Forging Better Frontline Communications with Unily x ScreenCloud

It takes on average 4.5 days for the average frontline worker to receive important information, according to a study of frontline friction by Unily and ScreenCloud. As if that wasn’t bad enough, 27% of frontline workers feel that they receive conflicting information and that this impacts their decision to do their job effectively.

These challenges go beyond mere inconvenience. Our study estimates that frontline friction cost enterprise businesses $80.6 billion per year in the US alone. 

The study, ‘Disconnected and disengaged: The economic cost of frontline friction,’ is the result of a shared mission by ScreenCloud and Unily; to help enterprises identify and improve the challenges of managing large, dispersed teams across multiple departments and geographies.  

The challenges of managing frontline workers

Whether it’s on the factory floor, working hospital shifts, or keeping the wheels turning from the supply center to an airport, frontline workers are usually the linchpin of the modern enterprise. And while tools such as email and mobile devices might have made communication quicker and easier behind the scenes, there remains a huge disconnect between senior leadership and their frontline teams.

Bulletin boards and paper notices are slow to update, easily overlooked, and unable to provide the dynamic, real-time information that today’s fast-moving businesses require. 

This reliance on outdated methods creates a number of pressing issues for business leaders and their internal comms teams.

1. The digital divide: The most significant challenge is the fundamental communication gap. While office-based employees can access company intranets, team chats, and email with ease, their frontline colleagues are often left in the dark. This creates a two-tiered workforce where a large segment of the company feels disconnected, uninformed, and undervalued.

2. Lack of a ‘Single Source of Truth’: Without a centralized, accessible platform, important information becomes fragmented. Team leaders might relay corporate messages with inconsistencies, leading to confusion and errors. This is particularly problematic for safety protocols, operational updates, and procedural changes - all of which must be universally understood to ensure efficiency and compliance.

3. The rise of "Shadow IT": As our study showed, when official tools fail to meet their needs, frontline employee communications don't grind to a halt. Instead, workers find their own solutions. Using personal messaging apps like WhatsApp or social media to coordinate work is a widespread practice, but it's fraught with risk. It creates a massive security vulnerability for sensitive company data and makes it impossible for the business to govern or track communication.

4. The employee engagement crisis: Feeling disconnected from the company’s mission and having no voice in the organization directly impacts employee morale and retention. When frontline workers don't understand the "why" behind their work or feel that their feedback is ignored, they are more likely to become disengaged and eventually leave, contributing to high turnover rates that are costly to a business.

Unily x ScreenCloud: A shared vision for the frontline

With frontline workers representing the face of the company, or being intrinsic to its operation, everyone involved wants the best result. Whether this is the frontline workers themselves or senior management and leadership - ensuring the right tools and information are available to perform is essential.

Both ScreenCloud and Unily have moved to solve the problem of communication in the workplace. And while they both solve the challenge in their own way, the partnership underscores how both tools combine to provide a formidable platform.  

Unily is a comprehensive employee experience platform, going beyond the traditional ‘intranet’. And here at ScreenCloud we know that screens have the power to change how businesses communicate, surfacing siloed content and improving visibility for legacy communication channels (we’re looking at you pin boards).

How Unily is a hub for company communications

Taking the intranet from a passive platform to a broader employee experience platform, Unily serves as a hub for modern business comms. Accessible via desktop and a mobile-first app, internal communicators can create, manage, and distribute targeted content across the workforce. 

Key features include:

• Targeted communications: Content can be personalized based on an employee's role, location, or department, ensuring messages are always relevant.
• Social features: The platform allows for two-way communication, knowledge sharing, employee idetion, and peer-to-peer recognition, fostering a sense of community.
• Seamless integrations: Unily integrates with a wide range of enterprise tools (like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Workday), allowing employees to access all their necessary resources from a single, intuitive interface.

For a frontline worker, Unily's mobile app becomes a pocket-sized intranet, providing a reliable and secure way to receive updates and connect with colleagues. However, for many frontline workers, accessing personal devices during their shift is usually off limits, meaning messages can be missed - highlighting the challenges faced by leadership teams.

Surfacing communication with ScreenCloud

Digital signage has become a ubiquitous tool across retail and hospitality, but increasingly global corporations are also seeing the value in screens for communication. Whether that’s sharing internal comms messaging across factories, logistics hubs and head office, or creating visible messaging in healthcare facilities, schools or mult-site facilities.

• Passive, high-impact reach: Digital signage captures attention in high-traffic areas without requiring employees to check their phones or emails. It's a "broadcast" medium that ensures messages are seen by everyone who passes by.
• Dynamic and real-time information: ScreenCloud can display everything from live data dashboards and operational KPIs to safety alerts and company news.
• Ease of use: The platform simplifies content creation and remote management, making it easy for internal comms teams to deploy and update content across multiple locations from a central dashboard.

While digital signage is a useful and powerful tool in it’s own right, it’s at it’s best when connected to live data or feeds. And it’s when connecting communication or data sources, from internal comms tools such as Unily, to live dashboards, or social media feeds, where ScreenCloud can make the difference. 

The benefits of Unily and ScreenCloud

1. Bridging the divide

The Unily x ScreenCloud partnership provides a solid solution for a diverse workforce. Unily serves as the personalized, interactive digital hub for every employee - the place for two-way communication, collaboration, and accessing personal information like pay stubs or schedules. 

Simultaneously, the content created and approved within Unily can be automatically pushed to ScreenCloud displays.

For the frontline employee who may not check their phone for company news, they can see the most recent corporate announcements, safety alerts, or a colleague's work anniversary on a screen in the breakroom. 

2. Real time data to enhance safety and productivity

The integration allows for the display of operational data and business intelligence on screens where it matters most. A business manager can use Unily to create an important announcement about a new quality control process, and that message, along with a live KPI dashboard from Power BI, can be automatically displayed on ScreenCloud monitors on the factory floor. 

This provides frontline teams with real-time, actionable insights that help them make better decisions, improve performance, and maintain safety protocols. Immediate access to information via screens helps to cut down on the 120+ hours lost per employee each year due to information-related friction.

3. Streamlining internal comms

For internal communications teams, the Unily and ScreenCloud integration is a massive time-saver. Instead of having to manage a variety of disparate systems for email, intranet, and digital signage, they can create content in a single platform. 

The integration automatically formats and pushes content from Unily to ScreenCloud, ensuring that visual assets and messages are always on-brand and optimized for the big screen. 

4.Building an engaged company culture

The partnership is a powerful tool for employee engagement. By using ScreenCloud, internal comms can visually celebrate wins, recognize top performers, and highlight team achievements. 

Content can be pulled directly from Unily's social feed, providing a seamless loop of recognition that makes every employee feel seen and valued. This is crucial for frontline employees who often feel invisible to leadership. 

The ability to see their own work, and that of their colleagues, celebrated publicly helps to reinforce a culture of appreciation and teamwork, which can directly address the dissatisfaction and turnover issues highlighted in our study.

Find out more

You can read the full report by Unily and ScreenCloud here. 

If you’re ready to change how you communicate with your frontline, get started with a free trial of ScreenCloud, or book a free demo to find out more.