Jul 1, 2025

By David Burnand, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at Staffbase Walk into any hospital, retail store, warehouse, or manufacturing plant, and you’ll find employees working through change without ever having opened a company email. They’re navigating policy shifts, responding to new procedures, and adjusting to reorganizations, often relying on a single person for clarity: their direct manager. In a world where internal communications teams are expected to be strategic advisors, cultural stewards, and change agents, often with smaller teams and fewer resources, it’s time to rethink who’s driving communication on the ground. It’s not just the comms team or HR, but middle management. The Communication Gap That’s Costing You According to the 2025 Employee Communication Impact Study, more than half of U.S. employees say their immediate supervisor is their preferred and most trusted source of workplace information. Yet, the people who rely most on that relationship, frontline workers, consistently report feeling less informed than their desk-based peers. While 67% of desk workers say they get timely, clear information from their manager, only 48% of frontline workers say the same. That isn’t just a visibility issue, it’s a performance and retention risk. Nearly 60% of employees who think about quitting say poor communication plays a role in their decision. Closing the communication gap between desk and non-desk employees isn’t just a cultural imperative, but a business one. The Myth of the Message Cascade and Growing Significance of Middle Managers Most employee communication strategies still rely on a traditional cascade model where corporate crafts the message, leaders approve it, and it gets passed down through the organization. In today’s fragmented work environments, hybrid offices, decentralized teams, and frontline operations, that model can quickly fall apart. Messages don’t just need to be sent, but translated, contextualized, and reinforced. That’s where middle managers come in. They aren’t just message carriers, but trust brokers, culture translators, and clarifiers of the “why.” Without support, they can also become bottlenecks or, worse, sources of misinformation. The extra layer here is that being a people manager today is harder than ever, with these key members being expected to juggle productivity, performance reviews, mental health check-ins, internal comms and more. For many, it’s another responsibility they’re not trained or supported to deliver. This often results in incomplete messaging, awkward team meetings, and missed opportunities to connect change with purpose. That’s why forward-thinking companies are reimagining communication not as a top-down process, but as a distributed capability, one where managers are not just messengers but communication leaders in their own right. Turning Middle Managers into Communication Activators Companies that succeed in aligning and engaging their people during times of change all treat internal communication as a shared responsibility. Rather than expecting middle managers to write memos or create messaging from scratch, they empower them to activate communication in practical, meaningful ways. That starts with prioritizing clarity over volume, providing managers with distilled talking points and structured message frameworks so they can confidently deliver information. These companies offer in-the-moment coaching, including short-form training and timely resources to help managers navigate difficult conversations or address employee questions as they arise. They also invest in tech-enabled access, using mobile-first communication tools to ensure frontline staff are informed, while giving managers intuitive dashboards and prompts that make it easy to reinforce key messages during team interactions. For example, DHL Group , which has over 300,000 frontline workers and limited access to the intranet, implemented a mobile app to ensure consistent, personalized communication. While the tech was an important part of the solution, the real impact came from training managers to engage with the tool and become the bridge between corporate and the frontline. That strategy helped earn DHL recognition as a Top Employer in Europe. Why This Matters Now More Than Ever We’re living in an era of near-constant transformation, restructuring, cost-cutting, AI integration, and new hybrid work norms. These shifts can’t be successfully implemented through corporate announcements alone. Employees need clarity, context, and the ability to ask questions, and they want that from someone they know. In moments of uncertainty, trust is the currency of communication. The person holding that currency is often a middle manager with a phone in one hand and a team waiting for direction in the other. Internal communication doesn’t belong to one department. It’s a collaboration between leadership, HR, comms, and managers. Not every organization needs more messages, but every organization needs more messengers who can connect the dots in a human, consistent, and credible way. It’s time to stop viewing middle managers as passive recipients of corporate messaging, but time to start treating them as one of your most powerful change enablers. When equipped properly, they won’t just pass on information, they’ll drive alignment, spark dialogue, and earn the trust that turns change into progress. David Burnand is the Chief Marketing Officer at Staffbase, where he drives global employee communication and engagement. With over 20 years of experience in tech marketing, David has held leadership roles at Veeva Systems, Box, Siemens, and Adobe. At Box, he led European and Global Digital Marketing, introducing a new digital strategy and rolling out the Content Cloud in Europe. Passionate about youth sports and equal opportunities, David has served as a coach and board member at Sandbach RUFC and also played a lead role in campaigns opposing extremism in local politics. He lives in the UK with his wife and two children. Prev Post