Internal Communications

A mid-sized logistics company in Ohio spent eighteen months trying to fix a problem most of their employees didn't think existed.

The problem was internal communications. Or rather, the lack of any real system for it. Memos went out through email. Updates got posted on a bulletin board near the break room. Shift supervisors passed information verbally. The HR director, Sandra Melnik, had been tracking message delivery failures since 2019. Her spreadsheet showed that on average, only 34% of warehouse staff actually received company-wide announcements within the first 48 hours.

The CEO didn't see this as urgent. The operations team thought it was an HR issue. HR thought it was an IT issue. IT said the email system worked fine.

Melnik brought the data to a quarterly review in March 2022. She showed the spreadsheet. She showed three specific incidents where critical safety information failed to reach night shift workers. One of those incidents resulted in a worker's comp claim.

The company hired a consultant.

David Chen ran a small firm out of Chicago that specialized in workplace communication audits. He'd done similar projects for manufacturing plants, hospital systems, regional banks. His standard approach involved spending two weeks on-site, interviewing employees at every level, mapping existing information flows, identifying bottlenecks.

Chen's initial report was 47 pages. The executive summary said the company had six different communication channels operating simultaneously with no coordination between them. Email for office staff. A WhatsApp group that warehouse supervisors had created unofficially. The bulletin board. A monthly newsletter that nobody read. Verbal announcements during shift changes. An outdated intranet page that hadn't been updated since 2017.

Melnik pushed for Slack. Chen advised against it. His argument was that Slack worked well for knowledge workers who sat at computers all day. It didn't work for warehouse employees who had limited phone access during shifts and might check messages only during breaks.

The company went with Slack anyway. The IT director had used it at his previous job and felt comfortable with the implementation.

Four months later, adoption rates among warehouse staff sat at 12%. Office staff used it constantly. The gap created a new problem: office workers assumed everyone had seen their Slack messages. Warehouse workers had no idea those messages existed.

Chen got called back.

His second report was shorter. Eight pages. He quoted a line from a warehouse supervisor named Miguel Reyes: "They gave us an app that office people use. We're not office people. We move boxes."

The company switched platforms. They went with a system called Beekeeper, which Chen had seen work at two manufacturing clients. The interface was simpler. It supported multiple languages. It was designed specifically for frontline workers without dedicated workstations.

Implementation took three months. Melnik's team created a pilot group of 30 warehouse employees. They tested message formats, notification timing, content types. They learned that warehouse workers ignored anything longer than three sentences. They learned that messages sent at 6:15 AM got read rates of 67%, while messages sent at 2 PM got 23%. They learned that including a photo or short video increased engagement by roughly 40%.

The full rollout happened in January 2023.

Six months post-launch, Melnik's tracking spreadsheet showed 81% of warehouse staff receiving company-wide announcements within 24 hours. The number climbed to 89% within 48 hours.

Chen presented the case study at an HR technology conference in Atlanta last September. He spent most of his presentation talking about the failed Slack implementation. An attendee asked why he focused so much on the failure. Chen said failures contained more useful information than successes.

He quoted something Melnik had told him during their final project review: "We assumed our communication problem was about technology. It wasn't. It was about understanding who we were actually trying to reach."

The company has since expanded the Beekeeper system to three additional warehouse locations. They're tracking a new metric now: time between safety incident and confirmed receipt of related communication. The current average is 4.2 hours. Before the new system, they couldn't measure this at all because they had no way of confirming who had received what.