Practical Tips for Using Microsoft Viva to Engage Frontline Workers

Key Takeaways

• Frontline engagement only works when it’s part of one connected digital workplace, not a separate app.
• Viva Connections can now bring your full, branded intranet into Teams on mobile – a big shift for frontline workers.
• Viva Engage turns broadcast into conversation, lowering the barrier for frontline workers to ask questions and be heard.
• Smart Notifications will help reduce noise by sending fewer, smarter alerts to the channels people actually use.

Frontline and non desk workers keep your organisation moving, but at Silicon Reef we often hear they’re often the hardest to reach and the easiest to overload. Gallagher’s latest Employee Communications Report shows that organisations with a primarily frontline workforce are 1.3x more likely to perceive higher risk in achieving their communication goals, and 1.7x more likely to put culture at the top of the agenda. At the same time, 81% of internal comms professionals see audience burnout as a significant risk, and 83% say information overload is a growing problem.

That combination is toxic for frontline teams. They’re more exposed to change and operational risk, yet often receive less targeted, less personalised communication – and when messages do arrive, they’re competing with noise from multiple tools and channels.

From our work with organisations across a range of frontline sectors, like energy, manufacturing, and higher education, we see a clear pattern: many frontline teams still live in a completely different digital world to office based staff – different tools, different logins, different places to get news. That fragmentation kills engagement. A more sustainable approach is to treat frontline experience as part of a single digital workplace vision: one connected environment where every employee can access the tools, information and communication channels they need to work effectively, anytime, anywhere.

When you enable collaboration for frontline workers through a simple, familiar platform – usually Teams, powered by SharePoint and Viva – the impact goes far beyond launching an app. It reduces fragmentation, creates a single place for updates, and makes it easier for organisational news, leadership messages, town halls and training to reach people in every role and location. Instead of juggling separate channels, frontline staff experience one joined up digital space where they can stay informed and connected to your mission and strategic priorities.

Viva Connections: Your Intranet, Finally in Your Frontline

Viva Connections is often described as “your intranet in Teams”. In practical terms, it gives employees a branded entry point into your intranet and key services directly inside Teams, which is especially valuable for frontline workers who may only use one or two corporate apps on mobile.

For frontline teams, the promise is simple: one tap into Teams, one tap into the intranet, with news, tools and resources all in a familiar place. That reduces the need to jump between apps and logins, and makes it much easier for internal comms to bring everyone into the same digital space.

But on mobile, the experience hasn’t always lived up to expectations. Most frontline workers have seen a generic Microsoft dashboard: a news carousel, some cards, a list of links. The content might be right, but the experience doesn’t feel like your intranet – it feels like a Microsoft app with a bit of your brand layered on top.

That’s a problem when frontline workers already feel one step removed from the corporate centre. If the “real” intranet exists somewhere else (usually on a desktop), you’re unintentionally signalling that the full experience isn’t really for them.

The Big Viva Connections Mobile Update (and why it matters)

Until recently, Viva Connections on mobile has been locked into that dashboard-style view. Microsoft is now changing this so that you can route mobile users straight into the full SharePoint web experience inside Teams – not just on desktop, but on phones and tablets too.

In practice, this means:

• Frontline workers will see the same branded intranet pages as office-based colleagues, optimised for mobile but recognisably “yours”.
• Your colours, layouts, navigation and design language carry through to mobile, instead of being squeezed into a fixed dashboard shell.
• You’re designing and governing one intranet, then extending it to everyone, rather than maintaining a “proper” intranet and a stripped-back version for frontline.

We’re expecting this update to land this quarter (it’s March 2026 at the time of writing, so if you’re reading this from the future, you might already have it). It might sound like a configuration tweak, but for internal comms it’s a big deal.

For the first time, frontline workers won’t be seeing a watered down representation of your intranet: they’ll get the same rich, intuitive experience as their office based colleagues, delivered through Viva Connections in Teams. That’s a significant leveller. It closes the experience gap, strengthens your internal brand, and makes Teams feel like a genuine front door to your digital workplace rather than a bolt on.

