How to create a successful digital transformation roadmap

The Winter 2025 product release highlights Blink's latest innovations — some already live and others rolling out over the next quarter. Missed our Autumn 2024 release? Check it out here!

At Blink, our employee experience platform is always evolving to keep pace with the ever-changing needs of organizations and their teams.

In line with our dedication to creating exceptional employee experiences — whether on the frontline or in the front office — we’re excited to introduce our latest product features, built to transform how employees connect with their organizations and each other.

From enabling easy communication with in-app calling and live streaming, to powering better outcomes through enhanced data intelligence, these powerful new features are designed to support a connected, engaged, and uplifted workplace.

#1. Voice and video calling: Power real-time, in-app collaboration

​​We’re excited to announce the addition of native 1:1 video and voice calling within Blink, making it even easier for employees to connect, collaborate, and deliver real-time results for your business.

This new feature will include:

• Streamlined communication: Enables seamless 1:1 video and voice calls directly from individual chats or colleague profiles on mobile.
• Built for international teams: Ideal for organizations with global workforces who need quick and reliable access to colleagues.
• Future-proof design: Will launch on mobile, with plans to extend to desktop and explore group calling capabilities.
• Flexible add-on: Available as an optional feature priced based on users, ensuring scalability for any organization.

{{mobile-voice-video="/image"}}

#2. Live streaming: Go live with all employees at once

Bring your live events to life on Blink! Our new live streaming feature lets you promote and host events directly in the Feed, fostering real-time engagement and interaction.

Here’s what you can do:

• Stream seamlessly via Vimeo or YouTube, with full support for Vimeo interactions on Blink.
• Share streams from other platforms using Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) for an additional cost.
• Engage your audience as they comment and interact during your event.

{{mobile-live-stream-poll="/image"}}

#3. Advanced employee intelligence: Unlock organizational insights

Discover what drives your organization with Advanced Employee Intelligence — an upgraded analytics suite that goes beyond the basics to tackle turnover, engagement, and productivity. These actionable insights, available as a paid add-on feature, will empower you to address challenges proactively and foster a thriving workplace.

Transform your data into a powerful driver of organizational success with four core pillars of insights:

• Activation: Ensure every employee is connected and engaged with activation metrics by team and role, plus gamified nudges to boost adoption.
• Communication: Maximize the impact of your messages with heat maps and deep-dive analysis into communication effectiveness by category, media, and more.
• Engagement: Track and improve satisfaction with tools like engagement leaderboards and influencer metrics that spotlight key communicators.
• Productivity: Streamline workflows by analyzing app usage, tool access, and shift management to reduce friction and optimize efficiency.

#4. Journeys 2.0: Engage employees before day one

Make a lasting first impression with Blink’s new Journeys for preboarding! This enhancement to our Journeys feature allows managers to kick off onboarding before an employee’s first day, creating a standout employee experience right from the offer stage.

Here’s what’s new:

• Include line managers in the journey for a seamless, supportive experience.
• Use enhanced start-date triggers to send tailored communications ahead of the first day.
• Deliver a bespoke preboarding journey that sets the stage for success.

#5. Image-first feed: Curate the content experience

We’ve made the Feed even better with a new posting experience designed for high-quality, highly curated content that stands out and visually engages users.

Here’s what’s new:

• Choose your layout: Opt for the classic look or an enhanced layout that puts your images front and center.
• Audience-first review: See how your post will appear to your audience before you post.
• Simple to use: The curation and review steps are seamlessly built into the posting process.

#6. Self-service SSO: Simplify access to third-party systems

Our new self-service SSO feature streamlines user access to key third-party systems directly through Blink, reducing the need for multiple logins and improving overall security. This feature makes it easier than ever to connect Blink with the tools your teams rely on.

Key takeaways include:

• Enhanced user experience: Simplify workflows by allowing users to access essential systems without remembering multiple passwords, driving better uptake and ease of use.
• Flexible configuration: Administrators can set up and manage SAML 2.0 Single Sign-On directly from the Blink Admin dashboard, enabling seamless integration with your Service Provider.

#7. Polls as Stories: Boost engagement with a visual integration

Take your Polls to the next level by sharing them through Stories, including our new image-first Polls feature, to maximize visibility and participation. This integration helps make employee feedback and interaction more accessible and engaging than ever.

Here’s what you can do now:

• Increase engagement: Promote Polls in Stories to capture attention and encourage more responses from your teams.
• Visual appeal: Leverage image-first Polls to create a dynamic and engaging experience, driving curiosity and interaction.

{{mobile-story-polls="/image"}}

#8. Chat and channel moderation: Maintain a professional communication environment

Administrators now have greater control over chats and channels with new moderation capabilities, including the ability to hide certain types of content when necessary. These tools empower admins to foster a safe, engaging, and well-managed communication space for everyone.

With this feature, you’ll gain:

• Improved oversight: Maintain a positive and professional environment by managing and moderating conversations directly within chats and channels.
• Content management: Use the “hide” feature to remove inappropriate or irrelevant content, ensuring discussions stay on track.

#9. Dark mode: A new way to experience Blink

Enjoy a more comfortable and visually striking interface with our new dark mode feature, now available via a simple toggle in your settings. This update adds a touch of personalization and comfort to your everyday platform experience.

With dark mode:

• Improved comfort: Reduce eye strain during late-night use or in low-light environments with a sleek, dark interface.
• Personalized experience: Give users the flexibility to choose between Light and Dark modes based on their preferences.

{{mobile-dark-mode-post="/image"}}

Coming soon

Get excited for updates to the Hub experience, moderation enhancements, and in-app events management!

Bring your consumer-grade employee experience to life

As we kick off a new year of workplace evolution, our mission remains unchanged: to deliver tools that strengthen connections, boost productivity, and ensure every employee enjoys a seamless and exceptional experience — no matter their role or location.

These latest product enhancements reflect our commitment to helping organizations supercharge their employee experience as we step into 2025.

IM Flash Technologies, a semiconductor factory with a large frontline workforce, was struggling with its worst turnover in decades.

As a last resort, they turned to employee engagement surveys.

Senior leaders spent the next year collecting insights and making the changes their employees asked for.

By the next year, they'd reduced turnover by 50%.

Clear, actionable data is the key to making informed decisions about your workplace culture and internal communications: the good, the bad – and the ugly.

And what’s your best bet to get this data? Extract it straight from the source: your people.

Senior managers have been using the trusty annual employee engagement survey for the past 30+ to ask workers how they really feel.

And fair enough. When done right, an annual employee survey can get you some solid insights. But it’s not going to cut it in today’s world. At least not on its own.  

In this post, we’ll walk you through the ins and outs of conducting an employee engagement survey, why it may or may not work for your company, and the employee survey alternatives you can start using right away. 

