Do you know that as of 2023, 112 million people, or 70% of the U.S. working population are frontline workers? It is estimated that nearly 90% of companies rely on these workers.
Undoubtedly, frontline employees are the lifeline of any organization. They are your grocery store clerks, construction workers, airline operators, healthcare professionals, and just about anyone who is public-facing, in the field, or “on the ground” for an organization. They are often the first point of contact for customers and play a key role in shaping customer experiences while ensuring the smooth running of your operations.
However, assessing their performance is difficult because they don’t work from a desk and may perform multiple roles, the impact of which may be more qualitative than quantitative. At the same time, empowering these workers is important because they represent your organization to your customers and are an important part of a well-oiled machine.
This begs an important question - how can you do a fair evaluation to reward frontline workers for their efforts and fill their performance gaps with the right training while motivating them to continue working for you?
Performance analytics can be the key to achieving all the above aspects. Choosing the right HRMS performance analytics platform can provide insights into your employees’ performance and development needs.
Performance analytics is a systematic way of collecting and analyzing data to understand an employee’s strengths, performance, work habits, and improvement areas. This data-driven approach enables you to make informed decisions about engaging your employees and providing the required training to help them do better at work, eventually resulting in improved business outcomes for your organization.
Over the last few years, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, the evaluation process has evolved because of a hybrid working model, the emergence of technology, and the changing mindsets of workers. The good news is that performance analytics platforms have also evolved to keep pace with these changes, making them a great fit for a changing business and social environment.
Traditionally, employee evaluation depended on annual reviews, one-size-fits-all training programs, and managers’ feedback. Though these methods have their merits, they also fall short in today’s dynamic environment in the following ways.
Due to these limitations, organizations are increasingly turning to software platforms that provide on-demand performance analytics based on a wide range of parameters.
Performance analytics software platforms offer many advantages over traditional review methods. Moreover, they are future-ready, enabling you to leverage emerging trends.
Here are some key advantages.
A highlight of performance analytics platforms is their real-time insights. You don’t have to wait six months or a year to know how an employee is performing. Rather, you can evaluate an employee’s performance as it happens and compare it with past trends to provide immediate and targeted feedback. In turn, these real-time insights can positively influence employees by helping them improve their strengths and focus on areas that need nurturing.
You can access an employee’s detailed performance data to create custom development plans. This approach helps identify specific areas for improvement and match training opportunities to individual needs.
In traditional evaluation strategies, there’s always an element of bias in the manager's feedback. Performance analytics tools, on the other hand, collect data from different sources and analyze them to ensure a consistent and unbiased review process. Moreover, some platforms offer customizable evaluation parameters, multi-source feedback (360-degree reviews), and goal tracking, to comprehensively understand an employee’s performance.
Using the data-driven insights of performance analytics tools, you can make informed decisions about promotions, salary adjustments, and future training needs. This strategic approach provides transparency and creates a culture of continuous improvement and growth.
Another advantage is that performance analytics platforms offer customizable templates for getting performance reviews and feedback. This ensures consistency and uniformity in the process while providing the flexibility to adjust questions and feedback based on an employee’s everyday tasks. These templates improve the accuracy of the performance evaluation process while reducing the time and effort involved.
Develop Your Employees with Performance Analytics
Enhance your employee development strategy with data-driven insights. Lanteria’s performance analytics tools help identify skill gaps, tailor training programs, and boost engagement.
Performance analytics focuses on employees’ growth and career progression, which in turn, showcases your commitment to upskilling and caring for your employees. When they receive such support, it builds a sense of loyalty and belonging, eventually leading to greater job satisfaction and higher retention rates. Many studies worldwide reflect this positive impact of organizational commitment on employee turnover. You can also leverage this impact with the below strategies.
Overall, performance analytics helps organizations create an environment where employees feel empowered, engaged, and motivated to contribute to the company's success.
Next, let’s see how an organization decided to put its employees first and in the process, reaped immense gains.
Below is a case study of how the Shire of Murray leveraged a leading performance analytics platform from Lanteria to empower its frontline workers.
The Shire of Murray, located in Western Australia, is a local government authority responsible for providing essential services to its residents. As a community-focused organization, the Shire of Murray relies heavily on its frontline employees, who are the first point of contact with residents and are integral to delivering high-quality services.
However, the Shire faced challenges in effectively managing its frontline workforce. Recruitment and learning processes were time-consuming and often did not match the specific needs of the employees or the organization. They were also grappling with too much paperwork, which often resulted in lost documents. This paper trail further made it difficult to manage employee training records.
Together, all these challenges led to inefficiencies, lower engagement, and a potential skill gap among frontline staff.
To address these challenges, the Shire of Murray turned to Lanteria, a leading provider of HR solutions.
Lanteria offers a comprehensive platform that integrates recruitment, learning, and performance management tools to help entities like the Shire of Murray streamline their operations and improve employee development.
Here are some ways in which Lanteria’s unique solution helped the Shire of Murray.
Lanteria’s Recruiting module centralized and automated the Shire of Murray’s recruitment processes. It provided customizable workflows and reporting options, which enabled the organization to seamlessly manage job postings, track applicants, and communicate with candidates more efficiently. The Talent Pipeline feature matched job descriptions with candidates’ skills and qualifications, simplifying the process of identifying and hiring the right frontline employees.
