are announced by senior management, and it is the frontline manager who has to see that they are implemented and the frontline team that is responsible for making them happen. Senior management soon forget about them and then the next month, another one comes down the line. Nothing is more dispiriting.
People do not like change; they are often fearful of it. Also, it is not unusual for people to be overly aware of their shortcomings and to become negative to initiatives that might expose their weaknesses. Again, this is where coaching and training come in. Frontline managers need to be coached, and provided with training so that they can see that the new responsibilities are not something to fear but something that will improve their job and should be embraced.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not easy to implement. Ingrained assumptions and working practises are hard to replace, but with setting this as a priority and providing the necessary investment in training and support, senior management will see significant improvement in the quality of the product offered and the enthusiasm by which it is delivered. All of this leads to happy customers, something we should all desire.
