OTSP #11: Are You Reaching Your Frontline?

Reaching frontline employees takes more than an app, a digital sign, or a weekly briefing for supervisors to deliver. Employees working in manufacturing plants, on delivery routes, on construction sites, and in healthcare settings have different opportunities to receive information—and different needs. Communicators may not control the channels those employees rely on, and getting a message in front of someone doesn’t mean they understood it or could act on it. Before auditing channels or proposing another communication tool, organizations need to answer a more basic question: What are they trying to accomplish? In this episode of “On the Same Page,” Shel Holtz and Mark Dollins explore how to make frontline communication relevant, accessible, and useful. Drawing on recent studies and examples from their careers, they discuss working with local managers, equipping supervisors to interpret decisions, creating opportunities for employees to ask questions, and testing approaches before expanding them. They also challenge the assumption that frontline employees care only about schedules and pay, and offer a practical way to uncover the gap between publishing information and communicating it successfully. Links from this episode: The frontline information gap: why more technology hasn’t made work easier 3 Reasons Frontline Workers Experience a Communication Gap 2025 International Employee Communication Impact Study Team dynamics on the front line: How managers and organizations impact this overlooked key to retention Staffbase-Commissioned Study Finds Only 23% of US Frontline Workers Feel Fully Supported Subscribe to Employee Signal, Mark’s New Substack! Raw Transcript: Mark Dollins: Hey, Shel, how are you doing? Shel Holtz: I am doing great, Mark. How about yourself? Mark Dollins: I’m doing very well here in Connecticut, just past Halloween, and I guess we’re ready for Christmas. We kind of skip directly to the next major holiday. There’s this Thanksgiving thing in the way. It’s crazy. Shel Holtz: Yeah, on my end Hanukkah starts almost immediately after Thanksgiving, so I’ve got to get ready. Mark Dollins: They’re all jumbling together. But I was thinking today we could talk about a topic that I hear a lot about from my clients. Of course, I spent a lot of time working on this in my roles leading employee communications for a number of large multinational companies. The topic is frontline communications. Invariably, the question always comes to me first: “Hey, Mark, we need to figure out how to improve our frontline communications, so we need to do an audit.” And I say, “Well, let’s talk about something that we need to answer first, and that is: What are you trying to accomplish?” Interestingly enough, most of my clients can’t really answer that question because they haven’t thought it through fully. They’ve got some ideas, but they really do need to have a very clear sense of what they want to do with frontline communications. It comes with a lot of, let’s just say, politics and potential conflict. It’s not as easy as, “Well, we own all the channels and we own all the ability to reach our frontline employees,” because, especially in most larger organizations, the truth is communications does not. I’m curious if you’ve got similar things happening in your world, where you’re working or in the world of consulting that you’ve come from. I would imagine you’ve tackled this topic a time or two. Shel Holtz: Most definitely, throughout my career. My first corporate communications job was with an energy company. Oil production was way at the top of the list. You had people out in the oil patch, people on offshore oil rigs, people in refineries, all of them in different conditions and different circumstances for getting information. We had people on ships, on the tankers. I worked for a pharmaceutical company where you had salespeople out in the field driving around to doctors’ offices all day. You had people working in labs and in production facilities. I was with Mattel, the toy company, so manufacturing was a big deal there, as well as people like retail merchandisers. And now I’m with a construction company, so every construction site, every project, is a different siloed frontline collection of employees. Certainly, during the 21 years I consulted, this was an issue for a lot of my clients. It’s interesting that you brought this up as a topic. The day you sent me the email suggesting this was the same day I got an invitation to a webinar from Forrester and Staffbase. They had just finished a brand-new survey on frontline communication. So I think we have a lot to talk about here. Mark Dollins: We certainly do. I think you’ve made probably one of the most important points of all already, and that is: This is not a one-size-fits-all solution for anybody. As you were talking about the industries that you’ve worked in, I was reflecting on the work that I did when I was with PepsiCo for almost 20 years. You would think that the way a Frito-Lay route delivery driver has access to company channels and communications would be somewhat similar to what happens on the beverage side. And the truth is, that’s not the reality. Not just across industries, but even within the same company, that frontline experience, whether you’re in manufacturing or distribution or whatever you’re doing, is going to be different. It takes a lot of thought and a solution that looks at all those potential scenarios. Shel Holtz: I think in a lot of those really large organizations, you