Culture & Alignment · 6 min read

Your internal comms ignore the majority of your workforce

Turnover, safety incidents and quiet disengagement are usually culture problems wearing operational costumes.

The UAE's population is roughly 89% expatriate, and the largest single group by nationality is South Asian. Yet walk through the internal comms of most facilities, construction, logistics and retail operators in the region and you will find onboarding decks, safety briefings and culture campaigns written in English, in corporate language, aimed at a management layer that is a small fraction of the actual workforce.

This is not a translation problem. It is a visibility problem, and it is measurable well beyond the Gulf. A 2025 industry survey found that deskless workers make up more than 80% of the global workforce, yet their communication needs are consistently the last addressed, with nearly a quarter of surveyed workers saying ineffective communication actively disconnects them from company culture. A separate 2025 study on frontline culture found 87% of frontline employees feel excluded from company culture altogether, not because they care less, but because they are structurally engaged less.

Companies that talk about diversity and inclusion in their brand campaigns often run internal cultures where the majority of the people doing the physical work have no real channel to be seen, heard or promoted. In labour-intensive sectors, this shows up first as turnover: reports on frontline attrition consistently link the disconnect to workers leaving within the first year of a contract, long before any culture programme reaches them.

Fixing it does not require a translated poster. It requires building the culture programme around the people who are actually there, in the languages, formats and moments where they actually receive information, and treating that reach as seriously as the message itself.

Topics: Culture, Workforce, South Asians, Internal Communications