Frontline Workers Know How to Solve Your Organization’s Biggest Problems

Improve trust, strengthen engagement, and design work

Bryan Belmont

Frontline employees see barriers to better performance every day, yet most engagement surveys fail to capture what they know. I saw this repeatedly when I led Customer Service & Support at Microsoft. Whenever I spent time with frontline Support Engineers, whether in hallway conversations or structured roundtables, I heard about problems and improvement opportunities that were often very different from what my leadership team and I believed to be true. We also relied heavily on frontline employees during our initial AI deployment. Many of the earliest, highest-impact scenarios came directly from them. Just as important, involving Support Engineers in shaping the tools gave them a much stronger sense of agency than they had experienced in previous technology deployments. In a recent article, Constance Noonan Hadley and Debbie Lovich outline a disciplined six-step process for turning frontline insight into action through structured interviews, targeted surveys, collaborative problem-solving, and rapid experimentation. My experience reinforced the same lesson: when leaders and employees co-create solutions and measure the results together, they build trust, strengthen engagement, and design work that delivers for employees, customers, and the business. Read more in Harvard Business Review.

https://hbr.org/2026/07/frontline-workers-know-how-to-solve-your-organizations-biggest-problems

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