Practical Tips to Make Connections Work for Frontline Colleagues

1. Design your intranet with mobile in mind

Review your navigation and key journeys through a frontline lens. Can someone on a break, on a shared device, get to what they need in two or three taps? Focus especially on:

• News and leadership updates relevant to frontline locations.
• Safety, HSE and operational content.
• Everyday essentials (rotas, HR forms, training, benefits).

Consider the information architecture of your intranet to ensure key journeys are straightforward on both desktop and mobile. We’ve helped organisations with large cohorts of field workers, like TagEnergy and Gulf Oil, redesign their intranet navigation and structure, and implement Viva Connections. This type of thoughtful design, applied to both your ‘standard’ intranet and Connections pays dividends for team members accessing content through mobile devices.

2. Use audience targeting to create frontline views

Viva Connections and SharePoint let you target content based on role, location and other attributes. Use that to create home experiences for frontline-heavy audiences – for example, a depot or branch homepage that prioritises local news, safety alerts and operational updates, wrapped in your broader organisational story.

Whilst these native Microsoft 365 features are great, we hear from a lot of organisations that the personalisation doesn’t go far enough – especially around news and the growing sense of “information overload”. Internal comms teams tell us they want frontline colleagues to feel more in control of what they see, without losing the ability to land critical messages.

Based on that feedback, we built Beacon News. It lets employees ‘subscribe’ to the topics that matter most to them and decide how and where they receive updates – for example, dialling down head office news while staying close to strategy and local operations, with notifications delivered only through Teams. At the same time, when something is genuinely business critical, comms teams can override individual preferences to ensure essential updates still reach everyone.

3. Make Teams the single front door

Many frontline workers already use Teams for rotas, chat and calls. Lean into that. Configure Viva Connections so that opening Teams effectively brings them “home” to the intranet as well – the same one everyone else uses, not a parallel experience.

When we worked with the University of Leeds, part of the success came from making the intranet feel like a natural part of people’s daily tools, not somewhere separate they had to remember to visit. The new Connections update makes it much easier to replicate that pattern for frontline teams.

4. Test with real frontline users

Finally, don’t assume a design that works in the office will automatically work in a depot or on a ward. Put early versions in the hands of frontline colleagues on real devices, in real connectivity conditions, and iterate based on what they find confusing or slow.

Viva Engage: From Broadcast to Conversation

If Viva Connections is about giving frontline workers a front door into your digital workplace, Viva Engage is about what happens once they’re inside.

Traditionally, frontline comms have been dominated by one way channels: posters in break rooms, emails to shared inboxes, manager cascades that may or may not land. They can work for simple updates, but they don’t scale well, and they rarely make people feel heard.

Viva Engage lets you move from broadcast to conversation, even for people who don’t spend their day in front of a screen.

1. Lowering the barrier to asking questions

Frontline workers rarely have time to hunt for information. If they’re not sure about a new process or policy, they’ll either ask whoever’s nearby, or work around it. Neither is ideal for safety, consistency or customer experience.

Viva Engage’s ‘Ask Me Anything’, best answers and topic tagging features are designed to lower that barrier. Someone on a shop floor, a site or a ward can ask a question once and benefit from expertise across the organisation. Over time, those conversations turn into a reusable knowledge base that can be surfaced via SharePoint, Teams, Viva Connections or even Copilot – so the next person doesn’t need to ask again.

This is how you turn day to day frontline questions into a strategic asset, rather than letting them disappear into private chats or local workarounds.

2. Moving beyond “news channel” mode

In many organisations, Engage starts life as another place to post news. The real value shows up when communities mature into spaces where people ask questions, share knowledge and join events – even if they’re rarely at a desk.

For frontline audiences, our advice is to create communities that mirror how the organisation actually operates: regions, branches, service lines or major sites, with membership driven dynamically where possible. That way, updates feel relevant rather than generic, and local teams have a clear place to go with questions and feedback.

Alongside those structural communities, it’s worth deliberately building communities of practice that cut across roles and locations. These are spaces where people connect around a shared craft or challenge – for example, customer experience, safety, or process improvement – rather than a job title or cost centre. When a depot supervisor, store manager and head office specialist all contribute to an “innovation in action” community, frontline and office-based colleagues can swap ideas, surface patterns and share what’s actually working on the ground. Done well, these communities stay close to day to day work, but they create room for connection, creativity and shared best practice to flow far beyond local teams.

