How to communicate change to frontline employees when they don’t read email

Katie Hickman is the founder of Confluent Strategic Communications.

You have a change communications plan. The emails are scheduled, the intranet page is built, the manager toolkit is ready and maybe there’s even a town hall on the calendar.

Then someone asks a deceptively difficult question: How are we going to reach our frontline employees?

But in my experience, the question isn’t how to reach frontline employees. It’s how to design communication around how they actually work, what they need to know and when they need to know it.

I saw this firsthand during a global technology transformation that replaced roughly 80 technology tools across 40 countries and approximately 8,000 colleagues. Most of those employees were field-based technicians, salespeople, service employees and installers. They traveled to customer locations, served customers and generated revenue. Their workday wasn’t organized around checking email or visiting the intranet.

The transformation was also much bigger than replacing technology. It changed business processes, responsibilities, controls, ownership and ways of working. Employees in different roles and countries were affected differently. Some would have access to fewer tools because they would only need the technology required for their jobs.

That meant the communication challenge wasn’t simply getting information in front of people. We had to help employees understand what was changing, why it was changing, what it meant for their role and what they needed to do differently.

For frontline workforces, that’s the real communication challenge.

Stop treating ‘communicate early and often’ as the strategy

“Communicate early and often” sounds like good advice for a major transformation. But for frontline employees, it’s a good way to become ignored quickly.

The challenge isn’t simply deciding how early to start communicating. It’s deciding what is actually useful to communicate at each point in the transformation.

Eighteen months before a major technology rollout, there may be plenty to say about the business problem the organization is trying to solve and why the transformation matters. There likely is not enough information to help a technician understand how a future process will work.

That distinction matters because transformation details change. Tools are being built, timelines shift, testing uncovers issues and processes are refined. As the organization moves through end-to-end testing and user acceptance testing, the details employees care about become much clearer.

If you communicate those details too early, you risk creating a different problem. Employees hear one version of what is going to happen, then another, then another. Over time, they can stop paying attention or start questioning whether the project team actually knows what is changing.

That doesn’t mean waiting until launch to communicate. It means being deliberate about how much detail is useful when.

For example, I would expect a frontline audience to need much more active engagement in the roughly eight weeks leading up to a significant change, outside of any legal or regulatory requirements. At that point, the organization should be able to get much more specific about what is changing, what employees will experience and what they need to do.

Earlier in the transformation, the communication can stay at the business level. As the organization gets closer to launch, it should become increasingly connected to the work.

That is particularly important for frontline employees because they have limited time and little patience for information that doesn’t help them do their jobs. If communications asks them to pay attention to something that won’t affect them for another year, they may be less inclined to pay attention when the information finally becomes important.

The art is knowing when to give people enough information to understand the significance of the change without asking them to absorb details that aren’t settled or useful yet.

Training is not the same as readiness

Another common mistake is assuming that if frontline employees complete their system training, they’re ready for the change.

Training readiness asks: Can this employee use the system?

Business readiness asks: Can the business operate on day one?

Those are different questions.

In this transformation, we developed a business readiness checklist focused on what the organization needed to be able to do when the new technology went live. Could employees quote new projects? Could they provide service? Could the organization bill customers and receive payment? Could the customer experience continue without disruption?

That doesn’t mean every part of the technology has to be perfect. A business can operate with temporary manual workarounds while issues are resolved.

Communication plays an important role in that readiness. Employees need to understand what is changing and why before they get into the mechanics of how to use a new system. Leaders need confidence that their teams understand what is expected and know where to get help.

Build a network of people that employees trust

Trusted local voices can be one of the most effective parts of a change strategy.

During the transformation, we built a change champion network. Local leaders nominated people who were respected by their colleagues, understood the local work, were strong adopters of change and could influence others.

They were listeners, translators and could quickly identify concerns that their peers likely had.

An employee may be much more comfortable asking a colleague who understands the day-to-day work, “What does this actually mean for us?” than asking someone from a corporate technology team who doesn’t understand the operational realities of their job.

Change champions could surface questions and concerns back to the central team while also helping colleagues understand what was happening locally. That made the network especially valuable as the organization moved toward launch.

Measure whether the business is ready

Finally, don’t let communication effectiveness become a proxy for email metrics. Open rates, attendance and training completion can tell you whether people interacted with something. They don’t necessarily tell you whether employees understand what is changing or whether the business can operate when the change goes live.

For frontline transformations, I’d focus on practical questions. Do employees understand what they need to do differently? Have they completed the required training? Do leaders believe their teams understand the changes? Do employees know where to go for help? And one of the most important questions: Can the business perform its critical day-one activities?

Those measures connect communication to the reason the transformation exists in the first place: to change how the business operates.