7 Steps To Master Frontline Employee Communications

You wouldn’t treat a cat the same as a dog. There are far fewer walks on the beach and significantly less gratitude when it comes to feeding time.

So, when there’s a distinct difference between the needs of frontline employees and desk-based workers, why are so many of us still adopting a one-size-fits-all approach with our internal comms?

With specific regard to frontline employee communication, many businesses have failed to identify the niche challenges associated with ensuring they’re not left out on an island.

In this guide, we’re going to do exactly that. What follows are the challenges associated with frontline employee communications and the actionable steps you can take to plug the gaps.

What makes frontline workers different from desk-based workers?

Frontline workers are unique in any organization. Unlike their desk-based counterparts, they spend the majority of (or sometimes entire) workday on their feet and away from a desk or an office.

These are employees like healthcare professionals tending to sick patients, oil rig workers operating heavy machinery, and shipyard operatives covering enormous areas without seeing another person (let alone another computer) for hours.

In warehouses, they lack the wifi reach and cell coverage is poor. In remote locations, it’s even worse. When on the move, it’s near impossible to load the contents of an email or download the latest version of a risk assessment from the company intranet.

When they do get the time to sit down, sifting through the buildup of emails, chat, and urgent notifications becomes a real chore.

With no communications strategy in place to make them aware of company changes and the sheer volume of information they must consume in a short period of time, it’s impossible for them to get up to speed with everything.

Yet, most modern communications platforms don’t cater to this. Instead, frontline workers get the same license and access type, and are expected to either catch up in their own time or deal with not having absorbed the information at hand.

It’s a genuine challenge when it comes to digital workplace transformation. But it’s one that can be sorted with the right approach and technology.

The challenges of internal comms for frontline employees

The ultimate challenge is creating an inclusive digital workplace environment.

In fact, the challenge is ensuring that the ‘environment’ differs per employee need. In the case of frontline workers, this means understanding the niche elements that make their roles so unique.

Distance

Frontline employees could be covering all areas of a department store or miles out to sea. Their step counts and mileage charts are through the roof.

This means staying connected to a single source of connectivity is near impossible. Updating systems, maintaining version control, and communicating with desk-based colleagues in real time prove a challenge.

Likewise, it means there’s rarely a point when frontline teams have the chance to dedicate time to ‘catching up’. There are no in-office bulletin boards to browse between meeting rooms as there is no office.

Catching up as a frontline employee often means rushing through emails, tasks, and news feeds rather than spending an appropriate amount of time actioning everything that needs attention.

Connectivity

Not only are frontline employees a distance away from stable connections, the quality of that connectivity is often far from perfect.

Emergency responders, for example, can’t be expected to find a wifi spot when they’re called out to high-pressure situations in remote locations. The connectivity of choice for these types of workers is still radio waves.

And the last time we checked, you can’t download the latest company handbook off radio waves.

More pertinently, someone like a construction worker doesn’t have the benefit of a permanent connectivity source. When a job gets patched to their device, their goal is to get there and get the job done as efficiently as possible.

Activity

If the rise of remote work hours worked in the office doesn’t equal productivity.

For frontline workers, however, this isn’t the case. The correlation between hours worked, often including overtime and unplanned maintenance, is that the more time spent working, the more time disconnected from other parts of your business.

Think about the hospitality worker managing the bar at a wedding. With 200 guests deciding they’re not ready to wind down for the night, they keep the bar going until 3am. While serving drinks and clearing tables, when exactly is your host expected to catch up with emails about the next day’s booking?

Tech

When you operate a forklift or traipse around a hospital campus all day, it’s impractical to carry laptops, chargers, and privacy screens around all day.

Instead, frontline workers often have a rugged mobile phone or rely on pagers and public phone stations.

As novel as it may seem, if you’re working in a warehouse with heavy machinery, the main concern for your mobile phone is that it bounces and survives that bounce. Manufacturers of these devices genuinely conduct ‘from-height tests’ to ensure this is the case.

For doctors with overflowing emergency departments, running from patient to patient with constant beeps and notifications means your mobile battery is unlikely to last.

Having a common area phone in every building is vital to keeping up with patient demand—but not conducive to receiving real-time updates for other business matters.

7 ways to keep your frontline workers connected

Now we appreciate the scale of frontline workers’ remit, we can start to make changes to our internal communications strategies.

While there will still be a reliance on connectivity and availability, these small changes can make vital improvements to the way we interact with and update our frontline peers.

1. Bring everything together in one hub

Having multiple sources to check and update doubles, triples, and quadruples the time taken for deskless employees to get up to speed.

Having a single source of truth for company information, documentation, and communication channels means there’s one place to check. This source is likely a company intranet—and in more modern businesses, a social intranet.

This means not only is your intranet the place where files and templates live and you get to review the latest company news, but you can also see what in-office and fellow frontline colleagues are up to, host chats, listen to company podcast highlights, and respond to messages.

