Deskless is not the same as remote#
Around 80 percent of the world's workforce is deskless, roughly 2.7 billion people, and most internal communications strategies are built for the other 20 percent.
Before anything else, separate two groups that get lumped together. A remote worker is at a computer, just not in your office. A deskless worker is not at a computer at all: they are on a ward, a production line, a shop floor, a rig, a bus route, a construction site. The distinction matters because almost every fix designed for remote work assumes a screen, and that assumption is exactly what fails here.
There is also meaningful variation inside the deskless category itself. Someone working alone in a vehicle all day has completely different information access from someone on a production line surrounded by fifteen colleagues, who in turn differs from a retail employee working four-hour shifts across three sites. How people actually do the work determines how they can receive information and how often they can have a conversation about it. Treating all deskless workers as one audience is the first mistake, and it is why generic frontline strategies underperform even when they are well resourced.
Deskless workers are also concentrated in the sectors where communication failure is most expensive: healthcare, manufacturing, retail, logistics, and construction. These are environments where a misunderstood procedure is a safety event rather than an awkward meeting.
Why the default playbook fails#
Search for advice on this and you will find a consistent answer: adopt a mobile-first frontline app. That answer comes almost entirely from companies selling mobile-first frontline apps, and while the tooling is often genuinely useful, the research points somewhere less convenient.
Studies by Redefining Communications, drawing on more than 350 staff across 14 organizations in the UK and Ireland across two waves in 2019 and 2023, found that investing in line managers' communication skills has the biggest impact on this group, despite the widespread belief that digital tools are what will solve it. That finding survives a global pandemic sitting between the two research waves, which is about as robust as internal comms research gets.
The structural obstacles explain why tools alone underdeliver:
No corporate email, and often no corporate device. Whatever you build has to work for people who have never had a company inbox. If your fallback assumption is "we will email it," a large share of your workforce is outside the system by default.
Personal device reluctance. Asking people to install a work app on a personal phone, use personal data, and receive work notifications outside paid hours is a bigger ask than most comms plans acknowledge. Some will do it. Enough will not, so you cannot build your primary channel on it.
No slack in the day. A knowledge worker can read an update between meetings. Someone on a production line or a ward cannot stop to read anything. Communication has to fit into an existing gap rather than assume one exists.
**Shift patterns break everything synchronously. **** A Tuesday 10 am all-hands excludes anyone on nights, anyone on rotation, and anyone whose shift started at 5 am. Anything live reaches a fraction of the audience by design.
None of this is solved by a better app on its own. It is solved by designing around how the work actually happens.
The finding that should reshape your channel mix#
Here is the most useful single insight in the research, and the one most comms plans ignore: deskless workers are verbal communicators. Office-based knowledge workers, including most managers and most comms teams, tend not to be.
That mismatch creates ongoing friction. Deskless workers prefer to communicate by speaking rather than in writing. The people producing communication for them prefer to write, because writing is how office work is done and because a written artifact feels like proof the communication happened.
So the standard output is a written update, produced by people who process information by reading, aimed at an audience that processes information by talking and listening. Then everyone is surprised when engagement is poor and concludes the content needed better formatting.
The practical implication is not that writing is banned. It is that written communication should not be your primary channel for this group, and that any format carrying voice, whether that is a manager conversation, a briefing, a short audio update, or a video, is working with the grain rather than against it.
Line managers are your channel, whether you planned it or not#
Follow the verbal finding to its conclusion, and you land on line managers, because they are the verbal channel that already exists.
Nearly all deskless workers rely on their line manager for information. And the research surfaces a consequence that should worry any comms lead: if employees think their line manager is a poor communicator, they conclude that communication across the entire organization is poor. Your carefully produced company-wide content gets judged by the quality of a five-minute shift briefing you never saw.
This is where most organizations are structurally exposed. Industry data shows 87 percent of communicators consider managers lacking the skills or capacity to communicate a moderate or significant risk, while only around 21 percent actively provide manager toolkits. The most important channel for the hardest-to-reach audience is the least supported one.
