What does workforce communications actually return?

The business case problem

If you lead internal communications or HR at a large organization, you already know the argument you need to make. Frontline employees are disconnected. Critical information isn't reaching the people who need it. Turnover is climbing, safety incidents aren't decreasing fast enough, and your communications team is spending most of its time rebuilding the same message across multiple systems instead of doing work that actually moves the needle.

The problem is that knowing it and being able to prove it in financial terms to a CFO or executive team are two very different things.

"We need better workforce communications" is a qualitative argument. It sounds like a cost center making a case for more resources. Budget conversations, especially in the current environment, require something different: a number, a methodology, and ideally a third party willing to put their name on it.

The stakes of not making that case are real.

Research from Firstup’s recent State of Employee Engagement [North America and UK versions] found that more than 66% of employees regularly miss critical updates, and 50% are planning to leave their organization within the next 12 months. Those aren't just engagement survey footnotes. They are operational and financial risks sitting on your leadership team's balance sheet, whether or not they've been quantified yet.

The question isn't whether investment in workforce communications can be justified. It's whether you have the right framework to justify it. Now there is one.

What the Forrester TEI methodology is and why it matters in a procurement conversation

Forrester's Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) framework is one of the most widely recognized methodologies for evaluating the return on enterprise technology investments. It's not a vendor projection or an internal estimate. It's a structured, third-party analytical model built from interviews with real customers, stress-tested for risk, and discounted to account for the time value of money.

For a budget conversation, that distinction matters enormously. When you walk into a room with a TEI study, you're not asking your leadership team to trust your instincts. You're presenting an independent framework, built by Forrester Consulting, not by the vendor, that documents what comparable organizations actually experienced, models those outcomes conservatively, and translates them into the financial language executives use to make decisions.

Forrester was commissioned to research and compile a TEI study of Firstup, the workforce communications platform. They interviewed eight decision-makers across enterprise organizations in healthcare, manufacturing, IT distribution, and retail. From those interviews and their substantial industry knowledge, they constructed a composite model representing a 10,000-person global organization with a large frontline workforce. Every benefit figure was risk-adjusted downward, and every cost was risk-adjusted upward.

The result is a framework designed to be defensible, not optimistic. The headline findings: 398% ROI, $8.9M in total benefits for an organization of 10,000 employees, and payback in under six months.

Retention: $4.7 million

This is the largest benefit category in the model, and the logic is straightforward once you see the numbers. The composite organization has 6,500 skilled frontline employees with a 20% voluntary attrition rate before Firstup. Firstup-enabled communication initiatives (targeted messaging, mobile access for frontline staff, two-way engagement) contributed to a 4% reduction in that attrition rate over three years.

At an average replacement cost of $40,000 per frontline employee—and up to $60,000 in healthcare, where skilled clinical staff is particularly expensive to backfill—the avoided costs across three years total $4.7 million on a risk-adjusted present value basis.

The important framing here is that Firstup isn't modeled as the sole driver of retention improvement. Forrester attributed only 30% of the total turnover reduction to Firstup as the mechanism for scaling companywide retention initiatives. The financial credit is conservative by design.

Productivity: $2.3 million

When employees spend less time hunting for information, they spend more time doing their jobs. The composite model captures this across two populations: frontline employees saving approximately six hours per year, and desk employees saving approximately two hours per year, as a result of centralized, targeted communications replacing a fragmented multi-tool environment.

Across 10,000 employees over three years, those incremental savings accumulate to 69,000 productive hours recovered, valued at $2.3 million. Forrester applied a 50% productivity recapture rate, meaning only half the time saved is counted as productive value. Again, the model is conservative.

Safety: $1.1 million

For organizations with significant frontline, manufacturing, or clinical populations, this benefit category may be the most operationally meaningful—and the one with the largest potential variance depending on industry. The composite model assumes eight serious safety incidents per year before Firstup, with incident costs averaging $250,000 each when accounting for insurance claims, productivity loss, workers' compensation, and compliance exposure.

With Firstup enabling more consistent, targeted, and timely safety communications, including mobile studying of near-miss incidents and digital signage reinforcement, the model projects a 20% reduction in serious incidents in Year 1, 25% in Year 2, and 30% by Year 3. Risk-adjusted over three years, that's $1.1 million in avoided costs.

Communications efficiency: $533,000

Before Firstup, communications teams at large organizations often had to rebuild the same message across multiple disconnected platforms—different logins, formatting requirements, and publishing workflows—for every piece of content they produced. The composite model includes 15 communications employees and 30 content creators across the organization.

With Firstup, communications employees see productivity gains of 20% in Year 1, growing to 30% by Year 3, as workflows centralize and audience targeting automates. Content creators save an average of eight hours per year on publishing and content reuse. Over three years, those gains total more than 12,000 hours, valued at $533,000.

Legacy tool consolidation: $336,000

The final benefit category is the most straightforward: retiring the fragmented stack of email platforms, intranet tools, digital signage systems, and mobile apps that Firstup replaces. The composite model assumes $150,000 in annual legacy licensing costs eliminated—a direct, line-item cost reduction that also reduces IT overhead and vendor management complexity. Over three years, that's $336,000 in risk-adjusted savings.

What customers actually said

The financial model is built from real organizational experiences. Three quotes from healthcare interviewees in the study illustrate the human reality behind the numbers.

On the foundational problem Firstup solved:

"We needed a solution that could reliably reach our frontline workforce and get critical information to them directly, versus hoping it trickled down through managers or by word of mouth."

– Assistant Director of Communications and Marketing Operations, Healthcare

On the connection between better communications and retention outcomes:

"Had we not had Firstup, I do not believe our other retention initiatives would have been nearly as successful as they were."

– VP, People Operations, Healthcare

On what improved safety communications meant in practice:

"In every major event category, roughly 30% of harm-reduction events were directly attributable to Firstup-enabled studying. From a C-suite perspective, Firstup essentially paid for itself because catching 30% more errors before they reach patients changes both risk and cost."

– Chief Innovation Officer and Physician, Healthcare

How to apply the composite model to your organization

The composite organization in the TEI study (10,000 employees, 65% frontline, $2 billion in annual revenue) is representative of the interviewees but not identical to any of them. Forrester designed the framework to be adaptable, not prescriptive.

If your organization is smaller, the absolute benefit figures will be lower, but the ROI logic holds. Retention savings scale directly with headcount and attrition rates. Productivity savings scale with the size of your workforce and the degree of fragmentation in your current communications environment. Safety savings will vary significantly by industry: manufacturing and healthcare organizations with higher incident rates and costs will likely see larger returns than lower-risk environments.

The TEI study includes the full modeling assumptions and formulas behind each benefit category. That transparency is intentional. Forrester built the framework so that procurement teams, CFOs, and technology evaluators can substitute their own numbers (their own attrition rates, their own replacement costs, their own incident frequencies) and arrive at a figure that reflects their specific context rather than a composite average.

That's what makes it useful in a budget conversation. You're not asking leadership to accept Forrester's numbers as your numbers. You're using Forrester's methodology as a credible, third-party structure, populated with data your own organization can validate.

The business case is already built. You just need to use it.

If you've been making the qualitative argument for workforce communications investment and not getting the budget response you need, the Forrester TEI study can help change the conversation.

It gives you a third-party methodology, five quantified benefit categories, and a financial model your CFO will recognize. It gives you customer evidence from organizations that faced the same challenges as yours. And it gives you a number: 398% ROI, $8.9 million in total benefits, and payback in under six months.

The business case is built.

Download the full Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study of Firstup to see the complete methodology, benefit calculations, and customer perspectives, and to start building the version that's right for your organization.