At Goodwill Central Texas, at any given moment, employees might be sorting through donations, helping customers or assisting with community programs. They’re probably not sitting in front of a computer. That means communicators can’t assume the strategies that reach corporate workers will land the same way with frontline teams.
Christina Lee Thorsen, director of internal communications at Goodwill Central Texas, said that messages for frontline workers often need to move through some combination of manager meetings, digital signage and printed material to stick in the intended way.
“We use Teams for corporate team members, but with retail team members, there’s the hourly aspect,” Thorsen told Ragan. “If you send a message outside of work hours, how do you handle that? And we also have a really diverse population, so not everyone has the same digital literacy.”
Thorsen also emphasized the importance of a layered comms cascade for frontline workers. Internal comms shapes the message, but managers and on-site leaders carry it through.
“I think what’s important is making sure that we are providing talking points to our leaders, so they have the information and can be our voice when they get questions,” Thorsen said.“Sometimes that means asking for short messaging to be printed, and sometimes it means saying, ‘Please share this in your huddles today, tomorrow and so on.’ It relies a lot on tag-team, human telephone conversations.”
Tell managers exactly what to do after they get a message
Once managers of frontline workers get a message, they need to know what action to take next. Internal communicators can make their comms cascades more useful for managers by labeling the kinds of messages being sent into one of four buckets:
- For awareness: Managers should understand the update, but don’t need to share it with employees yet.
- For team discussion: Managers should bring up the message in the next team meeting or in one-on-one conversations.
- For employee action: Workers need to complete a task or know where to get help with it.
- For employee questions: Managers should know which questions to answer and which ones to escalate.
Thorsen added that with the intentional cascade in place, managers have gotten more proactive about asking what needs to move through their regular meetings.
“One store manager from each region will contact me and say, ‘What do you have to share as we get into our region meeting this week?’” she said. “They take it on themselves.”
Make the same message useful in different ways
Due to channel and tech constraints, the same message will often need to show up more than once. But Thorsen stressed that doesn’t mean simply sending an identical message over and over in the same way. Instead, the same core point should address different frontline employee needs.
“We can’t expect to launch something today, announce it this week and be done,” she said. “It needs to be a campaign. It needs to be multi-week and reinforced. If it’s a new program, then two weeks later or a month later, we’re talking about it from a different angle so it doesn’t get stale or boring.”
For instance, if internal comms needs to share a message about benefits, it can go beyond just stating that a healthcare plan is available and instead divide it up into a few different messages for frontline workers:
- A break room flyer to remind employees about free services with a health plan.
- A digital sign reminder to schedule a yearly exam.
- A manager huddle that reminds employees where they can go with benefits questions.
- A poster on the job site that reminds employees of important enrollment deadlines.
Thorsen said these are great opportunities for communicators to use their storytelling skills to keep messages visible without making every touchpoint feel identical.
“It’s not just about the announcement,” she said. “It’s, ‘How am I going to tell this message or story in a different way while still hitting the talking points?’ You need to get to them five or six times, but you’re still bringing it back to the same service.”
For Thorsen, it’s all about making the information relevant to the frontline audience.
“It really comes back to what we’ve known as communicators since that first class: keep it simple,” she said. “What matters? What do they need to know? Ask, ‘Is it for me? How am I being impacted? What’s in it for me? What do I need to know, and why does it matter?’”
Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.
