Around 80% of the world’s workers don’t sit at a desk. That’s roughly 2.7 billion people, per Emergence Capital’s much-quoted estimate. They drive, build, nurse, serve, stack, fix and deliver.
And yet almost everything we call “internal communication” was designed for the other 20%. The intranet, the all-staff email, the leadership video, the Teams post: each assumes a screen, a login, a reliable connection and a working day with a few spare minutes in it.
We then describe the majority of the workforce as “hard to reach”, as though the problem were their working conditions rather than our design choices. The workers themselves have noticed: in Microsoft’s survey of 9,600 frontline employees, 63% said messages from leadership simply don’t reach them.
There’s a particular kind of organisational optimism that believes this can be fixed by giving people another app.
Frontline employees aren’t reading the intranet? Give them an app. They’re not opening emails? Push notifications. They’re not engaging with leadership messages? Perhaps some gamification. A leaderboard, possibly. Everyone loves a leaderboard, particularly when they’re finishing a twelve-hour shift.
The frontline communication problem isn’t really a frontline problem, it’s a design problem. Specifically, we’ve designed communication around the convenience of the sender rather than the circumstances of the person expected to receive it. And the sender, almost without exception, sits at a desk.
It’s a pattern Jonathan Phillips and I kept running into while writing Digital Communications at Work, in hospitals, retailers, charities and manufacturers alike. The sector changes. The assumption doesn’t.
The desk is doing more work than you think
Most internal communication practices carry a set of assumptions that are so deeply embedded we barely notice them.
Employees have an email address. They have a device on which they can access comms. They can check messages during the working day. They can follow a link to the intranet, answer riddles three to authenticate, sacrifice a goat to the god of multifactor authentication, and spend a few minutes reading something that mattered enormously to the person who commissioned it.
For many office workers, these assumptions are broadly reasonable. Even if they don’t always have the inclination to read the latest leadership update, they have the ability to do so.
Now consider someone driving a bus, serving customers, working on a production line or halfway through a hospital shift.
“Check the intranet” is not a neutral request. Neither is “we sent an email”.
Both make assumptions about the employee’s device, access, connectivity, attention and, crucially, who gets to decide what they do with the next five minutes of their working day.
An office worker can usually glance at a notification between meetings. A nurse cannot necessarily interrupt a medication round because Corporate Communications has published an exciting update about the organisation’s strategic priorities.
And this isn’t simply a question of access. It’s also about what people actually need to get their jobs done.
The employee on the production line may need to know that a safety procedure has changed, that tomorrow’s shift starts earlier or that a particular piece of equipment is out of service. They may be less interested in a video of the CEO discussing the organisation’s transformation journey, however handsomely produced.
That doesn’t mean they are disengaged. It could just mean they’ve correctly identified which information is useful to them.
Utility, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And we’re often too happy to mistake our own priorities for everyone else’s needs.
An employee app solves access, not opportunity
The employee app market has done a good job of recognising that traditional corporate channels don’t work equally well for everyone.
Mobile access can be transformative. It can put shift information, payslips, policies, operational updates and support services into people’s hands without requiring a desk or corporate laptop. For employees who previously relied on printed notices or information passed down through managers, that’s a genuine improvement.
But there’s a difference between making communication technically accessible and making it practically usable. In the same Microsoft research, a third of frontline workers said they lacked the tools to do their jobs, rising to 41% among those without management responsibilities, and more than half had been handed new digital tools with no training at all. The access problem hasn’t been solved, it’s just been handed to the employee.
You can give a warehouse employee an app. You cannot assume they are allowed to take out their phone while operating machinery. You can send a notification to a retail worker. You cannot assume they can read it while serving a customer. You can publish a beautifully accessible article for a care worker. You cannot conjure up ten spare minutes in an already overstretched shift.
Nor should we assume employees want to use their personal devices for work. That raises legitimate questions about privacy, boundaries, employment law, data costs and whether the organisation is transferring the cost of its communication infrastructure to its workforce. <waves in Works Council>
An app can put information in someone’s pocket. It cannot put five spare minutes in their shift.
This distinction gets lost when organisations measure the success of frontline communication primarily through downloads, registrations and monthly active users.
Those are useful measures of whether the technology is being adopted. They tell you somewhat less about whether employees can access the information they need, at the moment they need it, in a form they can use. It’s the distinction we draw in the book between outputs and outcomes. Downloads tell you whether people have adopted the technology. Outcomes tell you whether it’s made their working lives any easier.
