What Inclusion Requires When Your Workforce Isn’t All in One Place
The gap between the experiences of corporate and frontline employees is a conversation that many organizations would rather avoid. It’s an expected result of having drastically different kinds of functions and day-to-day roles. Nobody sat down and designed an employee experience that works well for people with laptops and badly for people driving delivery routes or working twelve-hour warehouse shifts. It accumulated that way through years of building systems, communication channels, and programming around the assumptions of one kind of workday, without consistently determining whether any of it translated to another.
ERGs inherit that gap. And the leaders trying to close it are often doing so without the organizational infrastructure to make it realistic.
The Access Problem Is Real, and It Belongs to the Organization
When frontline and deskless employees aren’t participating in ERG programming, the diagnosis is almost never lack of interest. It’s lack of access, and that access problem is bigger than any ERG can solve on its own.
A warehouse employee working a 6 a.m. shift doesn’t have a company email that she checks between tasks. A delivery driver doesn’t have time during his route to browse the intranet for ways to connect to colleagues. A retail associate on the floor isn’t going to step away to join a noon speaker event on Zoom. Years ago when I was a bank teller, it sometimes felt like we were totally disconnected from the rest of the company. There were 6 people in our branch, but zero conversation or involvement with teammates outside our own building unless something went wrong. Later as a call center manager, I had very little flexibility in my own schedule and even less with the employees whom I was responsible for, amidst the constantly changing call volumes and expectations. At the time, adjusting staffing or workflow to enable employees to participate in ERGs wasn’t even discussed; today, I’d argue that the things happening in employee-led groups are vital for our customer-facing employees to feel valued and connected.
These aren’t outliers or exceptions. They’re the daily reality for a significant portion of most large workforces, and ERG ecosystems built around office-based assumptions don’t reach them, regardless of how good the programming is.
It’s not a callout of organizations, but a call in, because misdiagnosing the problem leads to the wrong solutions. If low frontline participation is treated as a motivation problem, the response is better marketing. If it’s treated as an access problem — which it almost always is — the response looks different, and more of the responsibility lands where it actually belongs: with the organization, not the ERG.
Meeting People Where They Already Are
The most effective approaches I’ve seen to this challenge share a common logic: stop asking frontline employees to travel to where the ERG is, and start figuring out how the ERG can show up where the employee already is.
When I was leading ERG work at Amazon, we built an app that warehouse employees and drivers could access directly from the systems they were already using for work-related tasks. It required investment: a fulltime program manager, developers, a project team, and multiple iterations. But it solved the key problem of reaching people by not requiring a new login, a separate platform, or an additional step that was totally outside the workflow. The ERGs were present in the environment where employees were already operating. That’s the path of least friction — and in workplaces where time is genuinely scarce and attention is legitimately divided, friction is the difference between participation and invisibility.
A large retailer GEN advised took a different approach suited to their environment: regular ERG updates on breakroom bulletin boards, along with branded buttons and swag that employees could wear on the floor. It sounds simple, and it is — but it did something the digital approach couldn’t. It made ERG membership visible in a physical space where employees gathered, created casual conversation around it, and gave people a way to signal connection that didn’t require attending anything. Belonging doesn’t always start with a program. Sometimes it starts with a button.
These two examples look nothing alike, and that’s the point. There’s no universal solution for reaching frontline and deskless employees because there’s no universal frontline experience. A manufacturing plant, a hospital floor, a retail store, a distribution center, and a fleet of delivery vehicles are genuinely different environments with different constraints, different cultures, and different communication norms. The organizations that make progress here don’t apply a template; they ask what participation realistically looks like in this specific context, for these specific employees, and then build toward that answer.
The Corporate-Frontline Disconnect Is Broader Than ERG Programming
The painful truth is that ERGs are navigating a symptom of something larger. The experiential gap between corporate and frontline employees in visibility, in access to resources, and in how the organization communicates with them exists well beyond ERG participation. In many companies it’s one of the more significant fault lines in employee experience, and it doesn’t get created or resolved at the ERG level.
ERG leaders, particularly those who came up through corporate roles, may not have direct visibility into what a frontline employee’s workday actually looks like. And it means that building meaningful connections across these workspaces often requires deliberate effort to understand an experience that isn’t your own: spending time in different work environments, building relationships with frontline managers, asking questions before designing solutions.
When corporate-focused ERG leaders do that work, the programming they create is noticeably different. And the frontline employees who encounter it can tell the difference between something designed with them in mind and something designed for someone else that was later extended to include them.
What the Organization Has to Own
ERGs can close some of this gap. They cannot close all of it, and expecting them to is its own kind of inequity — asking volunteer leaders to compensate for structural limitations that aren’t theirs to fix.
The organizations making the most progress on frontline inclusion treat it as an infrastructure question at the enterprise level: what systems, channels, and resources does the full workforce actually have access to? Where are the gaps, and what would it take to address them? When ERGs are trying to reach employees without the tools to do it, the answer isn’t more creative programming. It’s organizational investment in the access layer that makes everything else possible.
What Becomes Possible
When frontline and deskless employees are genuinely part of the ERG ecosystem — not as an afterthought or an extended audience, but as members whose experience shaped the design — the groups become more representative, more credible, and more useful to the organization. The insights that surface from a workforce that includes people across roles, shifts, and physical locations are different from the insights that come from a narrower slice. And the belonging that ERGs are built to create becomes real across the workforce, rather than real for some employees and notional for others.
That’s worth building toward deliberately, specifically, and with candid acknowledgment of what it actually requires.
Reflections
For ERG Leaders
When you designed your last major initiative, who was in the room and whose daily reality wasn’t represented in that conversation?
What would it take to spend meaningful time in the work environments of the frontline employees you’re trying to reach, before designing the next thing intended for them?
For Program Managers
Do ERGs in your ecosystem have access to the channels and systems that frontline employees actually use — and if not, what’s the path to changing that?
Where is low frontline participation being misread as disinterest, when the more accurate diagnosis is access?
For HR Leaders and Executives
Is your organization treating frontline ERG inclusion as an ERG problem to solve, or as an infrastructure investment to make?
What would it signal to your frontline workforce if the organization visibly prioritized making ERG participation as accessible to them as it is to corporate employees?