Performance Enablement for Frontline Workers: A Conversation with JD Dillon

CommLab Podcast with JD Dillon

Sherna Varayath 0:18
Hey there, welcome back to the eLearning Champion podcast, where we dive deep into strategies, trends, and triumphs shaping the world of digital learning. Now, speaking about digital learning, frontline workers are often in the forefront of receiving the latest learning technologies. And who better than JD to speak more on this?

JD Dillon began his career on the front line, managing movie theaters and theme parks. With 25 years of experience leading operations and L&D at dynamic organizations like Disney, AMC, and Kaplan, he has become a recognized authority on performance enablement and a passionate advocate for improving employee experience. As the Chief Learning Architect with Axonify, JD develops technology and services that empower over 4 million frontline workers worldwide to perform at their best every day. A sought-after speaker, author, and advisor, he specializes in
ecosystem strategy and AI enabled practices through Learn Geek. JD's latest book, The Modern Learning Ecosystem, offers a personal, practical, hilarious perspective on L&D's evolving role in today's workplace. Welcome to our podcast, JD.

JD Dillon 1:57
Thanks so much for having me.

Sherna Varayath 1:59
Now, before we dive in, dear listeners, make sure you never miss an episode back with valuable tips, inspiring stories, and the latest industry buzz by making sure you follow us. Now, to start off, JD, you've spent much of your career focused on frontline workers. What inspired you to make this your mission and what keeps you motivated today?

JD Dillon 2:22
It really comes back to my first day at my first job. As mentioned in my bio, I started out managing movie theaters and theme parks. When I was a teenager, I was a very shy kid. I had no real experience interacting with the public, let alone doing the types of work I was going to do at my first job. I remember on my very first day getting dropped off at the mall, which is where my first movie theater was located, and standing outside the building not wanting to go in. I just didn't feel like I could do this job. I was lucky in the fact that I ran into a particular trainer in my very first job who didn't say that I know you're scared, but he could tell that I was uncomfortable. And he took his time with me and helped me practice and really understand how to get the job done, how to count money, how to interact with people, all these things that I'd never done before that I needed to do to be successful in what started as just a summer job and turned into the next six years of my life because I went from being a frontline employee to management within the organization. And it all comes back to that first training experience for me. And since then, I've always found myself leaning in the direction of or being directly in support of frontline teams, whether I was a frontline worker myself, I was a frontline trainer in different organizations, supervisor, management, and even when I go into learning and development, I'm still supporting contact center agents and hospitality workers. And now, I'm on the technology side enabling frontline workers.

I believe, and the research bears out that 70 to 80% of the global workforce is on the frontline, primarily people working in deskless positions. At the same time, they're the most underserved and under supported, not because people don't want to help frontline workers. I think it's just always been a really complicated problem. And the great news is that today we have more opportunities. We have technology that can help us support people in different ways and really rebalance the equity in terms of support. So it's not just about the corporate team getting the help they need. It's about everybody getting the help that they need. So for me, it comes all the way back to that very first day at the first job and really feeling what it's like to feel supported and to have what you need to be successful and wanting to try to help everyone have that same experience.

Sherna Varayath 4:50
Wow, that's really motivational. How do you define frontline enablement and how's it different from traditional training or employee experience efforts?

