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Find the keynote transcript down below.
Introduction
Welcome everyone to Quinyx’s product innovation keynote Spring 2023 edition. My name is Sammy Walton, Head of Product Evangelism at Quinyx. Get comfortable because over the next 20 minutes, I will share some exciting news around the future of frontline engagement and get stuck into the latest and greatest Quinyx product value in that space.
You might have it heard all before, but everything they say about the importance of Frontline Engagement is true. Frontline workers are longing for a better balance between work and life, and better tools to support their work and daily outlook. As their roles shift into product experts, brand ambassadors, and their impact on customer experience holds greater weight, workers are more dependent than ever on their employers’ support to meet their full potential.
Most organizations understand that an engaged, focused, and dedicated frontline workforce is a key ingredient to generating business success.
But in a time where inflation continues to rise, and economic uncertainty remains top of mind, the real initiatives that drive long term success, motivate your frontline and make them stay are often relegated as “nice to haves” rather than essentials. Meaning business leaders often double down on meeting the most basic needs of their workforce, like increasing pay, rather than strategically investing in the resources and tools that have long-term impact.
Focusing efforts on these essential elements allows organizations to reap the reward of a more engaged, productive and committed workforce. Research from Forrester shows that more and more companies choose to focus on employee engagement as one of their main business priorities. You can boost people and the business by improving the employee experience.
State of the Frontline Workforce 2023
In fact, our own 2023 State of The Frontline Workforce research shows exactly how important frontline engagement is. We polled over 13,000 workers across eight countries, working in retail, hospitality, warehousing and logistics.
One in three frontline workers are using 4 or more apps and digital tools to support their work. 62% reported experiencing work-related stress, with the lack of scheduling flexibility as the main stress driver. And 45% report that their work schedule caused them to miss social events or holiday celebrations.
At Quinyx, we know that when employees feel like they have a stake in their future, a say in their day-to-day and a sense of connection to their colleagues and workplace - they tend to stay longer.
That’s why at Quinyx, our commitment is to build tools that make work, just work.
When work just works
Work that works for everyone. It’s important for us to keep on providing value to you and your employees. You already know us as the key AI WFM player, but we’ve taken things even further - ready to disrupt the workforce management space with a full product suite.
…that’s designed to help you Optimize your Business, Manage your Workforce and Engage your frontline. Our all-in-one frontline platform. We help HQ take their service, compliance and budget adherence to the next level with AI-driven forecasting and schedule automation. We help managers to make daily life at work easier. Create and roll out schedules in a snap, make absence hassle-free and enjoy seamless payroll. All from one single intuitive place. And we transform employee engagement with our app, offering several ways to share information, communicate and interact with tasks, surveys and rewards. One single platform that serves HQ, managers and your frontline workers all at once.
Today we’re going to get really focused on the value we’ve created to retain your frontline workforce, maximize productivity and increase engagement. Let’s dive right into it.
Fair scheduling
First up, fair scheduling. From our own research we know that 34% of frontline employees have considered quitting their job because of a lack of work-life balance. With manual scheduling, biases or unfairness can occur. Quinyx customers already benefit from our automated scheduling functionality to reduce bias in shifts, but with our new additions to our AI functionality we’ve taken a major step toward increasing frontline workers’ happiness and wellness.
Keep an eye out on the additions to the auto shift assignment algorithms. Additions that our customers requested the most. Three new fairness oriented rules to create a balance. Equally distributing scheduled hours and shift types across all employees, all while keeping the business optimized.
Equal assignment of specific shift types among employees. This could be used to ensure that every employee has balance between desirable and less desirable shifts types, like for example weekend shifts or shifts that require heavy lifting. We make sure that the most desirable shifts, or the shifts that are requested most by employees are also distributed equally and fairly.
This also means ensuring that there is an even distribution of scheduled hours across employees’ contracts, rather than filling the hours in some employees' contracts before moving on to others. This brings balance to the percentage of contracted hours filled in each employee’s agreement. This extended AI functionality is part of our AI-driven scheduling solution and Labor Optimization and I don’t think I need to stress this, but now is the time to create fairer schedules and make the transition!
Next, is an area where we just can’t stop improving on - flexible scheduling.
Flexible scheduling
Flexibility matters most when it comes to reducing stress for frontline workers. And being able to perform workflows such as swapping or requesting shifts in easy, straightforward ways, can go a long way to reducing some of that stress.
Our State of The Frontline Workforce Research shows that 41% reported they don’t have any say over their work schedule and that 78% of employees don’t have access to a work app for swapping shifts—despite the high number of apps and digital tools they’re currently using in the workplace. A problem they would not have if they worked with Quinyx. Let’s dive in.