3. Leader visibility as a frontline engagement strategy

One of the biggest EX challenges comms leaders share with us is getting leaders to actively engage online, not just sign off messages. That’s amplified when you think about frontline teams, who rarely meet senior leaders in person.

Viva Engage’s leadership features – from leader communities and storylines to replies in conversations – are more than digital etiquette. When leaders visibly join conversations, we see daily engagement stay higher for longer and discussions become more constructive, particularly in frontline-heavy communities. For people who often feel furthest from decision makers, that visible acknowledgement and follow through is a powerful signal that their voice matters.

If “be more present online” feels vague, start with one simple, frontline focused practice: pick a frontline heavy community – for example, a region, branch network or service line – and ask a leader to commit to a regular cadence of short storyline updates and replies. Over time, that creates a feedback loop where leaders can sense check reality on the ground, and frontline teams see that their feedback leads somewhere.

4. Designing communities for psychological safety

Opening up Viva Engage to large frontline populations often prompts concerns about comments “getting out of hand”. The answer isn’t to shut comments down; it’s to be deliberate about how you manage them.

Our advice is to:

• Establish clear, visible guidelines for commenting, and reinforce them regularly.
• Make it easy for people to report concerns and follow through consistently.
• Consider options for anonymous or lower visibility participation in sensitive topics.

This not only supports neurodiverse colleagues who may find public posting daunting, it also creates a safer space for frontline workers to share what they’re really seeing and feeling, without worrying it will be held against them.

Governance is an enabler here, not a brake. When employees can see that inappropriate behaviour is handled consistently – and that challenging feedback is welcomed, not punished – they’re more likely to speak up. For frontline workers, that can be the difference between tolerating broken processes and feeling confident to highlight safety issues, customer pain points or operational blockers in an open forum.

For more practical advice and real-world stories on implementing governance in Viva Engage, read our article exploring lessons learned from recent rollouts.

5. Being intentional with announcements and notifications

Community announcements are one of the most powerful ways to reach frontline audiences in Viva Engage – but they can also be a major source of noise if overused. Today, when an admin posts a community announcement, it immediately triggers a notification in Teams and a push notification on mobile. If the announcement hasn’t been read, an email lands two hours later. For someone on shift who hasn’t checked their phone, that can easily mean three separate nudges for the same message.

Microsoft is updating this behaviour so that announcements work harder, not louder. When an admin posts a community announcement, the first notification will go out only via the channel that person uses most – Teams, mobile push or email. If they haven’t engaged after two hours, a second notification is sent via their next most used channel. For frontline workers, that means fewer duplicate alerts and a better chance that important messages show up where they actually spend time, rather than in a channel they rarely check.

There is a caveat: even with smarter routing, too many announcements across too many communities will still create notification fatigue. Our advice is to reserve announcements for genuinely high importance messages and use standard posts for everything else, so when frontline colleagues see that “announcement” banner, they know it’s worth their attention.

How Silicon Reef Can Help

At Silicon Reef, we help internal comms and digital workplace teams bring frontline and non desk workers into the same connected ecosystem as their office based colleagues – using the Microsoft 365 stack they already own. That has included:

• Designing modern SharePoint intranets for organisations like TagEnergy, Gulf Oil, Argent Energy and the University of Leeds, with frontline journeys built in from day one.
• Configuring Viva Connections so those intranets show up in Teams as a branded, mobile friendly front door for frontline workers.
• Setting up Viva Engage communities, governance and leadership practices that move communication from broadcast to conversation – without creating uncontrolled risk.

If you’re exploring how to close the gap for frontline workers, our “Art of the Possible” sessions are a good place to start. These workshops are designed for internal comms teams and focus on what’s achievable with your current M365 licences and tools, and where you could go next. If frontline worker comms is your key focus, we can tailor sessions to focus there.

We’ll look at your current channel mix, map key frontline journeys, and show how Viva Connections and Viva Engage – plus other M365 tools like SharePoint and Copilot – can support a simpler, more human, more connected experience for every worker, wherever they are.