What is an employee engagement survey? 

An annual employee engagement survey is a set of questions shared with workers once a year. The answers help gauge employee sentiment, identify issues, and contribute to (possible) solutions. 

mployee engagement is crucial for any organization’s growth. Teams with highly engaged members sell over 20% more than groups with low engagement, according to a PeopleMetrics study. Engaged workers have the potential to get your company more customers, while disengaged workers increase expenses and reduce profits. 

So an annual employee engagement survey measures the extent to which workers feel valued at your organization. 

With that in mind, here’s a rundown of how you’d typically go about conducting a yearly employee engagement survey in an organization. 

How to run an employee engagement survey

Figure out your goal

Before creating and distributing a survey to your workers, you need a crystal clear idea of what you want to measure and why. This will help you generate the right questions and get data you can actually use. 

For example, your purpose for conducting an annual employee engagement survey could be:

• Help find ways to transform a toxic workplace culture
• Generate ideas to enhance the employee net promoter scorer (eNPS)
• Identify how to increase employee engagement throughout the company
• Come up with ways to improve employee retention
• Develop two-way communication between managers and workers

Plan your survey questions

Asking great questions is the key to getting to the heart of workplace issues. The right questions will get better answers from workers. And the better responses you get, the easier for your company to identify areas of improvement. 

Here are the best questions for an annual employee engagement survey. These are a baseline – but a solid one!

• What is your favorite thing about working at our company?
• What is your least favorite thing about working at our company?
• What’s the most important thing we should do to make things better at our company?
• Do you feel like a valued member of our company or just a number? Why?
• What can we do to foster better internal communication at our company?
• Do you get constructive feedback from your seniors on a regular basis?
• Do you see your career growing in this company?
• Is the number of tasks assigned to you reasonable?
• Are you satisfied with our rewards and recognition policies?

Don’t overwhelm your readers

If you conduct an employee engagement survey only once a year, it’s tempting to combine multiple surveys or ask a wide range of questions. 

Give in to this temptation, and you’ll likely end up with a survey that confuses workers and doesn’t generate actionable feedback. 

That’s not what you want, right? So keep it simple. Only include the most important and specific topics to keep your survey from turning into an SAT exam. And make sure to use plain language that all the employees can easily understand. 

Ideally, your survey should include around 30 questions. Go more than 40 and it’s overkill. 30-40 questions are just enough to cover all the key aspects as per your objective without putting too much burden on the workers.

Build and distribute your survey

The next step is execution. How will you create the survey and share it with the employees? The good news is there are many intuitive tools at your disposal. Take Blink for example.  

Our employee experience platform helps you share anonymous polls and surveys with your employees. These surveys get high completion rates and honest feedback. 

All you need to do is create your form with a 3rd-party application such as Google Forms, Survey Monkey, or Typeform. Once your form is ready, simply copy its URL and add it to the Hub.  

Promote, promote, promote!

Now comes the fun part — getting workers to fill the survey. Just like charity begins at home, survey advocacy begins with senior management. Here are the key steps that will help maximize the reach of your annual employee engagement survey. 

• Get the senior leaders and managers to complete the survey first. This way, you can get feedback on the overall experience of filling the survey. So you can make any amends, if needed, before sharing the survey with the whole workforce.
• Use an employee app to provide resources that may come in handy when a worker sits down to complete a survey. 
• Promote the survey at every opportunity. Boost participation by mentioning the survey in employee newsletters, posting flyers, announcing prizes, and reminding workers about the survey in meetings and conferences.

Are annual employee engagement surveys dead?

Now you know how to conduct surveys. But you should also know that an annual employee engagement survey has certain shortcomings. 

An annual employee engagement survey can help gauge your work culture only to some extent. So when used on its own, it’s not the best way to learn more about your employees. Often, it may not reveal any solid insights into your organization’s core issues.

Before you decide on planning a survey, also consider the drawbacks below.

It’s impersonal

An annual employee engagement survey, by its nature, is a cold way to get feedback. When you send a set of questions once a year to be answered by your workers, the unspoken message they may hear is: 

"We want your inputs, but only in a certain format and confined to the questions we have developed. We're not attempting to build or nurture a relationship or anything! Don’t think too much and just check a few boxes. No big deal!"

An annual employee engagement survey can make workers feel that their employer doesn’t take feedback seriously. So neither should they. 

It doesn’t provide valuable data

An annual employee engagement survey doesn’t encourage honest feedback. Many of the workers may not trust the system. They might think that being too honest in an annual employee engagement survey - like slamming their manager - can get them in trouble.

It relies on fluffy metrics 

HBR once reported in a case study that United Parcel Service faced a huge loss because its annual employee survey didn’t uncover problems associated with a surge in part-time jobs. So when workers went on strike, it cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

Most commonly-used questionnaires make use of “percent favourable” metrics. So the data you get consists of inflated scores and blind spots, giving you the illusion of high engagement when it’s the opposite in reality. 

It’s not regular enough

For anything that matters, measuring your progress just once a year is not enough. Whether it’s your personal health, financial investments, or employee engagement, you’ll be wise to keep tabs regularly.

An annual employee engagement survey is a snapshot in time. And the feedback you get from employees in a singular moment can’t accurately reflect their feelings for the whole year. 

Since organizations using annual surveys don’t get the data they need to act, they don’t. They finish conducting the survey like it was just a formality and move on, further tarnishing whatever trust workers had in the employer.

For these reasons, many HR leaders believe that annual employee engagement surveys are dead. While we won’t go as far, it’s evident that once-a-year surveys alone aren’t enough to get accurate and comprehensive insights, which brings us to the next part. 

Employee engagement survey alternatives 

Gone are the days when workers were happy just to have a job. And before you counter — Yes, even if it provides standard benefits like health insurance and retirement savings. The ingredients that make your employees engaged, satisfied, and happy are now more nuanced and sophisticated. 

To find out how successful your recipe is, you need comprehensive techniques that can capture worker sentiment in a timely and relevant manner. Let’s see what those are.

1. Tracking company-wide metrics

The tools and technologies that you use for employee management and collaboration can give you a ton of real-time and continuous feedback from the workforce. 

Most modern systems these days come with built-in analytics to drill down into worker behavior and identify areas of improvement. For example, you can view:

• Performance appraisal and evaluation ratings
• Number of discrimination complaints and legal claims
• Number of workers on a leave of absence
• Employees who have filed compensation claims
• Number of workers who resigned in the last 12 months
• Number of training hours workers attended voluntarily
• Average employee commute time (the shorter, the better)
• Number of workers on zero-hour contracts

By understanding such people trends, you can get an accurate sense of engagement across the organization. And you can do all this without directly involving your employees. 

2. Pulse surveys

Research shows that 77% of employees want to provide feedback more than once per year. And that most employees prefer to provide feedback four times a year.

