How to Do Your Research

The first step to setting meaningful, achievable goals is conducting background research to better understand the problem you're trying to solve — this provides valuable input for more detailed discussions with your main stakeholders. Before those discussions, research what words and language are used to describe the problem, which stakeholders you should talk to, what you can learn from past campaigns, whether there are underlying problems that might be the real issue, and whether there's any data to quantify the problem. If you can't clearly determine what you aim to change as a result of your communication, there's little value in proceeding — putting the effort in now avoids wasting time later on goals and outputs that aren't really needed or won't work.

How to Understand Stakeholder Needs

The next step is engaging with your main stakeholders to understand their needs and expected outcomes, which can feel intimidating when one of them is a senior leader. Five tips for mastering these discussions: come with data, leave with respect; practice asking tough questions ("Can I ask you a tough question?"); drive your influence by being a good listener; understand personal motivation ("Why is this important to you?"); and ask outcome-oriented questions ("What should employees do and know as a result of the communication?"). It's often valuable to involve other stakeholders in defining the problem, such as organizing a workshop with key stakeholders and subject matter experts — this helps define the problem while building relationships and gaining early support from key influencers.

How to Create SMART Goals

Once research and stakeholder conversations are complete, the most important question when defining a communication goal is: what do you want your employees to do, know, and feel as a result of the communication? SMART is an acronym for the ingredients of an effective goal: Specific (well defined, clear, and unambiguous), Measurable (trackable metrics and benchmarks), Attainable (realistic and achievable), Relevant (aligned to your overall goal), and Time-bound (a clearly defined timeline that creates urgency). For example, the goal "Ensure our employees understand and support the acquisition" becomes the SMART goal: "Within three months of the announcement, achieve over 90% agreement among employees on the pulse survey question: 'Do I understand and support the acquisition?'"

Audience Understanding vs. Segmentation

To be seen as a trusted advisor and audience expert, it's essential to better understand your internal audience — this enables more tailored content and messages that resonate. Segmenting your audience lets you automatically target the right content to the right people, while also letting employees choose topics based on their interests. Five basic areas to research: Organization (how the organization is broken into departments and locations, and their relative sizes), Demographics (gender, age, languages, locations, and average length of service), Work Patterns (shift workers, front line, field, or factory workers), Channels (which communication channels exist and how they're used), and Engagement (patterns in employee motivation and engagement).

Why and How to Create Personas

Personas are fictional characters that ideally represent your most important user types and describe common pain points, motivations, needs, or typical technology use. Based on audience research, personas should be realistic yet challenge you to find better solutions — keep them practical by creating three to eight well-defined personas. You can use your understanding of the audience to tailor content by addressing different angles for different personas — for example, in an acquisition, employees who value stability may respond to messages about reduced business risk, while those who prioritize career development may respond more to content about new markets and opportunities.

Segmentation Best Practices and Examples

Segmentation means breaking the whole audience into sub-audiences who receive information relevant to them, avoiding information overload. One option is letting employees subscribe to content they care about themselves. Real-world examples: an automotive company with 45,000 employees uses 2 groups for internal vs. external employees, 50 groups for divisions and locations, 25 interest-based groups, and 5 groups for internal events; a retail company with 5,500 employees uses 5 leadership groups, 70 division/location groups, 4 trainee groups, and 5 location-based groups; a bank with 800 employees uses 1 leadership group, 8 region-based groups, 1 new-employee group, and 2 campaign-interest groups. Good understanding and segmentation of your audience helps you avoid information overload, deliver more relevant content, and help your audience better understand your message.

Framing Your Message

Sharing a message begins with framing: how does your audience already perceive your subject? Next comes the narrative: what story will you tell, and in what context should it be received? Finally comes the message itself: what do you want your audience to do, know, and feel? To craft a great message, first understand your audience's point of view — through surveys and conversations, internal and external social media, and informal channels (don't shy away from the "water cooler"; effective communicators tap into the company grapevine). For example, an acquisition announcement could be framed either by reassurance (emphasizing the success of previous acquisitions) or by fear (over job security and uncertainty). This frame becomes the basis for developing a narrative — a story and a particular way of explaining or understanding events.

Building a Narrative

A simple model for a narrative has four parts: the challenge (what are we facing?), the destination (where do we want to be?), the journey (how will we get there?), and the result (how will it benefit us in the end?). Once you understand how your audience thinks and have developed an explanation for why and how things are happening, it's time to focus on crafting the central message to drive results.

