You've nailed Employee Experience(EX). Your wellness programs are industry-leading, your onboarding process runs as smoothly as butter, and your company culture actually means something. Meanwhile, your in-office team is thriving, engagement scores look solid, and you're feeling super confident about your EX strategy. Awesome stuff. But here's an uncomfortable question: What if over half your workforce has never actually experienced your EX efforts? 

We’re asking because it's likely they haven’t. Most EX strategies are built the traditional way, with an EX definition in mind that doesn’t quite apply to all workers. Statistically speaking, 80% of the global workforce is operating on the frontline. We mean, retail associates, delivery drivers, healthcare workers, warehouse teams, hospitality staff. They’re the people who actually run your business. They’re often out and about, or on their toes without a desk and a computer.  Following the traditional EX policies that assume everyone has a desk, a corporate email, and spends their day in an office doesn’t quite work for these workers. Unfortunately, this is not an exception, and more of a reality today.  

In this blog, we explain exactly why it is critical to revisit your EX definition to include the frontline. We also highlight what it must entail to include the majority of workers in the global workforce and explain how you can build an EX strategy that works for everyone. 

What is the definition of employee experience?

The conventional EX definition suggests following employees through their entire journey. It begins with attraction and progresses through onboarding, engagement, development, and departure. Three core elements shape each EX stage:

• Physical Environment: This includes the physical office space and the workspace design.
• Culture: This consists of the company values, feeling recognized, and identifying with a sense of belonging towards the organization. 
• Technology: This encompasses the daily tools and systems that are provided to employees for work. For example, the employee experience app, different tools, and so on. 

Defining employee experience through its business benefits

When all three core elements we just listed above are effectively addressed, the framework delivers excellent results. There’s no shortage of employee experience statistics proving that the investment pays off. Companies that prioritize EX harbor engaged employees and clock in results like:

• A workforce that’s 16 times more engaged
• 21% boost in profitability
• 17% increase in productivity
• 41% lower absenteeism
• 59% reduction in turnover
• 10% increase in customer satisfaction 

While these benefits are ones every organization dreams of, the reality is that most don’t. Why? Because 80% of the entire global workforce is frontline, and too often, they’re the ones left out of the employee experience equation.  

Let’s understand how that ends up happening.

Why the current EX definition completely breaks down for frontline teams

You might wonder: The phases of the EX journey are mostly the same for frontline and desk-based workers? So, why can’t the EX approach be the same?

The reason: There are crucial differences in how they operate. So what works for each group differs. Let's examine the specific ways the traditional EX definition often falls short for most frontline teams:

Information most often does not reach them

Let’s suppose your company updates(like most other companies) flow through email, intranet posts, and Slack channels. While perfect for the desk-based laptop or PC users, these routes make it (almost) impossible for someone mid-shift on a retail floor or in a delivery truck to access the update on time. The result?  

Frontline workers hear company news from customers or break room gossip (that is, if they listen to it at all). Statistically speaking,  74% of frontline retail workers report missing critical communications on a weekly basis.

Culture stays in the office

Team lunches, wellness workshops, and leadership Q&As: these are all great and wildly popular ways to build culture among office workers. But none of this reaches your overnight warehouse crews or weekend retail teams. 

For frontline workers, the "company culture" primarily equals their immediate manager and shift teammates. They rarely have the opportunity to interact beyond that, and 80% of frontline teams confirm this isolation. Furthermore, research also shows that CEOs spend only 3% of their time engaging with frontline workers despite their enormous reliance on them. As for the line managers stepping in to close this CEO gap, it turns out that 53% of them are already burned out. In other words, they can't do much either. In essence, the culture doesn’t reach this segment.

Technology creates barriers instead of removing them

Most technology systems that organizations popularly adopt are designed to "empower" and “engage” employees. However, they end up becoming friction points for non-desk teams. While a desk worker can hop onto the company portal from their laptop easily to swap shifts, update personal details, and so on, the warehouse worker plays on expert difficulty. After all, this means they’re expected to borrow a supervisor's computer, wrestle with a system that wasn't built for mobile, and perhaps even fill out actual paper forms in 2025. Every barrier they face sends the same message: "We didn't think about you when we built this." 

Collectively, these become more than minor inconveniences, and they add up fast. Unsurprisingly,  59% of retail frontline workers, such as cashiers, sales associates, and stock clerks, have considered quitting their jobs. Additionally, as many as 70% of frontline workers also report feeling burned out.

Pause for a moment and think: What if we flipped this entire approach to be more inclusive? Instead of forcing frontline workers to fit into a desk-based model, what if we built EX around their actual work processes? 

Time for a new definition: EX built around how people work, not where they sit

Our idea is that instead of designing around desks, we build EX around actual work patterns of real people. The inclusive EX for the frontline  we’re talking about primarily rests on three pillars:

Pillar 1: Equitable access to information and opportunity

This isn't about spam-bombing people with more emails (please, no) to give access to information. It's about delivering the right information to the right people in the right format.  This is possible with mobile-first communication that delivers updates, schedules, and training directly to employees' pockets( we mean on their phones). When your frontline team hears company news from you before they hear it from a confused customer, that’s when magic happens, trust builds, and alignment grows. What’s next is hello to the feeling of "We're all in this together".

Fact check: Over half (51%) of deskless employees prefer mobile methods like text messages or push notifications, yet most companies are still stuck in email mode.

Pillar 2: A shared sense of community and belonging

The next pillar is prioritizing a unified culture. We mean one with no VIP sections and no second-class citizens. Think of it as building a digital town square where the night shift warehouse team can high-five the day shift customer service crew, and the CEO's updates reach everyone simultaneously. This is possible via a digital space where everyone can communicate across departments, celebrate wins, ask questions, and connect with leadership, regardless of time zone or location. Focusing on this kind of stuff can create equity that physical offices can't match. 

Pillar 3: Technology that empowers frontline work

Finally, tech remains the enabler. Not any tech, but the right tech, which doesn't just inform, but makes work genuinely easier. We're talking about simplifying accessibility to:

• Knowledge bases and SOPs  (because nobody has time to hunt down a supervisor for basic info)
• Shift swapping(because life happens, and flexibility shouldn't require a PhD)
• Training modules by fitting them into actual workflows (not those painful "mandatory training" nightmares)
• Peer-to-peer communication while people are doing their jobs

Our point is that when technology supports how frontline employees already work, it becomes indispensable, rather than something they run from at all costs.

We know, we know, this framework sounds fantastic in theory. But how do you actually implement it? How do you level up from "keeping people informed" to "making people feel powerful."

Making the change: From theory to action

Good intentions aren’t enough to make excellent EX a reality in your organization. Implementation is where most strategies succeed or fail.

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That’s why we put together a detailed step-by-step guide to building inclusive EX for your frontline—covering audits, technology choices, and integration. You can explore it in detail in our whitepaper here: Employee Experience Strategy Whitepaper

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Frontline first: redefining what employee experience really means

Your frontline teams are the face of your brand. They interact with customers, execute strategy, and bring company values to life. If your employee experience definition doesn't include them, you're undermining everything else you're building.

On the other hand, the companies that crack the inclusive EX first code will dominate. Think better retention, stronger culture, happier customers, and improved profitability.

Pause and take a look at your frontline teams right now: Are they experiencing the same company as your office workers? If not, it's time to rethink what employee experience actually means. And to change it for good, you know who to contact ;-)

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