 I'm here with Jill Haneman and thank you so much for joining. I'll let you introduce yourself here briefly. But one thing I'll just say that there's a lot of people that are like, look, I participate regularly in the tweet jams. I don't know that I'm an expert on frontline workers. I think once it started, because I think some people were put up by like, well, what does that really mean? I don't think I work with anybody. Then when you really dig into it, we all work with frontline workers in these different roles. So we'll get into that. So Jill, why don't you introduce yourself? Sure. Hi, I'm Jill Haneman. I am a consultant with Avanade. I work within our Workplace Experience Advisory Group, and I'm based in Seattle. Excellent. I'm excited to go to Seattle here in a few weeks. Well, I'm sure I'll see you. I'll holler. Fantastic. The first question that we started off with was, what is the frontline workers employee experience, and how has it evolved within your organization? Okay. So I'm going to fully admit right now, as a consultant working for a large consulting company, we are not the traditional frontline workers scenario, but I interact with frontline workers every single day, and I also have the privilege of working for a good number of very large companies who are dealing with how to improve the employee experience for their frontline workers. And so most of the answers that I have are really from the perspective of the clients and their concerns, and where I think we are in the marketplace and where Microsoft is catering to improving the frontline worker experience. And so kind of with that in mind, how has it evolved? I think with, so we're learning a lot about trends. We're learning a lot about the impact of COVID on our corporations and our workforce. And there's something, we've all been hearing about the great resignation. People are leaving their jobs. They realize perhaps maybe their passions that they need to pursue outside of the work that they were previously doing. So people are leaving their jobs in numbers completely unprecedented to any other period of time. And companies are scrambling to keep their workforce, to keep people happy and to figure out how to keep people happy. And so whether it's frontline, whether it's information workers, whether it's consultants at Avanade, we're all trying to figure out better ways to keep our people happy. So I think employee experience is really critical right now because we are the ones who are taking care of the customers. Yeah. And our customer experience is directly tied with our employee experience. It's interesting, you've mentioned a couple of things which are kind of keywords for question two, because I think that's a, it kind of extends this. Then the questions are meant to kind of, you know, bleed into each other. And so that's kind of a, you know, to further the conversation. But question two is, is there a divide between information workers and frontline workers when looking at employee health and wellbeing? And if so, why? And you know, and you've talked a lot about, you know, I think a lot of us that are in, certainly in the collaboration technology space, well, we may not have frontline workers like our clients are. We know people, we interact with people that are in those roles. Like one thing that I've noticed, I mean, there's a lot of impact that's been, you know, a lot of advances in technology, more contextual collaboration. You know, obviously all of the technology across the board has really improved. It's just huge leaps and bounds there. But that's also been true for folks out in the field. I think one thing that certainly with the pandemic, and we have a question on the pandemic specifically, but it's been, you know, over the last couple of decades, one of the changes is that the recognition that frontline workers, there's equal value in having them as part of that rig, the same collaboration system as your information workers, the people that are, you know, office bound. That just because somebody is out in the field and accessing information through a tablet or a device or the phone, then they're out there, you know, on the front lines, literally sometimes for military frontline workers, they're still being able to have access content to be able to collaborate, find people, find information. And, you know, and I think one of the big changes is the removal of, this is an evolution I've seen, the removal of silos of information to realize, hey, we're one company, we're working on this, we need to be more closely collaborating. So I think in terms of communications and generating that sense of spirit and engagement in what is our company's vision? What are our beliefs? What are our goals? What are exciting things that are moving the needle for us as an entity? And that level of communication that we've typically seen in an intranet, that is getting, you know, I think that's something that brings together information workers and frontline workers together because we're all working for the same company. We're all trying to deliver on the same mission and hold to the same belief standard and deliver the same customer experience. So I think in that regard, it's very similar in the health and wellbeing of our employees, whether they be frontline or whether they be information workers. But fundamentally, there is a really core difference that our information workers are usually sitting with behind a computer. And our frontline workers often are not. They might be on a shop floor. They might be behind a counter. They might be using a mobile device. They might be bringing their own mobile device. Folks who may not have had our companies that may not have had digital mechanisms to deliver this content securely are now looking for ways to do that to bring folks together and, you know, for their to your point, break down silos. And so I think it's just figuring out ways to bring modern technology into roles that have typically not had any technology associated with it. And that's the biggest difference. Yeah, there's a great example of that. I did an interview a few weeks back with trying to understand like the collaboration patterns within hospital systems. And that's a great case study and like case management moving towards collaboration because that was separate silos. So a lot of the ones that are at the computer and they're sitting there and there's chat and there's files, there's other storage, there's a lot of SharePoint and things like that. But then they had these very unique, these other third party, very, you know, health center centric case management systems for patient records and information and all that kind of things. And they found, I said, so how do you bridge the gap? And so much of the style was like they physically get together and meet repeatedly throughout the day and go through. They have regular checkpoints for with that. And so I said, well, so with the pandemic and with things tightening up, did that, how did