Introduction:
In today’s digital world, we often focus on the enterprise by setting up Microsoft 365 services for the office-based workforce and migrating services to the cloud. But what about the employees in customer facing roles who provide services and support, or are selling products, or are involved in the manufacturing and distribution of products and services? These frontline workers can often feel disconnected from the rest of the business, have Inconsistent experiences with traditional tools which can decrease productivity and employee satisfaction.
This is where the Microsoft Frontline Worker licenses come into play to enhance and support employee experiences in the following areas:
- Enhance communications and collaboration: Streamline team and one-on-one communication across your entire organization with Microsoft 365 for frontline workers capabilities. Enrich and expand corporate communications with Viva Connections to make sure each of your workers feels connected to your broader organization. Make sure your workforce is able to seamlessly communicate with Teams chats, notifications, Walkie Talkie, and more.
- Transform Employee Experiences: Foster an inclusive company culture that increases employee wellbeing while making sure your workers have the resources they need. Using Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Viva Connections, and Viva Learning, you can connect employees with the tools, people, and devices they need to do their work and build skills faster.
- Increase Frontline Operational Efficiency: Microsoft 365 includes apps like Lists, Tasks, and Approvals that can help your organisation streamline operations and bring them from paper-based to digitally tracked processes. Your organisation can enhance these by adding workflow automation, custom apps, and business data tracking with Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power BI from the Power Platform. Your organisation can extend even further with solutions provided by Microsoft’s partners in the digital ecosystem. Enhance workforce management with Shifts, the schedule management tool in Teams that keeps your frontline workforce connected and in sync. Shifts connectors enable you to integrate Shifts with your workforce management (WFM) system. After you set up a connection, your frontline workers can seamlessly view and manage their schedules in your WFM system from within Shifts.
- Safeguard your Business with Security and Compliance offerings, including Support for Modern Devices: Security and compliance features, such as identity and access management, identity and threat protection, and security management.
The Microsoft 365 for Frontline Workers licenses refers to the Microsoft 365 F3, F1 licenses or Office 365 F3 license types. Descriptions of the license types can be found here.
So How Do we Enable Frontline Working?
Typically, this can be done by using the adoption principals below:
- Start:
- Assess existing frontline environment and processes.
- Identify core stakeholders – business, IT, and frontline.
- Identify motivations, goals, assumptions, and potential blockers.
- Identify any other in-progress initiatives that might be related, to understand any potential overlaps, conflicts, or potential for alignment.
- Discover:
- Define what’s needed and why with personas, problem analysis, and stories.
- Understand current workarounds and gaps.
- Confirm “what’s in it for me” for all of your personas.
- Get executive sponsorship.
- Envision:
- Evaluate what you need technically to enable the scenarios.
- Map apps and capabilities to light up key scenarios and user stories.
- Think through questions about device management, such as: how will workers access Teams (install themselves? pushed to them?), how will they log in and how will you manage their identities? What’s your approach to bring-your-own, corporate shared, or assigned devices?
- Identify relevant roles and responsibilities for the execution phase.
- Build:
- Implement your scenario or solution at a small scale.
- Use a pilot program to validate your solutions and scenarios with a subset of users.
- Grow:
- Roll out your solution at scale.
- Continue to gather feedback and establish ongoing maintenance and governance.
- Plan for continuous education and readiness.
- Expand scenarios as needed, over time.
Frontline Worker Scenarios:
Using Frontline Worker scenarios can help your organization discover ways you can use Microsoft 365 for frontline workers to connect and engage your workforce, manage your workforce, and streamline operations.
When your organization has defined the frontline worker scenarios, you can go-ahead and set up:
- Microsoft 365’s core elements such as, Microsoft Teams and any other services to suit your organizational needs.
- Configure the services and apps you need for your scenarios, the steps to configure each scenario, plus training resources you can provide to your end users.
- Setup devices to work with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams to allow your frontline workers to communicate more securely within your organization.
- Roll out communications and training for your frontline managers and workers.
Next Steps:
Microsoft provides a Frontline Worker workshop which partners like risual Ltd can use to:
- Assess your frontline workforce needs. Identify personas and scenarios to deliver innovative solutions to your frontline workers through the lens of Teams, linking back to business requirements.
- Showcase tools most desired by customers, such as Shifts, Time Clock, Tasks, Approvals, Power Apps, line-of-business apps and industry specific solutions.
- Delve into priority scenarios most relevant to the customer:
- Connect & engage your workforce
- Increase operational efficiency
- Enhance workforce management
- Identify frontline workers scenarios and define a plan to implement them in a Proof of Concept/Pilot
Providing your organization meets Microsoft’s eligibility requirements, these can be provided and paid for by Microsoft, so contact our sales department for more information and to book your Frontline Worker workshop today.
Want to take your Frontline workforce to the next level?
Why not register for our Enable Frontline Working workshop, and benefit from:
✅An assessment of your frontline workforce needs
✅An identification of your pain points & challenges
✅Personas and mapping to your top prioritised scenarios to deliver innovative solutions to your frontline workers.
✅A combination of presentations and immersive experiences designed to showcase Microsoft Teams, Shifts, Tasks, Approvals, Power Platform, Viva Connections, LoB apps.
✅A prioritised, actionable plan to quickly address your frontline worker needs.