That’s where Pulse surveys come in. Pulse surveys get employee feedback using short, frequent check-ins that are not confined to specific content or topics. When you ask quick questions at short intervals, the feedback you get will be more authentic and practical.

3. Town-hall meetings 

Townhalls are another viable alternative to annual surveys. If you manage a team that’s too large for a conference table, organize a Town Hall meeting to spark discussions and learn about team members’ concerns. 

Don’t want to put yourself on the spot? Easy. Ask employees to submit questions in advance so you can be better prepared to answer them. 

4. An open-door policy

Why wait for a formal process or tool to get feedback? You can create an environment in which spontaneous feedback is encouraged. 

Make your employees feel safe and comfortable with two-way communication mechanisms. When they can talk openly about their concerns, you’ll always have a string of things you can improve in your repository. So you won’t have to go hunt for good ideas once every year. 

Final thoughts 

If you really want to have a lasting impact on your culture, you must consult your employees regularly and consider alternatives to a once-a-year survey. By pairing surveys with alternative ways to get employee feedback, you’ll be on your way to shaping a work environment where workers feel more productive and content.

Internal communication mistakes are eye-wateringly expensive. According to estimates, they cost US companies up to $1.2 trillion every year. Mistakes lead to lost business, missed deadlines, and lower employee productivity.

In frontline organizations, communication mistakes are often more pronounced — because it’s notoriously hard to reach employees who are on-the-go, working away from the office in demanding, hands-on roles.

Here, we look at how to avoid six common frontline communication mistakes, improving frontline comms in the process.

This is what we’re going to cover:

• The frontline employee communication challenge
• The link between communication and retention
• How to avoid six common frontline communication mistakes
• Frontline employee communication: essential considerations
• Frontline employee communications FAQs

The frontline employee communication challenge

Reaching your frontline employees with internal communications has never been easy. Unlike desk-based workers, they often spend work days on their feet, away from a computer and sometimes their coworkers.

Communication over a traditional intranet or via email is, therefore, unlikely to be effective. Frontline workers don’t always have a good Wi-Fi connection or access to an appropriate device. So it can be hard for them to perform basic tasks — like finding and downloading a policy document or an email attachment.

Varying shift patterns make it hard for comms teams to reach employees with real-time updates. And — unless you’re tailoring your content to frontline worker needs — the volume of information can easily feel overwhelming. Employees then end up missing critical messages.

For too long, frontline employee communication has been an afterthought. Organizations haven’t always had the strategy or technology they need to make frontline comms effective.

But now, with a renewed focus on employee engagement and retention — and with more tech tools on offer than ever before — many organizations are rethinking how they communicate with their frontline staff.

The link between communication and retention

In frontline industries, there continue to be high levels of staff churn. In transportation, annual turnover stands at 56.7%. In hospitality, the figure stands at 73.8%. This compares to a national average of 13%. 

One of the primary culprits behind these sky-high stats? Internal communication mistakes. 61% of employees considering switching jobs cite poor internal communication as a factor.

Good internal communication keeps employees in the loop. It helps them understand company values and goals. Effective communication channels support frontline employees to connect with coworkers and feel part of company culture.

Being empowered to do a good job. Strong workplace relationships. Feeling part of something bigger. These things boost frontline employee engagement and encourage loyalty.

But with just 40% of frontline employees saying they have a strong sense of connection to their direct leader and 43% saying they have a strong sense of connection to their organization, it’s clear that frontline companies have work to do.   

How to avoid 6 common frontline communication mistakes

Good frontline communication can be transformative for your organization. Here are the mistakes you need to avoid to keep your frontline workers informed and engaged.

Mistake #1: Sticking to the same ineffective frontline communication channels

Many frontline organizations still use paper methods of communication. They send out a newsletter or put memos up on an already crowded noticeboard.

These messages are easy to miss. The information can be outdated by the time it’s distributed. And communication only goes one way — there are limited opportunities for employee interaction.

Email is equally ineffective for frontline workers who don’t always have a corporate email address. And word-of-mouth messaging and phone calls are time-consuming for frontline managers.

Many workers are turning to the tech tools they use in their personal lives to bridge the communication gap. 55% of workers say that WhatsApp is their primary workplace communication tool.

But shadow IT platforms, like WhatsApp, are flawed, too. There are huge compliance and data security issues associated with shadow IT. It also lies outside the control of your comms team so there’s zero oversight. 

Making do with internal communication channels like these makes it hard for your comms team to communicate key messages. It also harms the frontline employee experience. 

How to solve it:

Move beyond this patchwork approach to frontline communication. Unify your messaging with the help of internal communication channels that frontline workers can access easily.  

A reliable way to reach employees is via an employee app, which employees can access on their smartphones. Here, you can bring together all strands of workplace communication and provide social-media-style tools that employees will enjoy using.

Common features include a dynamic company news feed, secure chat, and a content hub packed with essential policies and guides.

{{mobile-main="/image"}}

‍

This app becomes a go-to hub of communication and a single source of truth. Employees know they can use the app to quickly and easily find the information they need.

Mistake #2: Your frontline communication tech isn’t mobile-first

A frontline connection gap exists in almost every frontline organization. And it can make frontline employees feel like second-class citizens.

49% of frontline workers say that there are two separate cultures at play within their company: “one for the frontline and one for everyone else.” This unfairness can lead to division and disengagement. And too often, internal communication mistakes — and poor tech choices — are to blame.

Not all employee apps are created equal. And unless you choose a mobile-first solution, designed around the needs of mobile users, you’re likely to run into one (or all) of the following problems:

1. Your app offers an inferior user experience. It doesn’t support the features and functionality that your desk-based employees enjoy on the desktop version.
   
   
2. Your app is difficult for employees to access, either because it uses long-winded login methods or because it requires a corporate email address.
   
   
3. Employees don’t like using your app, either because it has a complicated interface or because it’s one of many digital tools they’re expected to use during the workday.

Problems like these create a two-tier system, with office-based employees getting better access to internal comms than their frontline coworkers. They also cause friction for employees, which means they’re much less likely to use the app.

How to solve it:

When choosing technology for frontline employees, get input from a wide range of stakeholders — including your frontline staff. They can tell you what features and functionality they’d like to see in an employee app.

Supplement this input with an understanding of best practice. The best apps for frontline workers provide the following as standard: 

• A mobile-first solution. This ensures the platform experience is equitable, with the same features and functionality available on both mobile and desktop versions of the software.
• A user-friendly interface. To ensure high levels of app adoption, it should be easy for frontline employees to learn and use the platform.
• Strong integrations. So frontline workers can access all workplace tech — not just your communication channels — from one dashboard.

Single sign-on technology. So employees only have to remember one set of login details to access all the tech tools they need.