The Recipe for Your Message

To achieve a direct link between your communication and measurable business outcomes, define exactly what you expect employees to DO once they receive and understand the message — but also define what they should KNOW and how they should FEEL about the topic. Talking about action and tangible outcomes first is usually easier for leaders to grasp, and "feel" does much of the hard work in moving the needle. Continuing the acquisition example, the key message becomes "Combine strengths to become unstoppable" — under DO, employees join weekly updates and contribute questions; under KNOW, everyone is aware of the joint product launch date; under FEEL, everyone senses their questions and concerns are taken seriously by leadership. When delivering bad news, six basic rules apply: be timely (employees hear it from you first), be accurate (honesty is the best policy), be human (show that you care), listen (allow employees to vent), make a plan (say what you'll do next and what employees can do), and keep it local (support your local leaders). To bring a message to life, use relevant personal experiences that resonate with your audience — adapt the message to fit the sender, audience, and channel rather than repeating the exact same words everywhere.

The Right Role for You and Your Team

Securing sufficient resources for internal comms starts with understanding your role — defining what employee communication means for your organization and having a clear focus on where you want it to be in the future. Communication experts Sue Dewhurst and Liam FitzPatrick describe four levels: Content Producer (skilled and creative content production is the basis of all communications work); Behavior Driver (creating campaigns and messages with a clear expectation of the actions you hope to motivate, and measuring the change); Supporter & Facilitator (anticipating the communication needs of teams and leaders, and delegating tasks to focus on strategic priorities in larger organizations); and Asset Grower (communication plays a key part in building and developing company culture as a strategic business asset). These four value areas aren't mutually exclusive — decide to what degree they matter to your organization and build your role accordingly.

Increasing Your Influence

Since communication roles usually don't come with a lot of formal power, the expertise and relationships of the communications team matter even more. Personal sources of influence include your skills (concise writing, video production, creating powerful messages), your knowledge (about the company, its business model, and your internal audience), your internal network (few roles are as broad by definition — get out of the office and build relationships), and your role as a trusted advisor (be reliable, honest, and knowledgeable so leaders rely on you for feedback). Harder-to-manage sources include past outcomes (positive results build influence) and change & crisis (a crisis or major change program always shines a spotlight on internal comms and increases its influence). Tangible sources include your comms strategy (shows your plans clearly and that you're aligned with what the business cares about) and your comms channels (owning the key internal communication channels and understanding your needs and options, rather than leaving decisions about these tools to others). You can combine these sources — for example, defining top initiatives and goals with senior leadership at the start of the year, building a campaign strategy, then coming back to stakeholders with an overview of results, output, outcome, and audience insights.

Get the Resources You Need

Getting resources for internal communications means more than asking for a bigger budget — also consider trust & authority (the ability to make your own decisions rather than getting every piece of content approved by senior leadership) and leaders & communication (senior leaders must understand they need to be communicators themselves; internal messaging can't be 100% delegated to a comms team). You can also build relationships with stakeholders outside your team: local line managers (like plant managers or business unit leads) to build a network of communication champions; IT to support planning, implementing, and supporting IC channels; HR to think more holistically about employee services and experience; and marketing/external comms to ensure close alignment of content and topics.

Comms Planning Challenges

One of the biggest challenges with planning communications is that it's tough to control — internal communicators oversee only a small portion of the vast number of messages shared within and beyond the organization, and must compete for employees' time, attention, and mental bandwidth against independent key initiatives, service functions like HR or IT, business units, country operations, individual locations, external communication, marketing, and even social and broadcast media. This means strategic topics or safety guidelines can easily get lost in the noise. Other challenges from a lack of planning include communication overload from too many messages, similar content being created multiple times by different editors, and inconsistent or contradictory messages that do more harm than good.

Internal "Air Traffic Control"

Think of your company as an airspace, with all its messages flying around like planes — communications planning is like establishing air traffic control so too many messages don't land at the same time. This starts with an overall set of rules — your communications strategy — that should include goals and outcomes, messages and audiences, a high-level annual editorial calendar, and a set amount of airtime for major initiatives. Once you have an agreed strategy, the modern, agile way to plan and prioritize communication activities on an ongoing basis is a newsroom approach: a topic-centric model where topics come first and channels come second, so core topics are delivered on all channels in different stories but with one core message. Meetings are the focal point of newsroom coordination — a Strategy Team including the CEO meets twice a year to set overall priorities on topics, messages, and expected outcomes; a monthly topic review coordinates topic management, developed from corporate strategy as well as bottom-up employee-driven topics; and a daily morning briefing handles operational coordination.