end up with communicators in big business units, big divisions, and they’re making decisions on their own for their people. They may have a dotted line to the top-line corporate communications, but they’re dealing more with the corporate-level messaging and communications. In a lot of cases, they’re dealing with executive communications and don’t have that much influence over how information gets to the front line. Mark Dollins: Yeah, and especially when you’re in the manufacturing area, ownership of those channels does not belong to communications. It belongs to those shift supervisors and the staff management at that location. They have very limited windows in which they can communicate, and they’re going to own it as much as they possibly can and prevent outside influences from stepping into it. So that’s another bit of politics that we’ll talk about. Shel Holtz: And it brings us back to manager communications too, doesn’t it? Mark Dollins: Absolutely. Number one. I thought maybe we could start with—you know how I’m big on data—talk to us about the results of that survey. It’d be a curious place to start and see how our experiences line up with what the new research is telling us about frontline communications. Shel Holtz: Sure. There are some interesting findings out of this. I summarized the ones that I found most interesting. First, more than half of employees who responded to this survey, which included managers, by the way, receive necessary work information through six or more channels. So access to information can coexist with fragmentation, but it also leads to the potential for inconsistency. Mark Dollins: Wow, okay. Shel Holtz: Do you want to talk about each of these as we go through them? Mark Dollins: No, keep going. This is all good. Shel Holtz: Okay. Twenty-seven percent report moderately to very inconsistent information across channels, which speaks to that fragmentation. Getting to your earlier point, distribution of this needs clear ownership and version control. Forty-eight percent report lower productivity or operational efficiency when needed information is missing. So failures in communication have operational consequences. Forty-four percent report greater risk of errors, quality problems, or missed deadlines. So “Did they see it?” really becomes an inadequate measure of success. I know that’s what a lot of communicators did measure: “Did you see this information?” And 83% of frontline workers expect a single app combining work activities and information to have a high or very high impact. They’re looking for simplicity, but this measures expectations and not demonstrated results. Is giving a phone to employees adequate? You have to look at a couple of things. First, do the conditions allow them to use a phone while they’re working? Do they have individual accounts? Is there reliable connectivity where they’re working to use their phones? When they do have allowed time to read, can they also ask questions? Do they have that allowed time? Does the night shift get the same opportunity as the day shift? There’s a lot to consider here, and the nature of the work also matters. A nurse, a delivery driver, a retail associate, somebody working on a construction project site—they don’t all automatically get the same channel strategy. Or if they do, it wouldn’t be very effective. Mark Dollins: Nor necessarily should they have the same channel strategy, to our earlier point in this discussion. All of those data points lead me to wanting to know more. As I think about those macro trends, how does this work where I’m working and with my employee communication base? I’ll go back to that question. People want to audit. Okay, yes, please do audit in order to get the data on how your organization is working with and responding to those issues. You’ve got to have data to help you make those decisions. But before you go out and measure things, you still have to know: What is it that I’m trying to accomplish? Am I trying to drive a CSR message into an operating environment? If so, the only way I have to get there is through a shift supervisor and a supervisor’s meeting. Probably not going to be a big successful strategy for you, right? What is my lane that I want to stay in, where I actually can influence because I have access to those channels and I can create the right kind of relevant content? I’m going to go back to something you just said: “Do they actually see it?” as a metric. Well, should they see it, or should they hear it? Or should they receive it directly from face-to-face communication? That’s what a lot of those frontline communication solutions need to have: that face-to-face, verbal, live delivery. It’s not just, “Here, I’m going to hand this out. Read it.” At the same time, there are kiosks or monitors in a lot of those frontline environments that can be very helpful for saying, “Yes, it is important that you saw that deadline for annual registration for your health benefits is on Thursday, October”—whatever it’s going to be. Those are important things to see. But if you want people to understand or to act and change behavior, the strategies very quickly have to shift to other channels. That’s why I’m really big on making sure: What is it you’re trying to accomplish by reaching the front line that is actually attainable? Then let’s start talking about the channel auditing strategy. What channels do you have? What channels do you need? Regardless of that, what channels do these people use, and which ones do they trust? Which ones do you own, and which ones do