The Josh Bersin Company has introduced a new research-backed framework designed to help organizations better understand and manage the frontline workforce. The model categorizes frontline employees into five distinct groups, challenging the long-held practice of treating all deskless workers as a single talent segment.
Lastest report from the company’s Frontline-First Initiative highlights that frontline workers make up almost 75% of total US workforce and remain one of the most rapidly expanding segments of the labor market. But, the study claims that general workforce planning usually fails to take into account the major variations in skills wages qualifications, career options, and challenges faced by workforce in different frontline occupations.
In their report, the authors of the study delineate five groups of frontline workers: Customer-Facing Associates, Back-Office Associates, High-Skilled Specialists, Licensed Specialists, and Credentialed Professionals. Each set of workers must be handled differently for recruitment training compensation, technology support, and career advancement.
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Authors used data on 600+ occupations from the O*NET database to create their model. Their results unveil wide differences within frontline jobs. For instance, vocational nurses and HVAC technicians who are licensed professionals generally receive two to three times higher wages than entry-level service workers. The authors of the report also emphasize that more than 60% of frontline roles require specialized skills that are hardly automatable whereas the health care sector among others is experiencing increasing shortage of talents.
Besides this, the study underscored high turnover rates in some frontline industries with attrition levels in restaurant and fast-food jobs exceeding 160% Dashboard. However, the increasing demand for skilled trade workers and healthcare professionals is opening up new opportunities to those who want to earn a stable and good salary
Nehal Nangia, Senior Research Director at The Josh Bersin Company, emphasized the need for a more nuanced workforce strategy: “It’s time to remove a long-standing blind spot in workforce strategy: the assumption that frontline workers can be treated as a single, homogeneous group.”
The report recommends that HR chiefs first identify their workforce based on those five categories, then come up with specialized talent plans for each segment. If organizations match their recruitment methods, training sessions, perks, and tech investments with the specific requirements of various frontline teams, they’ll be able to increase employee retention, enhance productivity, and make their operations more resilient.
Josh Bersin remarked that this approach offers a very handy instrument to employers to cater to the different needs of the workforce that for a long time had been ignored by one-size-fits-all HR policies. Such changes, in turn, lead to better engagement, performance, and workforce sustainability over time.
