In any company with a frontline workforce, "just use Teams" is probably the most well-intentioned bad advice going right now.
Swap in "post it in Slack" or "send an email" and you get the same problem with different logos.
The mistake is an easy one. These tools work so well for desk workers that it's natural to assume they'll travel to the rest of the workforce just as smoothly.
Tools like Teams, Slack, even email were all largely built for people who start their day by opening a laptop. Company device. Company inbox. Meetings that leave gaps where you can actually check a channel or read a message.
That's a real worker. It's just not the one you're trying to reach.
The frontline employee clocks in for a shift. No company device. No email address. No window between meetings because there are no meetings.
They're not ignoring the channel. They were never set up to see it.
When the message doesn't land, the instinct is to blame adoption. But you can't adopt a tool you were never set up to use.
That's not a workforce problem. That's a design decision that got mistaken for a strategy.
Real frontline communication starts with a different question — not "what tools do we already have?" but "what does this person's workday actually look like, and how do we reach them inside of it?"
The answer is rarely Teams, Slack, or any other tool that was built for the people already sitting at a desk.
Short, human-written takes on frontline work, product, and AI — one email, once a week.
Andy Tolton is VP of Marketing at MangoApps, where he leads content, brand, and go-to-market strategy for the company's AI-powered unified workforce platform. His focus is on helping frontline organizations understand what's possible when communication, operations, and knowledge all live in one place, and making that case through storytelling that sounds like a person, not a press release. Andy's perspective is shaped by nearly two decades across communications, PR, and marketing in tech, sports, and enterprise software, and a belief that the best marketing starts with paying attention to how work actually happens on the ground.