JD Dillon 5:04
I love the word enablement just because it unlocks us from having to think specifically about learning. Because the goal really isn't to help someone learn, it's to help someone do their best. How do we help maximize people's potential? And when you talk about enablement and the frameworks that I use to help people do their jobs, it really enables us to use all the different tools at our disposal, because in a lot of cases, some of the best tactics or the best technologies might not be things that we would typically refer to as learning tools or learning technologies. One of the most transformative tools that I ever used in a frontline environment was a wiki. It wasn't something you would traditionally think of as learning technology, but it was a technology that meaningfully helped people solve problems and do the job every day. And by going outside the box of how we traditionally define learning and development, it gives us that many more options. And especially for frontline workers, it helps us get that much closer to where the job is done. Because there's just an unfortunate reality in a lot of cases that traditional learning technology or traditional learning content just isn't part of the everyday experience for someone who's working in a retail store or a grocery store or a manufacturing facility. The odds of them seeing an HR platform or a learning platform as part of their day is very limited because of how they spend their time and how structured their schedule is. So rather than try to get people to come to us, enablement is about going to them and figuring out what tools do you use on the job? What problems do you typically run into? When and where do you do your job every day? And especially for frontline workers, when it comes to digital anything, what devices are available? Because I can design great content, I can put it in a very dynamic system, but if there's no device available in the flow of work for a frontline worker, it doesn't matter. So we have to understand what those realities are like, what the environment and the context is like for frontline workers, and then design a support structure around them rather than expecting them to change how they do their job in order to fit what we think is the best solution. So that's the difference between traditional learning and training, which is part of the story when it comes to the bigger picture of enablement.

Sherna Varayath 7:21
Right. Now that we see that frontline jobs are changing fast, what are the biggest shifts you've seen and what do organizations need to do to keep up?

JD Dillon 7:35
There's a tremendous push to do more with less. So how do we maximize our labor spend? Frontline operations have always only scheduled the number of people that are absolutely needed to get the job done, to serve customers, to deliver on that value promise. And we've seen that more and more pushed on where maybe instead of having people in the frontline who specialize in different departments or different functions, there's more of a lean towards, how do we cross train people, so the operation is that much more agile? And instead of having 10 people on shift today, maybe we only need 8 because we can move people around more dynamically to support where the guest flow is. So there's been a shift towards how do we maximize our investment, maximize our labor spend. And that shifts what we're able to do from a learning and development perspective because it makes every minute that much more precious and that much more valuable. So if you're going to ask to pull people out of the operation for even 30 minutes, that's a significant disruption, and in some organizations, a significant expense. Because if you have 400,000 frontline workers in your organization and 30 minutes times 400,000 is a significant amount of time and money. So our ability to justify any type of disruption is that much more heightened. I'm not saying we shouldn't ever pull anyone out of the operation. Classroom training is still important. Courses are still important. But from an enabling perspective, it's more about, how do we use those tactics when it's the right thing to do rather than it being the default or standard practice? And a big part of that and a big part of keeping up and evolving our practices so we're less disruptive, more embedded in the day-to-day job, is helping people across the organization think differently about what learning and enablement means at work. Because a lot of people, stakeholders, managers, employees, still think learning at work is school. I go to a place and I complete an activity of some type and once I'm done, I take a test, and I've learned something. And we all know that's not how anything really works, but it's the deep-seated belief that people have about what learning and education is. So we have to show people that there's a different way to help people perform at their best, to help people solve problems, and that the traditional form of learning still has its place, but it's not the way to solve every problem. It's one of the options that we have under a larger enablement umbrella. So much in terms of transformation comes down to not technology or content, it's about mindset and how people think about change. So we have to help the organization and all our stakeholders think differently about how we can help people and enable people, and that will hopefully unlock our ability to keep pace with change and help frontline workers get the support they need to manage change, not just year to year, quarter to quarter. Change is a day-to-day situation on the frontline. We have to find ways to be there with them day-to-day to help them out.

Sherna Varayath 10:39
Wow, interesting. Now, what role should technology, especially AI, play in supporting frontline teams day-to-day? Where are the biggest opportunities or risks in this?