that change? And I said, well, we still did a lot of it and it became a little bit riskier with the patient interactions and all things there. But, you know, that they just started some of the systems, the more advanced hostile systems looking at, hey, we could do a lot of this digitally and real time and pull people together, same time periods, but we don't have to physically be standing in a circle doing this round robin, going through patient records that we could literally digitize that experience. So there's that just something that they, it was always too hard and too separate. And there was a tremendous opportunity for, you know, changing that, evolving the way that they worked. So it's really fascinating stuff. Question three was, this kind of touches on that, is what are the primary frontline workers' collaboration and communication gaps? And what is your organization doing to close those gaps? So I think we touched a lot on some of those gaps. I completely agree. But, you know, one of the cool things that I feel like we're seeing in frontline worker specifically is these jobs and these roles are very prescriptive. It's very different from information workers in that sense. They might be governed by unions. They may have very prescriptive requirements that they have to abide by or limited channels with which they are able to communicate with some other colleagues and also shifts. When they're able to actually leverage these apps or this information. And so, you know, I'm hearing a lot about different scenarios of being able to communicate with your manager to ask real-time questions. I'm hearing a lot of scenarios around just shift management and being able to virtually manage shifts on, you know, B-O-I-O, you know, D, how do I manage my shifts and not have to deploy devices to my frontline workers? Right, yep. And then accessing information. So information may have been on-prem. How do we bring that into the cloud and make it easier for folks to access the plant guides or recipe guides that they need to do their job on a shop floor or even how do I fulfill a form without having to type anything in and just use voice recognition, for example. So I think there's a lot of very practical gaps that different technologies are starting to show up in that but they're all being wrapped up in teams. You know, teams is that front-facing application that's starting to bring together, you know, walkie-talkie shifts and, you know, data and the communications and those bulletins around, you know, what are the specials of the day that we wanna promote to our customers who are coming in? So I feel like there's a lot of really exciting things happening and I've seen a couple of prototypes of things that we're doing for clients. It's very exciting. You know, Microsoft is infamously is not been fantastic at naming products but one thing the tagline around teams, like they nailed it and I find myself saying all this is like the hub for teamwork. And it really acts as that and it has impacted organizations around the world. In fact, I've interviewed many companies about their pandemic experience and their readiness for moving to a virtual, you know, and eventually maybe back into about a hybrid, you know, model and was enabled by teams and those that said, you know, it was much easier than we thought across the board. These were organizations that had already started adopting teams and helped with that transition. So it was a definite, you know, positive but different win within the pandemic. One of, on the backside of that is the next question which is around security and compliance gaps. So it's kind of the same question. What are the most pressing security and compliance issues for frontline workers and how is your organization addressing those? So I think a lot of them are stemming around a lot of the regulations governing, I think certain roles in frontline worker and also any union rules that have to be applied. And so that's when an ubiquitous solution just doesn't work, right? Because each organization has its own rules and things that they need to follow. So a couple examples that I can think of at least would be that a frontline worker cannot access the app or any of the information within the app, you know, do, unless they're in a physical proximity of the location and it is within, you know, so we're talking about geofencing and in the timeframe of their shift. So once their shift begins, they can start interacting with the app, teams lights up, additional features within teams pops up, you know, we have a custom app, we have a custom connections app that pops up, shows all the latest goodies from, you know, with some adaptive cards on metrics and whatnot and, you know, cool stuff starts showing up for the frontline worker, but as soon as they step outside the bounds of a certain radius of that store, all of it shuts down and they're able to just interact with the shift app to request a change or see when they're next scheduled. And so, you know, there's a certain element of security within all of that and compliance to the different regulations that each of these different companies is subject to. So I'm just kind of touching on some of the specialized ones, but obviously, you know, there's probably tons of companies who are looking to beef up their, you know, their DLP and look up to beefing up retention schedules and legal holds. So we're not even talking about some of the things that are, you know, I want to say a little bit more baked in to M365 at this point. Yeah. Well, and the other side too that you mentioned before, the one thing I would add on to all of that is, is the bringing on device, you know, movement as well is locking a lot of that down. A lot of organizations that are realizing, you know, hey, well, we can still have, you can have your personal device, but I can manage these devices and be aware of what's going on. And it's some incredibly powerful tools there that more organizations are like taking advantage of those things too, to make sure that they're especially when you're dealing with sensitive customer information and highly regulated industries where they need to have that assurance that, hey, this is properly being used, that content is being stored, that they're accessing the right things, all those things. So, well, we've kind of already answered five, but if you have any final thoughts on that, has that pandemic and hybrid work changed your corporate culture around frontline workers? If yes, how, if not, why not? Well, yes, I think, I'll speak from an Avonad perspective. The pandemic has definitely changed the way we work. I think we were already set up very well to work remotely in just a life of a consultant. You're always somewhere else other than a desk or an office. And it's made our relationships with our clients that much more challenging in building those connections. And trying to establish those relationships. And I think, while I'm not, I'm hoping that we never go back to