Saturday, September 13, 2025
Saturday, September 13, 2025
Anete Vesere, Speakap
The morning shift began before the sun had made up its mind. Out by the loading dock, the air was heavy with the smell of damp cardboard and diesel, the ground still slick from last night’s rain. Leila tugged her jacket tighter as she crossed the yard, weaving past forklifts and stacks of shrink-wrapped pallets.
Her badge beeped at the entrance, though the scanner froze for a moment before letting her in. She’d long stopped noticing the pause — like so many little inconveniences in this place, it had just folded into routine.
Inside, the chatter was already picking up. Theo, who everyone called “professor” because he had a way of explaining even the simplest thing like it was a lecture, was going on about a new stacking rule. Apparently pallets weren’t supposed to go higher than chest-level anymore.
“Chest-level?” Javi scoffed, rolling his shoulders as if warming up for a fight. “Whose chest? Yours? Mine? That matters, you know.” The others laughed.
Leila smiled, though faintly. She hadn’t seen any memo. There might have been something pinned up in the break room, but the board was always cluttered with half-faded flyers — blood donation drives, lost items, HR reminders. She hadn’t been in there long enough to sort through it.
When she got to her station, a faint vibration in the floor told her the conveyor was already running. The machine had been rattling louder these past weeks, like a cough in its chest. She’d heard maintenance would come by, but no one ever confirmed.
Her day unfolded in these small uncertainties: Was the overtime approved for Friday? Were the gloves in storage actually replaced with the new safety kind? Did the company picnic mean they’d be cutting hours next week? The questions didn’t come in dramatic bursts. They trickled, quietly, like water finding cracks.
At break, someone mentioned a new company initiative — “something about employee wellbeing” — and Leila caught herself laughing. Not out of cynicism, but because the words floated in the air with no anchor. Wellbeing? Where was it written, who had explained it, how would it show up in their shifts?
Nobody knew.
The group drifted back to their stations. Javi kept joking about pallet heights. Theo muttered about proper guidelines. Leila carried the silence in between. She didn’t expect answers anymore. But she felt the absence of them all the same..
Communication wasn’t the extra piece of her work. It was the ground she stood on — or tried to. And lately, that ground felt thinner each week.
The blind spot isn’t that communication is ignored. It’s that most organizations don’t see communication as the very essence of frontline employee experience. Too often, it gets treated as a delivery mechanism — a side channel to ‘get the message out.’ But for the majority of workers, communication is the experience. It’s how they know what’s expected, how they stay safe, how they feel recognized, how they know they belong.
And that’s the uncomfortable truth: the “employee experience” we celebrate is often a desk experience dressed up as universal. Meanwhile, the frontline — the retail associate juggling five customers, the nurse sprinting between patients, the driver on a 12-hour route — gets whatever trickles down.
Think back to Leila on the factory floor. None of her challenges that morning were about “values” or “belonging.” They were about basics: knowing the new pallet rule, trusting that the conveyor would be fixed, feeling confident she wasn’t the last to know about schedule changes.
Over 80% of the global workforce is frontline. And most of them face hurdles like Leila’s every single day.
Here’s where the disconnect stings: we talk about “employee experience” like it’s a list of shiny add-ons — culture, wellbeing, recognition, learning. But for people like Leila, those things only exist if the basics land first. If the updates don’t reach her… If the feedback loop never closes… If she’s left piecing things together on the floor… then all the rest is just noise.
For Leila and millions like her, experience lives and dies in the small moments:
Without those foundations, everything else crumbles. Culture can’t be credible. Recognition feels hollow. Engagement never sticks.
When communication is treated as just a channel — instead of the foundation of frontline experience — the cracks show quickly:
From HQ, it doesn’t always look broken. The intranet is updated, emails are sent, slides are polished. But on the frontline? The message never lands. And every missed update chips away at trust — quietly but relentlessly. Because for employees like Leila, communication isn’t extra. It is their experience.
For someone like Leila, communication is the experience. It’s how she knows what’s changing this week, whether the safety rule applies to her shift, if her feedback mattered, or if she’s the last to know again. Strip that away, and everything else — culture, recognition, engagement — collapses under its own weight.
So flip the script. Stop starting with feelings and trying to layer function underneath. Start with function, then let the feelings follow.
Ask yourself:
Get those right, and the rest finally sticks. Culture feels believable. Recognition feels earned. Purpose starts to resonate. Because your frontline can actually trust they won’t be left in the dark.
At Speakap, we’ve worked with hundreds of frontline brands. And here’s the pattern we see every time: the moment you stop treating communication as the side channel and start treating it as the foundation of employee experience, everything shifts.
When someone like Leila opens her phone and instantly finds what she needs — onboarding steps, today’s safety update, a quick message from her manager — that’s not “just communication.” That’s the employee experience, lived in real time.
And when she gives feedback and actually sees something change? That’s not a survey result. That’s belonging. That’s engagement. That’s values moving from the slide deck into the shift floor. That’s the foundation of an employee experience that is built with the frontline in mind.
Now one thing is to talk about in this case a fictional character named Leila. But we’ve seen this play out first hand too. A manufacturing company, STULZ USA, got in touch with us a while ago with a similar issue: a visible gap between what leaders thought employees were experiencing vs what was actually happening on site. What looked like a communications gap from HQ turned out to be an employee experience gap. Once they shifted the focus, treating communication as the foundation, not the afterthought, engagement rose, safety incidents dropped, and retention stabilized. The pattern is clear: whether it’s Leila on the factory floor, a construction crew on-site, or manufacturing employees at STULZ USA, communication IS the employee experience. And when it works, everything else finally has a chance to work too.
If employee experience is going to mean something — for everyone in your company, not just the people at desks — then communication has to be treated as the foundation.
It’s not the delivery mechanism. It’s the ground everything else stands on. Culture, values, recognition, wellbeing, learning — those things are only as strong as the communication that carries them to the frontline. Until organizations stop designing EX around HQ convenience and start designing it around frontline reality, the disconnect will stay.
So the real question isn’t: What do you want frontline employees to feel? It’s: What do your people actually need to know today to do their jobs well?
And when organizations realize that — and you as a communicator give yourself credit for being the one who makes it real — everything else in frontline employee experience finally has a chance to stick.
Written by: Editor
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