JD Dillon 11:00
I'm extremely excited about some of the very simple but powerful opportunities AI represents for frontline workers. Let's take the simplest example, maybe, which is improving day-to-day at this point is language translation. Translation has historically been a timely and expensive challenge. So all the companies I've ever worked with in my corporate roles, we always had to make a decision to say, what are the most popular, commonly spoken languages in the organization? We'll translate our materials to that limited number of languages. And you don't know who you're leaving behind because maybe people can speak different languages to a decent degree. Maybe it's a requirement of the job in a lot of cases. But how often are people just trying to understand the information, let alone learn it or apply it right? How do we knock down that barrier by automating the translation process, still including people in the review process to make sure it's accurate? But that opportunity, even in the last two years has improved tremendously. So now we're at a place where we can almost perfectly automate at least the basics of language translation to the point where last year I delivered a keynote presentation in South Korea to an audience that primarily spoke Korean. I don't speak Korean, but my AI avatar does, and my slides were all translated. All my materials are translated thanks to ChatGPT and Gemini. So we have this opportunity to level the playing field and increase equity and opportunity through this technology. So that's a simple but really powerful example for frontline. And then the other one I would highlight for frontline workers is the move around digital assistance. Just the ability to put reliable answers into people's pockets changes the day-to-day nature of frontline work because first, it gets rid of the need to go hunting for information. In past projects I've actually had a stopwatch and recorded how much time it took for someone to leave their department in a store, go to a computer in a backroom, click through a SharePoint site, find a document, print it, and then bring it back to their location. And that's a 15 minute experience in a lot of cases. To go from that to a place where the device that you're carrying is, whether it's your personal device which a significant number of frontline workers opt to use at work, as long as it's value add to them, or it's a device that the company has provided, or a device that's in your department or at your workstation, the ability to put reliable information there that you can engage with in natural language, that you can engage with in your preferred language, changes so much about the job. Because first of all, we as training teams don't have to overload people because there's a place that they can go to look up a lot of information now. So now we can focus on delivering the stuff they have to remember, the stuff that's difficult to apply, that they have to practice. We can focus our training time on the right things. We can defer a lot of that resource opportunity or on demand problem solving to technology. And it also gets rid of the reliance on both your peers and your manager for answers. Because a lot of times when someone who's new on the job or maybe hasn't faced this challenge before, they don't know what they're doing. They might turn to the person next to them and say, how do I do this? What are the chances that person knows what they're doing? That creates inconsistency. It creates a lot of the ‘this is how we do it here' type of stuff. And then there's the variant where people will go ask their manager. And 40% of frontline managers are burned out on a daily basis. A lot of them are just trying to figure out how to do their jobs, let alone help everyone else do their own. If we can lighten the load on managers because people don't have to go to them for every question, whether it's something about an operational process, whether it's how do I request time off, whether it's something about health care benefits, there's no world where the manager knows everything. But so often we defer to when you have a question, ask your manager. So if we can lighten the load on the manager, the managers can also focus on the right things, helping people when they have a really complex need that can't be answered simply. And again, we put the most knowledgeable coworker available in the pocket of every frontline worker. That changes so much about the experience of trying to be a confident, capable frontline team member. So I think AI has a lot of meaningful applications, but it's some of those kind of basic concepts. We're not even talking about agents and automations and these types of advanced things we can start doing. It's some of those simple things that fundamentally change the experience in a positive way for people who are doing physically and emotionally hard jobs every day.

Sherna Varayath 16:05
Right. Many companies struggle to retain frontline workers. What are they missing when it comes to improving the employee experience from day one?

