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- Anne-Sophie Duport
- November 5, 2025
Digital Workplace and Mobility: How to Connect Frontline Employees?
Over the past decade, organizations have profoundly transformed their work environments. Office employees now benefit from collaborative tools, digital workspaces, and instant communication solutions.
Meanwhile, a large part of the workforce — frontline employees — has been left out of this digital revolution.
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Municipal agents, technicians, healthcare workers, production operators, or logistics staff… These employees, essential to service continuity and customer satisfaction, often lack access to their organization’s digital tools.
This paradox weakens cohesion, security, and overall efficiency. For IT departments, the challenge is significant: how to connect frontline workers without compromising on security or digital sovereignty?
The mobile-first digital workplace has emerged as a strategic answer — intuitive, inclusive, and secure, reconnecting the field with headquarters and placing every employee at the heart of digital transformation.
1. Digitizing Frontline Employees: A Key Link
While most organizations have digitized office roles, frontline employees are often left behind in the digital transformation process.
According to a 2023 Deloitte study, only 23% of frontline workers believe they have access to the technology they need to be effective, and 80% report that their company offers few opportunities to connect to work.
These employees represent 80% of the global workforce, ensuring essential services — maintenance, healthcare, logistics, production, public services, and more.
The lack of access to digital tools fuels feelings of exclusion and isolation. A Yoobic report shows that 34% of frontline employees feel disconnected from headquarters, and 76% say they would feel more connected if they could access internal communication via mobile.
🦺The Risk of Shadow IT
Without suitable tools, many bypass official IT systems — using WhatsApp groups, personal cloud drives, or unsecured public messaging apps.
This phenomenon, known as shadow IT, meets an immediate need for efficiency but creates major risks for security, compliance, and data governance.
For IT leaders, one fact is clear: digitizing the frontline is a prerequisite for performance, cohesion, security, and innovation.
2. Digital Inclusion and Security: A Dual Imperative for IT
For IT departments, digitizing frontline workers is not only about equipment and usability — it’s also about digital inclusion and risk management.
🔗Internal Digital Inclusion: A New Mission
This means IT departments must:
- Provide unified digital environments, avoiding a proliferation of field-specific apps.
- Design intuitive, mobile-friendly interfaces suited to on-the-go use and low-connectivity environments.
- Rationalize costs while maintaining a seamless experience across all devices.
🎯The goal: ensure equal access for all employees, allowing everyone to participate and engage in the organization’s life.
🛡️Security: The Foundation of Digital Trust
Extending IT systems to the field naturally increases risks — personal devices (BYOD), unsecured connections, and sharing of sensitive data.
IT departments must therefore prioritize:
- Strong authentication and identity management — ensuring each user is properly identified, even on shared devices.
- Systematic encryption of data and communications — essential in sensitive sectors (healthcare, energy, public administration).
- Shadow IT prevention — managing local initiatives and limiting the use of unapproved or personal applications.
- GDPR compliance and sovereign hosting — ensuring all mobile or field data is handled in compliance with European standards.
👑Governance and Sovereignty
Digital inclusion can only be sustainable if it relies on clear governance of identities, data, access, and infrastructure.
For public organizations and critical sectors (health, energy, local authorities), this aligns with a sovereignty approach — SecNumCloud hosting, access traceability, and vendor control.
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3. The Mobile-First Digital Workplace
The mobile-first approach, which makes mobile devices the central access point to an organization’s digital life, is a natural evolution of the workplace.
For many frontline employees, the smartphone is often their only available device.
A 2024 OpinionWay study found that 6 out of 10 French employees use their personal smartphone for work — a figure even higher among frontline workers, often without proper frameworks or security.
📲The Principles of a Mobile-First Digital Workplace
For IT departments, success relies on three pillars:
- Universal accessibility — a single entry point for all tools (messaging, documents, processes, calendar, communications).
- Seamless user experience — ergonomic, fast, and simple, even in mobile contexts.
- Built-in security — authentication, encryption, and access control.
🤝Rebuilding Connection and Strengthening Cohesion
A mobile-first digital workplace also enhances cohesion between headquarters and the field.
Mobile tools help to:
- Streamline internal communication through targeted and contextualized information flows.
- Value field feedback, making it easy to report issues, ideas, or best practices.
- Strengthen recognition and belonging, giving a voice to employees who were previously disconnected from corporate culture.
Acting quickly is essential — 55% of frontline employees considered resigning in 2024, mainly due to lack of prospects, recognition, and access to the right tools, especially mobile ones.
4. Building an Inclusive and Sovereign Environment
Connecting frontline employees cannot come at any cost.
Field digitalization must rely on a secure, independent, sustainable, and sovereign technological foundation.
🔒Digital Inclusion Through Sovereignty
Ensuring sovereignty means:
- Knowing where and how data circulates.
- Being able to audit and evolve solutions independently.
- Guaranteeing full compliance (GDPR, SecNumCloud, etc.).
This requirement is even more critical in the public sector, where frontline digitization often involves sensitive services — energy, hospitals, emergency services, critical infrastructure…
🧩Open Source: A Driver of Independence and Adaptability
Open source now offers a reliable and sustainable alternative for building inclusive environments, thanks to its many advantages:
- Transparency — the code is open and modifiable.
- Interoperability — open-source tools integrate easily with existing business systems.
- Durability and cost-efficiency — no dependency on proprietary vendor cycles or price increases.
- Active ecosystem — supported by vibrant communities driving continuous innovation.
Open source provides a reliable and lasting path to digital autonomy.
Finding the Right Balance
The mobile digital workplace is now a strategic lever for including frontline employees, strengthening organizational cohesion, and improving overall performance.
However, transformation isn’t just about deploying apps on mobile devices — it’s about finding the right balance between inclusion, security, mobility, and sovereignty.
The IT department plays a central role: building a digital environment that connects frontline and office workers while maintaining control over data and systems.
Open source, mobile-first, responsible governance — the chosen approach must place user experience at the center.
For IT leaders, the challenge is to build an inclusive, adaptable, and sustainable digital workplace, one that supports collective performance and long-term trust.
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I am the communication manager at eXo Platform. I found myself in communications a bit by chance, but this field brings together everything that pationates me: creativity, energy, meetings, collaborative work, sharing and exchanges of good practices. I need to give meaning to what I do and put people at the center of all my actions.
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