Mistake #3: An HQ-centric approach to comms content

With the right technology, you can finally reach the frontline employees in your organization. But you can’t simply serve up the same content you’ve always delivered.

Long-winded corporate content is a no-no for busy frontline teams. You’re unlikely to engage them if you ask them to download a PDF policy document or scroll through long paragraphs of text. Remember: they’re consuming content on a small smartphone screen.

Likewise, if most of the content they see is geared toward office-based employees, frontline workers are likely to lose interest. Scrolling through lots of irrelevant information to reach frontline-specific content is a headache your frontline really doesn’t need.

How to solve it:

Long-winded, text-based comms are out. Short, snappy, visual content is in. 

Think of the kinds of messages that work well on social media platforms. Here, attention-grabbing headlines, multimedia posts, Stories, and straight-to-the-point text convey a lot of information very quickly and effectively.

{{mobile-stories="/image"}}

‍

This is ideal for busy frontline workers who don’t have time to scroll through reams of text-heavy content. They get need-to-know information in bite-size form.

Personalization is also key. A home care worker doesn’t need to know about the faulty photocopier in the office. But elderly care updates? New incident reporting procedures? The latest shift availability? That’s all really useful and engaging stuff. 

Segment your audience so frontline workers only see information that relates to them, their location, role, and team.

Mistake #4: Too many corporate updates, not enough community

Your office employees can congratulate their coworkers on a successful sales pitch face-to-face. They can share ideas with a teammate on the way to lunch. Or chat about the latest binge-worthy series with their buddies while brewing a coffee in the office kitchen.

But it’s different for the frontline. Frontline workers don’t get the same opportunity for coworker camaraderie as their desk-based peers. There are few options for collaboration and only 30% feel seen and valued by their organization.

Corporate updates are an essential part of employee communications. But you can’t stop there.  Failing to focus on community across your communication channels leaves frontline workers feeling isolated from company culture — and each other.

How to solve it:

Becoming a connected organization is about more than passing news from HQ to the frontline. Effective communication goes both ways and — with the right tech tools — you can build a shared sense of culture and purpose.

To bring every member of staff into the conversation, ensure your platform supports employee interactions. Can they leave comments on news feed posts? React with emojis? Post their own content?

Also, look to launch the following:

• Fun, informal posts. Create polls, launch content challenges, and post event videos. This fun content encourages interaction and helps frontline employees to feel part of company culture.
• Shared interest groups. Communities are a great way to bring frontline employees together. They can find coworkers who share their interests and hobbies, and build meaningful workplace relationships.  
• Regular recognition. Organizations that make recognition an everyday part of the employee experience improve retention, employee engagement, and a sense of belonging. So encourage managers and coworkers to regularly create employee recognition posts.
• Group chat. Create group chats for each frontline team and location. When employees can easily connect with their coworkers, collaboration and connection improve.

Mistake #5: Communication is one-way

Top-down communications are important. You need to keep employees in the loop about company updates, safety announcements, and schedules. But if communication only flows one way, engagement will suffer.

Two-way internal communication shows employees you value them and their input. It demonstrates trust, which then gets repaid. You also get insights that drive smarter business decisions.  

Frontline workers interact with customers. They can spot supply chain bottlenecks and operational inefficiencies. They know which policies are causing frontline frustration — long before the C-suite does.

Without easy, two-way communication, leadership is left in the dark on issues that impact productivity, customer experience, and employee retention.

How to solve it:

Don’t settle for a digital bulletin board. Make your employee app a hive of interactivity by encouraging employees to join the conversation. Here’s how:

• Surveys. Launch regular employee surveys to gauge employee sentiment on everything from policy changes to break room design to internal communication strategy.
• Forms. Make it easy for employees to report safety concerns or suggest improvements using easy-access digital forms.
• Real-time chat. Give frontline workers a direct line to managers and coworkers with 1-to-1 chat functions.
• Interactive content. Craft content that encourages employee input: pose questions in news feed posts, create flash polls, or run a leadership Q&A.

By giving frontline employees a voice, you create a more engaged, informed, and empowered workforce — one that actively contributes to company success. 

Mistake #6: You don’t act on insights from employees and app analytics

If you’ve already rectified the other mistakes on this list, you’re now actively listening to employees and gathering a ton of useful internal communication data through your employee app.

But collecting feedback and analytics is only half the battle — it’s what you do with that information that really counts.  

Failing to act on employee insights weakens trust in the feedback process. When employees don’t see changes based on their input, they become disengaged and less likely to participate in future surveys or discussions.

Ignoring app analytics is equally costly. Unless you segment and analyze the data, you risk making internal comms decisions based on assumptions, not facts. This means missed opportunities to optimize content, improve reach, and create messages that resonate with employees.

The result? Internal communications stagnate, employee engagement declines, and your strategy fails to keep up with the evolving needs and expectations of your frontline employees.

How to solve it:

• Close the feedback loop. Every time you launch an employee survey or embark on a listening tour, tell employees about your findings and thank them for their contributions. Let them know what you plan to do next and keep them posted on any changes and improvements you make.
  
  
• Make proper use of analytics. Use app analytics to track internal communication KPIs. Look at metrics like platform adoption rate, leadership visibility, profile completion, and the number of responses, likes, and reactions your messages receive. Also, segment the data so you get a real sense of how frontline employees are using your internal communication tools. Then, make improvements based on your findings to make your internal communication platform work even better for frontline teams.

Frontline employee communication: essential considerations

Internal communication mistakes are costly. But can avoid them by remembering these guiding principles for frontline comms:

• Think mobile-first. Frontline workers spend all, or most, of their time away from a desk. They need communication systems that move with them.
• Provide short, engaging content. Busy frontline employees need information in an easy-to-digest format. So make like a social media marketer with succinct, visual, and highly engaging messages. 
• Connection, not just communication. Build an online company community by encouraging employee interaction and coworker conversations. 
• Commit to iteration. Continually evaluate your communication strategy and encourage regular feedback from your frontline employees. Then, make meaningful changes based on data, not instincts.

Is your frontline communication falling short?

You only avoid the communication mistakes we’ve looked at in this article if you have the right internal comms tech on your team. That’s where Blink comes in.

Blink is an employee app that offers the same great experience for frontline and desk-based employees.

With secure, single sign-on technology, a user-friendly interface, and deep integrations, it acts as a digital hub. It gives frontline employees access to the information, tools, and connection they need day to day — all via their smartphones.

Blink. And connect your frontline employees like never before.

The company intranet shouldn’t be a place where your documents go to gather digital dust. Done right, an intranet acts as the beating heart of your organization.

That’s because there are so many ways you can use an intranet. Internal communication, project management, personnel services, collaboration – a modern intranet can be the hub for a diverse range of workplace activities.

