In today’s digital world, enterprises often focus on setting up Microsoft 365 services for their office-based workforce and migrating services to the cloud. However, it’s equally important to support employees in customer-facing roles who provide services and support, sell 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 and have inconsistent experiences with traditional tools, which can decrease productivity and employee satisfaction.
This is where Microsoft’s Frontline Worker licenses come into play. These licenses enhance and support employee experiences in several areas, including:
➡️ Enhancing communications and collaboration: Streamlining team and one-on-one communication across your entire organisation 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 organisation.
➡️ Transforming 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.
➡️ Increasing 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. You 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.
➡️ Safeguarding 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 refer to the Microsoft 365 F3, F1 licenses, or Office 365 F3 license types. To enable frontline working, you can follow the adoption principles below:
• Start by assessing the existing frontline environment and processes. Identify core stakeholders, such as business, IT, and frontline, and identify motivations, goals, assumptions, and potential blockers.
• Discover what’s needed and why with personas, problem analysis, and stories. Understand current workarounds and gaps and confirm “what’s in it for me” for all of your personas. Get executive sponsorship.
• Envision 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 workers will access Teams and how they will log in and manage their identities.
• Build by implementing your scenario or solution at a small scale. Use a pilot program to validate your solutions and scenarios with a subset of users.
• Grow by rolling 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.
When your organisation has defined the frontline worker scenarios, you can go ahead and set up Microsoft 365’s core elements, configure the services and apps you need for your scenarios, and set up devices to work with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams to allow your frontline workers to communicate more securely within your organisation. Roll out communications and training for your frontline managers and workers.
Microsoft provides a Frontline Worker workshop, which partners like risual Ltd can use to assess your frontline workforce needs, showcase the tools most desired by customers, delve into priority scenarios most relevant to the customer, identify frontline worker scenarios, and define a plan to implement them in a Proof of Concept/Pilot.
In conclusion, enabling frontline working can help your organisation connect and engage your workforce, manage your workforce, and streamline operations.
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.
