The energy sector depends on people working away from a desk: engineers, technicians, operational teams and contractors. Yet digital workplaces have traditionally been designed around laptop-based work.
That creates two connected challenges for energy organisations managing distributed workforces and significant change. Frontline employees need to feel connected to the wider organisation and have timely access to the information, knowledge and tools required to do their jobs.
For Internal Comms and Employee Experience teams, the conversation is often about engagement: how do we reach people who aren’t checking Teams all day, help them feel part of the organisation and give them a voice?
Move into IT, Operations or Digital Workplace teams and the focus shifts to enablement. Can someone on site quickly find the latest procedure, access the right document, complete a process or get an answer without spending twenty minutes working out where somebody filed it?
Those may be separate conversations inside the organisation, but they’re not separate experiences for the employee. Communications, operational information and everyday tools are all part of the same workday.
The challenge, then, is to create one joined-up experience for deskless workers that covers all aspects of the digital workplace.
Through our work with organisations across the energy sector, we’ve gained insights into how they’re navigating this challenge – from keeping people connected and making information and everyday processes easier to access, to bringing Internal Comms, IT and Operations together around the realities of the frontline workday.
Here’s what we’ve learned.
‘Frontline worker’ has become the umbrella term for a wide range of roles. In energy, that can include field engineers, technicians, maintenance teams, plant and site employees, contractors and other operational roles. It can also include multiple locations and levels of digital access:
Some people move between sites, while others remain at one operational location.
Some regularly use Teams and Microsoft 365 on a mobile device; others only interact with the corporate digital workplace on occasion.
Some are full-time employees whilst others may be short-term contractors or partners.
That variety can make things more complicated – there isn’t a ‘one-size-fits-all’ frontline experience that works for everyone. What works for an engineer moving between renewable sites may not work for somebody based at a plant, and neither may match the needs of a contractor with different devices or permissions.
What people really need is an experience designed around the realities of their job. People need information that’s easy to reach, relevant to their role and location, and available through the devices and channels they can realistically use.
That leads to two recurring questions: how do we keep frontline people connected to the organisation, and how do we make their working day easier?
For Internal Comms teams, the question is whether frontline employees can stay informed, feel connected and participate while getting on with their jobs.
Effective frontline communication needs to be:
A strong campaign or engaging intranet achieves little if a significant part of the workforce rarely sees it.
Make company communications easy to reach without shrinking a desktop experience onto a phone. In practice, that means:
In practice: TagEnergy + Network Plus
We’ve seen this play out with both TagEnergy and Network Plus. For TagEnergy, we brought a dispersed digital workplace together through SharePoint, Teams and Viva Connections, giving office-based employees and field engineers a clearer way to access information wherever they worked. With Network Plus, mobile access was an important part of making the digital workplace work for frontline teams, rather than assuming everyone would be accessing it from a desk.
Access alone isn’t enough. Frontline workers need content that’s specific to them – they’re unlikely to care about the announcement for next week’s head office bake sale. Make each interaction worth people’s attention by:
Frontline employees want to feel part of the conversation, rather than simply receiving a one-way stream of communications. They also bring valuable perspectives and insights from the field that head office teams might not have visibility of. Create practical routes for that knowledge to travel back through the organisation:
For IT and Operations, the emphasis shifts to whether people can find trusted information and complete tasks quickly. The practical questions are simple:
In energy, this can span operational knowledge, project documents, safety information and everyday processes.
An engineer checking a maintenance procedure shouldn’t need to know its exact title, owner or location. People in the field are often on the go and time-poor, so they should be able to find what they need in three clicks or fewer.
The employee-facing experience should be simple, while SharePoint handles the structure, governance and security behind the scenes. That means:
In practice: UK energy infrastructure organisation
For one major UK energy infrastructure organisation, the digital workplace needed to become a clearer entry point for employees and external partners, bringing project information, key tasks, tools and resources together. The work focused on navigation and content ownership as well as the user experience, helping create clearer routes into the information people needed.
Finding information is only part of the working day. Frontline employees also need to report issues, submit site data, complete checks, raise requests and move work to the next person – often while using a phone, or working with limited connectivity.
When those tasks depend on paper forms, spreadsheets, email chains or several disconnected systems, small delays quickly add up. Power Platform can bring the process into one mobile experience, capture information at source and route it automatically to the right team.
Start with the task, then remove friction:
Copilot is changing how frontline employees reach organisational knowledge. Instead of knowing what a document is called, where it lives or which team owns it, employees can ask a question in natural language: ‘What checks do I need to complete before starting this task?’ or ‘What’s the latest procedure for this asset?’
For someone working on site, that conversational route could remove several steps between the question and a useful answer.
But Copilot is only as useful as the knowledge and controls underneath it. Frontline scenarios need:
Internal Comms, IT and Operations may approach the frontline from different directions, but employees experience one workday. Every interaction either helps it flow or adds friction.
A joined-up Microsoft 365 experience can combine:
The combination will vary, but improving engagement while leaving operational friction untouched – or simplifying processes while people remain disconnected – only solves half the problem.
In practice: Gulf Oil
Gulf Oil’s global workforce was navigating disconnected SharePoint sites, Extranet links and email chains. We helped bring those routes together into a clearer, more consistent digital home for employees across locations.
Across energy and infrastructure, our work spans both sides of the frontline experience: communications for dispersed workforces, and reliable access to knowledge, documents and tools.
That might mean bringing scattered news, policies and site resources into a mobile-friendly SharePoint experience; surfacing it through Teams or Viva Connections; reorganising operational documents around roles, assets and tasks; or replacing paper forms and email hand-offs with Power Platform workflows. The precise solution varies, but the aim is consistent: fewer places to search, fewer steps to complete routine work and a clearer route back into the wider organisation.
Frontline employees shouldn’t have to navigate the boundaries between Internal Comms, IT and Operations to stay informed or get their jobs done. For energy organisations, the opportunity is to bring those disciplines together around the realities of the working day – creating a digital workplace that helps people feel connected, find trusted information quickly and complete everyday tasks with less friction, wherever their work takes them.
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