Too often, however, the company intranet is neglected. Without regular improvement, it becomes irrelevant and unappealing to your employees. Usage drops and you end up paying for something that no one really engages with.

So how do you keep your intranet up to date and in use? If you feel your company intranet has lost its shine, take a look at the list of intranet improvement ideas below. They’ll help you to maximize your intranet – boosting employee engagement, connection, and productivity in the process.

What is a company intranet?

The intranet has changed a lot over the years. So we thought it wise to start with a definition.

A company intranet is a local network, exclusively for you and your employees. Unlike the company website, it’s a place where you can share documents and data privately – without worrying about clients, competitors, or the general public seeing them.

A basic company intranet usually includes:

• Internal communication tools
• An employee directory
• Document sharing
• Access to personnel services

That’s how we’d describe a traditional company intranet. But there’s a lot of variation between different intranet software. As we’ll see in a moment, older intranets are a world away from the modern versions many companies use today.

Why is it important to improve your company intranet?

An intranet can boost employee engagement and streamline operations. But if your organization is still using an older style of intranet, you may run into the following problems:

• Functionality is limited
• Employees don’t like using your intranet
• Some employees (for example, your frontline workers) can’t access your intranet

There’s no getting away from it. Older intranets have limitations- they were designed for a version of the workplace that no longer exists. They’re great for sharing information among a desk-based team but traditional intranets aren’t particularly user-friendly or accessible.

‍

In contrast, modern intranet software solutions are built with the needs of today’s digital workplace in mind. They allow easy internal communication and collaboration, even when employees are away from the office. And they provide a hub for workplace essentials, like benefits and payroll. 

But remember – whichever type of intranet you’re currently using within your organization, there’s always room for improvement. Technology and employee expectations are constantly changing and your intranet needs to keep pace.

Updates enhance the intranet experience for employees, which means they’re more likely to use the platform. They also bring a greater range of functions under the same intranet umbrella, helping teams to be more productive.

A fully optimized intranet (or a similar tool – like an employee app), puts essential tools at the fingertips of your workforce. Employees are more effective and engaged. And you get the most out of your software investment.

14 ideas to improve your company intranet

An older intranet is sometimes little more than a glorified shared folder. Even modern intranets can quickly fall behind ever-evolving tech trends and employee needs.

By improving your intranet, you create something altogether more useful and exciting. Adopt modern intranet features and you’ll bring your company intranet up-to-date while encouraging employee uptake too.

In this section, we’re going to look at lots of ideas for improving your company intranet.

1. Improve communication channels

2. Personalized user portals

3. Content creation

4. Social networking features

5. Integration of AI and automation

6. Mobile accessibility

7. Rewards and recognition

8. Feedback and surveys

9. Integration with other tools

10. Analytics and reporting

11. Onboarding and training resources

12. Security and data privacy

13. User training and support

14. Commitment to continuous improvement

1. Improve communication channels

Think of the communication tools you use outside the workplace – the apps you use to chat with friends and family.

These apps are appealing and engaging. They facilitate fast and easy communication via instant messaging. They allow you to chat privately or in groups. And they come with an intuitive, user-friendly interface.

Recreate the same experience within your company intranet and you boost both team connection and employee engagement.

So where should you start? The first step to improving intranet communication channels is ensuring everyone has a voice. Conversations should be two-way, not one-way. That means using communication channels that allow information to travel in all directions – peer-to-peer, top-down, and bottom-up.

Once you’ve established these types of communication channels, encourage your teams to use them. Allow employees to create spaces where co-workers can chat and collaborate. Welcome feedback and frontline intel from your workers and use channels to share important news.

When communication channels crisscross your organization in this way, everyone hears and is heard. And important information is a lot less likely to be missed.

2. Personalized user portals

Marketing emails. Grocery store rewards. Netflix recommendations. The best digital experiences are tailored to each individual consumer.

Personalization makes experiences more engaging – and, when we spend our days bombarded with information, it cuts through the noise to ensure that key messages resonate.

We can apply this approach to the company intranet. When an employee logs in and sees a dashboard personalized to their role, their team, and their past intranet interactions, everything becomes much more engaging. An employee gets relevant content front and center.  

Whether your intranet provides personalization automatically – or if employees can rearrange the user portal themselves – tailored experiences are another great way to improve your intranet.

3. Content creation

At a minimum, employees should be filling out their employee profile. But you can encourage them to go further. Make your intranet more relevant and engaging by involving all team members in content creation.

Employees can share team news, tutorials, and guides. To ensure cohesion, you can create a content template to support employees with the process, outlining the structure they should follow and the tags they can add.

Of course, employees can also contribute their posts, comments, and reactions on a social-media-style news feed.

4. Social networking features

72.3% of the US population uses social networking sites. So it’s safe to say that most of your employees enjoy hanging out on at least one of the popular social media platforms.

Add a social-media-style news feed to your intranet solution and you make things feel a little less corporate and a little more social. Employees can see and share posts, images, and videos. They can also comment and react to posts published by their co-workers.

A news feed keeps employees in the know. It’s a place to share important workplace updates and events. But not any old news feed will do. If you want high adoption rates, you need a news feed with a user-friendly interface. When a platform is intuitive, employees find it easier to weave it into their work day.  

Blink Feed – a feature of the Blink super-app – replicates the experience of popular social network news feeds by prioritizing connection and usability. It offers a range of really useful add-ons, too – like critical messages that sit at the top of the news feed until employees read and acknowledge them.

5. Integration of AI and automation

Love it or loathe it, AI is making work quicker and easier. So incorporating it into your company intranet makes perfect sense.

With the help of AI, you can:

• Automate repetitive intranet tasks, like expense report processing and employee onboarding
• Give time-strapped content creators inspiration for their posts
• Personalize employee portals based on the features they use most often
• Send push notifications, drawing employee back to the intranet when new content is posted

Add an AI chatbot to your intranet and you can do even more. This virtual assistant can handle routine inquiries. It can help employees find answers to FAQs, locate relevant resources, or troubleshoot intranet issues. 

When AI and automation do some of the heavy lifting, employees complete tasks quickly and easily, and you lighten the load for your personnel and IT teams, too.

6. Mobile accessibility

Back in the day, old intranets worked off a server in the office. You could only log in if you were based on a desktop computer in the same building.

We’ve come a long way. Now, in a world where employees work remotely – and where they’re used to slick digital experiences – most intranets can be accessed via an internet connection. But does this go far enough?

If employees access your intranet solely from a computer or laptop screen, then maybe. But if you’re a frontline organization, probably not. You need a solution with mobile-first design that ensures the same great intranet experience across all devices.

That’s because frontline workers don’t always have access to a desktop or laptop computer. They often don’t even have access to a work email address. And if your intranet offers a sub-standard (or non-existent) mobile experience, these workers can end up cut off from co-workers, comms, and company culture.