Internal Publisher Enablement

With Internal Publisher Enablement, the internal communications team provides access and training to internal publishers. Access means publishers get communication channels to reach employees — even more powerful if they can post to the intranet homepage or send push messages. Training means publishers learn guidelines, how to use the platforms, the overall messaging strategy, and how to create good content. In return, publishers provide relevant content, locally reinforce core messages, and help foster interaction — as long as they adhere to the guidelines. Modern communication tools let central internal communication managers hand over publishing rights for a specific targeted channel to a local publisher or team; on mobile, the ability to send push notifications matters more than the homepage, and should only be handed to a publisher who will use that power responsibly.

Why Comms Need a Channel Mix

Internal communicators deal with many different message types, and which channel to use really depends on the desired outcome of the message. Two concepts help you choose the right channel.

Choosing The Right Channel for Your Message

Media richness refers to the capacity of different media to carry information and emotions, on a scale from lean to rich. A rich example is a real-life or face-to-face conversation — interactive and immediate, suitable for complex conversations. A lean example is an email or text message — neither interactive nor immediate. The general rule: the lower the chance of misunderstanding, the leaner the media you can use. The Communication Escalator, a model by comms expert Bill Quirke, relates the degree of change in a message to how involved your audience should be — starting at awareness (information requiring no action, like a canteen menu change), then understanding, support, and involvement, up to commitment at the top, where employees become ambassadors of change. The main takeaway: the bigger the change, the more involved your audience should be.

Good Channels and How to Manage Them

A manufacturing company example with 2,000 employees aimed to meet employees where they are, have channels for every need, and link channels so they support each other. Their mix: an intranet as the heart of internal communication, a mobile app for employees on the go, MS Teams for collaboration-focused desk workers (displaying updates and the intranet homepage), a monthly on-site town hall for face-to-face CEO updates, an annual employee event, and a weekly email newsletter highlighting key updates. Linking channels means the intranet and app content stay synced, the intranet is available within MS Teams, the newsletter curates key content from the app/intranet each week, the town hall is live-streamed into the app/intranet, and the annual event has its own branded channel. Modern comms platforms help by connecting all channels and letting you manage them in one place.

How Content Formats Work Together

Everyone is competing for attention, including your employees'. For a sustainability campaign, content formats could work together as: a town hall introducing the initiative and why it matters; a follow-up survey to collect employee insights and ideas; sharing successes and project milestones on your main channels; a photo competition showing what employees do to be sustainable at home; and a "Meet the employee" format introducing the people driving the project.

How to Make Content Reader-Friendly

Great formats only succeed when your audience is engaged. Keep headlines short, specific, and sincere so employees know right away what the information is about. Images carry information and add value, but only tell half the story — the best images are real and personal, so use your own photos where possible rather than stock images; today, taking your own pictures is easier than ever, especially with a mobile editor. The Inverted Pyramid model helps structure content once you have your building blocks — but you're still missing the glue: telling a story.

The Power of Storytelling

Our brains love stories — information shared through stories is retained much longer than facts and figures. When a story resonates, our brains release oxytocin, a chemical that boosts trust, compassion, and empathy, and stories are easier for our brains to process than formal communication. All stories have one thing in common: they're about transformation, with the protagonist changed through experience by the end. Kindra Hall's "Stellar Storytelling Framework" has four ingredients: an identifiable character the audience can relate to; an authentic emotion of that character to draw the audience in; a particular moment, zooming in on a specific point in time; and a specific detail the audience can visualize. Storytelling format ideas for internal comms include "A day with…" (accompanying an employee at their job for a day), Customer Stories (letting employees tell stories about their customer experiences), and Change/Hero Stories (following employees training for new roles or switching departments).

Top Leadership and CEO Enablement

Top management sets the tone for communication across the organization and, as role models for other leaders, must speak with a unified voice for consistency. CEOs are especially important communicators because they're one of the most trusted local sources of information — the most important thing they should communicate is the organization's vision and strategy, giving information context rather than just passing it along. Common challenges: CEOs are people (how can you make it easy and effortless for them to communicate?), CEOs lack time (how do you make sure feedback about their communication reaches them?), and CEOs need feedback (how do you find a format that fits their personality?). Great leaders speak to both the hearts and minds of people, connecting the analytical and the emotional.

