Closing the frontline communication gap, one step at a time
By Sally Pritchett
CEO
The IC Index 2026 highlights clear gaps in the frontline communication experience. Here’s how organisations can start closing them.
The latest IC Index 2026 shows a consistently poorer communication experience for frontline employees than for their desk-based colleagues, with clear gaps in trust, leadership visibility, employee voice and manager communication.
Those findings set the scene for a recent IOIC South session hosted at Something Big, where Jennifer Sproul, Chief Executive of the Institute of Internal Communication, Andrew Boatman, Client Growth Consultant at Gallagher, and our Co-founder Sally Pritchett explored what communicators can do in practice to start closing those gaps.
The leadership and trust gap
Frontline employees are much less likely to hear directly from senior leaders. According to the IC Index 2026, when major change happens just 18% of frontline workers typically hear it from their senior leadership team, compared with 39% of colleagues who work mostly at a computer. One in five frontline employees say they hear about big changes through word of mouth.
There’s a corresponding gap in trust. Just 35% of frontline employees say they trust their CEO or most senior leader, compared with 54% of desk-based colleagues.
One question raised during the discussion summed up the challenge neatly: how do you trust people you’ve never met?
Closing that gap doesn’t mean adding another CEO email or video to your comms plan. It means thinking about how leaders become more visible and connected to the reality of frontline work.
That might mean leaders spending more time on site, listening directly to employees or working more closely with local leaders who understand what is happening on the ground. The important step is to give frontline employees more opportunities to see, hear from and speak to the people leading the organisation.
The voice gap
There’s also a significant difference in how safe employees feel speaking up.
Only 39% of frontline employees say people can share their opinion without fear of negative consequences, compared with 52% of those mostly working at a computer.
Communication alone can’t create psychological safety, but it can help create an environment where people feel part of the conversation rather than simply on the receiving end of it.
Sally shared DHL’s global ‘I Belong’ campaign where what could have been a traditional corporate message became an invitation for employees to tell their own stories. Leaders helped get the conversation started, but colleagues were then given the freedom to make the idea their own.
The practical challenge is to create communication people can genuinely participate in, rather than adding another response mechanism to an otherwise one-way conversation.
The manager gap
Managers remain central to the frontline communication experience. They’re also under enormous pressure.
Around one in four managers in frontline settings spends less than 15 minutes a day communicating with their team. And only 53% of frontline employees say their manager does a good job of adapting communication to their team’s context, compared with 69% of desk-based colleagues.
The encouraging part of the research is that support makes a real difference.
Only 48% of managers given no communication support feel equipped to lead conversations with their teams. That rises to around 90% when managers are given training or dedicated time to prepare.
Yet the discussion also highlighted how complicated that role has become with managers often finding themselves caught between competing organisational priorities.
As one example raised in the discussion, they may be asked to help teams work faster because output is down, while also reinforcing the importance of working safely. At the same time, they are expected to explain change, keep people motivated and answer questions about decisions they did not make, often while managing operational pressures of their own.
The answer to this problem isn’t another lengthy cascade pack.
Andrew talked about equipping managers before broadcasting, while Sally encouraged us to think about managers as people, not communication channels. That means giving them time to understand the message, usable language for difficult conversations and somewhere to go when they don’t have the answer.
Bringing local leaders in earlier can help too. They often know what other messages teams are hearing and where priorities may conflict, which means they can help sequence communication before managers are left to make sense of it.
The good news gap
One of the more striking IC Index findings was about good news. Just 56% of frontline employees say their organisation communicates good news effectively, compared with 70% of desk-based employees.
For bad news, the difference almost disappears: 44% compared with 46%.
That raises a useful question: what does good news actually look like for your frontline?
That answer may look different in every organisation. It could include business success, but it might also be recognition for great work, a local achievement or seeing frontline employees properly represented in the organisation’s story.
Sally shared DHL Defenders, a security campaign that deliberately positioned frontline employees as part of the solution. Rather than focusing on mistakes people might make, the campaign reframed the message to recognise the important role they played in protecting the business.
The way we communicate can focus only on what we need frontline employees to do, or it can also recognise the value of what they already contribute. The step here is to understand what good news matters to your frontline, then make sure their contribution is visible within the success your organisation shares.
There’s no silver bullet, but there are plenty of places to start
No employee app, new channel or AI tool is going to suddenly close the frontline communication gap. Technology can play a useful role, but it can’t create trust, give an overloaded manager more capacity or make people feel heard on its own.
Look at the frontline communication experience in your organisation. Where is the biggest gap? It might be connection with leaders, employee voice, pressure on managers or whether frontline employees feel recognised and valued.
Then start there.
So, what step could you take today to start closing the gap?
Where is the frontline communication gap in your organisation?
We can help you understand where your frontline communication experience is falling short, identify the gaps that matter most and decide where practical action could make the biggest difference. Talk to us about finding and closing the gaps in your frontline communication.
Think you have a frontline communications problem? It might be starting at head office.
