Worth Their Time: what it really takes to achieve frontline technology adoption
We talk a lot about connecting frontline employees, improving communication and creating a more engaged workforce. And rightly so. But I think there's a question we sometimes don't spend enough time on: Why should someone make space for another platform in their already busy working day?
It's something we spend a lot of time thinking about at Work Networks, and it was the central theme of our recent webinar with Everyone Active and DP World: Worth Their Time: Earning a Place in the Frontline Working Day.
Both organisations have used Flip to bring communication, information and practical tools closer to their frontline colleagues. But they came to it from different starting points, with different challenges and very different working environments.
Everyone Active needed to connect more than 17,000 colleagues across over 265 sites, many without regular access to email. DP World was looking to better connect employees working across complex operational environments, including ports and terminals where people work long shifts and can be physically disconnected from central support functions.
We've had the pleasure of working with both organisations on their journeys, and what I particularly enjoyed about the webinar was hearing Michelle and Jules talk about the reality behind the projects, not just what they set out to achieve, but the decisions, challenges and experiences that shaped what happened next.
For me, four things sit at the heart of making frontline technology successful.
1. Information will always follow the path of least resistance
There's often a gap between how organisations think (or perhaps hope!) information is reaching their frontline colleagues and what's actually happening. On paper, there might be an intranet, SharePoint, email, a manager cascade and various other official channels. In practice, someone needs an answer quickly, so they ask the person next to them. Or their manager. Or they put a message in a WhatsApp group.
And why wouldn't they?
Every extra click, forgotten password, Wi-Fi problem or moment of "where do I find that again?" is another reason to take the easier route. We can invest in fantastic platforms and beautifully designed intranets, but if employees don't know where to start, can't easily get in or can't find what they need, they'll default to whatever works for them.
WhatsApp is a particularly good example. It's familiar, easy and already part of people's everyday lives. In many organisations, it's become an unofficial but incredibly effective way of keeping work moving. That doesn't mean it's necessarily the right place for business-critical information, employee data or organisational communication. But it does mean we need to understand why people use it before assuming we can simply tell them to stop.
This was a real consideration for both Everyone Active and DP World.
At Everyone Active, only a relatively small proportion of the workforce had regular email access, and communication relied heavily on channels including WhatsApp, noticeboards and word of mouth. Before the launch, 64% of General Managers said that 75% or more of workplace communication happened through WhatsApp. After launch, 62% said less than 10% happened through WhatsApp. That's a significant change in reported behaviour, and a much more interesting result than simply introducing another channel.
DP World initially approached the challenge looking for a secure, WhatsApp-style way for colleagues to communicate. But discovery with frontline colleagues and leaders uncovered something bigger. People weren't just struggling to communicate; they were navigating multiple applications, logins and systems to find information and get things done.
That changed the ambition of the project.
And I think that's the important point. You have to understand the reality of how people work before you can design something better.
But even solving the access problem is only the beginning. Access doesn't automatically create attention, usefulness or a reason to come back.
2. You have to earn frontline technology adoption through usefulness
One of the biggest shifts we're seeing at Work Networks is in the conversations organisations are having about frontline technology. The question is moving from:
"How do we reach our frontline employees?" to "How do we make their working day easier?"
That's a much more interesting place to start.
Of course, organisations need to communicate. Employees need to know what's happening, hear from their leaders and feel connected to the wider business. But if the only reason someone is being asked to open an app is because the organisation wants to tell them something, we're asking quite a lot.
What if that same app also helps them check their shifts, access their payslip, find an answer to an HR question, get to a work system, recognise a colleague or sort something out without having to ask their manager? Now we're giving them something in return.
And that's where I think the sequence really matters:
Usefulness → Adoption → Connection → Engagement → Business value.
Give someone a genuinely useful reason to come, and you can start to build a habit. Once they're there, you've created the opportunity to connect them with colleagues, leaders and the organisation. That connection creates the conditions for deeper engagement.
You almost have to earn the permission to communicate.
This thinking shaped both projects. For Everyone Active, it meant looking beyond company news to make everyday information and services easier to access, including things like payroll, perks and shifts, alongside opportunities for colleagues to connect. For DP World, it meant expanding the original communications brief to create a more useful starting point for the working day. The solution brought together communications, knowledge, applications and processes, giving colleagues simpler, more secure access to the things they needed.
DP World went on to achieve 70% adoption within three months, beating its initial target. Its Engagement team also won the Flip Forward 2026 Best Engagement Strategy award following the launch.
But does everything really need to be in one app?
We're hearing the phrase "one-stop shop" more and more, and I understand why. People are fed up with navigating multiple systems, remembering passwords and working out where different bits of information live.
But I think we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Your payroll system should do what it's good at. SharePoint can continue to provide a home for organisational knowledge. Other specialist systems still have important jobs to do.
We don't necessarily need to replace them all or recreate their functionality somewhere else.
What employees need is one obvious place to start. One place to remember. One place to log in. One place that helps them get to whatever they need, without having to understand the organisation's technology architecture.
That's a very different ambition from simply putting everything into one enormous app.
And it's where the right technology, supported by good design and integration, can make a real difference.
3. We need to stop making frontline managers the workaround
I think we sometimes underestimate just how much we ask of frontline managers. They're already responsible for running operations, managing teams, dealing with customers, handling staffing challenges, delivering performance and responding to whatever the day throws at them.