JD Dillon 16:17
It's interesting when we talk about onboarding and new hire training for frontline workers, because when you talk about these topics from a corporate perspective, we're often talking about the 1st 90 days or the first six months. Because when you go into a corporate job, you've probably spent a significant amount of time trying to acquire that job, right? You might have gone through multiple rounds of interviews. Maybe you moved. You're in a place where you're probably going to try it out for six months to a year to figure out, ‘Is this a good fit?’ before you start looking elsewhere unless something is very wrong. In frontline and workplaces, we see a lot of people walk out on the first day. Some people never come back from their first break. The term ‘quick quit’ is a common term in frontline workplaces because so many people leave in the first week or two weeks, let alone the 1st 60 to 90 days. About half of frontline employees don't make it through the first couple of months on the job. And what I find to be true is we often overload people upfront with training. We put people in a back room and have them click next to continue for multiple days at a time, or they're in a classroom for three weeks, maybe in some contact centers or financial service environments, and we're just overloading people with information that we know they can't retain. That's just not how people work. But something requires us to do it, whether it's stakeholders or compliance or regulators. So the situation's just focused on the wrong parts of the job because when it comes to retaining frontline workers, there are two things that keep people in the organization more than anything else, including pay, which is a different conversation. Frontline workers are more likely to stay if they trust their manager and they like the people they work with. And how often are those factors built into the first couple of days or weeks on the job so that we start creating that relationship with the manager? The manager should be part of the conversation on the first day. This is the person that you're going to be working with because the manager to a lot of frontline workers is the company. They're the person that they see. They're the person who makes decisions. They hired them, they pay them, they schedule them. So how do we start creating that connection so that we foster that trust between the manager and the employee early on? And how do we also focus on building community early on so that people start to meet the people they work with, they're not overloaded with information, struggling just to figure out how the job works. We spend some time training them how to do the basics of the job to get them capable, but at the same time get them comfortable with their team members. And it's been exciting to see several organizations out there that have significant frontline workforces starting to prioritize community as part of the onboarding experience to deal with short-term quick quits and short-term turnover. So they're gating the amount of training that people can complete early on. So on the first day, maybe you have to complete certain compliance requirements. But there's no rule that says on the first day on the job, you have to learn the history of the company and what the founder's name was, right? We go the wrong direction. So instead of that, we'll talk about company culture and values and things like that. But wouldn't it be more exciting if you learn what it's like to work here and what we value by spending time with the people who work here instead of time with a PowerPoint presentation telling you how things should be? I see more and more organizations carving off a couple of hours on the first couple of days for training, but more time spent in the operation with peers, meeting people and not taking the time for relationships out of the operation. Because that can happen very easily on the front line, like I said earlier, that push to do more with less can lead to, well, there's not a lot of time to have a conversation, right? Or people get in trouble for having personal conversations on the job. Imagine if corporate workers got in trouble for having a personal conversation on a Teams message. It's an appropriate conversation, but maybe it's a conversation about what you did on the weekend or how'd the kids school play go or something like that.

And imagine if your manager yelled at you because you took 30 seconds to ask how someone's child's soccer game went or something like that. So how do we make sure we build in the time for community and connection, especially in the early days on the job, so that people aren't just making a decision if they're going to go back to work the next day based on the job itself or the training experience itself. They're making that decision based on, the manager seems really nice or the manager's way better than the manager of my previous job. Like I wish I had this person there or I'm starting to make friends like there are people that I want to be with and want to work with here because a lot of frontline workers have options right down the street.

There might be an organization that's willing to pay them $0.25 more an hour to do similar type of work. And when I go to frontline operations and I ask employees, especially people who've been there a long time, What keeps you here? Because there's another store over there that you could work there instead. And rarely do people talk about pay. Rarely do they talk about the day-to-day tasks of the job. They talk about people, you know, I like the manager here. He helps me get the schedule that I need so I can balance things in my life. I like my coworkers and then you start talking about, well, I like working for this type of company. I like doing this type of work. So it's balancing the work and the connection and the community piece that really makes a difference when it comes to retaining employees, especially early on.

Sherna Varayath 21:50
Wow, you talk about reducing friction as a core principle of frontline enablement. What does that actually look like in practice?