By Sally Pritchett
CEO
Explore how to reduce frontline communication overload by joining up priorities, protecting employees' time and making messages count.
Frontline employees aren’t inherently hard to reach. Often, the problem is communication designed around desk-based ways of working.
But designing communication for the frontline is only part of the answer.
Because even the best-designed communication will struggle to land if it’s competing against multiple other messages for the same few minutes of attention.
Corporate news. Regional updates. Functional priorities. HR campaigns. Safety messages. IT updates. Leadership asks. Each one might be perfectly reasonable in isolation. But together, they can become noise.
So where does the frontline communication problem begin? Sometimes, it starts at head office.
Frontline employees don’t see your organisational chart
One of the challenges in large organisations is that communication tends to follow the structure of the business.
Corporate has something to say. A region has something else. Then HR, operations, IT, safety and individual functions all have their own priorities.
From inside those teams, each message feels important.
But the frontline employee on the receiving end doesn’t experience those messages as separate workstreams. They simply experience more communication.
And they have very little time to give it.
The IC Index 2026 found that most employees spend 10 minutes or less each day to engage with organisational communication, while one in five say they have no or hardly any time at all.
That should fundamentally change the way we think about what we ask people to read, watch, absorb and act on.
Because the question can’t simply be: “Is this message important enough to share?” It also needs to be: “Is it important enough to take up some of those ten minutes?”
Every message can’t be the priority
Communication overload rarely happens because somebody deliberately decides to overwhelm employees. It happens because every part of the organisation is looking at its own priorities.
The strategy update is important to the leadership team. The new people initiative matters to HR.
The system change matters to IT. The operational campaign matters to the region.
Everyone has a legitimate reason to communicate.
The problem comes when nobody is looking at the total experience of the employee receiving it all. If five teams independently decide their message is a priority, the frontline employee doesn’t receive five priorities. They receive competition.
And when everything is urgent, important and worthy of attention, it becomes much harder to work out what actually matters now.
That’s why frontline communication needs a gatekeeper.
Who is protecting the frontline’s attention?
By “gatekeeper”, we don’t mean one person standing between head office and the frontline with a giant red pen. It could be a communications team, an editorial process, a planning forum or a clear set of principles.
What matters is that somebody is looking across the organisation and asking:
- What does this audience genuinely need from us right now?
- What do they need to know, understand or do?
- What can be combined with something else?
- And what can wait?
That last question is important.
Internal communicators often spend a lot of time helping organisations communicate more. Sometimes our most valuable role is helping them communicate less, better.
Join the dots before the message reaches them
Reducing overload doesn’t necessarily mean important information disappears. It means doing more work before it reaches the employee.
Imagine someone receives one message about company strategy, another about regional priorities and another about what their function needs to deliver this quarter.
Organisationally, those may have three different owners. But do they need to be three different stories? Could they become one: Here’s where we’re going. Here’s what that means for our region. And here’s what we need you to focus on now.
That is the work of simplifying and combining narratives.
Because employees shouldn’t have to join the dots between corporate, regional, functional and local messages – especially with only 10 minutes to pay attention. The gatekeeper should join the dots before the message gets to them.
Earning the frontline’s attention
We know frontline environments are busy. Messages aren’t just competing with other communications, but also with customers, equipment, deadlines, safety requirements, colleagues and the task at hand in the moment.
Once we’ve determined what deserves attention, the next challenge is how to make it worth noticing. Being given space in the communications plan doesn’t guarantee anyone will pay attention.
This is where creativity matters.
That doesn’t necessarily mean making a message bigger or louder. It might mean a strong creative idea that makes the message easier to notice, understand and remember.
Making an employee app launch worth frontline attention
When DHL Express launched its Smart Connect employee app, it needed to reach 120,000 colleagues across 220 countries, many working on the frontline with limited access to traditional communication channels.
With a previous app experiencing low uptake, another corporate announcement wasn’t going to be enough.
We focused the launch campaign on what mattered to employees: finding information quickly, staying informed and connecting with colleagues. Distinctive illustrations helped the message stand out, while QR-enabled posters made it easy for frontline teams to access and download the app.
By making the benefits immediately relevant and easy to understand, the campaign helped drive more than 67,000 downloads in the first month, giving more colleagues a way to stay connected.
The frontline communication problem doesn’t always start with the frontline. So before asking how to get a message to cut through, first ask whether it deserves a share of their attention at all.
Protect the audience’s time. Join the dots for them. And when something really does matter, make it worth noticing.
Are competing messages making it harder to reach your frontline?
We help organisations bring together competing communication priorities, simplify complex messages and create campaigns that connect with frontline employees in the reality of their working day.
Explore our frontline communications expertise or get in touch to talk about the challenges you’re facing.
How to reach frontline employees. Spoiler alert: it’s not that hard.
By Sally Pritchett
CEO
Frontline employees aren't inherently hard to reach. The challenge is designing communication around how they actually work.