You may already know about our shift swapping capabilities, allowing peers to send, approve - or deny, and manage shift swap requests. Giving them more flexibility over their schedules and allowing the business to provide more autonomy and empowerment.
In addition to that, we’ve also optimized our mobile app for a seamless, swift experience, where employee availability can be added in just a few clicks and can even be repeated at specific times and dates. If a worker enters less available hours than required on their agreement, a warning will be triggered. Employee availability will be visualized in an intuitive weekly calendar view and will be automatically taken into account when you use our automated shift assignment feature.
Advanced Analytics - Engagement
Our next product innovation that is closely connected to engagement, is recognition. Our research tells us that close to 40% of all workers want recognition for their work and recognition would help them be more engaged at work. Today, you can already utilize pulse surveys and grant badges and awards through the Quinyx mobile app. Instantly receive feedback from your employees, recognise them and empower them to recognise each other.
And now, with a brand new dashboard added to Advanced Analytics, you can track engagement across your business in even better ways. We already help a number of companies get a 360˚ view of their workforce and business with Advanced Analytics. You can visualize, compare and analyze your data with ease. Then, dive deeper and see all the challenges facing your frontline employees across districts, units and locations around the globe.
With this new Engagement dashboard inside Advanced Analytics, you have a place to view insights from your Pulse surveys and badges. You get insights on who is sending the most Pulse surveys, what responses are and what the response rates are. Learn who is sending and receiving the most badges and take action across all units and locations. Curious how it works? Well, the Advanced Analytics Engagement dashboard is currently in BETA and we can’t wait to make it widely available to all of you.
Newsfeed Publisher
The engagement train doesn’t stop there. To keep your employees engaged, informed and connected to your company values, it’s essential to share the latest company news, and other relevant updates. That’s why you can now create, publish and track company information within the organization using the Newsfeed Publisher.
With the Newsfeed update, you get an entirely new article overview and editor in the Quinyx interface. You’ll be able to create, manage and see all the articles you’ve published, scheduled and have in the works. For the updates that don’t need to be sent to the whole team, Newsfeed is also equipped with advanced sharing options and keeps track of reads. This way you can decide who and when they’ll be able to see your article. Further increasing the engagement, because relevance is key.
Employee engagement begins with great and transparent communication, and with this Newsfeed update we’ve got you covered. But beyond the functionalities for two-way communication that Quinyx provides—sometimes making an announcement is all you need. Engage your workforce and start spreading your news!
The Frontline Portal
And finally, something we’re very excited to announce is the Quinyx Frontline Portal. Today we see processes used to train, manage and communicate with field teams are often poorly documented, organized, and at times, stored offline with limited access —making it difficult to keep track of employee interactions, feedback and execution.
With the Frontline Portal, we’re setting a new standard for how you can communicate with your teams for increased productivity, engagement, and retention, all while ensuring greater task compliance. The best part? You can do all of this without ever leaving the Quinyx app
No other platform on the market today combines all of this frontline value without the need for integrations or third party solutions. Quinyx truly is the all-in-one platform for Frontline Working. Our easy to use interface allows all operations and field teams to have a full overview of the events and tasks from a monthly, weekly, and daily level. Our research shows that 68% say they would stay longer in the business if they had more development opportunities. With our solution, associates are empowered to take charge of their growth by accessing any training guides, manuals, and policies that you believe are relevant to share.
And of course, no employee will ever be out of the loop when the latest news, brand content, and vital information can be shared for everyone who needs to see it.
Product vision and roadmap highlights
Ultimately, our goal is to connect the things you need to know, to the things you need to do. We want to make work seamless, to fit the lives of frontline workers, and to help you create long-term business success. But don’t just take our word for it, let us show you.
We cannot wait to change the future of frontline work with our product vision.
There is so much value we will bring to empower, engage and optimize your frontline employees - too much to fit into this keynote, but let me highlight a few.
- We’re going to make our app experience even more relevant to roles and users with customizable, tailor-made frontline homepages.
- We’ll also improve and add an extra communication layer with chat in the foreseeable future.
- And as always, we’ll implement many more improvements across the board. Think about compliance improvements with for example off-the-clock work, transparency by extending the audit logs and better accessibility with advanced roles and permissions in Advanced Analytics.
There’s a lot of exciting stuff coming up that will help you unlock Employee Engagement and tap into the potential of your Frontline. Don’t forget to sign up for release notes and the product roundup newsletter to stay tuned to all things Quinyx like new features and functionalities coming your way soon. In the meantime, I think it’s time to wrap up. Thank you so much for attending our Spring Product Innovation Keynote. We’ll see you next time.