A mobile-first intranet ensures every member of your organization – including those working remotely or on the frontline – gets the same information and sense of connection. Your intranet reaches employees wherever they spend their workdays.

7. Rewards and recognition

According to Gallup and Workhuman research, employees who get recognition for their hard work are up to 20 times more engaged than those who don’t.

Praise an employee and you boost their motivation. Give public recognition and that impact grows. You create a positive company culture. And the wider team – seeing that effort is rewarded – are more likely to up their game, too.

If you’re not using your intranet to recognize and reward the employee behaviors you want to see, this is another key area for improvement. You need tools – like Blink’s recognition feature – that help you weave small but meaningful recognition into your every day.

Show employees just how much you value them with instant, personalized messages. And go public, celebrating employee successes with the whole team so everyone benefits.

Aggregate Industries, a manufacturer and supplier in the UK, put this rewards action with their Net Zero campaign that is at a core of their organization.

In an effort to drive awareness about the team’s sustainability efforts, “carbon atoms” were placed throughout the Blink platform for employees to find while engaging with content. Once discovered, each atom held a question related to their Net Zero strategy, and when an employee answered the question correctly, they were entered into a contest for a prize. This ultimately drove incredible engagement with the platform while learning about a key strategy of theirs, and then the employees were rewarded when they engaged.

‍

To learn more about how Aggregate Industries utilizes Blink for their Internal Communications strategy, check out our webinar here.

8. Feedback and surveys

The best intranets have built-in feedback and survey functions that make it easy to discover employee needs, concerns, and expectations.

You promote open, two-way communication with regular requests for feedback. You then have all of the communication tools you need to share findings and a plan of action with employees.

With these tools at your disposal, you can seek feedback on any aspect of the employee experience, including the intranet itself. Perhaps a crucial feature is clunky and difficult to use. Or extra functionality would make a popular tool even more useful.

Launch surveys via Blink’s mobile super-app and it’s super easy for employees to respond – even when using a smartphone. You can discover what employees think of your intranet, and then make data-driven software improvements.

9. Onboarding and training resources

When you use your intranet for onboarding, there are lots of benefits:

• You create a standardized process
• New hires have a resource they can refer back to
• You save manager time because the intranet does some of the training for them
• It’s easy to gather feedback and data on the onboarding process

If you aren’t already using your intranet to train new hires, start by putting mandatory training resources, FAQs, and video tutorials onto your portal. Also, encourage new starters to use your employee directory, finding relevant co-workers to connect with.

Introduce new employees to your intranet from the very beginning and you showcase its role within your organization. Employees get to see its features and benefits, and are more likely to use it going forward.

10. Integration with other tools

Company intranets are most useful when they’re a one-stop-shop – a hub for all the technologies, tools, and resources you use within your organization.

Putting everything in one place speeds up and streamlines workflow. Employees don’t waste time logging in and out of different platforms. And they don’t have to familiarize themselves with multiple interfaces. Instead, they access everything they need via your intranet portal.

If you’re currently using a patchwork of different tools, you can improve things by finding out which integrations your intranet software supports.

Alternatively, you can connect tools via a feature like the Blink hub. Here, you can put HR systems, internal communications, project management, employee benefits, and more, in the same accessible place.  

11. Analytics and reporting

If your current intranet doesn’t have analytics and reporting features this is another area crying out for improvement. With analytics, you get to see:

• User behavior
• Which features users like best
• What users are searching for
• How engaged users are with your intranet

With Blink Analytics you can go even further.

See how communication flows around your company so you can identify both positive and negative relationships. Filter employee engagement data by team or date range. Find the most popular news feed posts to learn which content grabs employee attention. 

Analytics and reporting functions make intranet data easy to understand and act upon. You can then use your findings to make your intranet even more effective.

12. Security and data privacy

There’s a cyber-attack every 39 seconds. Any digital workplace needs to consider the cyber security risks they face and regularly reassess the safety measures they have in place.

The best intranets provide rock-solid security that keep systems and data safe. So if your intranet security hasn’t been updated in a while, this could be another key area for improvement.

Access control measures prevent unauthorized users from accessing specific intranet sections or features. Encryption and password protection keep sensitive documents from prying eyes. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is an extra-secure way to verify a user’s identity as they log in to the system.

Employee training is also essential. Everyone needs to understand secure password practices – and how to recognize and respond to security threats. When your teams understand best security practices you can rest easy, knowing that your intranet isn’t putting your business at risk.

13. User training and support

Employee security training is important. So too is intranet training. Too many intranets are underutilized simply because employees aren’t familiar with the range of features they offer.

Of course, the best intranets are intuitive and easy to use. But if you find that your adoption rates aren’t as healthy as you’d like them to be, hone in on training.

Create guides that explain intranet features and how to use them. Consider setting up a dedicated support channel for intranet-related issues and inquiries. Appoint intranet champions – members of staff who get full training on intranet systems and can then share their knowledge with co-workers.

Training and support help employees to understand and see the value in your intranet, while you maximize the impact of intranet features.

14. Continuous improvement

It’s never a case of implementing an intranet solution and then letting it run its own course. To get the best out of an intranet, treat it like a constant work in progress.

The tech tools we use in our personal lives are regularly updated. And your intranet solution needs to move with the times too. To stay relevant and engaging, it has to adapt to changing trends, tech advances, and the needs of your employees.  

With surveys, feedback requests, and analytics, you keep your finger on the pulse. You can figure out what’s missing from your intranet and which features need work. You also get the buzz of seeing which changes make the most impact.

Do companies still use intranets?

We’ve just spent a lot of time talking about the improvements you can make to the company intranet. But let’s circle back to an important question – do companies still even use them?

When it comes to the traditional company intranet, not so much. Business leaders have realized that a digital workplace and digitally-savvy employees need something more. They need an intranet that’s agile, user-friendly, and engaging. And traditional intranets don’t tend to tick these boxes.

That’s why many organizations have turned to modern intranet solutions courtesy of today’s top intranet software providers. They use an intranet that employees can access via an internet connection, one that combines lots of useful workplace tools, like project management and personnel services.

But for some organizations, these updated intranets are still falling short. So instead of an intranet solution, they’re choosing to use a mobile-first employee app.

Difference between intranets and employee apps

The intranet has its drawbacks. It doesn’t necessarily work across all devices. Nor does it provide the exceptional user experience that employees now expect. Employee apps – offering many of the same features as a company intranet – remedy these issues.

An employee app like Blink is:

• Mobile-first
• Intuitive to use
• Built on two-way communication

Everyone in your organization can use the employee app. They don’t have to be sitting at a computer. And they don’t even need their own company email address. This makes employee apps particularly well-suited to frontline organizations.

