For 80% of the world’s workforce, the employee experience has never been unique to them…until now.
At the Frontline Success Summit, industry leaders shared their tips for creating a frontline-first employee experience.
Moderated by Charlotte Buffington, Beekeeper’s Head of North American Customer Success, this panel brought together two speakers who shared their experience in building a better experience for thousands of employees.
- Brianne Hoffman – Former Sr. Marketing & Communication Principal, MasTec Industrial, a full EPC provider and general contractor with 2,200 employees and 20+ projects across the U.S.
- Tamara Palmer – Internal Communications Manager – Marketing, Flagger Force, a short-term traffic control provider for major utility clients with 1,700 employees and offices in more than 12 states.
Charlotte started the session with a reminder of the main issue. “Over the last decade, Beekeeper has uncovered and studied a massive disconnect between frontline businesses and frontline workers across many industries.” And it stems from many businesses using communication methods and tools designed for desk workers, leaving the frontline feeling unheard and unappreciated.
Flagger Force and MasTec Industrial have developed highly successful frontline-first experiences to ensure their dispersed workforces are connected, engaged, and empowered.
Here’s a quick recap. Be sure to watch the full session here for more insights and takeaways.
Successful Rollout of a Frontline Employee App
For MasTec, adopting Beekeeper was a direct result of their frontline workforce engagement survey.
“One of the reasons that our company rolled out Beekeeper was because our engagement survey told us every year that communication is always a big, common theme,” Brianne said.
But with their teams working in remote, hard-to-reach locations, MasTec needed to inform the workers about the rollout of the new app designed just for them. “The method that we chose was to actually do job site visits ourselves and do what I actually called our Tour de Beekeeper,” Brianne shared.
When it came time to roll the app out a second time to their industrial workforce, a new Beekeeper feature proved instrumental.
“The text messaging functionality ended up being a really good addition to the rollout for us. Having projects that are out in the middle of nowhere, being able to have people download the app ahead of time really saved us time.”
Creating a Frontline-First Employee Experience
With a 98% Beekeeper adoption rate, Flagger Force is able to build and maintain a frontline-first employee experience with a focus on safety, recognition, and engagement. In the first year alone, they had 20,000 posts and 80,000 comments and had to add a staff position just to support all of the activity on the app.
At MasTec, one of the ways they drive engagement on the app is by making Beekeeper an “exclusive landing place” for frontline workers to find the information they need. “We really want to put things there that are exclusive for them to go there and find. Our employee referral program is one of those things,” Brianne said. “They have to go there in order to refer somebody for the program.”
Smart Strategies to Drive Engagement on the App
Both companies had successful rollouts with high adoption rates. And they shared how they’ve kept that momentum and sustained that high engagement on the app.
At Flagger Force, employee recognition kept employees coming back to Beekeeper. “We recognize our employees for safe work and quality work,” Tamara said. “Things like our safety-driven spirit award, a monthly mentor award. We also have an employee spotlight.”
And those moments of recognition have become quantifiable ROIs.
“107 of those people have been promoted into leadership positions, 52% of which we have retained at this organization. That’s a huge cost saving if we’re retaining 52% of our field leaders,” Tamara said. “At $3,000 each, that’s a savings of just under $200,000 a year. And that’s just one great example of how we are driving engagement for the long term.”
*Editor’s Note: Brianne Hoffman is no longer with MasTec Industrial, but played a pivotal role in executing the company’s frontline success strategy while she was with the company.