you not own that maybe either you should, or you need collaboration? As I work with my clients, those are really important questions and issues to sort through first before you start going out and asking questions. I don’t know if you have different approaches, Shel. Shel Holtz: No, not at all. I agree completely. I think that recognition of the channels you own and the channels you don’t, and establishing that collaboration, is vital because you risk inconsistency and mixed messages if you don’t do that. If the manager gets up at the briefing and says one thing, and the digital signage says something else that’s coming from corporate, and employees are seeing that, that’s an issue. I know at UPS, for example, when the drivers are loading up their trucks, there’s digital signage. UPS sees that as their primary opportunity to get corporate messages to employees. But when they come back and see their supervisor, and the supervisor says something different, now you have a problem. Mark Dollins: It’s about us as communicators going into that environment and understanding: What is it that you do here? What do you need? What would be helpful for you, Mr. or Ms. Frontline Manager? Versus, “We’ve created this one-page weekly brief. We want you to read or communicate it to your people.” You can imagine how well that usually goes over, right? It’s like, “These corporate people want me to read this to you, but we’re not going to have time. You guys can read it over here. I’ll put it on the dresser,” or whatever it is that’s nearby, “and you can read it at your leisure.” It’s just not going to work. But when you sit down and have the conversation with a leader who’s there working with your front line and start asking questions—“What’s helpful to you? What are you struggling with right now? How could an adjustment in communications help? What is the content that would be helpful for you?”—chances are good you’re going to find something in there that a corporate communicator, someone who has enterprise responsibilities, can actually act upon. I’m also a big believer in not doing everything at once. Get a pilot going. Get some small wins that have very clear outcomes that matter to the stakeholders you’re trying to reach. When I say stakeholders, be clear about who that is. It’s the employee as well as the managers we’ve been talking about, as well as you and your boss or whoever’s driving you to do more with frontline communications. When you have those small wins, that’s when you say, “Now it’s time to scale it up. We’ve got a great story to tell. We have proof points that say, ‘Look what’s happening at manufacturing or frontline location A, B, or C.’ They’re actually seeing a measurable improvement in something that people care about.” Versus, “Here’s our solution to give you a one-page summary,” which I have heard on many occasions. I go, “Just stop. Please save yourself a lot of time and frustration.” You’ve got to ask the questions. Learn first and then come up with a solution. Shel Holtz: Right. And multiple channels—despite the fact that employees may think having one app is great, you give it to them and then they don’t use it, or even worse, it’s a bad app. That becomes an issue. But even if it’s a good app and they do use it, getting a briefing at the beginning of the shift, seeing a printed notice, having digital signage and the mobile information increases the opportunity for people to see it, the likelihood they’re going to see it. It also creates reinforcement. We keep hearing that it takes seven exposures to a message before it sticks. I’ve heard lately that number has actually gone up. I don’t remember if it’s up to nine. Mark Dollins: Would not surprise me at all, especially with all the diverse channels reaching people. It reaches people in different ways. You walk by a monitor and absorb information differently than somebody talking to you about it. Shel Holtz: I think it used to be seven, but I’ve heard recently that it’s gone up, with more recent research. I think that’s attention issues with digital. Mark Dollins: Guilty myself. One other thing to think about as we think about the channel solution is: What’s the right content that’s actually going to resonate? This is where I think we also get in our own way. We don’t really think about how this content can be presented in a way that’s clear, direct, concise, but also maybe a little innovative and, dare I say, fun, if it’s a topic that lends itself to fun. Have we put the filter in that says, “What’s in it for me, the employee?” And, to get back to our earlier point, “What’s in it for me, the manager?” If we always have that in mind as we’re creating that content, our odds of success in connecting with our frontline stakeholders and the managers who work with them are greatly increased. We have to think not just about the channel itself, but: Do we have the right recipe for the kind of content that will keep people engaged? I know some people focus more on one or the other, but it really is about the total package. Maybe one last point I would make is that it’s almost thinking about it not from, “What are we doing in corporate to reach them?” but, “Let’s define the personas that are out there.” To your earlier point, Shel, let’s define a couple of different personas on that front line: what they look like, what their world is like, where they get their information, what channels are reaching them—all the things we’ve talked about. Maybe we start with the end case: What is that persona’s experience like, and what would make it