A million app downloads would be a magnificent achievement… unless the million people who downloaded it still have to ask their supervisor where to find things.
Stop confusing communication about work with communication that helps people work
In Digital Communications at Work, Jonathan and I distinguish between broadcast communication and communication aligned with the work people actually do. We separate news from operational and reference content, because each has a different purpose, a different audience and a different lifecycle, and treating them as one undifferentiated stream serves none of them well.
Both have a place. Employees need to understand their organisation, its direction and the decisions that affect them. But they also need information that helps them complete a task, solve a problem, make a decision or respond to something happening right now.
Corporate communication tends to be organised around the former. Frontline employees often have much more immediate needs relating to the latter.
We have reached the peculiar point where an organisation can burn electricity, consume water and summon the full might of generative AI to ensure a warehouse worker receives a hyper-personalised video of the CEO explaining the company’s purpose, while remaining apparently unable to tell that same worker whether they’re on the early shift tomorrow.
The answer isn’t to abandon organisational communication. It’s to recognise that communication which helps people do their jobs can be an important foundation for everything else. A channel that reliably solves real problems earns a place in someone’s working day. A channel that primarily creates additional demands on their attention has a harder case to make.
Means, motive and opportunity: the Fletcher Test
In Digital Communications at Work, Jonathan and I introduce the Fletcher Test, borrowing the detective-story formula of means, motive and opportunity to ask three questions about any piece of communication.
Does someone have the means to receive it? A motive to engage with it? And an opportunity to do so within the reality of their working day?
Frontline communication is where the distinction becomes particularly important. Organisations have a habit of treating the first question as though answering it automatically settles the other two.
At Unily Unite recently, we put the test to work with more than 100 communications and digital workplace professionals. We gave them a fictional organisation, a week’s worth of internal communications and employee personas ranging from lorry drivers to head-office finance staff. Their job was to judge each message from the employee’s perspective, not the sender’s.
You can download the workshop toolkit and run the exercise with your own team.
Means: can they actually receive it?
Does this person have access to the channel? Do they have the right device, permissions, connectivity and language support? Can they authenticate without navigating a sequence of systems designed for someone sitting in front of a company laptop?
And does the format work in their environment?
A long article may be appropriate for someone who spends much of their day reading documents. It’s considerably less useful to someone who needs a short operational instruction between tasks.
Means is where technology can make a real difference. But it requires an understanding of the working environment before choosing the technology.
Motive: why would they care?
This is the question communicators sometimes find uncomfortable.
Not “why does the organisation want them to know this?” but “what reason does this employee have to engage with it?”
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
An update to a safety procedure has an obvious connection to someone’s work. A change to shift arrangements may affect their pay, childcare or journey home. Information about a new employee benefit may have direct personal value.
The announcement that the organisation has launched a refreshed set of corporate values may be very important to the people who spent six months developing them. Whether it deserves three minutes of a warehouse worker’s attention is another question. Particularly if the warehouse worker wasn’t consulted about the values, doesn’t recognise them in their own experience of the organisation, and has rather more pressing concerns about next week’s rota.
And motive is shaped by more than the message itself. It’s shaped by the relationship between the employee and the organisation.
In the UK alone, 1.2 million people are on zero-hours contracts, close to the highest figure on record, and over half a million of them are under 25. Asking people in that position to demonstrate commitment to an organisation that has gone to considerable lengths to avoid committing to them is quite an ask. Particularly when the proposed solution is a push notification about company values.
This doesn’t mean every communication must offer an immediate personal benefit. Organisations have legitimate reasons to explain their strategy, culture and decisions. Employees also deserve to understand the wider business they are part of.
But attention isn’t something an organisation is automatically entitled to because it pays someone’s wages. And if the employment relationship gives people little reason to trust what they’re being told, no amount of channel optimisation will manufacture that trust.
We should be able to articulate why a particular audience needs a particular message, rather than assuming that because it matters to the sender it must matter equally to everyone else.
Opportunity: is there a realistic moment when they can engage?
This is the one I think we neglect most.
Even when someone has access to a channel and a decent reason to care, there must be an opportunity to encounter and act on the information.
That might mean building communication into shift handovers, team briefings, existing operational routines or the systems employees already use to do their jobs. It might mean providing paid time to complete essential training or read important updates. It might mean recognising that some information is best communicated by a manager in person, while other information should be available on demand.
