“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

— Peter Drucker, Management guru

Culture isn't just a Silicone Valley buzzword that means ping pong tables and team building trips. In a very real sense, culture is what drives performance and engagement among all workforces—even in pragmatic, task-focused industries that rely on frontline employees.

That's because culture is more than just the way you decorate your break room. When it comes to the frontlines, "culture" is the tie between your people, your goals, and your results.

So how can you bring those three elements together for your frontline workforce? The answer is simple: make life easy for your workers. Right now, your corporate desked workers have great ideas and sound strategies. But there's a disconnect between the goals you put into place and the priorities that make it to your frontlines.

5 tips for improving the employee experience

1. Start engagement from day one

As early as the hiring process, let your intranet shine through as a differentiator. Highlight the ways you use your mobile-enabled intranet to reduce the burden on your workers.

2. Get serious about onboarding

Use your intranet solution to create a streamlined, intuitive onboarding process that delivers the right information and resources at the appropriate time. Giving your new employees a simple way to complete online training. As well as to find useful resources leads to better policy compliance and more time to focus on the job at hand.

3. Offer a consumer-like digital experience

Just like consumer-facing businesses strive to make their customers feel valued, businesses that rely on frontline workforces need to keep their employees happy. Done by offering polished tools that connect them to key resources, each other, policies, time management tools, and the corporate mission.

4. Create inclusive and authentic conversations

Keep the lines of communication open across your organisation, and establish a culture of trust between the frontlines and the back office. Ensure that senior leadership has digital visibility—a presence on forums, in blogs, and on social channels. Dedicate a digital space for recognising employee contributions and achievements.

5. Be clear on employee value

Don’t make your employees guess about what you want and expect from them. Define an employee value proposition that represents the employee profile that fits best, culturally, with your organisation. Then you can make sure it’s communicated throughout your digital workplace.