Simplicity for the Win: 3 Must-Haves for Frontline Communication in 2025

Reaching frontline workers has always presented unique challenges for internal comms pros, hasn’t it? Whether your company has retail staff, healthcare workers, manufacturing teams, or emergency services personnel, these frontline workers often don't have regular access to email, intranets, or company devices – so they’re often outside our default mode of communicating with employees. 

But I like to think that as we move into 2025, we will recognize that the most effective frontline communication strategies won't be about choosing between digital or human channels; they'll be about creating seamless experiences that blend both.

There are three big things on my mind for frontline communication in 2025: simplicity, technology, and line managers. Let’s dig into each.

1. Simplicity

First, and most important to me, is the return to simplicity.

Human beings love to complicate things. And we do it all the time, although often inadvertently and with the very best of intentions. Think about our communication systems in work and what happened to them during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Many organizations rapidly deployed new digital tools and tech and channels to keep their workforce connected, didn’t they? But it was all done with haste and a bit ad hoc and, as a result, we’re left with quite a cluttered communication system where employees may need to access multiple channels to find essential information. 

Want to check your shift schedule? Log into the workforce management system. Need to book time off? That's on the HR portal. Looking for safety updates? Check the digital signage in the break room. 

I mean, it’s maddening from the perspective of an employee. But it’s worse than that: this complexity and fragmentation is incredibly inefficient and even potentially dangerous. When critical information is scattered across multiple platforms, important updates can be missed.

So here’s me on my soapbox for 2025: let’s make this year all about simplicity.

Simplicity in our channels is a good place to start. Let’s look at the channels we’re using for frontline workers and just make an objective assessment to see if they make sense. Talk to frontline workers and understand it from their point of view. How do they work, where do they get their information, what are the channels they like and trust the most? Can we pare it all back to meet them where they are and get rid of the rest?

2. Technology

The second thing on my mind when I think about frontline worker communication in 2025 is technology. 

We have so much technology available to us today but, as we discussed above, it’s often deployed without enough intention and design. I think there’s a need to think more about frontline workers as key users for internal technology and find the right fit for them – rather than just trying to use whatever IT already has a license for and hoping that it works. 

We would never, ever take that approach for customers, so why do we think it’s okay to do that for employees?!

I’d love to see more companies investing in really high-quality internal comms tech in 2025 so that they finally have a direct channel of communication with frontline workers. This would help a lot with creating simplicity for frontline workers, wouldn’t it? 

If they could open up an employee app that helped them do all of their tasks in one place – find out their shifts for next week, book time off, get company news, find out about events – without having to visit multiple channels or rely on word of mouth.

This kind of tech can be brilliant, but it has to be intuitive so that you don’t have to lose production time in intensive training courses just so workers know how to use it. And it should be useful. Workers should immediately see the value in it and be glad to have it. 

It should also support two-way communication and give frontline workers a way to express ideas, ask questions, or get clarification on updates.

3. Managers

So, if we make things simpler and put our frontline workers first when we’re deploying technology, then what’s left? Well, this is the third thing on my mind: how we should try to use line managers as a verbal communication channel as effectively as we can.

Using managers to cascade information has always been tricky, but I think a lot of that comes from a mismatch between what we ask managers to do and how they actually operate. 

Let me give you an example.

When I worked as Head of Internal Communications in the Irish police force, I quickly discovered that the most effective channel for reaching frontline police officers wasn't the corporate intranet or email or posters on the wall.

It was the sergeant delivering team updates at the start of each shift. 

Officers trust their sergeants, value their interpretation of corporate messages, and are more likely to act on information coming from this familiar source than from distant headquarters.

So, I began to look at how I could work with sergeants to help them cascade important messages, and as part of this I researched what other organizations were doing. I was borderline horrified to see communication teams creating massive PowerPoint decks full of corporate jargon and unnecessary messages for line managers, calling them ‘managers’ toolkits’ and expecting this to work.

I saw one PowerPoint deck that was 45 slides long, and somehow a frontline manager was expected to deliver that in 10 minutes with time for questions (which they wouldn’t have the answer to).

Pure madness.

But if you actually ask frontline managers about how they can cascade messages effectively, you might hear them say things like this:

• I’ll cascade information that my team actually NEEDS to know
• Keep it short – bullet points are enough
• Make it easy to understand immediately
• No PowerPoint – we do a verbal team update and we don’t use slides

Collaborating like this can help you become more effective and realize what frontline managers actually need from you to pass on important information.

Nailing frontline communication in 2025

So that’s what’s on my mind for frontline comms in 2025. Let’s pare it back and make it simple, let’s look at using technology that actually helps our frontline workers, and let’s collaborate well with managers to make them a more effective channel.

The key is to remember that effective communication isn't about the quantity of channels or the volume of messages. It’s about reaching people with the information they need, when they need it, and in a way that works for them (not for you!).

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