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

# Employee Engagement

# Continuous Improvement

# Change Management

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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