going to work on site, sitting in some dark cubicle in a basement for three months. Ever again, I do miss client interactions for workshops and for connecting and delivery of some of our deliverables. And so I really hope that we can get back to a point where there are some elements of connections so that we can keep forging those relationships. It's the best part of the type of work we do. Yeah, yeah, there's, yeah. Well, I could talk for a while about that. Yeah, that we need to get something back. It will be different. And I think that there's, I think we're gonna still see some continued evolution of the hybrid experience and what that looks like. Well, the next one, question six, this kind of goes back to, we started talking about a little bit about, you know, employee health and wellbeing, and you talked about the great resignation. Six is, what are your best practices for not only retaining frontline workers, but for keeping them engaged? And I joked that there's a, I mentioned this during the tweet jam. We actually had, during an AMA, a panel response, somebody had supplied the questions, like, how do I keep people engaged in a team's meeting? And the response from multiple of us at the same time was, have a good personality. Now, that should definitely be built into, so it's good when you have a good manager and can go in and keep it. As a company, I mean, how do we keep our frontline workers would talk about collaboration engaged? Is it all just about personality? About the culture of the organization? I think culture is a big part of it, but we're actually seeing gamification come back in some of these teams' apps and designing the frontline worker experience and what they need for their day and how they wanna be communicated to and what drives them and what motivates them and creating different gamification opportunities in the apps and in their work-life integration. So that's one of the things that we're seeing, but also there's sort of that old adage that you work where you like the people, you stay because of the relationships and helping each of the local branches or the local groups continue to foster those relationships, one-on-one relationships with their manager, with their colleagues, I think is really critical. And so the technology is providing different ways of trying to remove some of that isolation in being able to easily connect with a colleague through walkie-talkie or being able to maybe joke in a yammer feed or something along those lines with one another or in chat. So it's about, I really think it's still about just strengthening that human connection through technology, which is kind of counter to what we were just saying about in-person connection, but I think you can get where I'm going. I think that there's, and we talked a little bit about this in the tweet jam, but I think that there's, this is another area, whether it's true for frontline workers, it's true for communities as a whole is that there needs to be some degree a constant community management. You can't just assume, hey, we have great feedback tools, we've got these mechanisms and we're all adults and they'll figure it out. Like no, there needs to be that constant nurturing that outreach and checking in with people and adjusting things and sometimes going a little bit faster, sometimes slowing it down. It's like when you try to get feedback from a team, you can sit in a room with 20 people, only a certain number, a handful, will actually respond to that. Others you need to have a smaller group or a one-on-one or provide the mechanisms for, hey, let's just have a chat online about this. Like I see you didn't respond. So you have to be more proactive about reaching out to those people like, hey, we've not connected in a while and what's going on? What are your thoughts on this announcement and how is this happening? What's your current day, your workload? How are you feeling about these things? So checking in with people that is an important aspect we've certainly learned, I've learned, but as a member of like a user group board and running events and talking with my teammates, which I'm the only one in my state, everybody else is all over the world. It takes a lot of constant check-ins to make sure that we retain those relationships. And then the last question, what three things can organizations do? I always like to ask the three things, but if you have three things, can organizations do today, this week, this month to improve the frontline worker's employee experience? Okay, so I would say, first thing you can do is if you have any kind of employee survey, employee satisfaction survey, I think qualitative and quantitative data around the experience is really helpful to just gauge engagement. It's actually something we do and I think we're decently good at. We do, every six months we do surveys, employee satisfaction surveys, and the questions are always tailored and specific to what's of the moment. It's something every organization should be doing to stay in touch with their employee base. And then the second thing would be to go out there and ask some questions, meet some of your frontline workers and get their feedback on what does their day look like and what are some of the challenges or pain points that they have in their day. And maybe the third piece is, think of what's one problem we can fix. And I don't know what that problem is, it's going to be, but I think that asking yourselves what's one problem we can fix for a segment of our users is a really great question to ask that can possibly position you into a larger trajectory because you may say it's this big, fat, hairy problem, right? And there's no way we're going to be able to do that in the next six months or in this budget cycle. But what that might do is it might broaden your thinking to how you can create a roadmap or a longer-term strategy to helping improve your overall frontline worker employee experience. So. I agree with that. I'm all about, it's the project manager in me as I learned this lesson. It's the more that you involve people in the process, the more likely they will accept the results of that process. So sometimes reporting back that there's no update, this is going to be a big, hairy problem, it's going to take time, but regular check-ins and people are, it calms their mind and they're more accepting them. They know that progress will eventually be made, but it's a transparent process. And I think that's certainly true when there's people out in the field. They make requests that they don't see that progress is being made, that they've not connected. It's frustrating. So make that as transparent as possible. Well, Jill, thanks so much for your time. Thanks for participating in the Tweet Jam as always. And hopefully we'll see you at the future events. Everybody watching, collab talk Tweet Jams are every month and you follow us out on Twitter. You can, anybody can get involved. And Jill, thanks for participating. Thanks for having me.