The Last Mile to Connecting Front-line Employees with Technology

A friend in the telecommunications industry recently introduced me to the term ‘last mile’.

She explained that the last mile is the final leg of the communication network that connects to customers when they run a phone line or cable into a residence.

As the leader of iTacit, an employee experience platform, the term’s relevance to HR tech resonated with me. For all of the backbone technology you can have built up in an organization, there’s still the last mile: Connecting your company to the front-line.

The changing role of the front-line employee

As a College of America study explains, “Even jobs considered ‘entry level,’ or front-line, such as call center customer service reps, require workers to do more than merely handle a transaction; technology now handles those straightforward processes.”

As mundane and repetitive tasks are increasingly completed by automation or even customer self-service portals, tasks on the front-line are more complex and varied. The front-line worker now handles requests, troubleshoots issues, and monitors digital streams of information –all while learning how to work with this new technology.

Further to that, an uptick in investment in internal information systems has digitized those functions, from CRMs to HR management. A lack of system integrations can mean a front-line employee has to be logged onto up to 10 portals. Those systems likely don’t correlate data either, but that’s another story.

The big takeaway here is this: The role(s) of our front-line workers are more digitized and no longer transactional.

The missing link is the last mile in HR tech

A failure to deliver the right information, training, support and tools to the front-line is a gap that companies are increasingly recognizing as a critical point of weakness.

The changing dynamics of the front line combined with the events of 2020 have forced companies to consider the frail connection to their front-line: ‘can we reach all employees and contractors by email?’ or, ‘what’s the liability of a process if we can’t trace it back?’

Companies approaching us want to plug these gaps with a missing piece of HR tech. They need the last mile of HR technology: an employee app to power their front-line processes and minimize risks for teams and human resources alike.

Understanding the right fit and function for your organization’s front-line employee app.

The current demand for front-line employee applications, a relatively new category of software for HR technology, is unprecedented.

In our experience, HR technology buyers are most often looking to solve an immediate problem. Sometimes a company’s objective is to tackle a break in communications or update aging training software. Other times, organizations need to track compliance and collect data.

I would caution that it’s important to consider not just the primary needs, but how the front-line interacts with your company and what other requirements could be supported in their daily routine.

I’m reminded of a recent story of ours. A health services company required an upgraded training platform and liked that our messaging function didn’t require email. Before long, they found critical use cases for employee data collection and shifted even more of their front-line’s daily operation to their employee app.

For their paramedic crews, the jump to real-time instant messaging and digital documents reduced critical issues. By storing their checklists in an app, they can now record critical stock in the ambulance or pull up the last crew’s sign-off to see what they’re getting into before their shift has even begun.

In this last mile, the services provided are saving lives, liabilities and the disconnect between reaching teams are literally life or death.

If you want to discuss your front-line challenges and the last mile of your HR technology, let’s talk.