JD Dillon 22:01
It starts with understanding what is it like to do the job every day and what is it like to do the job today? Not when I did the job 10 years ago or 15 years ago. An important part of my job is to make sure that I stay plugged in and connected to the experience of frontline work because it's been a while since I was in those roles. So it would be a mistake for me to make assumptions or to make suggestions about how to enable a team based on what happened to me 15 years ago versus what's happening to people who are doing these jobs day-to-day. So understanding what it's like to do the job and what challenges people run into day-to-day and making sure that we have those connections and those channels where we can hear the frontline team and listen to the frontline team. Because first of all, no one knows how to do this job better than the people who do it every day. And I also know for a fact that frontline employees love pointing out when things don't work. So what would you rather do? Rely on a limited number of corporate team members who have some understanding of the job, or a significant number of people who are doing the job every day, and a lot of whom are very willing to provide their feedback and their suggestions if you give them a chance. The key to that is not relying on bubbling up information again through the management team, because we keep relying on the ‘ask the manager, let's have the managers do it’. By the time information from a frontline team member gets through layers of management to someone who can make a change or help them out, chances are that information is either different or it just doesn't make it there in a timely fashion. So how do you plug in channels within the frontline workforce where people can raise their hand, facilitate a continuous conversation, people can make suggestions. This is another place where AI can come in very handy. Because if you have 3000 frontline employees and a lot of people have suggestions or feedback on how a new process is working out, it's really hard to listen to everyone or to parse through everyone's feedback to find the gems that are really going to help you change things for people. But now, with different types of tools, we can gain an understanding of sentiment, and we can identify trends in feedback and surface interesting ideas that align with the types of goals that we have and what we're trying to achieve. So it comes back to understanding what it's like to do the job, not making assumptions about the experience that people have or what people care about or what problems are most impactful in their day-to-day work. And then the last suggestion I have for everybody inclusive of people who are in learning and enablement positions is go do the job. Spend time in frontline operations. I am not talking about site visits. It's not about stopping by and chatting with a couple people and seeing people when the world is set up for your view. Most executives, when they go on a site visit, they don't see a real operation. They see an operation that's been adjusted for what they need to see because people don't want to get in trouble, right? People don't want to seem like they're not doing the thing they're supposed to do. But what are the chances that that location and operation looks the same tomorrow versus what it looked like today? So how do we embed ourselves in the conversation as much as we can so that we don't just hear feedback regarding the friction, we feel it ourselves. That was something I was very committed to when I was in frontline management and L&D roles. I would go back into the operation as often as I could, at least on a quarterly basis, if not more often. I would put the uniform or in some cases, the costume back on and I would make sure that for 6 to 8 hours a shift I was first of all seen by the team because I wanted it to be a trust building exercise where they saw I was willing to do the jobs that they do, and I was good at the jobs that they do. And two, I put myself into the types of positions where I was likely to experience those moments. So I didn't want to work off by myself doing something simple or a back of house type of activity, stocking something, right? I wanted to be front of house with customers, with guests so that if someone was going to get mad, they were going to get mad at me. If there was going to be a difficult situation, I was going to have to face it. And while I was in a position to be able to do things that maybe a traditional frontline worker couldn't do to solve problems, I could feel where those points were, where those challenges showed up, have almost peer-to-peer conversations with people asking what it's like to do this day-to-day, and then take that insight back with me to figure out, how do we fix this? How do we improve this? And when I showed up again, especially when I was L&D, people would often not necessarily just see me as the L&D person, they knew me as a person who was willing to do the job and understood what it's like to do the job. So it comes down to feeling the friction ourselves and building that relationship with the teams that we support so there's more honest communication and people are willing to raise their hand and say I have a suggestion, I have an idea, and I trust that you're the type of team or the type of person that's going to listen and that's going to try to help me out and figure out how we can smooth out the work experience.

Sherna Varayath 27:21
Frontline managers are often the glue holding operations together. What's your take on how we can better support and develop them?

