Human resources (HR) executives across industries share a common challenge: Front-line workers, who make up 80% of the global workforce, often resist changes to their established routines. This is especially true in times of change, like mergers, new management teams or new company direction and growth.
While we love the consistency, when front-line workers resist their own growth, it can limit organizational growth. There’s a ton of research suggesting that feedback and recognition are crucial to driving engagement and creating a growth mindset. In other words, feedback and recognition can be the catalyst that shakes up the routine and drives new growth. I think most talent leaders know this, though. I’ve seen it play out in many businesses and written about it, too (like this article for example).
It’s one thing to know that developing feedback skills will drive changes on frontlines, but it’s another thing to implement the training and measure the results. That’s the difficult bit. So, the real question is how do we drive behavior change for frontline workers? How do talent leaders get managers of front-line workers to give better feedback, and get front-line workers to receive it well, and then get them to give/receive feedback from their peers?
The key is to make feedback part of their job. Let me explain.
Making Feedback Part of the Job
There are lots of articles with tips, hacks and strategies, like starting “feedback Fridays,” or ensuring weekly one on one meetings with managers and direct reports. A lot of this is helpful. I always ensure managers at my companies have weekly one on ones with direct reports, and for developer and engineering teams in software companies, daily standups are a must. But that’s not what I have in mind.
The real task is behavior change, which requires time and coaching, making it hard to achieve at scale. Formal training sessions on feedback and recognition may be helpful and informative, but we’ve all attended enough training sessions, conferences, and webinars to know that very little of what we learn is put into practice, despite our best intentions.
HR professionals know that according to the 70-20-10 model, formal training accounts for 10% of learning. To be more effective, we’d need that conference presenter to become our coach for a while, which would get us into the 20% learning zone. That’s better. But most effective would be continually practicing what we’ve learned on the job, where 70% of learning happens. That real life practice would help solidify these new behaviors into habits.
So, when I say, “Make feedback part of their job,” I mean front-line employees need regular opportunities to practice feedback and recognition on the job. They need activities, embedded directly into the flow of their work, that provide the practice opportunities.
The Scale of the Opportunity
A couple quick stats can help us glimpse a pathway to success:
- Feedback drives engagement: A Gallup study found that 80% of employees who received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged.
Engagement drives productivity and profitability: Organizations with highly engaged front-line employees report 18% higher productivity and 23% higher profitability.
If feedback drives engagement, and engagement drives productivity and profitability, how can you kickstart the feedback process to make it all happen?
Breaking into Growth
Talent leaders at many companies are using curated training activities, delivered to their front-line employees in the flow of work, to help them actually change their behavior. Here’s what they’ve done to start the process and how they measured the business impact.
- Activities are the key.
Like in baseball, if you want to hit the ball you’ve got to get up to bat. If you expect employees to improve at feedback, they need the in-game experience. So, provide a sequence of practical activities that develop the skills, where each activity happens in the flow of work.
Activity-based, on-the-job training initiatives put learning investments where they have the highest chance of effectiveness. Based on the 70-20-10 model, 10% of learning happens in formal training, learning and development (L&D) budgets often prioritize in-class training, if only because that’s what’s always been done. But the numbers have long suggested that formal training need to be supplemented by activity-based training, completed on the job where 70% of learning happens.
- Keep it simple and personal.
The best activities are simple. Here’s an example: (1) Over the next three days, observe a colleague’s workflow and interactions. Note consistent behaviors or approaches they use to complete tasks. (2) Document two or three recurring actions they take that seem to contribute to their effectiveness. (3) Reflect on how these patterns impact team dynamics, workflows or project outcomes, and keep them in mind for future feedback conversations.
This activity is straightforward with little seat time and lots of benefit. Front-line employees look at what others around them are doing well, think about the impact it has on the team and then provide feedback. It raises awareness of others, has the potential to develop higher emotional intelligence (EQ), situates the employee in the team context, and readies them for communicating feedback. There’s nothing that makes this particular activity special (though it does receive high Level 1 metrics when learners do it). Instead, the point is practice, accumulating experiences like these over weeks and months.
What makes this personal? At a base level, delivering role-specific activities to each person is crucial. Upper management and front-line workers have very different on-the-job contexts, requiring different activities or the same activities but framed differently.
Some use more sophisticated means, like using AI to deliver activities in curated and personal sequences. For example, you could capture personality testing results and activity feedback to provide models with data about each learner, then allow the AI models to select the next-best activity for each person. But that’s a nice bonus, not a strict requirement.
Remember the activities serve the larger goal: driving behavior change through L&D initiatives.
- Measure impact.
Lots of L&D teams are catching on to how their colleagues have been measuring ROI: A/B testing. In A/B testing, you split the learners into 2 groups, one receiving the new training activities, for example, and another receiving only the standard formal training portion. Then, by tracking specific stats for each group in relevant metrics (customer satisfaction scores, sales metrics, employee engagement scores), talent leaders can demonstrate clear ROI on their development programs.
In Summary
The goal with all the feedback training activities isn’t to eliminate routine on the front-lines — it’s to make improvement and growth part of the routine. Across many industries, some innovative talent leaders are implementing activity-based training that introduces small, manageable changes and demonstrably solidifies behavior change.
For talent leaders looking to transform front-line performance, there’s a path forward: Implement simple, on-the-job training activities completed in the flow of work, personalize if possible and make sure to measure the impact. This approach turns the challenge of change into an opportunity for growth, helping front-line teams maintain their valuable consistency while continuously improving their performance.