Imagine a frontline worker – a bus driver who spends the day driving. She spends very little time with co-workers or at company HQ. In the past, when the company used an intranet that she couldn’t access, she relied on the depo notice board for company updates.

But now, thanks to the company’s employee app, she receives internal communication and makes co-worker connections via her smartphone. On her commute or during a break, she can open the app and get up to speed.

Unlike an intranet, an employee app boosts engagement, collaboration, and productivity for all employees. They typically have high rates of user adoption so no one gets left behind.

Preview Blink and learn about the features we offer for frontline teams.

The intranet of the future?

When you make improvements to your intranet, you help it to reach its full potential. You pack it with the features and functionality that make life easy for your employees.

Workers enjoy a user-friendly intranet experience that streamlines their workflow and helps them to connect with co-workers. You get boosted employee engagement and productivity.

Whether you choose to improve your intranet or switch to a mobile-first employee app, it’s all about using this incredibly powerful tool in a way that best meets the needs of your business.

Instant messaging and two-way communication features facilitate conversation across your organization. Integration with AI and other workplace tools makes teams more efficient. Personalized, social-media-style portals ensure employee engagement. Mobile-first solutions bridge the gap between frontline teams and HQ.

Prioritize improvements that match your business goals and you can have an internal communication solution fit for the workforce of today – and tomorrow.

Find out if Blink’s employee app is a good fit for your organization. Book a demo to see our platform in action.

How do you rate your workplace communication? And would your employees agree?

According to the IC Index 2026, just 56% of employees feel the communication they receive from their employer is open and honest.

That leaves nearly half the workforce feeling uncertain about what’s really going on. And this is a missed opportunity for organizations — because open communication is good for employees and good for business. 

Open communication keeps everyone on the same page. It supports a strong and engaging company culture. It empowers employees to do their best work — and also inspires their loyalty.

For frontline and remote employees, open communication is even more important.

These teams often get less face time with leadership and receive fewer informal updates — so clear, transparent communication is what keeps them connected to the organization and up to speed with what’s happening.  

Want to improve comms at your organization? Start by learning what open communication is, why it matters, and how to build it into your internal communication strategy.

What is open communication?

Open communication is a style of communication in which people share ideas, information, and concerns honestly and transparently — without fear of judgment or negative consequences.

In the workplace, that means no one is kept in the dark. Leaders share company updates regularly. Managers maintain an open-door policy. Employees feel comfortable sharing feedback and contributing ideas.

Open communication stands in contrast to closed communication, where information is restricted, decisions are made without consultation, and employees are left to fill in the gaps — often with assumption and rumor.

This approach to internal communication creates ambiguity and uncertainty. It erodes trust and makes it harder for people to do their jobs well.

Why open communication in the workplace matters

Ineffective internal communication is expensive. According to Grammarly’s State of Business Communication report, it’s costing US businesses $1.2 trillion every year.

Developing a culture of open communication is a powerful way to improve your comms — and boost your bottom line. Here’s what it could mean for your organization.

Open communication boosts productivity and efficiency

Teams lose an average of 7.47 hours per week to poor communication. That’s almost one full working day per week.

When employees don’t have access to clear, timely information, you get duplicated work and misaligned priorities. Your teams also waste time untangling the misunderstandings that clearer communication could have prevented.

Open communication removes that friction. It gives employees a clear understanding of roles, expectations, organizational goals, and deadlines — so they can complete tasks faster and use resources more effectively.

That means a big boost to employee productivity and operational efficiency.  

Open communication improves employee engagement and retention

Employees who get enough information to do their job well are 2.8 times more likely to be engaged. And employee engagement has a measurable impact.

Gallup research shows that organizations with highly engaged workforces experience  

• 17% increase in productivity
• 51% decrease in staff turnover
• 23% increase in profitability

Open communication is a really effective employee engagement tactic. It drives engagement by building workplace trust, creating clarity around goals, and giving employees a voice.

Open communication enhances workplace culture

Open communication is the foundation of psychological safety — the belief that it’s safe to ask questions, admit mistakes, and suggest new ideas. Without this belief, problems stay hidden.

Imagine a frontline worker notices a process that’s creating a safety risk, but they don’t feel comfortable raising the issue. In a culture of closed communication, that concern is never voiced and the risk persists.

In an organization where open communication is the norm, the worker raises the issue quickly through easy-access communication channels. The safety issue gets addressed. Everyone is safer as a result.

Psychological safety enables employees to speak up — whether they’re raising concerns or sharing a bright idea. It strengthens trust, improves employee well-being, and contributes to a workplace culture where people feel heard and respected. 

Open communication strengthens team relationships

Open communication doesn’t just bring benefits at an organizational level. It filters down to every team in the company. 

Embed open communication in your culture, and employees communicate openly and honestly with one another.

They get to know their teammates’ working styles, intentions, and perspectives. They’re able to share ideas, ask questions, and provide feedback sensitively. Conflict and misunderstandings are avoided — or resolved quickly.

Open communication makes teamwork much easier. Employees are better able to collaborate, which improves business outcomes as well as the employee experience.

Open communication drives problem-solving and innovation

Frontline workers have daily contact with the customers your company serves. They see operational inefficiencies up close. They know what’s working and what isn’t.

In organizations with closed communication, that knowledge stays stuck on the floor. Insights remain untapped and inefficiencies continue to drain profits.

But if your company communicates openly — if your frontline staff have access to two-way messaging tools, employee surveys, communities where ideas can be shared and built on — the story is very different.

With a direct line to your stores and a culture that encourages employee input, you surface knowledge from across the organization. Wherever that insight comes from, you can use it to identify and solve problems, make decisions, and come up with new ideas more effectively.

Open communication supports change

Change is one of the biggest stress tests of workplace communication.

When change communication seems to hide more than it reveals, employees fill in the gaps themselves. That can lead to confusion, resistance, and mistrust.

Open communication changes that dynamic. By communicating openly, employees understand what’s changing, why it’s changing, and how it will affect their day-to-day work. This approach also creates space for questions and feedback.

The result? Change feels less disruptive and adoption of new policies is faster because employees have all the information they need to get behind the organization.

Open communication improves retention

70% of employees who rate their company’s internal comms as ‘excellent’ intend to stay with that company for the long term. This drops to just 24% of people who rate communication as ‘good’.

The way you communicate with your workforce has a huge impact on employee satisfaction and retention.

When employees understand what’s expected of them, enjoy collaborative relationships with teammates, trust in leadership, and feel like they have a voice, they’re much more likely to stay working for you.

The 5 pillars of open communication

There are lots of benefits to open, honest communication. To foster this type of communication in your workplace, it helps to understand the five pillars that make it possible.

1. A lack of ego

Big egos get in the way of open communication.

