By Héctor C. Moncada D.
There is a version of a company that exists in the boardroom and a version that exists on the floor. For most organizations, those two versions have very little in common.
New research from communications firm Ragan found that only one percent of internal communicators describe themselves as very effective at reaching frontline employees. Survey data from HR platform Yourco adds to the picture: fewer than half of frontline workers consistently receive company communications, and only about a third read them when they do. For companies whose workforce is largely made up of hourly, non-desk employees, this is not a minor operational issue. It is a structural one.
The root cause is not hard to find. Internal communications platforms were built around corporate email, desktop access, and company-issued devices. For the estimated 80 percent of the global workforce that is frontline or distributed, those tools were never designed with them in mind. Research from communications agency Tribe found that 83 percent of non-desk employees do not have a corporate email address. Nearly half have no access to the company intranet. In that reality, most enterprise communication tools are effectively invisible to the people they are supposed to reach.
This is the problem that Tushneem Dharmagadda set out to solve when he founded HubEngage. The platform was built specifically for frontline and distributed workforces as what the industry is beginning to call a workforce experience platform, a category built around the idea that the employee experience is not a single touchpoint but a full operating environment. For workers in retail, hospitality, manufacturing, and government, that means a single mobile app that brings together internal communications, shift scheduling, task management, employee recognition, surveys, and continuous learning through AI-powered microlearning and an always-on chatbot. No corporate device needed, no multiple logins, no app store scavenger hunt. Just one place where every employee, regardless of their role or location, can stay connected to the organization they work for.
The approach addresses something that has frustrated HR and operations leaders for years. Asking a warehouse worker or a hotel housekeeper to navigate the same enterprise software stack as a corporate team is not a communication strategy. It is a way of ensuring the message never arrives. Consolidation, in Dharmagadda’s model, is not a convenience feature. It is the only thing that actually works at scale.
What makes HubEngage’s positioning notable is that it is built around the full employee lifecycle, not just the engagement layer. Most platforms show up after problems emerge. The workforce experience model is designed to be present from day one, covering onboarding and scheduling at the start and extending through recognition, learning, and ongoing communications as the employee grows into their role. Connection, in this framework, does not start with a survey sent six months in. It starts before the first shift ends.
The business case for getting this right is not small. According to Gallup, disengaged workers cost the global economy an estimated 8.9 trillion dollars each year. For large organizations running hourly workforces across multiple locations, the impact is measurable in turnover rates, productivity losses, and the kind of ground-level operational knowledge that never makes it up the chain because there is no channel for it to travel through.
HR technology has largely focused its innovation on desk-based employees. The platforms that serve the corporate layer are sophisticated, well-funded, and deeply integrated. The tools built for the frontline have historically been an afterthought. What Dharmagadda and the team at HubEngage are betting on is that this imbalance is starting to shift, and that the organizations that move first to build a genuine workforce experience for their frontline employees will have a meaningful advantage in retention, efficiency, and culture over those that keep sending emails to people who have never had a work inbox.
