Top 5 Strategies for Crafting Impactful Learning and Training for Frontline Teams

Frontline workforce learn differently and it comes with its unique set of challenges and opportunities. While we explored how frontline employees learn here, in this article we look at what strategies you can use to create impactful learning and training content:

1. Daily Quiz:  

It is one thing to create impactful, educational content and it is a completely different ball game to get your frontline teams to remember what they learn. The Forgetting Curve Theory explains how over time learners forget what they have learned if they don’t continue to revise their lessons. 

• While it is not possible to keep reassigning learned courses over and over, Frontlyne has a simple and effective solution to address this - Daily Quiz. 
• Implement a Daily Quiz that randomly presents questions from completed courses when team members log in.
• Daily Quiz refreshes memory and helps beat the Forgetting Curve. If learners get the answers wrong repeatedly, the feature informs them about the courses so that they can re-learn.
• Tip: Optimal practice involves 3-5 questions to avoid overwhelming the learners.

Using Frontlyne's Daily Quiz, a major QSR chain achieved an outstanding 89% daily employee participation, which in turn effectively encouraged proactive engagement with learning.

2. Gamified Assessments:

The goal behind assessments is to find out if your course was effective, and if your teams learned what you had intended them to learn. Assessments do not have to be tedious, tiresome or boring. It comes with the opportunity to be an engaging tool that helps your team learn better. 

• Assessment Placement: Assessments can be placed within lessons as a recap or at the end of the course as a test or you could do both. For example, Frontlyne offers 3 different types of assessments: Knowledge Check, Standard Quiz and Final Assessment.
• Mixed Gamified Formats: You can make assessments interesting and encourage voluntary participation by gamifying them. Within the assessment, you can make it interesting by adding questions in different formats: Multiple choice, Multiple Response, True or False, Fill in the blank, and Match the Correct Answer etc.
• Reward Learning: You could also reward learners with points and badges tailored to encourage learning. For example, apart from normal points, you could give bonus points for answering questions within x amount of the time of the assessment. Similarly, you could award Mastery points and badges to team members who get all answers correctly.

A mix of gamified formats can keep the teams interested and excited about assessments instead of the general dread that comes with tests. Additionally, rewards in the form of points and badges that translate to meaningful rewards help motivate the frontline workforce to learn better. 

3. Rewards & Recognitions:

When learning is tied to meaningful rewards and recognition programs, it yields much better results. And it is important to have these points and badges result in meaningful rewards. Your teams could redeem these rewards against company merchandise, e-commerce coupons, cash prizes and much more. Badges and certificates bring about a social recognition that has proven over and over as an effective means to keep teams motivated. 

• Incentives: You can award teams points, badges and certificates as incentives for completing courses and assessments.
• Redemption: Allow teams to redeem rewards for company merchandise, e-commerce coupons, cash prizes, etc.
• Motivation: Badges and certificates provide social recognition encouraging and motivating individuals to learn and do better.

A big hit among our clients is the Leaderboard element which compares learning, and training performance across their stores. It has helped build healthy competition among frontline teams motivating them to do better.

4. Creating Learning Paths and Auto Course Assignment:

A robust L&D team would always have several learning programs running simultaneously and these would be multiple types of learning and training programs. In such cases, what we have noticed is that defined learning paths always come in handy. 

• Learning Paths: A defined learning path across courses and training helps manage and implement structured learning, especially in big organizations.
• Auto Course Assignments: For example, if you have a structured learning and training program, you can use Frontlyne’s auto-course assignment feature to set the learning flow once and it will auto-assign the courses in the structure you define to your frontline members. This especially comes in handy for induction programs.

5. Digitised Instructor-Led Training:

Simplifying efforts to avoid resistance is a golden rule that can be implemented while creating learning and training programs. One way to do it is to digitise and automate processes when possible, especially in the area of Instructor-Led Training.

• Digitise Training Programs: While digitising training programs offers a bunch of advantages, one of the primary benefits is overall visibility, which ensures clarity and streamlines the training process for both trainers and attendees. It also provides a structured framework that optimises your overall training strategy. 
• Combining Learning with Training: To make training programs effective for frontline teams, you can assign pre and post-training requisites i.e. learning materials along with assessments. This would not only help your teams prepare better for the training but also help you measure the effectiveness of your training programs.
• Training Calendars: Every good learning strategy for frontline teams would have instructor-led training programs. This is why Frontlyne created the ability to plan and schedule training calendars that can span over weeks, months or even a year. Similar to the learning path, having a digitised training calendar ensures you create it one time and auto-assign it to trainers and participants. 

Learning and training in the frontline is a challenging yet highly rewarding initiative. When the above-mentioned strategies are implemented together they help you create a successful, result-driven learning and training program for your frontline teams.