Customer facing businesses depend on their frontline teams to generate revenue and their performance can greatly impact costs and profitability. These frontline teams have direct and frequent contact with leadership and take their cues from the top. This gives management ample opportunity to build good habits within their team. Habits, from a scientific perspective, are created after continuous repetitive behavior. As sterile as that sounds, leadership can use this theory to instill those positive habits to increase efficiency and productivity. As businesses face an uphill battle when it comes to controlling costs and generating revenue, establishing these good habits can help maximize performance from the most crucial part of the business, the frontline team.
Cultivating Curiosity
Managers would prefer a certain level of high enthusiasm from their frontline team but leadership ultimately sets the tone when it comes to employee engagement. Curious employees are eager to learn and can develop a better understanding of the business and how to perform their job. Managers should focus on fostering that curiosity by interacting and engaging with staff that encourages them to ask questions. Positively recognizing curiosity will lead to even more curiosity, creating more learning opportunities for the individual. The extended benefit of curious habits is that it increases the sense of business ‘ownership’ within the individual and can positively impact productivity and efficiency. Leadership can help increase curiosity offering training and development as well as tailoring engagement by staying attune to individual personal interests.
Encourage Well-being and Mental Health
It seems logical that healthy employees are more productive employees. From a ledger perspective, healthy employees also miss less work due to illness. Managers who prioritize frontline team well-being will can achieve higher productivity while fine tuning labour costs. Overworked frontline staff may not have the resources or skills to maintain their own well-being and mental health but leadership can play an active role in building good and healthy habits. Inside the work environment, managers should be able to quickly identify stressful situations and diffuse any negative interactions. Consistent and regular check-ins with individuals is an important tool for gauging how someone could be doing. Providing frontline staff with wellness resources can also entourage them to take better care of themselves. Motivation, productivity and work environment can all be directly related to individual well being and all facets can impact the bottom line. Businesses that highlight and encourage healthy habits can see substantial operational benefits.
The Open Door
Managers who work in consumer facing businesses highly covet frontline staff with strong communication habits. Whether it’s communicating to customers or internally, clear messages and understanding keeps the operation moving smoothly. Building good communication habits with frontline teams can be challenging as every individual has their own type of personality, but leadership can influence this habit by using repetitive behavior logic. In management circles, the term ‘Open Door Policy’ is a common way to refer to the ability for anyone to communicate directly with the manager or supervisor. From a baseline, this does create a comfortable environment for frontline teams knowing they can always engage the manager for whatever reason. Leadership can take this a step further by having random chit chats with employees and holding mini huddles during a shift. Frequent and consistent communication from the top down can encourage good communication habits.
The Bottom Line
Customer facing businesses depend on frontline staff to generate revenue and maintain brand image, making them crucial to a successful business operation. With external factors still looking uneasy, maximizing performance from frontline teams can be a challenge as quality labour pools continue to shrink. Savvy managers understand the importance of frontline team contributions and leadership within the organization can play a key role in instilling good habits in their teams. Those good habits will positively impact business costs and profitability. Managers can use their interactions to achieve greater performance by cultivating positive habits and consistent engagement with frontline staff can shape those behaviours. Pushing teams to achieve the best production and efficiency is necessary as operational costs continue to increase alongside a still shaky economy.