A frontline worker’s time is precious — most of it’s already spoken for between shift work and break time. So when they do have a minute to spare, what earns their attention?
Kevin Hähnlein has been grappling with this question for a while. As Head of Marketing & Strategic Advisory at Staffbase, he’s advised some of the company’s largest global organizations on getting frontline and desk-based workers to work together in the age of AI.
In his first issue, he brings that expertise, plus a lesson from something he’s training for himself.
Off to Kevin! — Kim
Pop quiz ↘
How long did it take American Electric Power (AEP) to hit 97% registration on their intranet?
~90 days
~6 months
~1 year
Scroll to the bottom for the answer.
Kevin Hähnlein, Head of Marketing and Strategic Advisory, Staffbase
Three weeks. That’s what’s left between me and the start line of my first Ironman in Italy, which I’ve trained almost 2 years for.
Here’s the thing about endurance: Nobody wins an Ironman in the first 130 miles.You win, or you fall apart, in the last 10. The last mile is where a whole year of work either shows up or doesn’t.
And the last mile is what I keep thinking about at work as well.
We are currently rolling out Staffbase’s AI assistant, and I keep having the same conversations with Comms, HR, and IT leaders as they’re trying to work out what their frontline workers would actually ask an assistant. Which questions, which answers, which content have to exist for it to be worth anything for their last mile, their hardest-to-reach employees.
A lot of very sharp people go surprisingly quiet here.
“Booking PTO.”
“What are my benefits?”
Great. Those are real. But that’s it? Is that genuinely the full extent of the value you have for the people who serve your customers and run the shifts?
Most organizations haven’t thought past it, and I’m not pretending it’s easy.
On my commutes or training routes, I see frontline workers everywhere on their phones. Not while working, obviously. But on their breaks or waiting for the bus. And I’m pretty sure very, very, very few of them are reading the latest safety update or scrolling their employee app for the latest CEO update. They’re on WhatsApp, TikTok, or Instagram.
So that’s the real question. How do we earn a few of those minutes? What kind of frontline value is good enough to beat TikTok for the 3 minutes someone has before or after their shift?
✍️ An exercise for you
Aside from vacation and benefits, what would a frontline worker actually ask an AI assistant?
Start here:
What would they actually ask an assistant if it could answer anything? Push past HR self-service and see what’s left.
Where's the operational value? Shift swaps, real-time answers, the things that make the actual shift easier, not just more informed. What are those in your org?
What actually earns attention? A quick win, a recognition moment, a short company video worth watching. Would it survive next to TikTok?
So, back to the last mile of an Ironman reaching your hardest-to-reach employees.
Endurance rewards the boring reps because that value compounds. No single training session wins the race. It’s the quiet, repeated ones that hold up when it counts.
Frontline value works the same way. It comes from small, useful, repeated reasons to open your employee app, until opening it becomes a habit worth the minute. One flashy launch or fancy competition won’t get you there.
AI makes this easier to build and far more tempting to fake. We can produce more content, faster than ever. But more content doesn’t mean more value. If it isn’t worth a break-time minute, the frontline will quietly route around it.
The last mile of any organization is the frontline. In fact, it’s earning the trust of your frontline, which is the hardest stretch, the least glamorous, and where the value of everything upstream either reaches people or gets lost on the way.
That’s the stretch to train for.
Three weeks to my start line. I'll let you know how the last mile treated me.
* * *
If you're wrestling with your own version of this, I'd love to hear how you're thinking about it. What does value that’s genuinely worth a frontline worker’s time look like for you? Reply here or find me on LinkedIn.
74% of frontline workers now use AI regularly, and 42% say it saves them a full workday every week. The catch: Most organizations still haven't worked out how to turn that saved time into real value.
67% of workers say organizational readiness, the culture, rules, and manager support around AI, matters more than the tooling itself. A good reminder that the value lives in what you build around the tool.
Employee engagement remains flat as AI adoption accelerates
AI use is surging, but employee engagement isn’t moving. What actually drives engagement? Managers who model the behavior themselves. The human layer is what AI can't replace.
The answer is a. ~90 days. After AEP rebuilt their intranet, a pulse survey found employees now consider it their most trusted source of information companywide. Hear their story, plus more from Bell Canada, Desert Financial Credit Union, and Mission Pet Health in our latest webinar.
Did someone forward you this newsletter? Subscribe to The Workplace Rewrite to receive the next issue!
Staffbase Inc., 408 Broadway St, New York, NY 10013, United States
