Welcome back to WorkJam’s Digital Workplace Blog where our aim is to help you revolutionize the way your HQ and frontline work together!

There’s a scene that’s playing out across frontlines all over the world, and it goes something like this: 

You walk into a restaurant or hotel and see that the smiling, yet tired face greeting and helping you is the location manager. They make your sandwich or check you into your room and you notice that next to them is a clipboard full of other tasks to check off or reports to fill out. They’re wearing many hats and their multitasking is multitaxing.  

And it doesn’t matter what industry – retail, healthcare, manufacturing – almost everywhere you go, you’re going to find managers who no longer have the time to, you know, manage.  

So much has been written about the labor shortage and the issues surrounding the employees that aren’t there that we often lose sight of what the labor shortage is doing to the ones that are. 

No single employee is feeling this labor shortage stress more than the manager. Whether they’re running an entire store or just a shift, more is being asked of these key members of the frontline than ever before.  

This leaves these managers in a tough bind: put in your hours and head home for the day with important management responsibilities unfulfilled or work longer to get everything done. Either option is a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

Plus, let’s be honest: your frontline managers are already exhausted. Asking them to do more is asking them to burn the candle at both ends, plus lighting the middle on fire for good measure, too.   

So how do you address it?  

Well, a tool like a digital frontline workplace is a great start. It takes a lot of those antiquated processes that are a real time suck and puts a simple solution in the palm of your hand.  

Consider something like tasks. That clipboard mentioned earlier likely has a list full of them and the manager is often responsible for making sure all of them are done. But what if you had a solution that allowed all your employees to have access to these tasks at once and – most importantly – just sent a notification to your manager’s phone if they weren’t complete?  No more chasing down the missing clipboard. No more wondering if something was completed. 

Better yet, it’s set up to really be able to orchestrate your entire workforce. These days your employees don’t have a lot of overlapping hours, so a tool that connects your frontline can break down a lot of communication barriers and create efficiencies. Sort of like the things your manager would be doing if they didn’t have to spend so much time working on the frontline instead of managing it.  

The labor shortage isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the extra burden placed on your managers. But investing in a digital frontline workplace can give you an extra set of eyes and ears on your operation and help out those invaluable frontline managers who need it the most.