JD Dillon 27:32
Before we ask for anything from frontline managers, we got to figure out how to make their lives easier.In L&D sessions that I do, especially on frontline workers, I will ask L&D professionals, Who is the most challenging stakeholder to gain buy in from? Is it the executive team? Is it IT? Is it HR? Is it your peer group? Is it the frontline employees? And the answer is always, no matter where I am, what session I'm doing, when I ask that question, the answer is the same. It's middle management, the front line management team. And the reason comes back to the fact that they have a really difficult job. They are pulled in a lot of different directions and on the same day that person has to deal with issues from a corporate team, a very upset customer, a team member having a personal challenge that they have to get involved with, or someone's upset and they have to play a role of counselor that they weren't expecting to do today. I was talking to a peer yesterday about the day that someone set my movie theater on fire. Not purposefully, but it was one of those accidental moments because we often say, you know, things are on fire. It's metaphorical. Sometimes for frontline managers, things are literally on fire. I've used a fire extinguisher multiple times in my life, so there is no normal day for frontline managers. You can come in with a plan, and three call-outs later, the day is completely different because you're just trying to figure out how to keep things moving. So how do we find ways to understand and empathize with the experience that managers have and then find ways to help them do their jobs better? And it's not just about training. They're struggling to keep the pieces together. They need a course on time management. That is not what is happening. So how do we figure out what are simple things that we could do because we understand, and we empathize with the manager's experience to help them do their jobs more effectively, so they can focus in the right areas? And if we want people focused on coaching their team members, being great teachers, we need to figure out how to lighten the load on the other side of the job when it comes to administration and those types of tasks. So it's understanding the workflow, figuring out are there places that we can help solve problems? I'll come back to that AI example with digital assistance, because so often as a frontline manager, I just didn't know the answer. I'd never dealt with this situation before. I relied on the people around me to help me navigate through the situation. If there was a place I could go to leverage the curated wisdom of the organization, it would have changed things for me. And the other big one that I think L&D can play a direct role in is connecting managers to their peer group because there's someone else out there that has dealt with this before. There's a manager who is just epic in their skills, but they might not work at your location, they might not work in your region, they might not work in your country. So how do you find these people who can help you go beyond what's in the documentation and what's in the training? Because part of the story is making curated wisdom and knowledge available. But a big part of the story is giving someone a person they can go to or a group they can go to and talk things out, collaborate through a problem, just ask the question, hey, how do you deal with this and get judgment free feedback. Because a lot of organizations, when I make that suggestion, a lot of people will go straight to, well, they can ask their boss. And my reply is no, they can't. Because sometimes you have a great boss who's very accepting and willing to teach and these types of things. But sometimes you also have a boss who's also got a lot going on, who might not have a lot of time cause they oversee a lot of different locations. And there might be political implications to asking your boss how to do something if they expect you to know how to do it already, whether that's the right expectation or not. So how do we give people a peer group, especially if they don't work in an operation where they naturally have that? And I was lucky in a lot of the places where I was a frontline manager, I had 5, 6, 10 other managers with me because we were managing large operations. And I didn't see these people all the time, or work with them all the time, but they were still there as a resource for me. So when I didn't get a class on something, or when something wasn't part of the training, there were people that I could lean on or people I could observe and learn from. And in my next book, in the introduction, I thank all the different people who were my trainers over my years as a frontline employee and manager and one of the names that I highlight, it's become more than a person to me, it's the name that I use every time I talk about an epic frontline manager, someone who's amazing at the job and you just learn from them by being around them, was a woman named Kathy. And if I hadn't run into Kathy, I don't think I would have become the type of manager I became because she was so good at it and so good at the people side of the job. She was great at the operational side, but she was the type of manager that built trust with team members in a unique way that created this bond that I aspired to. I don't think most people have Kathy in their operation. Some people very much do, and they have found some that version of not necessarily mentorship, but that kind of role model in their job. So how can we as L&D or as organizations foster these connections, whether it's just a text group, a regular cohort conversation, a regular once a month Zoom call with just the managers? No agenda, just ability to connect to people and talk it out. You combine available information that you can pull on to make decisions and get guidance and get nudged in the right direction with a supportive group of people. Again, it changes what we then need to do when it comes to formal training and so often frontline managers are promoted without expectation, they don't know that they're about to get this job. Their manager quit. They were the best person in the team, so they're the next person up. They know how to run the location or run the store, but they've never approved payroll. They've never dealt with an upset customer like that. They've never had to terminate a team member. How do I do this stuff? And I could wait for the next training program, or we could give people these tools so that they can manage their way through the basics early on and then we can build up their skill set through training and experience over time.