Line Manager Enablement

Line managers face three key challenges: information overload from being expected to cascade messages from every department; losing sight of a message's original intention the further down the chain they are, since they can add less context; and rarely receiving communication training despite their instrumental role. To enable them: provide comms training focused on giving context to messages and building constructive conversations with employees; lighten the load by using modern channels to share operational updates directly, freeing managers to focus on other priorities, and letting them assign champions within their teams; and create input together by involving line managers in the input process, since they often know in advance what questions their team will ask.

Internal Publisher Enablement

Internal publishers act like independent vloggers or writers creating content on topics of interest — valuable because they have local insight and add relevance to content and channels. The biggest challenge is coordinating so many different people and their content. Their enablement should include communication guidelines training, platform training, the messaging strategy, and training on creating engaging content.

Employee Voice in Organizations

Employee voice is giving people the opportunity to express ideas, perspectives, and feedback with authenticity and without fear of social or workplace consequences — from how they like their workplace, to ideas for improving a process, to their struggles. Feedback always happens: employees will have opinions whether you capture them or not, and companies that don't give them a space often see those voices go elsewhere — rumors, social media, or employer review sites. Benefits of listening: organizations adapt faster to change, keep employees and reduce knowledge/skill loss (research shows a strong correlation between valuing employee voice and retention), and reduce risk since frontline feedback provides early warning signs of emerging issues. It also matters for internal communication itself, since feedback helps communicators gauge whether a message was understood. Many departments care about these insights — HR uses it to build a better employee experience, PR/marketing wants employee stories for employer branding, and line managers need it to assess whether information landed — so coordinate well to avoid survey fatigue from asking for too much feedback.

Employee Voice Channels

Channels for employee voice fall into two categories. Direct means employees provide feedback on specific topics in response to organized queries — quantitative (annual or pulse surveys) or qualitative (focus groups, team meetings, exit interviews). Indirect means employees express thoughts openly in public forums without being asked specific questions, which are then analyzed — internal channels (like social listening on your intranet) or external channels (social listening on public social media or company review sites).

What Comms Can Do

To grow your listening culture, start slow and controlled — for example, launching your comms platform without feedback or interaction functionality, then gradually introducing likes and comments, possibly limited to specific channels. An AMA (ask me anything) format combines control with an authentic way for leaders to respond to employee voice — employees anonymously submit questions and management chooses which to answer publicly (Staffbase runs an embedded AMA form for its own CEO, answered in town halls or the company channel). Start by creating a listening strategy — deciding which channels you want to use for listening and identifying your stakeholders.

The Strategic Value of Interaction

Interaction is an important part of the comms cycle because it means you and your employees are having a conversation — it helps employees understand content, and becomes even more important for topics involving big change (per the Communication Escalator). Since communicators can end up spending too much time acting as community managers for every topic, prioritize your organization's top strategic priorities — especially change-related topics — when designing your engagement strategy, then place secondary focus on supporting and enabling other interactions that strengthen your platforms, channels, and community. For any project, always ask: why are we doing this, and what goal will it achieve?

How to Make Your Content Interactive

Five ideas for interaction: give a clear call to action (tell employees exactly what you'd like them to do — vote, like, share an opinion, or a picture — and make it as easy as possible); guide the conversation (for hot-button topics, provide structured options so your audience knows what you're looking for, such as asking employees to vote between home office, hybrid, or office presence); make it relatable (a colleague's personal story resonates more than high-level strategy — a Staffbase post about an employee's migraine struggle sparked wide interaction); have fun (research shows small, fun breaks boost productivity — light interactions activate the brain's recovery system, so keep content conversational, short, visually appealing, and use stories or games); and gamification (competitions, quizzes, and games with prizes or badges are especially good for richer formats like images or videos — one retail customer ran a "longest bill" competition photographing receipts).

What Can You Do?

Modern employee app and intranet platforms provide analytics that show the impact of your work, including insights on when to best share content and which formats most engage your employees.

The Power of Employee Services

Communication platforms become even more powerful when used to offer helpful benefits and self-services — a win for everyone, since employees get information and services at their fingertips while comms gains activity and adoption. Comms can support two kinds of services: Connecting Services (linking to other departments' employee touchpoints and including their services in the platform) or Comms-owned Services (summarizing important service functions or combining information with added value, like an events page listing all company events).

