Frontline workers are the backbone of every organization. They keep warehouses stocked, ensure machines run smoothly, organize store locations, and serve as the first contact point for customers. We depend on them to deliver consistent quality at an accelerated pace while managing personal safety risks, increased theft, and ongoing supply chain disruptions.
When frontline workers were asked about what could alleviate their work-related stress, better technology was the third most common response— just behind better pay and vacation time.1
Today, we’re excited to share some of our latest innovations that are designed to relieve the operational burden and equip them with smart tools to do their best work.
Our solutions are transforming frontline work in three ways:
- Increase efficiency with AI: Frontline workers have a wealth of information at their fingertips, but that information isn’t always so easy to find. It can require searching the web, sifting through hundreds of pages of documentation, or having to ask a manager for one simple answer. With AI, finding information can be more efficient and effective.
- Drive engagement: It can be challenging for frontline workers to feel connected to the larger corporate mission and their coworkers in different locations— or even those on the same shift. This disconnect can lead to a decrease in productivity and retention.2 To solve for a fragmented workforce, we are continuously evolving our unified platform to make connecting as simple and intuitive as possible. Find everything you need to collaborate and connect in one place.
- Secure any device: Every frontline is uniquely organized to fulfill a specific need. Our role is to provide the right tools to keep your data secure, regardless of worker profile, device type, or organization size. With new improvements in simple authentication and expanding support for shared devices, our solutions give you confidence that this integral part of your business is secure.
Boost frontline efficiency with in-the-moment answers from Copilot
In 2023, we launched Copilot as the most productive tool on the planet. Since then, Copilot has been adopted by 70% of Fortune 500 companies3. Frontline workers shouldn’t be left behind when it comes to AI transformation. In fact, they are ready for it. 80% of frontline workers reported wanting to use AI to find information faster. Here is how some of our customers are already recognizing the benefits of these new solutions.
Leverage AI to find information quickly across your resources stored in SharePoint
SharePoint houses a multitude of organizational resources. It is the place where store associates find customer policies, technicians find instruction manuals, and nurses find the latest health protocols. We know that the answer is in SharePoint, but finding the exact piece of information you need can prove difficult and time-consuming.
For Amey, a leading provider of engineering, operations, and decarbonization solutions across the United Kingdom, finding accurate answers quickly is imperative to keeping their frontline safe. With SharePoint agents, their employees can use their mobile device to send a chat, in whatever language they speak, and receive a response about health and safety policies in seconds. If further information is required, they can ask follow-up questions or use the cited direct links to the original, organization-approved documentation retrieved by the SharePoint agent.
Andy Richards, Chief Digital Information Officer for Amey, said: “The introduction of SharePoint Agents marks a significant leap forward in making innovative technology accessible to everyone in our organization, particularly for our frontline workers. With 99% of our data stored across 180 million SharePoint files, accessing critical information like safety policies can be slow and inefficient, requiring employees to leave their work site to search manually.
Now, employees can instantly access vital information via a simple chat on their mobile devices, transforming the way we work. This innovation is improving efficiency, enhancing safety, and boosting confidence among our teams, empowering them to deliver better outcomes for the UK’s communities we serve every day.”
SharePoint agents are currently accessible via SharePoint sites or Teams.
Customize and extend your AI agents to meet your specific needs
It is important that your AI agent references the data you care about, and we understand that information can be stored anywhere. With Copilot Studio, you can create custom agents or extend agents you’ve already created to reference knowledge beyond SharePoint.
Imagine a retail organization with hundreds of clothing stores across the world. Leveraging our low-code platform, this organization can create an agent accessible via Teams to empower their team to find accurate information stored in company-approved sources in the moment they need it. This would enable a store associate to find the exact return policy for clearance items or step-by-step instructions to troubleshoot a faulty register. A store manager could use the agent to learn more about the new training guidelines or changes to the uniform policy. Now, the time saved searching can be used to help customers, support direct reports, or organize the store.
Learn more about Copilot Studio here.
Drive engagement to increase retention
Connection in a frontline organization happens at three points: with headquarters, with coworkers across locations, and with coworkers on the same shift. Disconnect at any point can lead to lower retention rates, burnout, and less productivity.
Share your company values directly with your frontline
It is not easy to create a strong line of communication between leaders and employees across the company, but it is essential. Leaders must have a place to share the company mission and recognize the impact of their frontline directly.
With Storyline in Teams, leaders can post their thoughts about the company mission, celebrate a milestone, or provide context around a changing policy. These posts can be targeted to notify frontline workers or other groups within their organization. Once posted, leaders can access engagement analytics to gauge employee sentiment from their reactions and comments directly on the post.
Storyline in Teams will be available in public preview in February.
Foster a sense of belonging across locations
Shaping company culture is more than just transparency in leadership communication. It is about creating a sense of belonging by offering ways for employees to connect and support one another. In addition to positively contributing to employee wellbeing, high employee engagement has also been linked to 23% higher productivity and an 11% increase in retention.
A survey posted in the "New York City Stores" Community in Teams.
Communities connect people. So, we are bringing Communities to Teams to allow frontline workers to join or create communities aligned to personal interests and job functions. They can use these groups to build a network, find answers to questions, participate in conversations, and share best practices. This could mean posting in the Greater Seattle Area community to organize a regional potluck for the holidays or in the Sales Associates community to share tips or ask questions about holiday merchandise displays.