The Report Center is a comprehensive reporting solution that comes with a suite of predefined reports while also enabling Shire’s employees to create custom reports for different purposes. It also supports deep analysis and visualization of HR data, enabling real-time tracking and evaluation of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across various evaluation aspects. Furthermore, the Report Center also empowered the organization to make data-driven decisions for ongoing performance management and further training and development initiatives.
The Shire of Murray leveraged Lanteria's Learning module to effectively plan, implement, and evaluate its learning strategy tailored to its employees’ unique needs. This module offered various functionalities, like learning catalogs, individual and departmental learning plans, and a blended learning approach encompassing e-learning, classroom training, and self-study. Employees could self-enroll in courses or be assigned to them, and their progress and completion could be easily monitored. The Learning module also provided the capacity to measure the effectiveness of learning programs through assessments, feedback, and reporting, offering valuable insights to improve learning initiatives.
Together, these three modules addressed the Shire of Murray’s challenges and set the stage for empowering frontline workers.
Lanteria positively impacted the Shire of Murray's operations and its frontline workers’ performance in the following ways.
The above case study provides a glimpse into how the right performance analytics can empower frontline workers, resulting in improved efficiency, better retention rates, and enhanced employee engagement and motivation.
Rapid technological advancements can make performance analytics more sophisticated in the coming years. It has the potential to shape employee experience, productivity, and their contribution towards your organization’s growth and profitability.
Some trends that could potentially impact performance analytics are:
AI and ML are expected to shape every field, and performance analytics is no exception. AI can provide more accurate and detailed insights into employee performance while ML models can improve predictions and analyses. Together, these technologies can make performance analytics more dynamic and adaptive to help forecast employee performance and develop proactive strategies for skill development and retention.
Real-time data analysis can offer up-to-date insights into employee performance. This allows you to intervene and adjust training and development plans. But to leverage this trend, you must adopt new performance measurement tools and processes that can work with real-time data.
As wearables become more popular, they can provide data on employee health, well-being, and productivity, which can be integrated into performance analytics. This information can help create a more supportive and healthy work environment for employees.
In an increasingly competitive business environment, organizations find their competitive edge in qualitative aspects like customer experience, sustainable practices, environmental and social factors, and more. To keep pace with this trend, performance analytics will also go beyond financial metrics and focus on employee well-being, customer satisfaction, and other aspects that create sustainable and long-term value for organizations.
Going forward, your performance evaluations have to include a combination of financial and non-financial metrics that will result in a wide-arching impact on your organization.
The current levels of offering customized training will reach new heights due to AI and ML, leading to hyper-personalized performance evaluation systems. Your targeted training, evaluation, and employee engagement processes will be tailored to meet the unique priorities and objectives of every employee, based on factors like the nature of their work, demographic background, culture, organizational structure, expected goals, and more.
Stay Informed on HR Trends
Keep up with the latest in performance analytics and employee development strategies. Subscribe to our newsletter for the newest insights and tips.
Similar to customizable templates, automated workflows also ease the review process and the effort involved. It guides managers and employees through each step of the evaluation process to ensure consistency and efficiency. Furthermore, automated reminders and notifications help keep the process on track and ensure timely completion of evaluations.
Due to these advantages, organizations prefer to use performance evaluation software to accurately assess the employees’ performance, support employee development, nurture talent, and drive the overall success of the business.
Next, let’s dive down into the specifics of how performance analytics impact employee development, including the possible KPIs that you can use for evaluating your frontline workers’ performance.
Performance analytics is a powerful tool as it provides relevant data for making informed decisions. Let’s explore how it impacts the three key areas of employee development.
As technology and operations evolve, you must upskill your frontline workers to help them stay current and relevant. The first step is to identify the skill gaps and understand their current state using real-time data, and this is where the following performance analytics features help.
With such features, you can better understand where employees need improvement and what support they require.
Performance analytics helps create targeted training guides tailored to employees’ specific needs. Here’s how it can provide targeted training to enhance your employees’ confidence and productivity.
With these features, you can provide custom training that addresses the identified skill gaps, resulting in more efficient and effective development.
As governments tighten legislation around data security and privacy, create compliant performance evaluation processes and systems. Moreover, to ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and availability, adopt stringent access controls and data security policies.
To stay on top of these trends, you need an adaptive performance evaluation platform that can accommodate and scale well for the future.
Performance analytics is a powerful approach to understand, support, and optimize the potential of your frontline employees. You can leverage real-time data, targeted training, and ongoing feedback to pinpoint skill gaps, provide personalized development plans, and create a culture of growth and engagement.
The features and benefits of performance analytics discussed in this article apply to not just frontline employees but across your organization. By implementing data-driven performance management strategies for all employees, you can build a consistent approach to employee development and well-being, ensuring that everyone benefits from targeted training and continuous improvement.
With such measures, you can also stay agile and adaptive in a fast-paced business environment. Moreover, performance analytics drives a culture of transparency and accountability, supports better decision-making, and boosts employee morale and satisfaction.
If you haven't already, now is the time to explore Lanteria’s performance analytics solution that can help unlock your employees' full potential. Start creating a more empowered and engaged workforce today, and set the stage for a thriving future for your organization.
Explore Our Analytics Tools
Take a tour of Lanteria’s performance analytics solutions and see how they can elevate your HR practices and employee growth.