The simple act of having a single employee app for all communication needs saves unthinkable amounts of time. In fact, Keyloop saved an entire day’s worth of communications time per week when they rolled out a Workvivo intranet.

2. Roll out mobile apps

The main consideration for frontline staff is that they’re constantly on the move. It might be on foot, in forklifts, or ambulances.

When an employee’s main work location isn’t a static premises, it’s important to ensure they have access to the rest of your business while in transit.

Mobility can be guaranteed in two ways. First, you must ensure these types of workers have devices suitable for their role. This often means a rugged mobile device or older models rather than making hefty investments into new expensive smartphones.

Once kitted out with a droppable and losable mobile, it’s important the intranet platform you choose comes with a mobile app that reflects the same type of employee experience a desk worker receives.

That means access to:

• People
• Chats
• Company updates
• Internal newsletters
• Documentation
• Company podcasts
• Town hall livestreams and replays

Everything available to a desk-based worker via their laptop must be available to your frontline workforce on their mobile app. It’s a non-negotiable for getting frontline employee communication right.

3. Gather and act on employee feedback

It’s one thing connecting frontline workers to the rest of your business via an intranet app. It’s another thing entirely to know if they’re finding it useful.

How do you find this out?

Use polls and surveys to gauge if your new internal communications tools are working for them or whether it’s just another thing for them to check when they have downtime.

You can choose to anonymize responses, encouraging staff to say how they really feel. Likewise, you can opt to gather personalized feedback to learn which types of workers need the most support, tailored content, or any special measures.

Gathering this feedback is simple when you select the right tool for the job.

Pro Tip: Choosing an intranet platform like Workvivo means you get access to polls, surveys, and employee engagement metrics. Here, you get a holistic view of usage and user sentiment—allowing you to make better decisions for effective communication.

4. Make information accessible to all

Working in silos never helped anyone. When those silos are extended to remote locations and even more niche job roles, you encourage disconnection and poor collaboration.

Instead, make the conscious decision to treat all employees the same and give them access to the same company information.

This means basic things like accessing a company-wide wiki for FAQs and using personalized onboarding checklists for every type of user when they start a new job.

But it also means ensuring all staff have the right version at all times and enabling chat between any team member a frontline worker needs access to. Sectioning off departments from each other hinders rather than helps, so think wisely when it comes to information sharing and communication planning.

5. Make it easy to recognize peers

When you’ve implemented an efficient employee communication strategy, it brings departments together.

Calling in favors becomes the norm for deskless workers who don’t have access to office-based software, information, and knowledge.

Just think about the number of times field-based salespeople call their desk-based colleagues to look up a detail inaccessible on the road.

When this happens, it can feel like a one-way street for the desk-based employee on the end of the phone. They’re thinking, “Why do I have to do all their admin? Can’t they do this themselves? I never get any gratitude for this.”

Well, now they can. And it makes both parties feel better.

Ensure your internal communications tool comes with employee recognition not just as a social media feature, but as part of the digital company culture. Saying thank you should be as easy as a few clicks.

6. Never miss a moment with push notifications

Accepting that frontline workers are almost always on the move means they miss out on important updates when left to scroll through countless updates when they get a moment.

Enabling push notifications for critical alerts means they never go too long without getting an update automatically sent to their mobile device.

For things like location closures, weather warnings, or any other important updates, make sure your frontline workers aren’t the last to know when they’re the people most affected.

7. Make work fun again

Frank Sonnenberg, an American author, famously said, “If work isn’t fun, you are playing on the wrong team.”

While it’s often viewed as an absolute bonus if you enjoy your job, the rise of social intranets alongside following intranet best practices can help out with retention and happiness too.

Employ the basics when tailoring intranet experiences to frontline workers:

• Consider stepping away from long pieces of content that your frontline employees don’t have time to read, and opting for formats that are concise and engaging.
• Organize light-touch competitions; sharing photos of pets, hobbies, or weekend plans.
• Embrace virtual team celebrations and initiatives asynchronously as well as in real-time.
• Turn company updates into audio clips so they can be listened to in transit.
• Encourage participation with gamification and leaderboards.
• Host a pub quiz; without the need to be in the pub.
• Recognize colleagues’ efforts with badges.

How Workvivo creates an inclusive culture for frontline workers

Understanding frontline employee challenges is the first step.

The next is to put what you’ve learned into action.

With the right approach, you’re halfway there. But you will need the right technology to enable better, more personalized, and often more concise methods of communication.

Workvivo provides an intranet platform that aims to be the digital heart of your company.

It provides not only a safe space to collaborate and a useful source of company information, but a place where frontline workers feel they can go without the pressure to action emails and respond to everything on their feed.

Ready to connect your frontline employees?

Get your free personalized demo of Workvivo here.