What Do Frontline Employees Actually Want?

It's easy to justify equipping your desk employees with the proper tools to do their daily job as they generally work from one location.

But what about your frontline and deskless employees?

Frontline workers face a whole other set of barriers to communication that can make it difficult for them to be properly engaged. Per Emergence Capital, 80% of the global workforce is deskless — yet these workers are routinely excluded from the same communications desk workers receive by default, simply because they lack a corporate email address or VPN access. As they are primarily mobile and not always reachable, work can quickly become very isolating and disengaging. One concrete solution to these issues is implementing an Employee SuperApp that works on personal devices without requiring a corporate email or VPN. But at a more prescriptive level, there is a lot you can do to start to identify the gaps.

A few questions you should ask internally:

• Do your frontline workers have a mobile-first way to receive company communications without logging into a desktop or VPN?
• Do they understand how their daily work connects to the company's broader goals?
• Do they have easy, on-demand access to the tools, training, and resources they need to do their jobs?

If the answer is no to any of these three questions, then it might be time to reassess what your frontline workers actually want.

From our experience, we have found that what frontline workers want is:

• To feel like they matter to the company and their voices are heard
• To understand the company's big picture goals (and how they contribute to those goals)
• Easy access to technology and resources
• To stop receiving irrelevant company communications

When you start to take those factors into account, you will naturally see employee engagement levels rise among your frontline workforce. This can lead to increased efficiency, improved employee satisfaction, and more. The cost of ignoring these signals is real: replacing a single frontline employee costs between $4,400 and $15,000, making disengagement a direct financial risk, not just a culture problem.

How to Act on These Insights

Understanding what frontline employees want is only half the equation. Here are three concrete first steps organizations can take without waiting for a full platform rollout.

1. Audit your current communication channels for frontline reach. Per Social Edge Consulting, 91% of organizations operate an intranet — yet nearly a third of employees never log in, and only 13% use it daily. If your primary communication channel is a desktop intranet, a significant portion of your frontline workforce is structurally unreachable. Start by mapping which channels your frontline workers can actually access from a personal mobile device, without a VPN or corporate email.

2. Run a targeted employee engagement survey focused on tool accessibility and communication relevance. Frontline workers who feel unheard rarely volunteer that feedback unprompted. A short employee engagement questionnaire — five to eight questions focused on whether workers receive relevant information, understand company goals, and can access resources on the go — surfaces the specific gaps faster than any top-down audit. The 2026 Internal Communications Trends eBook outlines the communication gaps most commonly reported by frontline teams.

3. Prioritize role-targeted, AI-curated communications over broadcast messaging. The "stop receiving irrelevant communications" want maps directly to a concrete capability: AI-powered feeds that filter and surface content by role, location, and shift. Per IDC, employees already spend 2.5 hours per day searching for information — irrelevant noise compounds that problem. An employee experience platform that delivers role-targeted content by default eliminates the noise without requiring workers to configure anything themselves. For retail teams specifically, the Store Manager's Playbook for Smarter Retail Scheduling shows how targeted communications reduce operational friction at the store level.

Organizations that have acted on these steps report measurable outcomes. PetSmart reported a 4x industry engagement multiple after deploying a mobile employee app. OU Health achieved 87% workforce engagement within a few months of launching a branded employee app. These results are not outliers — they reflect what happens when frontline workers get the same quality of communication infrastructure that desk workers have always had. For a deeper look at how employee engagement solutions translate into retention and performance outcomes, the 2026 HR Trends eBook provides a useful benchmark framework.

Webinar — What Do Your Frontline Employees Actually Want?

Want to learn more about how you can actually engage your frontline workers?

Check out this webinar where one of our team members does a deep dive into how you can better engage your frontline workers and equip them with the tools to succeed with an Employee SuperApp.

In this webinar, you'll learn:

• Why your frontline workers often feel disconnected from management
• How you can properly equip frontline workers with modern technology
• How you can keep your frontline workers engaged and in the loop

Watch the webinar: What Do Your Frontline Workers Actually Want?

What Is an Employee SuperApp and Why Does It Matter for Frontline Teams?

An Employee SuperApp consolidates communications, task management, training, and resource access into a single mobile application that works on personal devices — no corporate email, no VPN, no IT provisioning required. This matters because the structural barrier for most frontline workers is not motivation; it is access. Per SWOOP Analytics, the average employee spends just six minutes per day using intranet tools — a figure that reflects how poorly traditional platforms serve workers who are not at a desk.

A unified employee experience platform changes that equation by meeting workers where they already are: on their phones, between shifts, on the floor. For industries like retail and hospitality, where shift-based schedules make synchronous communication nearly impossible, a mobile-first app is not a convenience — it is the only realistic channel for consistent engagement. The MangoApps recognition in a leading research firm's intranet platforms evaluation reflects how this category of platform is being assessed against enterprise-grade communication and engagement standards.

What Should You Measure to Know If Frontline Engagement Is Working?

Engagement is not a feeling — it is a set of measurable behaviors. The right employee engagement software surfaces leading indicators before turnover or productivity loss becomes visible in operational data. Key metrics to track include:

• App adoption rate within the first 90 days — a proxy for whether the tool is actually accessible and useful to frontline workers
• Content engagement by role and location — identifies which teams are receiving relevant communications and which are being flooded with noise
• Survey response rates on employee engagement questionnaires — low response rates signal distrust or disengagement, not just survey fatigue
• Training completion rates — per Gallup's research on employee engagement and development, workers who have access to learning opportunities are significantly more likely to stay; the connection between training and employee engagement is one of the strongest levers available to frontline managers

For organizations building out a measurement framework, Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace provides current benchmarks on engagement drivers that apply directly to frontline and deskless populations.