5 reasons Unily is first choice for connecting and engaging frontline employees

Frontline workers in the digital age

Frontline employees are commonly underserved when it comes to exceptional digital employee experiences. Despite being one of the most visible segments of the workforce—oftentimes referred to as "the face of the company"—enterprises persistently struggle to reach their frontline workforce with high-touch digital workplace experiences. 

When organizations get frontline digital experience right, they reap the rewards. An engaged and aligned frontline workforce powers exceptional customer experience and helps mitigate common velocity drains, including high turnover. In today’s competitive business landscape, leading enterprises recognize the opportunity to win the CX race by empowering frontline workers with a world-class digital workplace adapted to their unique needs.

Unily’s modern intranet solution helps bridge the gap between HQ and frontline workers, offering teams everything they need to not only do their jobs efficiently but also to become collaborative, connected, and integrated with the company culture.

5 stats to support your business case for connecting frontline employees with better technology

Before we delve into how Unily drives frontline engagement, here’s a quick reminder of why every organization should prioritize an exceptional digital employee experience for frontline workers:

• The frontline workforce is extensive – There are approximately 2.7 billion frontline workers — more than twice the number of desk-based workers. Gartner
• Frontline employees are most likely to struggle with inclusion – Frontline employees report the lowest sense of inclusion of all demographics in the workforce. Lack of inclusion is a leading cause of disengagement. McKinsey
• The financial consequences of a disengaged frontline workforce are significant – Actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. $450 billion to $550 billion per year in lost productivity. Disengagement also leads to higher turnover, absenteeism, safety incidents, quality defects, and lower profitability and shareholder returns. Gallup
• Frontline churn rates are eyewatering – Frontline roles have disproportionately turnover rates with high-demand sectors frontline as high as 500%. Wall Street Journal
• Deskless employees rely on workplace tech more than you think – Despite the non-wired moniker, 75% of deskless workers spend most of their working day using technology. Yet 60% report that it’s slow, inefficient, and hard to use. Emergence
• Empowering frontline workers with tech drives business benefits – When frontline workers are provided a thoughtful and strategic mix of technology to perform their jobs, productivity increases on average by 22%. Only 23% of frontline workers believe they have access to the technology they need to be productive. Deloitte

How does an intranet benefit the frontline?

A modern intranet or employee experience platform acts a digital HQ. It’s the universally accessible headquarters that brings together your people, business applications, and organizational knowledge into a seamless digital home. Frontline workers and corporate counterparts alike benefit from a single destination for everything they need to succeed at work – personalized to meet their unique needs. A unified intranet and employee app provides a single-pane-of-glass experience for instant digital employee experience uplift.

There are many different business benefits for having a modern  mobile intranet solution, particularly when it comes to frontline workforces.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the key intranet advantages:

Improve engagement

78% of executives believe that connecting and empowering frontline employees is critical to their overall success. A modern intranet allows users to access their company’s digital HQ from their mobile phones, so the frontline can always be reached and kept in the loop, no matter where they are. Effective internal communication is essential when it comes to keeping your workforce connected and happy, and overall productive.

Enhance customer experiences

There are over 2 billion frontline employees acting as the link between their business and its customers, however 80% of them say that their organization provides hardly any connection opportunities for them at work. Frontline employees need regular business and policy updates perhaps more than any other workforce segment. Yet we still rely on outdated comms methods like noticeboards and word-of-mouth for many essential updates. An employee app provides a bridge between corporate and the frontline, ensuring they have all the information, updates, and knowledge on-demand at their fingertips. 

Increase profitability

Deloitte research suggests that organizations in the top quartile of workforce experience are 25% more profitable than competitors in the bottom quartile. Setting up a company intranet with a mobile application not only acts as a virtual headquarters for all staff including those on the frontline, but also streamlines finding tasks, information and access to tools and applications that may be required. Better connecting your frontline in this way will increase profitability and drive financial success.

5 reasons frontline workforces love Unily

Unily works with the world’s most iconic brands to improve organizational velocity through digital employee experience transformation. Why do organizations with extensive frontline workforces favor Unily’s modern intranet solution?

#1. No email address or Microsoft license needed

Enterprises often struggle to connect with their frontline workers because they don’t have company email addresses or Microsoft licenses. Unily customers benefit from our independent platform architecture, enabling native identification, and mitigating the need for every user to have a company email or Microsoft license. Verify users through alternative identification providers like LinkedIn or Google, making it easy for everyone to claim their seat.

#2. Consumer-grade mobile experiences

Unily’s branded app offering combined with our developer framework gives enterprises the ability to create bespoke experiences that match up to your brands external identity. Give employees an app experience that feels like it could be one of their favourite consumer applications. The Unily app sits neatly alongside your other apps and notifications are received alongside your other alerts, with simple personalization that lets you toggle your preferences, so you’re not disturbed when you don’t want to be.

#3. Next-level frontline engagement features

For some frontline workers, feeling isolated and separated from the rest of the workforce can be a major issue. Unily’s  advanced social features make sure every voice is heard, no matter where the job takes you. Social is weaved throughout the experience, creating endless opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing. Bonus features like Kudos enable peer-to-peer recognition to flourish while our Ideation Portal ensures that everyone has a place to log and upvote novel ideas for improvements. Finally, offline reading makes content accessible even when there’s no internet connection – a gamechanger for the hardest to reach worker segments.

#4. Targeted experiences for segmented audiences

Frontline and desk-based employees have vastly different workplace needs. Unily’s robust targeting capabilities allow enterprises to easily create dedicated experiences for different worker types depending on their role and location. Commonwealth Care Alliance use their mobile app, CommonGround, to reach their engagement goals with targeted news.

#5. Integration opportunities

Frontline workers have specific applications and tools to enable them to work effectively that differ from office workers. Unily allows the integration of such tools within the platform - creating a single pane of glass experience that removes friction and drives adoption. Cathay Pacific introduced an integration with their in-house roster system, making the intranet the go-to destination for checking upcoming shifts.

Connect and engage your frontline with Unily

Ready to reinvent frontline employee experience? Get in touch with us today to see how Unily could transform organizational velocity at your enterprise.