Saying frontline employees are “hard to reach” no longer washes. Too often, “hard to reach” becomes shorthand for communication that has been designed around office-based ways of working. Frontline employees aren’t inherently hard to reach; they’re hard to reach through communication created for people who sit at desks, check emails throughout the day and have regular access to an intranet.
The problem therefore isn’t necessarily reach, or channels. It’s a design problem.
Asking the wrong question creates the wrong solution
Instead of asking, “How do we get this message to frontline employees?”, reframe the question to, “How do we design this communication around the reality of their working day?”
That distinction matters.
One in five frontline workers say they hear about major organisational change through the grapevine rather than directly from leaders. Trust in executive leadership sits at just 35% among frontline employees, compared with 54% among desk-based colleagues. And frontline workers are more than twice as likely to say they spend no time reading communication updates.
It would be easy to look at that final statistic and conclude that frontline employees simply aren’t engaging.
But there’s a much more useful question to ask: Do they genuinely have the time, access or reason to pay attention in the first place?
Because too much organisational communication still starts with the same assumptions: that people have a work email address, regular access to a screen, time to read during office hours, a relatively quiet environment and scheduled opportunities to hear from leaders. For millions of frontline employees, none of those things can be taken for granted.
They may be working shifts, moving between locations, operating equipment, supporting customers or delivering time-critical services. They may technically have access to a platform, but no realistic opportunity to use it.
So when communication is designed around desk-based assumptions, frontline colleagues are left to do the adapting. They have to find the message, work out whether it’s relevant, translate the corporate language into what it actually means for them, and somehow fit all of that around their working day.
Start with the person, place and pressure
One reason frontline communication can feel difficult is that the word “frontline” hides an enormous amount of variation.
A cabin crew member, engineer, care worker, warehouse colleague and station team member might all be described as frontline. But their working realities are completely different. They face different pressures, work in different environments and have very different opportunities to access communication.
So before thinking about channels, first consider the person.
What do they already know? What does their role involve? What language do they use? How familiar are they with the subject? And what access to communication do they genuinely have?
Then, the place.
Where will they encounter the communication? On a shift? At a site? In a vehicle? In a customer-facing environment? At home between shifts?
And finally, pressure.
What else is demanding their attention at that moment? Safety? A customer? An operational deadline? Noise? A dozen other messages competing for attention?
That’s what should influence the communication before the channel or creative execution is decided. When communication is built around the realities of a distributed workforce, the audience suddenly becomes a lot less “hard to reach”.
Reaching the frontline, where they are
“One of my favourite frontline projects was a strategy launch for Yodel. The brief was simple: understanding of the strategy couldn’t stop at manager level. It had to reach the frontline too. Mission accepted.”
Sally Pritchett, CEO, Something Big
When Yodel asked us to launch its new strategy across the frontline, the first step was understanding how people actually worked.
At the time, its frontline workforce included around 11,000 employed colleagues, agency workers and self-employed or contracted drivers and couriers, spread across the UK. Many spent limited time in hubs or service centres and there was no single digital channel that could reliably reach everyone.
So rather than trying to force a digital solution, we looked for something people already had in common: regular team briefings.
We created a physical, visually led session aid that managers and supervisors could use to run a short strategy briefing wherever their teams happened to be, from a rest room to a corner of a warehouse.
The session required no advance preparation. The aid included a simple script, questions to prompt discussion and guidance to help managers respond. It was designed to be practical, robust enough for an operational environment and, most importantly, easy to use.
We also tested it with frontline teams before launch, making sure the content made sense, felt relevant and spoke to people with the respect their roles deserved.
The result was strong reach across the workforce, exceeding our targets. Pre and post-session surveys also showed a measurable increase in understanding of the strategy.
Create communications for notice, understanding and action
Once you understand the person, place and pressure, the next question is whether the communication has been created to work in that reality.
Start with three simple tests:
Will they notice it?
Not just: Have we sent it or published it? But will it actually show up somewhere that makes sense in the flow of their day?
That might be a shift handover. A safety huddle or toolbox talk. A break area. A digital screen. A manager conversation. A one-page prompt.
None of these are especially exciting new communication channels. That’s partly the point.
Instead of constantly asking employees to go somewhere else for communication, we can take communication into moments that already exist. Fit the message into the rhythm of work, rather than adding another task to the working day.
Will they understand it?
Frontline employees shouldn’t have to decode corporate language or work out for themselves why something matters.
The message needs to be clear, relevant and easy to grasp quickly. What’s changing? Why does it matter? And what does it mean for me, in my role?
Can they act on it?
There’s little value in asking someone to do something if the realities of their working day make it difficult or impossible.
So the final test is whether the communication leads to an action that is realistic in the context of the role, the environment and the pressures they are working under.
Design for the frontline, not the desktop
Frontline employees aren’t hard to reach because they work differently from office-based colleagues. They become hard to reach when communication asks them to adapt to a system that wasn’t designed around them.
So, the next time we describe an audience as “hard to reach”, perhaps we should look at the communication first.
Because if we understand the person, the place and the pressure – and design around what they need to notice, understand and act on – reaching them might not be the hard part after all.