The ILO Front-Line Innovation Program is a powerful way to guide, engage, and learn from front-line staff. The program lowers costs, improves customer service and satisfaction, and increases retention of high-value front-line employees.

The ILO Front-Line Innovation Program is a simple, focused program, built around very brief one-to-one interviews with employees every week.

The program has three parts to it:

1. Weekly interviews (two to five minutes each) with every staff member who deals with customers.

These are the two questions:
What did you do this week that made a customer very happy, beyond his or her expectations?
How did you get one thing done this week with less work than you – or your employer – expected?

2. A weekly five-minute meeting with groups of 20 staff, to feed back to the group the ideas captured from the interviews.

3. Management review and advisory meetings with ILO staff and your management, to review ideas and insights collected and create prepare some for action, to identify larger strategic insights emerging from the program, and to ensure continuity going forward.

Getting Ready to Work with the ILO Frontline Program

The Front-Line Innovation Program begins with a six-week pilot, involving 80 of your front-line service staff. We begin the planning for the six-week trial with a number of conversations, and at least one on-site meeting, with the key management executives supporting the program.

Important accomplishments for these planning meetings:

Understanding your in-place metrics for customer service, for customer-contact staff performance, for employee turn-over rates and costs, and for the financial value of improvements in customer service. These measures are vital for understanding the success of the six-week pilot at its conclusion, and for establishing the potential value to you of continuing with the program beyond six weeks.

Creating a simple and clear communications plan, to share the goals, the methods and the expected outcomes of the program with participating staff and other stakeholders.

Formatting management review meetings. We’ll create the structure for meetings to be held every six weeks that will have three goals: to identify strategic insights emerging from the program (beyond individual ideas and insights provided by your front-line staff); to review the sorting, response and implementation of ideas and insights emerging from the program (see charts below); and to ensure good management of the program and plans for continuity.

Identifying the 80 front-line customer-contact staff to participate in the pilot.

Reviewing the schedules and work environment(s) of these staff to plan the right times and places for the five-minute interviews and five-minute reporting-out meetings.

Recognizing and Acting On Staffers’ Ideas and Insights

ILO leadership will work with your management team to establish and verify the most useful criteria for sorting ideas and insights, into the four categories above.

High-impact ideas and insights will fall into two categories – those that are easy to implement will be approved and put into practice quickly; those that are more challenging to implement will be feed back to frontline staff, to be ranked by importance, so that only those seen as important to staff will claim management time and effort to implement.

The process remains visible to staff, affirming the value of the ideas and insights they contribute to the program. ILO can track status of ideas and insights, and report out to frontline staff every six weeks as part of the overall program.

Sample Report to Staff

Long-Term Continuity

The ILO Front-Line Innovation Program is designed to provide long-term, ongoing improvements in customer-service, employee-engagement, and operational efficiency.

The six-week pilot is a starting point. It is designed to demonstrate the financial value of the improvements made through the program, and to give the program leaders the chance to fine-tune the program to your organization. After a successful trial – as measured by your standard metrics – there are three options for long-term continuity:


Option One

(Best expected outcome – highest trust with interviewers and clarity in keeping program focused and free of other internal agendas).

Continuous engagement by ILO – program runs with review and adjustment every six weeks.

ILO staff conduct interviews and reporting-out meetings

Interviewing done by outside staff keeps the promise that the interviews are not evaluative, anonymity will be protected, and participants insulated from internal politics.

ILO leadership runs management action and advisory meeting every six weeks

Keeping ILO staff as program leaders will ensure that the highly-focused nature of the program is not compromised – in our experience, it is almost impossible for inside management to keep other company objectives and goals from creeping in.

Important question in this model: Is it best run the program without stop, or on a staggered basis, six weeks on and six weeks off. This is worth testing as the program rolls forward.

Estimated ILO investment of time: 20 days for every six weeks/ 13 days per month


Option Two

Following initial six-month period, ILO trains designated front-line staff (your staff) to take over ongoing field interviewing.

Semi-annual tune-up training and coaching sessions will be important for trained interviews.

ILO leadership continues to lead management action and advisory meetings, provides ongoing program fine-tuning, analysis of findings, offers quarterly advisory review for management.

Estimated ILO Investment of time:

Initial six-month period: 78 days to run program; 5 days to train staff interviewers

On-going: 15 days per year for tune-up training and coaching, analysis of findings, leading review-for-action sessions


Option Three

Launch and hand-off: Following initial six-month period, ILO trains designated front-line staff (your staff) to take over ongoing field interviewing.

Occasional advisory review by ILO leadership – quarterly meetings recommended.

Estimated ILO Investment of time:

Initial six-month period: 78 days to run program; 5 days to train staff interviewers

On-going: Open


Contact Peter Temes at the ILO Institute for more information: peterATilo-institute.org