There is a group of people that are so important to everything we do, yet they often get overlooked when we design processes, communication and yes, communities.  I call them the invisible workforce.

When we talk about workplace community, I hear about things like Slack channels, team-building offsites, maybe a company happy hour.

But for the 80% of the global workforce who don’t sit at desks, community looks completely different.

It’s the team that shows up at 5am and knows whose kid is sick. It’s the break room conversation that keeps someone from quitting. It’s the group text that has nothing to do with work and everything to do with getting through the day together.

This is real community. But most companies have no idea it’s happening, or how much it’s quietly holding their team together.

When someone stays because of their team, not their compensation, that’s community. But we’re not measuring it. We’re not nurturing it. And we’re definitely not building our people strategies around it.

So how do you actually build community with a deskless workforce?

Show up where they are. Literally. Community doesn’t happen when it’s dictated by corporate. It happens on the floor, in the warehouse, on the job site. If leaders aren’t physically present, they’re invisible. And so is any sense of belonging to something bigger.

Make space for the informal. That break room matters. Those ten minutes before shift matters. Stop trying to optimize every moment and let people just be people together. Connection isn’t efficient, and that’s okay.

Elevate the connectors. Every team has someone who holds the group together. They remember birthdays, check in when someone’s struggling, train the new person patience. Find that person or those people. Recognize them. That’s real culture building.

Communicate. If your frontline hears news last, through the grapevine, after corporate already celebrated on LinkedIn you’ve told them exactly where they rank. Flip the script. Tell them first. At The Granite Group, we had something called The Truck Driver Test, coined by our CEO, Bill Condron. When we had a new initiative, we knew if it was successfully communicated if our truck drivers, those folks with the least amount of time near a Granite Group building, knew what was going on. Any communication failed if our drivers didn’t know.

The companies that figure this out will have something most organizations are desperate for but can’t seem to manufacture. People who actually care about each other!

And that? That’s where you want to be.