As retail starts to engage customers again and bring them back, you want to make sure your employees provide a great experience that makes customers feel welcome, safe, and positive.

Employees want to be able to quickly and easily know exactly how to pass on the right information, the right promotions, and the correct answers.

Further, we all want each location to deliver a consistently great experience for our customers. Having a digital workplace will become even more critical for the business to operate, not just this year but every year.

Organizations worldwide have been operating in this “new abnormal”, but retail and distribution leaders have risen to the occasion. 

We have seen some fantastic frontline management strategies put into action to facilitate what is being called Frontline Workforce Orchestration: a direct connection to all your workers to ensure all locations deliver the same experience through the delivery of communication, task education, and collaboration, all on one platform.

Frontline Workforce Orchestration in common

Over the past year, the WorkJam team has been busy working in partnership with these leaders to quickly enable their much-needed digital transformation, automation, and collaboration. We are lucky that we can share with you a blueprint for operational success laid out by these well-known brands, including Village Entertainment, Chatime, Shell, Woolworths, and Ulta Beauty. 

As executives, we have a responsibility to communicate our vision, our strategy, and our actions. Our regional leadership needs to collaborate, validate, and empower. Our frontline employees who may not feel part of the corporate family could experience a higher level of stress and dissatisfaction with the business leaders and organization, in general, resulting in higher absenteeism, turnover, and loss of productivity. 

Communication helps set the foundation for Workforce Orchestration at all levels of the operational hierarchy. Task Management assigned down to the employee shift will guarantee the customer experience. 

So, how are leading organizations ‘orchestrating’ with their frontline and field employees? 

• Daily executive updates to the entire organization using videos, surveys
• Innovative micro-learnings that convey ever-changing health and safety procedures 
• Detailed multi-step tasks delivered by certified members of your hourly staff
• Store audit walks with automated alerts and follow-ups to management 
• Realtime communication with targeted messaging
• Feedback from the frontline — our teams that are physically at our sites want and need the ability to provide real-time input and operational needs 

As the pandemic underscored, it’s no longer cliché’ to say, “employee communication is key.”  That is now an indisputable fact.  Next-level orchestration is the new plateau: do you have the tools to directly orchestrate and prepare your frontline teams for tomorrow?  

A Blueprint for Operational Success in Retail and Distribution

Our customers focused on enabling their sites to react in real-time to changing hours, changing demand, and changing inventory and schedules. 

What do businesses enable when they implement digital orchestration? 

• Instant updates on business changes 
• Mandatory health checks before each shift 
• Certifications on updated procedures and policies 
• Closed-loop compliance on health, safety, and HR tasks 
• True open shift bidding and labour sharing 
• Speaking their language – (WorkJam is deployed in over 35 countries and languages)
• Real-time visibility on tasks, audits and workflows for consistent execution
• Deliver the ability to collaborate digitally at the frontline

You can have the best strategy and process in the world. However, if you have no way to deploy, measure, and automate that process, you will be left with only good intentions. The companies addressing their strategy with technology are making it through this crisis and prepare themselves to thrive when coming out. 

Learn more in WorkJam’s latest white paper “Maintaining Operational Resiliency for a Competitive Edge.”