And it might mean deciding that a message doesn’t need to be sent at all. As we put it in the book, the most powerful distribution decision is often not sending.
This is the awkward part of the exercise. Communications teams are usually asked to improve reach, increase engagement and make messages more compelling. Much less often are they given permission to question whether the communication deserves to exist in the first place.
Yet attention is a finite resource, and frontline employees have particularly little discretion over how they spend theirs.
If you’re asking someone to stop doing the job they’re paid to do so they can consume something you’ve been paid to produce, the burden of proof is very much on you.
Stop treating frontline employees as one audience
There’s another problem with the phrase “frontline workforce”: it describes a relationship to the organisation, not a coherent set of information needs. And given it covers most of the working population, it’s a remarkably unhelpful one.
A brain surgeon and the person cleaning the operating theatre are both frontline workers. So are an airline pilot bringing 300 people into Heathrow, the bloke delivering your Ocado order, the woman checking tickets on the 7.42 to Waterloo and the person trying to persuade a drunk man to leave Wetherspoons. Their working lives have almost nothing in common, beyond the fact that none of them spends the day sitting in head office being invited to webinars about employee engagement.
They differ in what they need to know, how often it changes and what happens if they don’t know it. They differ in skills, expectations and digital confidence. They differ in the devices they’re issued (or not issued), and in how much say they have over their own time.
And they differ in their relationship with the organisation, even when they work in the same building.
Take the surgeon and the cleaner. One may be a permanent employee with considerable professional autonomy, access to clinical systems and a well-established relationship with the hospital. The other may work for an outsourced facilities contractor, on a different set of systems, with different reporting lines and little access to the organisation’s internal channels. They may work on the same ward, encounter the same patients and be affected by the same operational decisions, yet belong to entirely different information ecosystems.
This is all extremely pertinent when you’re designing communication. Who is responsible for telling the cleaner that a ward has closed? Does the hospital communicate directly with them, or through the contractor? Can they access the relevant information without a hospital login? And if the answer is that their supervisor will tell them, what happens when that supervisor is off sick?
The surgeon needs the safety alert before the operating list starts. The cleaner needs to know which areas require enhanced infection-control procedures before beginning their shift. Both are operationally important. Neither is particularly well served by a generic weekly newsletter announcing that the hospital is delighted to unveil its new strategic vision.
Some frontline workers operate alone. Others are constantly surrounded by colleagues. Some work predictable shifts in one location; others move between sites or spend their days travelling. Some will download an app the moment they’re asked; others haven’t been issued an email address, let alone a login.
The opportunities to communicate are different. So are the consequences of getting it wrong.
A retail worker might receive information through a daily team briefing. A field engineer might need an update integrated into the job-management system. A driver might need something available at a depot or during a scheduled break.
Treating all of them as a single audience because they don’t sit at desks is about as useful as treating everyone who does sit at a desk as having identical needs. Nobody writes a communication strategy for “people with chairs”.
The distinction between desk-based and deskless work matters, but it is only the beginning of segmentation.
Good communication design starts with the work: what people do, where they do it, which systems they use, who they interact with, who actually employs them, how much control they have over their day and what information helps them make decisions.
Only then should we start discussing channels.
Your managers are not a free distribution network
When digital channels struggle to reach frontline employees, organisations often fall back on managers.
“Cascade this to your teams.” Corporate shorthand for making someone else responsible for the bit where communication has to work.
Managers are expected to receive corporate messages, interpret them, decide what matters, translate them into something meaningful for their teams and deliver them consistently, usually alongside the small matter of running the operation.
This assumes a great deal about the people we’ve made managers. Many got there because they were excellent at their previous jobs. The best engineer became the engineering manager. The most experienced nurse became the ward manager. The person who could keep a warehouse running through a minor apocalypse was rewarded with responsibility for twenty other people. Whether any of them could lead, coach or communicate effectively was sometimes a secondary consideration, if it was considered at all.
Some turn out to be excellent managers. Others are indifferent, inept or actively dreadful. Plenty have never received meaningful management training. Yet we construct elaborate communication cascades on the assumption that every one of them possesses the judgement, confidence and interpersonal skills to translate corporate strategy into something useful for their teams. This seems an optimistic foundation on which to build anything, let alone an organisation’s primary means of reaching its workforce.
