Learn what 7,500+ frontline workers feel about culture, communication, and recognition.
How Can We Improve the Employee Experience for Frontline Workers?

Simon Rutter
External Contributor - Award-winning Sr Communications Strategist
August 4 2025

Frontline workers power every economy in the world, yet often they believe their employee experience is inferior to that of their desk-based colleagues. Organizations have long faced issues with attracting, retaining, and engaging people, and these challenges have only been heightened by the current global economic and political climate.
Investing in improving the employee experience for your frontline workers should not be considered a nice-to-have. It’s a strategic business imperative that will pay dividends in productivity, performance, and profitability.
It can be difficult to know where to start, so I’ve listed 10 ways you can enhance the employee experience for your frontline, with actionable tips.
1. Provide tailored comms channels
Just like your office-based employees, frontline workers want to feel you are providing communications channels that are specific to their needs. These people need information that is delivered in real-time, available on demand, and asynchronous. Channels should focus on communicating locally relevant information, specific to where the workers are and the type of job they do, and customizable for those interested in learning more.
Tip: Employee experience platforms enable frontline workers to feel up to date with company news, stay better connected to their company, and build communities with colleagues across the organization, which can facilitate the sharing of ideas for improvements in areas such as operations and customer service.
2. Give them a voice
Frontline workers are the face of your business. They may be managing areas such as production or coming face-to-face with customers. Whatever their job, they have vital insights that can flag risks early, identify improvements in efficiency or productivity, and deliver tangible business benefits. But they can only do that if they have a voice, a mechanism to provide feedback, whether anonymous or in-person.
Tip: Establish regular feedback channels and promote them widely. Use team meetings and other gatherings to encourage people to share their views, concerns, and ideas. Share stories of how you have responded to feedback to build trust and demonstrate that action has been taken as a result.
3. Health and well-being services
Exhaustion and burnout among frontline workers are sadly on the rise. From dealing with life and death situations to angry customers, the pressure and stress can be unbearable. As well as a realistic and manageable workload, frontline workers require access to health and well-being services. Offering such facilities shows your people that you care about them, and value them as individuals. This isn’t just the right thing to do for your people, it also benefits your bottom line in terms of reduced costs of short and long-term sick leave.
Tip: Promote your health and wellbeing services to your workers. Often, people don’t know where to look, so communicate on an ongoing basis and make the services as easy to use as possible.
4. Flexible working
Flexible working should not just be for office-based employees. There is no reason why your frontline can’t be offered flexible schedules, shift options, or remote working so they can blend personal and professional without either losing. Employers who accommodate this shift in expectations are seeing differences in engagement and productivity.
Tip: Listen and collaborate with your frontline workers on creative solutions. Do they want to work from home, more flexible on-site schedules, or a mix? How can you find solutions that work for everyone?
5. Sense of purpose
Everyone wants to feel their work matters. They want to understand how their job contributes to your company achieving its goals. (See my previous blog on connecting your frontline workers with your strategy and vision.)
When employees have a sense of purpose to their work they are more productive, engaged, happier, and take more pride in their job. That’s why it’s critical to regularly communicate your vision, mission, and strategy to your people, and how they fit into it.
Giving your frontline workers this clear line of sight provides clarity, focus, and prioritisation—which they need to do their jobs effectively, and to deliver your strategy.
Tip: Show, don’t tell. Tell stories about real-life examples of how the work frontline employees do helps the company achieve its targets. Where possible, involve frontline workers in sharing their experiences, as this will bring authenticity to your communications.
6. Line manager training
Every employee prefers to hear information from their line manager first. In fact, 61% of frontline workers find company communication most useful when it comes from their direct manager. On the frontline, line managers play a critical role—they must translate complex corporate ideas and language into simple instructions, and relay these directly to their team members.
They also need to coach and mentor their workers so they grow and develop, facilitate two-way communication to create an open and inclusive culture, and manage and resolve conflicts. To do all this and more, line managers need training on a wide variety of skills, and access to resources and support.
Tip: Offer training that works around line managers’ busy schedules. Make it on-demand, available across various media, and bite-size, to make it as easy and attractive as possible for managers to do.
7. Autonomy and control
One of the biggest predictors of employee engagement is having autonomy—that is, control (to a specified degree) over how you get your work done.
Because frontline workers understand your customers best, it’s essential they have autonomy over their work so they can do the best possible job they can. They need clarity to know what they can and can’t make decisions about, the options available to them, and the repercussions if they make the wrong call. This autonomy encourages creative thinking, fosters a greater sense of ownership, and improves customer satisfaction.
Tip: Provide freedom within a framework. Be clear on your non-negotiables, communicate changes quickly, and leave the rest of the job to the discretion of the worker.
8. Teamwork and collaboration
Teamwork makes the dream work, as they say, and nowhere is this truer than on the frontline. Harsh environments, customer pressures, and changing shift patterns can lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness.
The more you can facilitate frontline employees working together, for example in micro teams, it will build trust, strengthen belonging, and lead to greater productivity. As an ex-boss of mine used to say, no matter how menial the job, “work that’s fun gets done”. So if you want to improve the employee experience for your frontline, get them together.
Tip: Think outside the box. How could you re-design or make small changes to your working space and communal areas to build more collaborative team environments?
9. Proper onboarding
Proper onboarding helps to set frontline workers up for success in their jobs. But it’s about more than simply showing them the ropes and where the facilities are, and hoping for the best.
You need to have a proper system for integrating new hires, which should include information about the company (purpose, values, culture), clear instructions on their role and how their performance will be assessed, access to resources (such as mental health aids), and, if possible, a buddy system to help them settle in quicker.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and with the average 90-day turnover rate at 9.09% (which means that nearly one in 10 employees leave a job within 90 days of joining), you can’t afford to get onboarding wrong.
Tip: Use simple language for information and instructions. Frontline environments are based on verbal not written communication, so avoid corporate jargon and check for understanding.
10. Training and development
Offering clear routes to move up or across into different roles shows your frontline workers that you value their skills and want to provide opportunities for them to grow and develop.
Not only does this increase their chances of promotion at your company, it also makes them more employable in the market. Investing in your people improves their employee experience and boosts your employer brand, which will help you attract and retain more people, including those with highly sought after skills. In short, training and development is a win-win.
Tip: Don’t stick to traditional, formal ways of learning. For example, you could introduce skills badges that show a worker has attained a certain level of competence in a skill.
Improving the employee experience for your frontline workers is not rocket science, but it does require understanding their specific needs, being intentional about your interventions, and constantly iterating to ensure you’re hitting the mark.
If you do that, your organization will be in the best possible shape to thrive, even during difficult times.