Frontline workers have too often been categorized as a single entity, referred to as “all our non-office-based employees,” to their great detriment. By definition, a one-size-fits-all talent, training or support strategy will not serve every segment as it deserves. It’s much better to tailor talent and technology strategies to the distinct needs of different types of frontline work.

Since the Industrial Revolution and capital investments mostly began being allocated to machines, strategic attention has largely gone to desk workers designing work around machines and technology, with less care given to the boots on the ground. So, with HR leaders often designing talent strategies around office-based roles, already-stretched line supervisors are left to manage frontline teams. When HR does focus on the frontline, they often apply a broad-strokes approach to managing a workforce that is anything but homogeneous.

In the U.S. alone, frontline roles account for almost 73% of total employment—over 100 million workers, in nearly 166 million jobs. But some studies report that as many as 75% of this vital cohort feel overstretched and burned out.

It’s clear their needs aren’t being met, and that’s partly because HR hasn’t defined them. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies approximately 800 occupations, and the frontline workforce spans nearly 600 of them; so HR has essentially coasted on a lot of generalized employment practices that haven’t fully optimized this massive, critical workforce.

New Josh Bersin Company research highlights the issue of this huge blind spot in HR thinking to the detriment of pay, hiring, training, resourcing, AI implementation and beyond.

Instead, CHROs must start the core operational change of moving from overseeing a single “frontline workforce” to a new taxonomy: managing five distinct labor systems, each with its own strategy, technology needs and definition of career satisfaction. Our research clearly shows that employers that invest in this now will see reduced turnover, stronger performance and a more resilient frontline workforce.

A new HR taxonomy for frontline workers

In collaboration with Paradox and based on a number of research pipelines, including an AI-enhanced deep dive into the nearly 600 frontline occupations identified in the O*NET database, we have defined a five-tier categorization model of this deskless, diverse and increasingly important, multi-million-strong frontline workforce, with different ways of supporting them in terms of talent and technology strategies.

Customer-facing associate: relatively low-skilled, front-of-house, entry-level, mostly customer-facing employees. Examples: retail associates, fast-food crew, call-center agents, restaurant servers, hotel attendants.

Support them by streamlining hiring and onboarding for speed with AI-driven screening, digital paperwork and fast first-day engagement. Free managers from admin burden through automation, redirecting their time to coaching and reducing early attrition. Prioritize scheduling flexibility, self-service shift swapping, cross-location shift-sharing and demand-based scheduling, letting workers boost earnings and balance life commitments.

Read the full article here.