better or easier for him or her? Then we start coming up with solutions. Maybe we don’t need seven channels to do that. Maybe we need 12, I don’t know. Maybe we need one or two really good ones that are better at it than just using repetitive and different versions of the same content. It’s just flipping the model around to look at that end-user experience first. Shel Holtz: Having those personas can be invaluable. If you have a lot of people who are driving—it could be a delivery person, a FedEx driver, for example. Before we started recording, I was telling you that I had the fortune to meet Ed Robertson, the late Ed Robertson, who was the head of internal comms at FedEx. He reported directly to the CEO. That’s how internal comms was valued at FedEx. He came up with, I think it was initially a cassette and then a CD for the drivers so that they could listen to a show they put together. Today we would think about doing a podcast and just send them the notice that there’s a new podcast to listen to. Mark Dollins: This is going way back, but I even remember him being credited with putting monitors in the hallways at a check-in station so that when drivers came to get their trucks, they had no choice but to walk through this hallway and see these repeated monitors with messages the company wanted them to see. Nothing really super involved, but I thought, “Gosh, that’s so brilliant,” understanding the employee experience and how to take advantage of something that doesn’t necessarily take more time but gets their focus. I still remember that from many years ago when I was new. Shel Holtz: Right. It would certainly get their attention, which is the second step in what he called the pyramid of communication quality. But above that, it had to be relevant. So that gets to what messages you were putting on those monitors. If they’re walking down that hall and saying, “Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care,” then the monitors were just a waste of time and money. Mark Dollins: Exactly. The content has to be there. Maybe one other thing that’s crossing my mind as we’re talking about this is remembering that we’re not the only ones seeking access to those channels. Aside from the people who own them in the frontline environment, there are other parts of our corporate group, our brothers and sisters, who are also vying for access to those channels. It’s a competition. When we approach whoever owns those channels, we need to remember we’re not the only ones vying for that attention, trying to insert ourselves into a channel that works for them as they have it. Understanding that also helps us be better prepared for potential solutions, either collaboratively with some of those other functions—HR, compliance, whoever needs to get access. I can think of a million different parts of an organization that all want to get to that front line and make sure everybody sees this message. We’re not alone. We need to find out what’s happening. How are they doing it? Does it make sense to collaborate? Should we be working together? Or maybe we shouldn’t. That’s okay. But let’s ask the question and get the true big picture of what’s happening. That’s almost a separate persona, right? That persona of the manager who has responsibilities in that plant, in manufacturing, at that front line. Who is trying to reach into his or her world to insert themselves into that channel, just like us? Let’s think that one through. The more we know, the better solutions we can come up with that get people understanding: “We get you. We understand where you are. We’re here to help.” Ask the questions before just throwing a solution out there. Shel Holtz: We have digital signage, and it’s on a lot of our project sites. We work with a vendor that allows the project manager, project director, whoever the top dog is on the project, to put their own content on it. We work with them and talk to them about what they need to get to people, because it’s different from project to project. We try to limit the corporate messages to just a few, just the things we absolutely need to get out there. If there’s a deadline for taking the annual safety training, we’ll put that on the digital signage. If we need RSVPs to the holiday party by a deadline, that’ll go up there. If there’s new software we need everybody to start using and stop using the old one, we’ll do that. But we try to leave most of that space for local information. At one project, they did “Three things you need to know this week.” Others put their safety data up there because they wanted to improve that. It’s important, I think, to leave some of this decision-making at the local frontline level, but to work with them so they understand how to best convey that information through whatever channel they’re using. Mark Dollins: Right. The only way we can do that is by having a conversation with them. What I often will see is, “We need to get our CSR agenda out to the front line.” I’m like, “Well, how do you expect you’re going to do that?” It’s like, “We just wanted to share our sustainability report.” I go, “What are you going to do with that?” As opposed to, “If we had an example in your plant of someone who’s working on this and tied it to, ‘You should feel good about this. This is a point of pride, consistent with our values.’” Versus another topic: “Hey, let’s have a values series going out to the front line.” It’s like, “About what?” You really have to understand that those are operationally driven environments. To insert a corporate feel-good kind of message, you