Talent Management Considerations with Frontline Workers

Understanding Talent Management

For anyone still unfamiliar with the term ‘talent management’, it generally refers to the broad range of HR policies, workforce-related practices and investments, and management decisions within organizations that are intended to bring new employees into the organization, shorten their time-to-productivity, and keep them highly engaged (correlated with productivity and retention) by supporting their personal goals and interests. Of course, keeping an employee’s personal goals and interests on the radar, especially if they relate to developing relevant and marketable skills, will maximize their value to employers while broadening their career path options as well. 

Talent management as a discipline within Human Capital Management (HCM) spans the HR process areas of workforce planning and modeling, recruitment or talent acquisition, training or L&D, performance management, total rewards and succession planning; and when these functions are well integrated from a workflow, data standards and metrics perspective, organizations almost always reap strategic benefits such as improved organizational agility. Moreover, HR and workforce management experts for decades have also cited ‘the 3 Cs’, representing Competency, Commitment and Contribution, as being ideally linked within talent management in order to build high-performing teams and establish a culture of continuous growth and innovation.

The Role of Frontline Workers in Talent Management

This blog endeavors to apply a talent management lens to frontline workers, or those dealing directly with customers, and who many view as important to a company’s brand and reputation as their leadership team. Many in my peer group of HCM analysts and industry influencers have maintained this view because a poor customer experience is often cited as the main reason for a customer moving over to the competition, and this almost always involves a disappointing experience with a frontline worker … if not the combination of that employee and their supervisor or manager. Moreover, frontline managers, those charged with enabling, supporting and directing as large a group as 80% of the total workforce, are also expected to deftly handle challenging customers and other fires across the operations they oversee – all while accurately and efficiently plowing through daily administrative duties AND always giving the requests of corporate senior execs ‘priority attention’ if they realistically want to remain in good standing.

Key Findings from Recent Studies on Frontline Workers

Of particular interest to this blog’s author, the results of a recently published and comprehensive UKG global study of roughly 13,000 frontline employees and leaders provided these undeniably important findings around the intersection of talent management and frontline workers: 75% of frontline employees globally feel burned out; 55% say work-life balance/flexibility is one of the most important factors when choosing an employer; 49% say there are two separate cultures: one for the frontline and one for everyone else; and in my mind, possibly the most interesting finding of all: 73% of frontline workers don’t mind learning ‘on their own time’, seemingly highlighting this group as a major untapped asset in many organizations … a workforce segment ready, willing and often able to positively impact the business considerably more.

Other interesting and relevant research findings -– with my key implications

Another set of interesting research findings were those published last year by Beekeeper, a Switzerland-based company focused on frontline workers. A few of the findings follow, along with one of many key implications from my perspective. Based on surveying 8,000 in this workforce segment, the company found that:

• Forty-one percent of front-line employees and 38 percent of frontline managers have changed jobs in the last 12 months. One implication: When one’s work colleagues leave, their remaining team members usually face higher workloads and often spend more time training new employees. This naturally makes any semblance of work-life balance harder to achieve for a period of time.
• A mere 23% of frontline workers say they have digital tools to help them in their jobs. One implication: Clearly a huge opportunity for those employers that can extend the same “digital advantages” throughout their entire organization, irrespective of job, and in the flow of work.
• Similar to the above, only 14% of frontline workers report receiving any training in artificial intelligence, yet 86% say they need it for their jobs. One implication: Perhaps a low-hanging fruit of an opportunity is to, at the very least, conduct AI awareness training even if it’s not always able to be hands-on in nature.
• 50% of frontline workers are ready to quit their jobs in search of a better experience, but also 53% of frontline managers are burned out. One implication: These managers are not giving their frontline workers the attention they need to stay, and be engaged and productive each day.

Additionally, here are two other interesting, if not startling, research findings from what is likely a more familiar source to many, McKinsey & Company: “High attrition in retail is nothing new: annual employee turnover among frontline retail workers has been at least 60 percent for a long time.” And later in the same article: “Almost half of US frontline retail employees and two-thirds of frontline managers say they are thinking about leaving their jobs in the next few months.”

And back to UKG and from the HCM solution provider’s very popular Megatrends report published in 2025: 42% of global employees say their employer isn’t meeting their needs, a finding that can logically be attributed to a combination of factors including: feeling undervalued and unappreciated, not fairly compensated for their effort and commitment to the brand, being overseen or managed by someone not well versed in best people management practices, inadequate training, being poorly matched for their job (particularly when filling-in for an absent worker), or a sub-optimal on-boarding process, one which should ideally lead to being an engaged, prepared and productive contributor.

Finally, with respect to the above stat in bold, my own article published in HR Executive back in 2017 offered up a 5-pillar framework intended to guide organizations in delivering a “superior employee experience” or “EX” and served to preempt the unfortunately common dynamics above. It was depicted as follows and there’s little, if anything, I would personally change in these fairly universal EX elements today:`

• Intrinsic need for meaningful work, feeling valued, and being productive.
• Line of sight into career path/progress and how the organization supports it.
• Perceived fairness in how evaluated, rewarded, and invested in.
• Sense that the organization genuinely cares about employee well-being.
• Tools and processes that enhance vs. impede productivity and engagement.

Leveraging AI for Enhanced Talent Management

I’ll conclude with two AI-related technology capabilities I expect to play an ever-increasing role in engaging, retaining and generally optimizing this key segment of the workforce: 

• An AI-powered ‘Talent Marketplace’, essentially a digital capability set designed to maximize skill utilization within the organization, whether these skills are very visible to management or not; and one way this is achieved is by conveying the message or core value to employees that their employer is fine with them pursuing a non-linear or “try it out” job or career path given that interest is present, and it’s perhaps combined with transferable skills. AI also materially helps in identifying the latter.
• AI-powered ‘talent management or skills insights’, including those related to career-pathing, skills suggestions, job opportunity matching, recommended learning courses and/or coaches, or even quick ‘self-assessments’ to inform an employee of other interesting and maybe more satisfying job and career opportunities within reach given certain steps taken -- - ideally in partnership with a manager that’s also an advocate for their happiness, engagement and satisfaction at work.  Part of the immense potential value of such HCM tech capabilities to the organization is that these allow an individual to thrive by anticipating their career needs at key moments, not just for them, but for the organization. A significant takeaway here is that anything that helps elevate organizational agility, especially during pivotal moments for the business (like M&A’s, other restructuring scenarios, launching in new markets or lines of business, etc.), serves as a huge competitive advantage, given many of these moments that matter have underperformed or failed within many other organizations.