Sherna Varayath 34:13
Interesting. If you could give one piece of advice to an executor responsible for frontline teams, what would it be and why?

JD Dillon 34:48
Labor hours. I'd say take a hard look at the impact of scheduling on frontline workers from not just a short-term perspective, but a longer-term perspective, because a push for doing more with less doesn't lighten the workload. A lot of organizations schedule based on sales or customer volume, right? You have to earn your labor hours for a period of time. But there's a non-negotiable amount of work that has to get done. So even if no one comes into my restaurant today, there's certain things that have to happen in order for that restaurant to be able to operate. Do we have a solid understanding of what that is and what the requirements are so that we can build up from there when people earn additional labor hours based on volume and metrics and targets as opposed to continuously pulling back? Because again, I think people build labor models and schedules and labor budgets based on a perfect world that doesn't exist, where the truck is always on time and it doesn't suddenly rain that day, which causes a spike in customer activity in your location, which is something I dealt with when I was a movie theater manager. In one particular location, if it rained, we got on the phone and called everybody because we knew everyone was coming to us because we were indoor entertainment. A lot of other things were outdoor entertainment, and I can only project the weather so effectively, especially where I live in Florida. So, how do we give managers the level of flexibility and level of trust to run the operation when we always say, this is your business to run? Give them a little bit more freedom. I don't think we have to let people make all the decisions and let things loose and maybe spend way too much money and have way too many people schedule. That's not good for anybody. But how do we introduce the level of flexibility necessary so that we can do some basic things and that includes the basic task list that has to be completed every day, a level of cushion that meets the unpredictable reality of frontline work? And then one other big one which relates to what we've talked about, and I've seen several organizations starting to do this is, start thinking about the nature of working managers seriously, because in a lot of cases, frontline managers are either built into the labor budget, so they're also a frontline team member in addition to the manager, which naturally limits where they can focus their time. Or labor budgets are so tight, and tasks lists are so long that managers just have to step in and spend a lot of time doing the job of frontline team members because they just have to, because they're the salary team members, so they're making up for gaps in their staffing. And then they just either don't get to spend a lot of time focused on being the manager or they have to work 60, 70 hours a week to be an effective manager and that's what burns them out. So how do we take a serious look at how we staff frontline operations? Because so much whether it comes to retaining and enabling managers, fostering community and connection that reduces turnover. There's a lot of things we can do, right? There's effective training, there's recognition opportunities, there's all these different levers we can pull. But the most important one is our frontline operations properly resourced for the long-term benefit of that location and of the operation overall, rather than just thinking about it as a day-to-day labor budget target. Because if you start to scrape away just to hit day-to-day targets, what's the ongoing kind of cumulative impact of that decision? So much of being effective and successful as a frontline team comes down to having the basic tools that you need. And that includes technology and includes information. We're talking about AI. I think the starting point is taking a hard look at labor budgets and saying what's really necessary to be effective, to hit the goals we want to achieve. Are we making the right trade-offs? Or are we stuck in a more narrow, antiquated perspective on how we manage the workforce day-to-day?

Sherna Varayath 39:10
Wow, interesting. And this brings us to the end of another insightful episode of the eLearning Champion podcast. We've covered a lot today, like how to think differently, how L&D can equip the frontline workers and managers, and much more. Thank you so much, JD, for sharing your insights with us today.

JD Dillon 39:28
Thanks so much for having me and thanks everyone out there for doing your best to help enable the frontline workforce every day.

Sherna Varayath 39:35
Now, dear listeners, I hope you're walking away with some fresh ideas and actionable steps to get started. Do spread the knowledge and empower more champions and frontline workers in our field. And of course, if you haven't already, make sure you're following the eLearning Champion podcast. We've got more fantastic episodes lined up featuring incredible guests like JD tackling the topics that matter the most to you. Thank you so much for tuning into the eLearning Champion podcast. Keep innovating, keep inspiring, and happy learning.