Employee sentiment is hard to gauge – especially when it comes to frontline teams. This post explores how signals can help internal comms pros analyze sentiment to improve their workplaces. Looking for a smarter employee listening tactic that works for everyone? Start here.
When frontline workers are frustrated with a new process, how long does it take for your team to find out? Days? Weeks? Never?
Frontline workers are often the most important – and most overlooked – voices in an organization. They’re the ones interacting with customers, managing day-to-day operations, and keeping your business running.
But when it comes to understanding how they’re feeling, what’s working, and what’s not, internal comms teams often hit a wall. Frontline workers tend to lack access to the devices that office workers spend the majority of their days on, and inconsistent shift patterns make them more difficult to reach. Unfortunately, this can leave them feeling deprioritized, unheard, and dissatisfied.
Annual surveys can be time-consuming, easy to ignore, and rarely capture the full picture. Focus groups aren’t scalable and are difficult to execute with shift-based scheduling. Gut instinct is risky and inaccurate.
What if you could understand what frontline teams are telling you – without needing to ask a single question? That’s where signals come in.
What are signals in the workplace?
In the workplace, signals are AI-detected patterns in employee interactions that surface emerging themes, sentiment shifts, and cultural indicators.
They’re the digital breadcrumbs your workforce leaves behind in chats, comments, and conversations. And when these breadcrumbs are analyzed intelligently, they reveal what’s really going on beneath the surface – without interrupting anyone’s day, adding to survey fatigue, or frustrating internal comms teams.
Think of signals as a passive feedback loop. They help you understand without asking, and act without guessing.
Why do frontline signals matter for comms teams?
For internal communicators, especially those supporting distributed or deskless teams, signals can be a powerful tool for both employee listening and action. Here’s why:
They analyze frontline employee sentiment to surface issues before it’s too late
With research from SHRM and Fidelity Investments reporting an average turnover rate of 26% for deskless workers (10% higher than that of office-based workers), retention is one of the biggest issues around frontline employees.
Paying attention to signals can help IC teams detect dips in sentiment before they morph into full-fledged disengagement and, ultimately, turnover.
Whether it’s frustration over scheduling, confusion about a new policy, or a rise in burnout at a specific location, early knowledge means solving problems and cultivating an environment employees want to stay in.
They detect operational friction before it escalates
Repeated questions, complaints, or confusion from frontline workers? These are all signals. They point to where processes are breaking down or where communication needs to be clarified, before those issues become costly.
For example, if frontline team members are saying a new software is difficult to use, you’ll know about it right away, and be able to provide better training or instructions. In this case, something that would have caused major inefficiency will have minimal impact on the business because the right people could intervene early.
They use constant employee listening to recognize contributions that often go unseen
Praise happens organically and often on the front lines – but not always in a public or company-wide setting. When we use signals, we can surface these moments in everyday conversations among workers, their colleagues, and managers, and route them to the right leaders. For example, when a store manager casually praises a team member in chat, that moment can be elevated for broader, more public recognition.
This helps call out great work that might otherwise go unnoticed, highlight desired behavior among employees, and create a culture of recognition that boosts all-around frontline sentiment. It’s not just a feel-good exercise, either. Gallup’s researchers found that well-recognized employees were 45% less likely to have left their organizations two years later.
Applications: Using signals for frontline employee sentiment analysis
Here are a few examples of how internal comms teams can put signals to work as an employee sentiment analysis tool:
Accurate pulse checks for distributed or shift-based teams
As we touched on above, surveys – especially the lengthy, annual ones – aren’t always the best tactic for gauging frontline sentiment. These workers often don’t sit at desks, may not have regular access to email, and are spread across shifts and locations, making it hard to catch them at the right time or in the right format. Even when surveys are mobile-friendly, response rates can be low and skewed toward more engaged employees, leaving you with less-than-accurate data.
While shorter pulse surveys can be used effectively among frontline workers from time to time, it’s likely that you’ll want to supplement them with additional data to get the full picture. Signals can serve this purpose by providing a continuous, passive read on how teams are feeling – without interrupting their flow or chasing them to fill out a form.
Scaling recognition campaigns to improve frontline employee sentiment
Use detected praise and shout-outs to fuel recognition programs. Signals can help managers celebrate wins in real time, boosting morale and reinforcing company values.
Beyond surfacing individual moments, signals also help internal comms teams spot patterns – like which locations or roles are consistently under-recognized. That insight allows you to design more inclusive recognition campaigns that reach across shifts, sites, and job types, ensuring no team is left out of the spotlight.
Informing onboarding and learning priorities
If the same questions keep popping up in chat or comments, that’s a signal. Use it to refine learning materials and operational processes, create targeted training, or launch a comms campaign that clears up confusion.
These patterns can also reveal where knowledge isn’t sticking, whether due to unclear documentation, inconsistent manager messaging, or gaps in peer-to-peer support. By spotting these friction points early, comms teams can partner with L&D teams to close gaps before they impact performance or morale.
3 tips for using signals as a frontline employee sentiment analysis tool
Signals are only as powerful as the actions they inspire. Here’s how to make them part of your toolkit:
Inform comms strategies for deskless workers
A one-size-fits-all comms approach rarely works well for any audience, but it’s especially alienating for frontline employees. Their experiences, preferred channels, and what they need to know will differ vastly from desked workers.
Using signals as a tool to gauge frontline employee sentiment can help you identify their needs, preferences, and pain points so you can target messaging to resonate with them – which means effective comms and happier employees.
Guide manager enablement and support
Managers are your frontline amplifiers. Signals can highlight where teams are thriving or struggling, giving managers timely, contextual insights they can use to coach, course-correct, or celebrate. This helps turn manager comms from reactive to proactive, while making employee listening easier for managers at the same time.
Shape onboarding and training content
Signals can pinpoint where new hires are getting stuck—whether it’s confusion around tools, processes, or expectations. Use that intel to update onboarding flows, create just-in-time resources, or reinforce key messages in manager briefings.
The bottom line on signals for frontline employee sentiment analysis
Frontline employee sentiment is dynamic, and traditional tools often miss its nuance. Signals offer a way to capture what’s happening in real time without requiring constant manual monitoring or relying on self-reporting. For internal comms teams, this means more clarity on what’s driving engagement, confusion, or friction.
In today’s workplace, where retention, performance, and culture are shaped by how employees feel, signals help you move from reactive to responsive. They give you the context to act with empathy, the data to communicate with precision, and the insight to build a frontline experience that’s not just heard, but also understood.
Now that you know about the power of signals, it’s time to ask yourself (and your team) an important question: How can signal-driven insights help you better understand, serve, and celebrate your frontline workforce?