But they're also frequently the workaround for a fragmented employee experience:
Can't find something? Ask your manager.
Need to get an important message to frontline colleagues? Ask managers to cascade.
New process being introduced? Managers need to explain it.
Organisational change coming? Managers need to land it.
And then we introduce another platform and ask them to champion that too. It's a lot.
One thing both Everyone Active and DP World did particularly well was recognise the importance of involving frontline managers early, rather than simply treating them as the route to everyone else.
The Everyone Active story is a particularly good example of what that can look like. We worked closely with the Everyone Active team to involve General Managers and operational colleagues in shaping the experience from the outset. That included working with trailblazer sites, involving GMs before Heads of Department and wider colleague groups, testing real use cases and being open to feedback throughout.
The platform was introduced to GMs at their annual Colleague Forum, giving them the opportunity to experience it, contribute their views and understand what it could mean for their own sites. This wasn't simply about persuading managers to promote a platform someone else had designed.
We didn't just expect them to drive adoption amongst their teams. We had to earn their adoption first. And the results speak for themselves.
Everyone Active achieved 98% GM onboarding, alongside more than 14,000 colleagues onboarded within four weeks, some 75% of the workforce. Seventy-three sites achieved over 80% onboarding in the first month.
Of course, there were lots of things that contributed to that success, from the commitment of the central team to local champions, leadership involvement, training and launch communications. But I think involving managers as genuine participants in the change, rather than simply giving them another task, was a particularly important part of it.
And the bigger opportunity goes beyond adoption.
If technology makes it easier for colleagues to find information, access services and get answers themselves, it can start to take some of the burden away from managers.
That's what we should be aiming for.
Technology shouldn't create another engagement job for frontline managers. It should help make their existing jobs easier.
4. Does it pass the 7am test?
This is something I often come back to when we're designing or reviewing employee technology. Imagine it's 7am. You've just started a 12-hour shift. You've got five minutes before you need to get on with your job. Your organisation's new platform, latest leadership update or digital workplace strategy is nowhere near the top of your agenda.
Does the experience still work for you? And, more importantly, do you choose to use it?
That's the real test.
Registrations, downloads and initial adoption figures are important. Particularly during a launch, we need to know that people can access the platform and are getting started. But they don't tell us the whole story.
The much more interesting question is whether people's behaviour is changing:
Are colleagues choosing to go there first?
Are they finding information for themselves rather than asking someone else?
Are established workarounds becoming less necessary?
Are managers spending less time answering repetitive questions?
Are people connecting with colleagues they wouldn't previously have the opportunity to meet?
And are they continuing to come back once the excitement of launch has worn off?
At Everyone Active, there were 9,400 monthly active users in the first full month, and more than 85,000 messages exchanged during that first month. Those are encouraging numbers. But what really matters is the activity behind them: colleagues beginning to communicate, connect and use the platform as part of their working lives.
Likewise, DP World's adoption results are an important indicator of progress, but the longer-term opportunity is about making information, tools and processes easier to access, and establishing new habits that genuinely help people at work.
I also think we need to recognise that different measures tell us different things.
A high registration rate tells us we've successfully got people through the door. Regular use tells us they're coming back.
Changes in behaviour tell us the platform is starting to become part of how work gets done.
And improvements in employee experience, efficiency, connection or other organisational outcomes tell us whether it's delivering the value we hoped for.
We need to look at all of them. Because launch isn't the finish line. Even when you've successfully earned a place in someone's working day, you have to keep earning it. Needs change. Organisations change. People join and leave. Content gets out of date. New tools and processes are introduced.
If we're not continually listening, reviewing and improving, today's genuinely useful platform can quite easily become tomorrow's source of noise.
So, where would I start?
If an organisation came to us tomorrow and said, "We need a frontline employee app. Where do we start?", my first question wouldn't be about the app. I'd want to understand what they're trying to achieve and what life currently looks like for the people who'll be using it.
Who are they? How do they work? Where do they go for information today? What's frustrating them? What are managers spending time doing that they shouldn't have to? What systems already exist, and which parts of them work well?
And crucially, what would make someone's working day genuinely easier?
Those answers should shape the technology decisions, the experience you design, the way you involve people and how you measure success.
That's the approach we take at Work Networks. Sometimes it means helping an organisation choose the right platform. Sometimes it's designing and implementing a solution such as Flip. Sometimes it's getting more value from technology they've already invested in. The common thread is understanding the people and the work first, then making the technology deliver against that.
And the Everyone Active and DP World experiences show what becomes possible when the technology, the design and the approach to adoption all come together. Both organisations have made impressive progress, but neither story is simply about launching an app. They're about creating better ways for people to communicate, connect, access what they need and get things done.
That's what makes frontline technology worth their time.
Hear the stories behind the thinking
A huge thank you to Michelle from Everyone Active, Jules from DP World and the team at Flip for joining us for Worth Their Time: Earning a Place in the Frontline Working Day.
We explored these ideas through two very different frontline environments, with practical examples of what worked, what was challenging and what they've learned along the way.
If you want the real stories behind these four points, watch the webinar recording.
And if you're considering a new frontline platform, reviewing your current communications and technology, or trying to improve adoption and value from an existing investment, we'd be happy to have a conversation about where to start.