can do it, but you’ve got to be smart about it. Otherwise, it falls on deaf ears and you get rejected faster than you’d like. Shel Holtz: That happens all the time. I also think if the message is important enough—and it really does have to rise to that level—then an executive roadshow is not an inappropriate tool. This can be very important. First of all, it’s face-to-face visibility for frontline employees with the senior leaders of your organization, and that never hurts. It’s an opportunity for two-way communication, because presumably if you’re going to have three or four, even one or two executives meeting with all the people at the construction site or at the distribution center, it’s an opportunity for them to raise their hands and ask questions, or to fill out little cards and submit them if they’re not comfortable raising their hand and talking to the CEO directly. But it’s also an opportunity to say, “Hey, this is why this is important to you,” and then to ask questions of the audience: “Why does this matter here? How do you see this? What’s happening, or what needs to happen here on this site, in this facility, in order for this to be meaningful and to have an impact on the way you do your work?” Mark Dollins: An amazing thing happens when we operate outside of a vacuum, when we start engaging others in the solution, but also in defining the problem that the solution is here to help with. I find we often try to get really quickly to the solution that we think will work because we understand channels and communication—and we do—but we don’t understand the problem. We don’t understand what we’re solving for. Therein lies the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity to do things that add value. Shel Holtz: I think two-way communication is also something outside of the executive roadshow. Two-way is really important on the front line. Employees really do need confidence that raising a problem is going to be safe and that somebody will respond. There was a survey two years ago from Catalyst, of 1,800 frontline employees, and it linked manager fairness, support, and openness with better team relationships. Twenty-nine percent said their manager didn’t demonstrate openness. The study emphasized making actions taken in response to employee feedback visible. So it’s not just, “I got feedback,” but everybody knows the feedback was given. Mark Dollins: And here’s what we’re doing with that feedback, right? It makes a big difference. Shel Holtz: I’d also come back just for a minute to the issue of the manager, the supervisor, the person who’s having the huddle at the beginning of the shift. Are we enabling them to interpret decisions, or are we just giving them another distribution task? You mentioned this early: Just giving them the message to deliver really isn’t enough. Mark Dollins: No. Context is everything, right? Why are we talking to you about this? Well, let’s tell you why. Shel Holtz: There was a survey last year. This was another Staffbase survey. They did this one with YouGov: 3,574 employees across six countries. Only 48% of non-desk employees felt well informed by their managers, compared to 65% of desk-based employees. I think that’s an issue. For some reason, managers at the front line don’t feel it’s their job or don’t feel they should have to convey these kinds of messages, whereas those managers in the office apparently do. Mark Dollins: We’ve talked about this on other On the Same Page podcasts, about how important it is for employee communicators to focus on managers as a distinct stakeholder group, a subsegmented stakeholder group within employee communications. Giving them the content doesn’t mean they’re going to deliver it or deliver it well. Understanding their orientation to communication—to your point, “It’s not part of my job,” which we would all very much disagree with—is a big thing to understand. It looks like we need to do a job of explaining why it is part of your job and what happens when you do it well, and sadly, what happens when you don’t. There has to be context and consequences for doing the right thing and an understanding of what happens when you do it poorly, and the impact not just on your team, but on you personally. There’s the “What’s in it for me?” When we help managers understand what’s in it for them to be a good communicator, we help them develop the skill set, the awareness, the understanding, and then we give them the right content and the tools to do that. Now we’re doing something really powerful and empowering them to do the things we need for the sake of our company. Shel Holtz: And you’re still going to end up with managers who aren’t going to do it or are going to do a poor job, which is why those multiple channels continue to be important. Mark Dollins: Of course. You can’t bat a thousand, but you can bat a lot closer to it by focusing on those folks and giving them some help. It’s interesting, because of communicators I’ve talked to over the years, I’d say about a 50–50 split. Fifty percent say, “Yeah, that’s our job and we’re working on it.” The other half say, “That’s HR and org development and training.” I’m like, “No, it’s yours, trust me.” You can do it in partnership with HR and executive development, however you want to do it. At the end of the day, if you’re responsible for engaging employees in communication, it means you have to understand how that communication reaches them. One of the most impactful ways is having their manager well empowered and equipped to deliver it to them. So that’s your