This simpler, more integrated Communities will be coming to Teams in public preview in February.
Looking for a replacement for Workplace from Meta for your frontline workers? Learn more about transitioning from Meta to Microsoft here.
Help coworkers collaborate more effectively
Frontline workers must work together as a team to keep retail stores organized and productive. This begins with clear communication.
Microsoft Teams is a central hub for communication. Frontline workers can communicate across language barriers with automatic translations in chats, view notifications from regional channels, and have quick access to pinned chats in one single view.
A message notifying all cashiers with a reply automatically translated from Spanish to English.
Sending a message across a store in seconds is powerful, but only if the right person receives it. Imagine needing to send a time-sensitive update to all cashiers. Today, you no longer need to remember every cashier on shift and create a group chat. Now, you can simply @mention on-shift coworkers using their job titles in Teams channels to send targeted notifications. This means you would mention “@cashiers” in your update in the store channel and Teams would only notify all cashiers currently on-shift.
To enable these experiences in Teams, organization have the option of inputting scheduling data into Teams directly or integrating with an existing workforce management system. If you choose to integrate with an existing system, we encourage you to take advantage of our managed connectors that support out-of-box integration with major cloud-based workforce management systems, like UKG, Blue Yonder, and Reflexis. If you are using another scheduling system, we invite you to explore custom connectors, which make it easier to connect with any workforce management system using advanced Graph API endpoint for two-way syncs. Both solutions allow the frontline to view their schedules right within Teams.
Streamline operations for effortless organization
The process of viewing and requesting an open shift at a different store location.To leverage your scheduling data even further, we’ve crafted a solution to address staffing shortages more efficiently. Available by the end of the month in public preview, frontline workers will be able to view and request open shifts across locations. Now, a store associate assigned to your Downtown location looking for more shifts can view and request to fill the open shift at your Midtown location. This minimizes the back-and-forth communication between store managers and frontline workers, offers more opportunities for your employees, and aids in staffing shortages.
Scheduling isn’t the only business process we’ve streamlined. It’s critical to communicate and keep track of assigned and outstanding tasks. This is especially hard to do when tasks are stored across multiple third-party systems. Currently in public preview, app-powered tasks allows frontline workers to see every task in one place regardless of where it’s stored and offer task-specific guidance on completion from right within Teams.
Secure every device and every worker
Security is non-negotiable for every business. As a leader in enterprise security for decades, Microsoft is the clear choice to protect your workforce, from corporate to the frontline.
Share devices without worrying about sharing data
It is taxing to sign in to every application and remember to sign out before handing off the device to a coworker on the next shift. Even when you think you’ve done it right, there is always a worry that the next person may have access to your Teams messages. Thankfully, this is no longer an issue. With Shared Device Mode (SDM), there is one login required to access the device and every app on the device and one sign out across all apps to ready the device for the next user. In addition, this mode enables you to target conditional access policies to devices in shared device mode to allow for customized security policies.
In January, we are expanding Shared Device Mode (SDM) to support the Microsoft 365 application to allow your frontline to securely access Excel, Word, and PowerPoint documents via the app. This solution is already available with Microsoft Intune on iOS and Android. At Ignite, we announced our expansion to support Android for Omnissa and SOTI. Later this month, we will expand support on iOS to Jamf.
Learn more about supporting Shared Device Mode (SDM) for the Microsoft 365 application here and about managing frontline devices with Intune here.
Simplify sign-in, without sacrificing security
Even signing in just once can be time-consuming, so we’ve invested in several simple authentication methods to get your frontline to their work faster. Available today, domain-less sign-in, allows frontline workers to sign in without having to type out the full domain.
This is only one of multiple simple authentication options available. In February in public preview, QR + PIN enables sign in with the scan of a QR code and entry of a unique PIN number. This new, highly requested sign in option significantly decreases time to log in without affecting security.
Control access outside of working hours
A warning message restricting access to Teams outside of working hours.Muting notifications on productivity apps, like Teams, is a start to promoting positive work-life balance. We decided to take things a step further. With Working Time, we’ve made it easy for IT Admins to create boundaries around productivity app usage outside of set working hours. Restriction options range from warning notifications to fully restricted access. This solution is robust enough to satisfy the requirements of strict labor regulations and customizable enough to fit any frontline organization.
Get started with digitizing your frontline today, regardless of organization size
Digital transformation is essential for every part of your business and deploying digital tools for your frontline doesn’t have to be a daunting task. In early 2024, we streamlined this experience by allowing IT admins to easily group users by physical work location to create teams. In private preview, we’re expanding controls to give frontline managers the option of adding or removing members from any team. Together, these solutions result in efficient and accurate Teams deployment at scale.
Meet us at NRF
For years, through the pandemic and economic uncertainty, we’ve invested in supporting the frontline. We’ve listened to your feedback, evolved our platform to address your needs, and grew alongside your organizations. We are committed to delivering smart, simple, and secure solutions tailored to your frontline and are excited to showcase our latest innovations at the National Retail Federation (NRF) expo in New York from January 12 – January 14, 2024.
- Visit our booth on level 3 at booth #4503, conveniently located at the main entrance of the Javits Exhibition Hall.
- Explore our website to learn more about Microsoft 365 Frontline offerings.
- Learn more about how Microsoft is empowering the retail industry in the Microsoft Cloud for Retail blog.
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