They lead people to dominate conversations and discount views that challenge their own. To respond to feedback defensively, rather than constructively, and to avoid admitting mistakes.

Leaders set the tone here. When managers model the behaviors they want to see — admitting mistakes, listening actively, welcoming feedback, speaking authentically, and including everyone in the conversation — a culture of open communication is more likely to develop.

2. Trust

Trust is both a precondition for open communication and a consequence of it. When employees trust their organization, they communicate more openly. And that openness deepens organizational trust.

Building this kind of trust takes time and consistency. It requires leaders who follow through on what they say, managers who take employee concerns seriously, and a visible track record of acting on feedback.

Get this right, and employees will feel comfortable sharing their honest thoughts, feelings, and ideas. You create an environment where everyone feels respected and valued — which is great for employee communication and the employee experience.

3. Training

Even in organizations with strong cultures and good intentions, communication skills vary significantly between individuals.

Luckily, the principles of open communication can be taught. Active listening, constructive feedback, conflict resolution, and the ability to have difficult conversations respectfully are all learnable skills.

Investing in communication skills training at every level — not just for managers — helps you build an organization of effective, open communicators.  

4. Two-way interaction

Open communication with employees isn’t just about sharing information. It’s about engaging in conversation and answering employee questions, without always relying on a pre-prepared script.

By shifting from top-down broadcast to two-way dialogue, allowing employees to ask questions, and giving them answers they trust, organizations can dramatically improve the openness of their communications.

5. Tools

Once you move beyond a handful of employees, open communication requires infrastructure. Channels and tools that every employee can access easily — regardless of their role, location, or whether they have a corporate email address.

That means internal communication tools that support company updates, employee feedback, and day-to-day collaboration. And it means tools that work on a smartphone as well as a desktop computer.

How Blink supports open communication in organizations with a frontline workforce 

For organizations with deskless workers, the tools issue is where open communication most commonly breaks down.

Traditional communication infrastructure — email, desktop intranets — simply doesn’t reach employees who work on the floor, on the road, or across multiple sites and shifts.

Blink is a mobile-first employee platform built to bring open communication to your entire workforce, no matter where they work.

Here’s how the platform supports open communication.

A personalized news feed. Company updates, leadership messages, team news, and recognition all appear in a single news feed — accessible from every employee’s smartphone. And it’s not a one-way broadcast. Employees can comment, react, and respond to updates so everyone has a voice.

Direct and group messaging. Employees can chat with managers and co-workers over a secure, searchable, real-time messaging tool. Across a social-media-style user experience, they can add attachments, add emotion with emojis, and even launch a video call from within the chat.

Surveys and polls. In-app surveys and quick-fire polls give every employee an easy way to share feedback, straight from their smartphones. Analytics help leaders make sense of responses — and track platform usage rates. So it’s easy to see where internal communications can be improved.

A centralized knowledge hub. Policies, procedures, FAQs, operational guidance — every essential document lives in the content hub. Employees can access up-to-date resources from any device, without relying on their managers for vital information.

Events and live streaming. Every employee can join company-wide events, regardless of their location or shift schedule, thanks to broadcast-quality live streaming. You can host a town hall or an executive Q&A to share updates and answer employee questions.

Open communication starts here

To embed open communication in your company culture, you need leaders who act as role models, managers who really listen, and a fundamental belief that employee voice is an asset, not a risk.

Creating a culture of open and honest communication requires effort at every level of the organization. It also requires the right tools — tools that make open communication possible across a large, dispersed workforce.

A mobile-first communication tool ensures that every employee — not just those at a desk — gets to hear company news and take part in an open, supportive, and inclusive company conversation.

Blink. And bring open communication to every corner of your organization.

Meet Lewis Tran, London-based Senior Front-End Engineer and one of the creative forces bringing Blink’s user experience to life.

Just over two years ago, Lewis joined the team with a passion for building intuitive, impactful products. Since then, he’s been at the forefront of developing features that land directly in the hands of our users — shaping the way thousands of frontline employees connect, communicate, and get work done.

We sat down with Lewis to talk about innovation, problem-solving, and what it’s like to craft products that make a real difference every day. Let’s dive in.

#1. What is your Blink background?

I am a Senior Front-end Engineer working out of the London office. I have been at Blink just about over 2 years.

#2. What initially attracted you to join Blink?

Initially, I didn’t know much about Blink. But I’d worked at a startup before and knew I wanted to be in a fast-paced environment again. It wasn’t until I started interviewing that I got to learn more about what Blink does and get a taste of the product. It was easy to see the potential of Blink platform, and as a front-end engineer who loves building product, I was excited to explore those opportunities.

#3. What’s a project you are proud of from your time at Blink?

One project I’m especially proud of isn’t the biggest or flashiest, but it means a lot to me — an AI feature we built that started from an internal hackathon. About a year ago, we held an AI hackathon where people pitched ideas for using AI internally or in the product. I designed a prototype for a feed post summary tool, where you could select multiple posts and quickly generate summaries with links back to the originals. The idea was to make it easier to highlight key content in busy feeds.

The day after I presented it, Lauren reached out to ask if we could actually build it into the product. At that point, it was just a prototype, but we developed it further, integrated it into the app, and eventually launched it as part of our Blink Assist AI feature. Going from idea to a released product in just a few weeks was a great experience.

#4. How would you describe the company culture at Blink in three words?

Passionate, dynamic, and supportive.

Everyone here is excited about building a great product and solving real problems. There’s never a dull day, and while challenges come up, people are always ready to help each other out. That level of support makes Blink a really great place to work.

#5. What’s one thing you’re excited about for the future of Blink?

There’s still so much untapped potential in the employee communications space. Our customers face real challenges, and we have the opportunity to solve them in ways that make a genuine difference to employees’ lives. As an engineer, that’s incredibly exciting — designing solutions, speaking with customers, and creating tools that have a tangible impact on companies and their people.

#6. Can you tell us about a recent initiative or program launched at Blink that you found particularly exciting?

We have an internal initiative called Adopt a Customer, which has been running since the beginning of the year. Once a week, someone at Blink presents one of the companies using our platform. It’s a great way to see the variety of organizations we work with — from large logistics companies to small gyms — and to understand the broad impact Blink has.

I might be biased, but I’m especially excited to present my adopted customer. They’re a fantastic company, and I think everyone at Blink should hear about them and learn how they’re using the product.

#7. Why do you work for Blink?

For me, it’s about solving interesting problems every day — problems that have a real impact on people’s lives. That’s a unique and privileged position to be in. As an engineer, you don’t always get to work on something you believe in or feel passionate about, but at Blink, the mission and the product are perfectly aligned for me.

That combination makes me want to keep building the best product possible and finding solutions to the challenges our customers face. It’s exciting, meaningful work — and Blink is the perfect place for that.

‍