Even the good ones are stretched. Gartner puts it bluntly: the average manager has 51% more responsibilities than they can effectively handle. And in Microsoft’s frontline survey, 69% of frontline managers said their own leaders don’t communicate with them effectively, which rather undermines the idea of the cascade before it has started. Information is expected to flow effortlessly down a management hierarchy in which the people halfway down don’t know what’s going on either.
Managers can be an exceptionally effective communication channel because they provide something an app cannot: context, interpretation and the opportunity for a conversation. A good manager can explain what a decision means locally, answer questions and spot confusion before it becomes a problem.
But that is precisely why they should not be treated as human forwarding services. In Digital Communications at Work, we treat managers as a channel with its own requirements, including briefing, timing, capability and the authority to adapt the message, rather than the default fallback when digital reach runs out.
If a message requires local interpretation, give managers the information, training, authority and time to provide it. If it simply requires employees to know a fact, consider whether making that fact directly accessible would be more reliable. And if the same information must pass through four management layers before reaching the person who needs it, perhaps the problem isn’t that managers need another briefing pack.
Perhaps it’s that you’ve built a distribution model which only works if every manager is a competent communicator, despite having done remarkably little to ensure that they are.
What a frontline communication strategy should actually do
Before commissioning another platform, I’d suggest establishing what problem you’re actually trying to solve. An unfashionable approach, admittedly, but cheaper than discovering afterwards that you’ve solved the wrong one.
What information do different groups of employees actually need to do their jobs? Which messages require immediate action, which need to be available for reference, and which are primarily intended to build understanding or connection?
Where does information currently move successfully? Where does it get stuck? Which informal routes have employees developed because the official ones don’t work?
What access do people genuinely have during paid working time? What constraints are imposed by safety, security, location, language, devices and working patterns?
And perhaps most importantly, who has the authority to decide what gets communicated, through which channels and how frequently?
These are the questions discovery is meant to answer, which is why Digital Communications at Work opens with discovery rather than with platforms. I’ve also written about how to start with discovery, including a real example of why giving frontline workers access to an intranet isn’t the same as making it useful.
Because a communication strategy that doesn’t make choices about volume isn’t really a strategy. It’s a distribution plan.
The answer may involve an employee app. It may involve digital signage, improved intranet access, operational-system integrations or something as unfashionable as a well-placed noticeboard. It may mean investing in the communication skills of managers and supervisors, giving them proper training, support and time to do the job, rather than another briefing pack and a cheery instruction to cascade.
Most likely it involves a combination, because different information needs call for different approaches.
The important thing is that the channel follows the need, rather than the organisation buying a channel and then searching for enough content to justify it.
There is a particularly expensive form of organisational self-deception in which a new communication platform becomes successful because people are persuaded to use it, rather than because it makes their working lives materially easier.
Adoption is not the same as value. A launch is the starting line, not the victory lap.
Design around the work, not around the sender
An employee can be brilliant at their job, trusted by colleagues, knowledgeable about customers and proud of what they do, while remaining blissfully unaware of whatever the CEO had to say about the organisation’s exciting transformation journey last week.
This is not an engagement crisis. It may simply mean they’ve got a job to do, and are getting on with it. Which, given that you’re paying them to do precisely that, seems a peculiar thing to hold against them.
We’ve spent years measuring whether employees engage with our communication, and less time asking whether our communication engages with their work. When the numbers disappoint, we reach for another platform, another campaign, another nudge. Anything, apparently, except the possibility that what we’re asking people to pay attention to isn’t worth the interruption.
Perhaps the problem isn’t that your frontline employees are hard to reach. Perhaps it’s that you’ve designed communication around a working day they don’t have, priorities they don’t share and time nobody has given them. Then, when they fail to respond as expected, you’ve diagnosed a problem with their engagement rather than your assumptions.
Your frontline employees aren’t hard to reach. You’ve just spent an extraordinary amount of time, money and effort trying to reach them where they aren’t.
A note on interests, and an invitation: I’ll be in Paris next week for Flip’s People Connect Club, where I’m being paid to take part in a discussion about frontline communication. Flip hasn’t commissioned or paid for this article, and hasn’t had any editorial involvement. I’m writing it because the subject is on my mind.
If you’re an in-house communications professional, come along and join the argument in Paris on 20 October. I’m particularly interested in hearing where you think I’ve got this wrong. Writing is how I work out what I think; finding people prepared to disagree with me is how I find out whether any of it survives contact with reality.
And if your organisation is trying to work out why its communication isn’t reaching the people who need it, that’s exactly the sort of problem we help solve at Lithos Partners.