Thank You Day falls on the 7th July and is an opportunity to express gratitude for overlooked heroes, working behind the scenes to power everyday life. The lifeblood of the manufacturing and logistics industries is an army of dedicated frontline workers, who operate outside of traditional desk-based office roles. Encompassing roles like drivers, forklift operators, inventory clerks, order pickers, and warehouse associates, these are the people that drive operations and determine success. Yet almost four in ten frontline workers feel less valued than colleagues in desk-based jobs.
As an HR or operations leader in the logistics or manufacturing industry, you'll want to ensure your team of managers express gratitude to their reports – on Thank You Day and beyond.
82 per cent of employees consider recognition as an important part of “happiness at work” - yet how do you ensure these ‘thank yous’ strike the right tone and do not seem just lip service? Follow our top tips for how to say thank you to your frontline, desk-free workers:
- Make it personal
Nothing is likely to rankle a workforce that already feels overlooked like a mass ‘thank-you’, sent out via blanket email. Instead, empower and incentivise your line managers to reach out to their team individually, connecting on a personal level. For drivers and warehouse staff who work in a separate location to their managers, this might mean using an online platform to facilitate these conversations. The digital feedback route also brings the added advantage of recording for posterity, adding positive comments to a user’s personal record.
- Keep it specific
When the line managers who regularly work with staff are reaching out themselves, this opens up the opportunity to tailor the thank you message, adding authenticity. What has each worker done especially well? In logistics, desk-free workers may not interact with their specific line manager daily. It can help to have a software solution that allows any employee to comment on another’s performance, giving a fuller view of how each individual is performing by taking into account multiple viewpoints. The manager in question can then review all the feedback given to an employee from across the whole company, and pick out highlights. Delivery giants UPS even extend this beyond the company, allowing the general public to ‘Thank a UPS hero' online.
- Do it in real-time
Rather than waiting till a monthly or even yearly 1:1 appraisal, it’s important that team members receive regular, consistent positive feedback. This ensures good actions do not get forgotten – it might be that smaller positives get lost in the grand scheme of a yearly review, but deserve acknowledgement. Having feedback software helps greatly, as it allows employees to directly send praise as and when they think of it. This is especially true with a cloud-based system, which is accessible to every device with internet access, meaning ‘thank-yous’ can be sent as easily as updating social media!
- Actions as well as words
Of course, just saying thank you isn’t enough without a solid bedrock of progression opportunities, to show employees they have a future at the company and demonstrate investment in their success. Don’t let desk-free workers get forgotten; consider a scheme like GXO Logistics’ ‘Grow at GXO’, which specifically targets frontline workers who aspire to develop into higher-paid positions. Manufacturers Senator Group are also an example to follow, as they provide factory workers with long-term careers, training and progression.
A survey revealed that 64 per cent of frontline workers would extend their employment by six years with enhanced career support and training.Consider linking your ‘thank yous’ for frontline workers to what you know about each individual’s career goals – much easier if you have a performance management system that holds this crucial information and aligns it with appraisals.
OneAdvanced’s Performance & Talent is a continuous performance management software solution that offers all the capabilities discussed above, to ensure your frontline workers feel valued. This includes:
- Real-time feedback
- Agile goal setting
- Capturing employee conservations more effectively
- Ability to collate comments from individuals inside and outside the company (360 feedback)
- Cloud-based access – perfect for deskless employees
Book a demo with us to find out more.
Want to learn more about the challenges and opportunities related to managing your deskfree workers? Check out our latest guide: Desk-free workers: The asset businesses cannot afford to lose