Fixing this is cheap relative to a platform purchase. Before any significant announcement, give managers a one-page pack containing: the three points that must be said out loud, the questions people will actually ask with honest answers to each, what is not yet decided and when it will be, and a two-minute spoken version. Two minutes is deliberate. It has to fit into a shift handover, not a meeting.
The objection here is real: managers are busy, and many did not want a communication role. That is true, and it does not change the fact that they are already the channel. The choice is not whether they communicate; it is whether they do it with support or improvise it.
Do not invade the third space#
One of the more counterintuitive findings concerns where you place communication physically.
The third space is the area between where someone works and where they live: the canteen, the break room, the locker room. It is intuitively appealing to comms teams because it is where the audience gathers and stands still. It is also, for the people using it, the one part of the working day that is theirs. It is where they decompress and talk to colleagues, not where they do the job.
Filling it with screens, posters, and campaign messaging is experienced as intrusive rather than helpful, and it can actively damage sentiment toward communication generally. Use it lightly if at all, and prefer things people can choose to engage with over things that demand attention. The point is not that break rooms are off limits. It is that attention there is not free just because people are physically present.
Relevance means location, not just role#
Deskless workers consistently ask for content relevant to their work and their site. The underlying reason is worth sitting with: for this group, belonging tends to come from the people immediately around them rather than from the organization as a whole. Their team and their site are the unit that feels real. Head office is an abstraction.
That reframes what "relevant" means. Segmenting by job function is a start, but segmenting by location is often what actually lands, because a message about their site is a message about their world. This matters more given that frontline employees receive the least strategy and change communication of any employee group in most organizations, so the little they do get needs to earn its place.
The practical version: for every company-wide message, ask what this means at each site, and let local managers add that layer rather than shipping the corporate version untouched. Industry data shows only about 20 percent of comms teams tailor messages regularly despite three-quarters agreeing it matters, so doing this at all puts you ahead of most.
The playbook#
Pulling the research into a sequence you can run:
- Map how the work actually happens. For each deskless group, document shift patterns, device access, whether they work alone or in teams, how much they move between sites, and when in the day a gap genuinely exists. This is a half-day exercise that most teams skip, and that determines everything downstream.
- Audit who your real channels are. In most cases, it is line managers, then colleagues, then anything official. Rank them honestly rather than by what your channel strategy claims.
- Fix the manager layer first. One-page packs before every major announcement, with a two-minute spoken version. This is the highest-return intervention available, and it does not require procurement.
- Give voice-based formats a real role. Whether that is briefings, short audio, or video, stop making written text carry the primary load for an audience that communicates verbally.
- Segment by site, not just by role. Let local context be added locally.
- Leave the third space mostly alone. Prefer opt-in over broadcast wherever people are trying to rest.
- Design for asynchronous by default. Anything live excludes shift workers. If you run a town hall, and in frontline-heavy environments in-person town halls are rated the most effective channel available, make an on-demand version that carries the same content, because effectiveness drops sharply when the same format simply moves to video call.
- Measure comprehension by group, not reach overall. An aggregate open rate hides the fact that the office population is carrying your numbers. Break it out by site and shift, or you will not see the problem.
Where audio fits, and where it does not#
The verbal-communicator finding is the reason audio deserves consideration for this audience specifically, rather than as a general trend. Audio matches how deskless workers already prefer to receive information; it works while hands are busy and eyes are occupied, it does not require sitting down with a screen, and it is inherently asynchronous, which solves the shift problem that breaks live formats.
It also carries tone. For a workforce that often feels distant from head office, hearing an actual explanation rather than reading a memo does something a written update cannot.
