Why U.S. Frontline Workers Are Quitting

There are 11 million unfilled jobs in the United States, most of which are tied to a specific location and cannot be done remotely. Health care, retail, manufacturing, and transportation and warehousing are some of the jobs that aredeskless. Businesses have raised wages for deskless workers by up to 10% since the Covid-19 epidemic began, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Wage increases have not been enough to win back frontline talent.

Improving managers relationship with frontline workers is the solution.

A bad relationship with their boss was the most common reason for turnover in the retail, distribution, travel, and food service industries. This shouldn't surprise us. Direct managers have the biggest impact on the daily work experience.

The job of frontline managers has become more challenging during the Pandemic. Many of the other reasons for quitting are also driven by the boss. Workers look to their managers for stability, empathy, and support, especially during these times when staff schedules, work responsibilities, and personal stresses have never been more difficult to manage. When managers are stressed or struggling, their team members are more likely to be impacted, either directly or indirectly. The ties that bind people to an organization are loosened by this.

Some of our clients with large frontline workforces report that up to 40% of their frontline managers are in the first year of a leadership role. Many frontline leaders lack the basics of people management and are promoted based on technical competence. Sometimes it's the simple things that make a difference, such as how to handle difficult conversations or how to coach effectively.

How can companies help their managers to bring their best, most authentic, empathetic, motivating, coaching, and mentoring self to work every day? The four effective tactics are based on the experience of the BCG.

1. Define what your great frontline managers do and then let them teach their peers.

Traditional frontline management training is often theoretical, abstract, and delivered in conference or classrooms far from frontline realities. The best way to improve and sustain frontline leadership is to find a group of the best managers.

Shadow these leaders through full days and shifts, analyze their calendars to map how they use their time, and review the tools they use as well as the informal checklists and guides they have created for themselves. Organizations can identify the daily practices, routines, attitudes, knowledge, and skills they use. Take the best from each one and create a picture of what great day-to-day leadership looks like in practice.

The design for adoption approach ensures that the new skills are adopted because they are based on the real experience of your own organization and frontline managers will accept them as credible.

When we shadowed the best frontline managers at a metal manufacturing organization, they did a few things differently.

• They stopped when they saw something that didn’t look right instead of hurrying to where they were originally headed.
• They asked truly exploratory questions instead of correcting or, even worse, scolding.
• They took the time to lead problem-solving discussions so the workers found the solutions themselves.
• They made sure that they followed up and publicly recognized the individuals who found and applied solutions.

We found that most of the organization's frontline leaders didn't do them consistently. Great practices spread quickly when a group of people share their knowledge, skills, attitudes, routines, and tools. One of the most important metrics in industrial manufacturing is the Total Case Incident Rate, and it went down by 50%.

2. Meet managers where they are.

Companies need to make it easy for deskless leaders to reinforce these best practices. Virtual training may be effective for some skills for managers who work all day at desks. Many frontline managers don't have email addresses that they check regularly, and deskless managers rarely use the computer. New ways of giving tips need to be adopted by companies. deskless workers can easily access courses delivered via smartphones, which are being provided by several startups.

3. Create tighter feedback loops.

If they don't get feedback at all, deskless managers usually get little to no feedback. The engagement scores of frontline employees at the large retailer were more than doubled after the implementation of individual development plans and a structured feedback process for in-store managers. Store managers have career goals with their supervisors. They met weekly to share more tactical performance feedback after each quarter's formal review.

4. Rethink the “support structures” for hourly labor.

If other critical HR systems or structures are lacking, frontline management may not be enough to keep all workers happy and engaged. It is important for companies to invest in skill-building programs and give workers time to use them. Scheduling processes and systems may need to be adjusted to make it easier for workers to fit work around their lives. Career paths may need to be created to give opportunities for growth and advancement. Frontline managers should be in charge of the design and implementation of these approaches.

Companies will be able to boost workers satisfaction and engagement if they develop great frontline managers and have strong HR policies and resources. That should help slow turnover.