4 keys to new hire comms for frontline workers

The challenge for internal communicators reaching new frontline workers is about more than just getting the message across. It’s about proving the company understands its employees from the outset.

“In a lot of companies, there’s a rift between the field experience and what corporate headquarters knows,” said JP Ervin, internal communications manager at STO Building Group.

“Some of our superintendents are sitting on a 104-degree job site in October in Phoenix. They’re not thinking about AI all day. That perspective changes how you approach employee communication, especially at the start.”

For communicators, that insight changes everything about how onboarding should be built. Onboarding comms need to reflect the realities frontline workers are facing. They need to be designed with the field in mind and be grounded in both company culture and employee listening.

Here are four concrete steps that internal comms pros can take to design effective new hire comms for frontline workers:

1. Standardize the essentials and localize the delivery

Onboarding comms for frontline workers need to strike a careful balance. If they’re too centralized in the corporate experience, they can seem unaware of the realities of the workers they’re trying to reach. If they’re too localized, there’s a risk of disconnection with the larger company. Ervin told Ragan that standardizing the key messages from corporate and allowing for individualized delivery can help make onboarding stick.

“We’re a family of builders working across different companies, regions and sectors,” Ervin said. “There are big differences in size and culture — some companies are pushing 2,000 people and others are just a couple hundred. So what we try to do is strike a balance between the regional and local culture and the enterprise-level stuff. We let regional offices approach onboarding in a way that fits their culture, while also providing strong enterprise-level resources.”

Ervin also detailed some of the ways new hire comms go out at STO.

“There are packets,” Ervin said. “There’s also digital content. And one helpful thing is that we have universal adoption of our intranet. We didn’t have to convince people to download something or sign up. If you have an email, you have access on day one. These steps allow us to centralize resources while still letting local teams own their piece of it.”

2. Tie clarity to culture

When frontline workers show up on their first day, they need to understand quickly. They need answers to questions about what tools they’ll use, what safety standards apply and what’s required immediately versus in the future. But when onboarding is too rooted in logistics, it becomes a staid information dump. Ervin said his organization is committed to pinning down the basics first, but also recognizes the importance of the cultural part of onboarding for frontline workers.

“We’re trying to do more cultural integration as part of the process. It’s not just ‘here’s the policy and procedure and tech stack.’ We’re thinking about how to create a sense of shared connection so people understand the big picture, which is our company and why it matters.”

STO Building Group has a program called Safety 360 that’s rolled out to all new employees, which focuses on more than just keeping physically safe on the construction site.

“The program is a huge point of pride for us,” Ervin said. “It goes beyond just checking regulatory boxes. We’re promoting a broader culture of safety — and that includes mental health. Our industry has one of the highest suicide rates of any industry, so treating mental health as a safety issue is a key part of onboarding.”

Framing mental health as a safety issue signals that the company sees the whole worker and not just the job they’re performing.

3. Learn about what the frontliners need

If onboarding for frontline workers is designed back at corporate without any insights into what people in the field are experiencing and feeling, it’s bound to fall flat with its intended audience. Ervin said that the biggest key for internal communicators to gain credibility is proximity. If you want your onboarding comms to resonate, you need to construct them with the people they’re intended for.

“We’ve really been trying to develop more of a ground-up approach to communication,” he said. “Half our staff are field workers, so we’re doing more listening and amplifying their voices. The philosophy is that they often know better what works than I do.”

He also shared some details on how listening shows up in onboarding comms.

“We have a Superintendent Roundtable that brings together supers from across the STO Building Group family,” Ervin said. “They gather what works and what doesn’t, and we’re turning that into materials, proposals and toolkits that shape onboarding and job site culture.”

4. Connect the job site to the bigger picture

Frontline workers often find themselves in physically challenging and sometimes isolating situations. Communicating culture and a sense of belonging can’t be as abstract as it sometimes is for corporate workers. Internal communicators need to make belonging visible and practical — through ownership programs, mobility pathways and small cultural signals that show the company understands daily life on the job.

Ervin said that STO’s stock purchase program is one way that the company’s onboarding process makes this connection.

“It’s not just about getting people to sign up for the program,” he said. “It’s about conveying what it means to have a vested interest in your company — to really own what you’re building.”

He added that onboarding comms need to go beyond just the everyday descriptions of the job and make employees feel valued from the outset.

“Some of our teams are experimenting with small but meaningful ideas, like bringing a barber onto a job site because workers are there 12 hours a day and don’t have time for basics like a haircut,” Ervin said. “We’re gathering those ideas and building recommendations around them that then find their way into our onboarding communications.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.