job. Shel Holtz: When we talk about the influence that internal communications has, I think influence with executives and influence with HR counts. If you can convince them to add communication to the mix of what managers are evaluated on, then they’re going to pay more attention to it. If they’re already being evaluated on it and it counts for 5% of their performance review, they’ll be willing. Mark Dollins: That’s a whole other podcast we could get into: How do you do that? I’d love to talk about that more because, yes, that is often a conversation I’ll have with people who lead employee communications, corporate communications, and HR. I’m finding more HR folks actually do include communications, but not in the way we would necessarily define it. I think there are always opportunities to refine that definition and really get into more of the details about what that looks like in terms of behaviors. Shel Holtz: One more data point. This is from a survey last year, Workvivo’s research: 7,500 frontline workers globally. Forty-eight percent considered most communications that came to them from the company irrelevant to them. This goes back to an earlier point: What is relevant, and how do we get that information to them? But 69% wanted to understand company decisions better, and 58% wanted updates from their CEO. That challenges this idea that frontline employees only care about the stuff happening at the front line, and what they want to hear from the corporation is about schedules and pay. Mark Dollins: Employees are getting smarter all the time. They’re learning how to ask the right questions and understand bigger, broader topics and issues as they relate to them and their futures and, quite frankly, their company’s reputation in the marketplace. We should expect that employees are getting smarter and wanting to know more about the big picture from their most senior executives. If we’re doing our jobs as employee communications leaders, we’re putting those leaders in positions to provide not just the answers, but the context to those questions and decisions. Shel Holtz: Right. And again, recognizing that some may not hear that from their managers, it gets to this notion of tailoring information to the employee. These days it’s very easy; it didn’t used to be. We can get information to the front line that’s different for a project engineer than it is for a foreman. A lot of the information they need is the same, but a lot isn’t. The project engineers aren’t doing huddles. They’re not talking to people at the beginning of a shift. They don’t need that information, so it’s different. Our intranet is the dumping ground. That’s where everything goes, but then we can parse it out from there. The tools are there to make that really easy. Mark Dollins: Right. I think that’s when it doesn’t become a repository but a place for doing work, as we always like to say. In my world, my experience working with intranets, it becomes a useful, valuable channel for the organization. It’s when it becomes a repository for information that it’s not viewed that way. Shel Holtz: Right. If I were going to summarize all this, I’d say: Choose an important announcement. Ask employees across different shifts how they learned about it, what they understood, and where they went with questions. Include employees who never opened the digital version. This is an exercise that can expose the difference between publishing information and successfully communicating it. It gets back to your point that it starts with asking. Mark Dollins: Love it. Shel Holtz: I wanted to ask you: On your microphone, it says Employee Signal. That’s your new Substack, isn’t it? Mark Dollins: I’m sending a signal, Shel. Employee Signal is a new newsletter and podcast. It’s available on Substack, and thank you, Shel, you’re willing to place this also on the FIR network. This will be a monthly update solely about employee communications issues. I go into a lot more detail about some of the topics we’ve covered. The first edition, which we just put out last month, is all about change communication and the discrepancy between the recognition among employee communication leaders that we need to understand the discipline of change management and the number of people who are actually getting the knowledge or certification that demonstrates we understand change management as a discipline we can apply communications to. We go into a lot of detail. There’s a free edition of Employee Signal every month. There’s also a paid version if somebody wants to pay a couple of bucks. I put some tools out there based on best practices, case studies, and workable tools that can be deployed immediately, along with some very specific AI-related prompts that can help you save a little time in getting to what you need in the world of employee communication. I’m happy to have shared this, and thank you for asking, Shel. I’m excited to launch this and keep things moving in the world that I care about and love so much. Shel Holtz: I’m a big fan of cross-promotion of podcasts on the FIR Podcast Network. Delighted to have you there. We’re going to have to talk about getting you set up so they can start appearing there. Mark Dollins: Great. Shel Holtz: Internal communicators, having seen the first edition of this, I would definitely urge you to subscribe. It’s a great resource. Mark, I’ll see you in two weeks. Mark Dollins: Thank you, Shel. You got it. Have a good one. The post OTSP #11: Are You Reaching Your Frontline? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.