10 Service Examples

Shift plans so employees can stay on top of their schedules; quick time-off requests directly from a phone; linking payroll information for easy access; embedding the employee handbook in the app; a company phone book to find colleagues quickly; an emergency contact list; helpful links for reporting safety issues; easy event sign-up within the platform; an overview of internal job postings and application details; and an easily updated restaurant guide or canteen menu.

Best Practices

Think about your audience — know their workdays, the information and services they need, and the devices they use, since this can vary by role and location. Think about structure — keep news front and center so employees see it even while scrolling to something else; usability tests show users don't mind a few extra clicks if the information architecture is comprehensive. Think about integration, at four levels: linking to a service (easy, reduces complexity, e.g. via a launchpad); embedding a service (ideally with single sign-on so employees don't log in again); a mixed approach (partially embedding, partially linking, e.g. embedding an org chart but linking out for complex HR tasks); or fully integrating services (great for user experience but often expensive and not feasible for many organizations).

Starting With Measurement

Measuring your internal comms efforts is key to showing the value your work brings to the organization, though it's one of the most challenging topics for communicators. Common challenges include not having time, not being able to see the metrics you need, not having any benchmarks, reporting on metrics without giving them context, and not acting on what you learn from the data. Still, it's worth it: measurement lets you show the impact of your work to leaders, show the strategic value of your work, and track what you do so you can learn and improve — all in a language the business understands.

Benchmarks and the Measurement Cycle

The Measurement Cycle has four steps. Define Success first, using benchmarks where available as a point of comparison from previous data. Collect Data — what you're measuring informs the data you collect. Compare Data against your definition of success. Evaluate Next Steps — if your data matched your definition of success, great; if not, understand why, which may mean investing your resources elsewhere in the future.

Metrics for Operative Measurement

Day to day, internal communicators focus on two operative questions: are our channels performing as intended, and is our content performing as intended? Channel metrics: Reach (measured via registration rate — how many employees signed up for a channel), Usage (activity rate on a weekly or monthly basis), Interaction (likes, reactions, comments, event registration, survey participation, user-generated content), and Satisfaction (often measured with a Net Promoter Score via an NPS survey asking whether employees and contributors would recommend the channel). Content metrics: Attention (potential reach — total employees you can access through the channel), Interest (actual open rate, visits, views, and visitors), Engagement (likes, reactions, comments, sentiment analysis, and returning users — visits divided by unique visitors), and Take Action (shares, @mentions, event registration, survey participation, subscriptions). Channel and content metrics are often accessible through a platform dashboard, though returning users, subscriptions, or survey responses may need to be collected elsewhere.

6 Core Comms Competencies

The C.O.M.P.A.S model (Tench, Zerfass, Verhoeven, Moreno, Okay, and Vercic, ECOPSI Benchmarking Report, 2013) describes six core competencies for internal communications. Counseling is about building and managing relationships with senior leaders, departments, and your team — building trust, being authentic, and acting as a strategic advisor (for example, supporting and advising leadership on delivering a town hall with complex messages). Organizing/Executing is about writing a strategy that is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) so you know what you're delivering against. Managing is about business focus and cross-functional awareness, helping you have appropriate conversations with leaders about how internal comms adds business value. Performing/Creating is about your craft — presentation, writing, or media skills. Analyzing is about research and listening, crucial for understanding the workforce and developing the right channels for two-way dialogue, such as pulse checks, focus groups, town halls, and drop-in sessions. Supporting/Guiding is about developing the people around you, while keeping an eye on the organization's vision and ethics. At the heart of all six competencies lies empathy.

Identifying Growth Areas for You and Your Team

Rather than trying to visualize five to ten years ahead, start small with daily, monthly, and annual goals. For yourself: define where you want to be in three years as your "north star," then identify one clear action for this year (e.g. sign up for a professional development course), this month (e.g. join a professional network like Staffbase Comms-unity), and today (e.g. subscribe to a newsletter). For your team: discuss where the team wants to be in three years and how that aligns with the organization's business goals; for this year, consider team growth areas like new hires that complement the team's skill set; monthly, host a recurring team growth session where members share something they've learned; and today, make growth a topic in your 1:1s with your manager or direct reports.

Internal Comms Career Advice

Advita Patel's advice: "Make sure that you write down your accomplishments. We are terrible at writing down the things that we achieve. So, whether it's annual, whether it's monthly, whether it's daily, write them down."