We build a tool in this space, so treat the next paragraph as an interested party talking. Sprep converts documents you already have, such as policy updates, safety briefings, and onboarding material, into short two-host conversational podcasts, with a person reviewing and approving the script before any audio is generated. It distributes to Slack, Teams, an LMS, or a private podcast feed, and an approved master script can be generated in over 70 languages on Team plans, which matters because frontline populations are frequently the most linguistically diverse group in a company, as covered in our guide to multilingual communication in the workplace. Dätwyler, a global manufacturer, uses it for onboarding and internal communications. If you are considering a regular internal show rather than one-off updates, the practical setup questions are covered in our guide to launching an internal podcast.
Where audio is the wrong answer for this audience: anything requiring precise reference, since nobody should be checking a torque specification or a dosage by scrubbing through audio. Anything urgent, because a shift worker may not listen for two days. Anything genuinely two-way, because audio broadcasts and this group's biggest unmet need is being heard rather than talked at. And it does not substitute for the manager layer. If you deploy audio instead of fixing manager communication, you have added a channel to a structure that was already the problem.
The honest summary is that no format solves frontline communication on its own. The research points consistently at people, relevance, and timing first, with format as the multiplier rather than the fix. That ordering is the same one we argue for in our internal communications strategy guide.
FAQ#
What is a deskless worker? A deskless worker is someone whose job does not involve sitting at a computer, such as nurses, retail staff, manufacturing operators, drivers, and construction workers. They make up roughly 80 percent of the global workforce, around 2.7 billion people, and are concentrated in healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and logistics.
What is the difference between deskless and remote workers? A remote worker is at a computer, just not in a company office, so most digital communication reaches them normally. A deskless worker is not at a computer at all during the working day. Strategies designed for remote work almost always assume screen access, which is why they underperform with deskless populations.
Why is it so hard to communicate with frontline workers? Several structural reasons compound: many have no corporate email or device, they cannot stop work to read, shift patterns make live events exclusionary, and asking people to install work apps on personal phones meets real resistance. On top of that, most communication is written, while research shows this group prefers verbal communication.
What is the most effective channel for deskless workers? Line managers, in almost every study. Nearly all deskless workers rely on their manager for information, and research finds that improving manager communication skills has more impact than digital tools. There is also a reputational multiplier: if employees rate their manager a poor communicator, they tend to judge all organizational communication as poor.
Do we need a frontline communications app? It can help, but it is not the first move. The research consistently finds that manager capability outperforms tooling, and an app cannot fix irrelevant content or a message that assumes people have time to read. Sort the manager layer and content relevance first, then evaluate whether a platform closes a gap that still remains.
Why shouldn't we put communications in the break room? The break room, canteen, and locker room form what researchers call the third space, which is where employees relax and socialize rather than work. Filling it with campaign messaging tends to be experienced as intrusive and can worsen sentiment toward communication overall. Use it sparingly and prefer content people can opt into.
How should we segment communications for frontline teams? By location as well as role. Deskless workers tend to derive their sense of belonging from the people immediately around them rather than from the organization, so site-specific relevance lands harder than company-wide messaging. A practical approach is to let local managers add site context to corporate messages rather than distributing the corporate version unchanged.
Does audio work for deskless workers? It fits this audience better than most formats, because research shows they prefer verbal communication, and audio works while hands and eyes are occupied. It is also asynchronous, which solves the shift-pattern problem. It is a poor fit for anything needing precise reference, anything urgent, and anything requiring a two-way conversation.
How do you measure communication with deskless workers? Break results out by site and shift rather than reporting organization-wide averages, which are usually inflated by the office-based population. Better signals than reach include whether repeat questions drop after an announcement, whether training completion holds across sites, and whether safety or error rates differ between locations receiving different communication treatment.
How do you reach shift workers who are never online at the same time? Design asynchronously by default. Assume any live event reaches only a fraction of the audience and produce an on-demand version carrying the same content. Where a live in-person format is available it tends to perform best in frontline environments, but the recorded or written follow-up is what reaches the other shifts.
See what this looks like for your frontline teams#
If you are trying to reach shift workers and site-based teams who never open the email, we can walk you through how other comms teams are running it: turning existing briefings and policies into short audio, distributing to Slack, Teams, or an LMS, and producing site or language variants from one approved script.
See it in action