Frontline employees are critically important for the continued productivity and growth of an organization. Yet most manufacturing organizations we speak with at Sparrow Connected face challenges reaching and communicating with their frontline employees.
We gathered our top five articles on how internal communications teams can better reach frontline manufacturing employees.
Like so many organizations that have a large percentage of deskless, frontline employees, Pacific Western Transportation (PWT), faced communication challenges due to scale and diversity of operations.
Drivers and other frontline staff, who make up the majority of PWT’s 5,000+ employees, had limited opportunity to interact with the parent organization.
Find out what you can learn from PWT’s story.
You’ve tried everything from email, to printed handouts in the lunchrooms, to PA announcements, to digital signage, to posters, but your messages STILL don’t seem to be reaching your workforce. You hear things, like “I’m out of the loop,” “I was never told about that,” or “I didn’t see that message.” Talk about frustrating!
There are so many factors that affect your ability to communicate critical information to frontline workers.
Learn how mobile apps and SMS can improve communication with frontline employees.
In a manufacturing environment, much of the "internal communication" employees receive consists of short, formal briefings from their supervisors, at a fixed time – less than once a week, early in a shift or at the end of the shift.
But employees go about their jobs and then connect socially and that's where the "real" communication tends to take place.
Learn more about social influence and how to harness it.
A typical construction site has hundreds of individuals working at any time. That workforce is made up of a mix of full-time and employees, as well as contractors and subcontractors. Some construction sites even have several shifts overlapping by a few minutes.
In addition, the age range can be significant, adding additional complexity in terms of preferred means for being communicated with. Sounds similar to manufacturing, doesn’t it?
Learn internal comms strategies from the construction industry that you can apply to manufacturing.
Focusing on the challenges faced by frontline workers, particularly under cultural and political environments, two highly regarded internal comms experts talk about the challenges, solutions & best practices of internal comms for deskless/frontline employees.
Learn how to solve common internal comms challenges for manufacturing companies.
Follow us on LinkedIn and together we can accelerate business performance and elevate the world's communication leaders.