The Value of Strategic Comms

Gallagher's State of the Sector report has, for six editions running, identified the same top three priorities for communications teams: engaging teams around purpose, strategy, and values; developing or refreshing the internal communication strategy; and enhancing people manager communication. An internal comms strategy is a plan for how to communicate with employees and stakeholders so everyone is informed, engaged, and aligned with the organization's objectives. 75% of internal communicators report spending most of their time reacting to requests to "get stuff out," with little time for strategic topics (IC Maturity Assessment 2023) — a strategy gives you a basis to say "no" to requests and declutter your daily work, echoing Michael Porter's idea that "the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." Components of a comms strategy include identifying key stakeholders, defining communications objectives and key results, developing messaging and narrative, understanding the business objectives, understanding your audience, and assessing the effectiveness of channels — it is not about daily operational topics, sporadic messages, personal preferences of the comms team, or a focus on just one channel. A key component is prioritizing the strategic focus topics of the organization.

Comms Challenges and Strategic Topic Management

The main purpose of internal communication is to create a sense of culture and belonging where employees feel valued and motivated; in large companies, strategic alignment also creates clarity about shared vision and purpose, and promotes organizational agility. Today's top challenges for comms include increased digital speed and complexity, information access at an all-time high, everyone being able to share their take, aligning topics and messaging, remaining focused and consistent, and aligning timing and channels. In the worst case, employees hear sensitive internal news externally first, from sources like LinkedIn or the press — in 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported on planned Meta layoffs two days before CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed employees. 63% of a company's market value is linked to its reputation (Weber Shandwick, "The State of Corporate Reputation," 2020), so misaligned internal and external communications risk damaging it. Strategic Topic Planning means defining, prioritizing, and planning all communications around 3 to 5 focus topics based on the company's strategic objectives, in four layers: Strategic Focus Topics (set annually and centrally, based on business objectives), Topics/Campaigns/Projects (splitting focus topics into sub-topics with concrete messaging distributed across the year), Stories (matching stories, schedule, and channels to each sub-topic), and Content/Formats (the formats that best support each story). This represents a shift from channel-driven to topic-driven communication — what analysts call the "New Golden Age of Communications," where organizations take back control over their topics, messaging, timing, and channels.

Crafting Your Narratives

Narratives are the underlying patterns, themes, or deep structures that shape the stories we tell, helping organize new information and serving as blueprints for messages — for example, "The Danger of Trusting Strangers" is the deep narrative behind the "Little Red Riding Hood" fairy tale. While you can't control every message that goes out, you can shape the narrative embedded in your stories, developing central narrative(s) around your 3 to 5 focus topics that reclaim and strengthen your company's identity and future plans. Example organizational narratives: the Innovation Narrative (pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo); the Transformation Narrative ("we have a growth mindset and welcome change," emphasizing continuous improvement); the Community Narrative ("we're in this together," building belonging and shared purpose); and the Mission-Driven Narrative ("we're making a difference," centered on purpose). You may need to adjust narratives for different audiences even while keeping the same central "North Star Narrative" — your most influential audiences are employees and customers, since they help share your narrative with the world. North Star narratives are defined over a longer timeframe (roughly 3 to 7 years) and should match the company vision, while campaigns and focus topics change over shorter spans, around a year, tied to shorter-term business strategy.

Key Insights with Jeff Corbin

Jeff Corbin, Principal Strategic Advisor at Staffbase, has worked in internal communications for more than 25 years. He ran KCSA Strategic Communications in New York City for most of his career and is known as a US pioneer in using mobile technology for internal communications — he founded APPrise Mobile and theEMPLOYEEapp (later sold to a private equity firm) and is a principal in the ECA Consulting Group, which helps organizations use employee communications technology to optimize internal communications.

Communicating Change

Change communication involves informing and educating employees about planned or ongoing organizational changes to ensure understanding and buy-in — it's a little different from other types of communication. Common organizational transformations today include remote work and virtual collaboration, sustainability and corporate social responsibility, efficiency and cost-saving, artificial intelligence and machine learning, digital transformation, and reskilling. Leading an organization through change involves communicating the reasons behind the change, its benefits, and its impact on employees, with the goal of getting buy-in so employees trust and support the change.

Creating a Successful Change Comms Plan

A change communications plan is a strategic approach to communicating and managing changes that impact an organization. Several models exist for managing change — Lewin's Change Management Model, Kotter's 8-Step Change Model, the Action Research Model, and the ADKAR Model — and while no two change projects are alike, common steps across these models for your change comms plan include: creating a sense of urgency, building a strategic vision, building a community of supporters, removing roadblocks, celebrating small wins, and keeping your foot on the gas. Research from McKinsey shows 70% of complex, large-scale change programs fail, often due to a lack of employee engagement caused by poor communication — frequently because organizations act too fast without supporting the whole change process with communication. Comms should support change with the right narrative (the deeper theme that gives the change purpose), stories (specific anecdotes showing the change in action), and supporting messages — change managers recommend communicating a key message up to 21 times in different ways to be effective. Before crafting your narrative, brainstorm the change by asking about the Why (what problem called for the change, why it's necessary and urgent, what the alternatives were), the What (the objective, what should change, the timeframe, the risks), and the How (what the change means for each unit, who's involved, who leads it, what resources are available, and the steps and timeline). Many change initiatives fail because it's easy to revert to previous habits once economic or organizational pressure eases — companies often move from change program to change program without the crucial "refreeze" step from Lewin's model that sustains a new status quo.

Principles for Effective Change with Phil Buckley

Phil Buckley, Senior Change Management Strategist, has over 25 years of experience managing large-scale change projects globally, including co-leading the global change management for Kraft Foods' $19.6 billion acquisition of Cadbury, coordinating 40 change leaders across 60 countries. He is the author of "Change on the Run: 44 Ways to Survive Workplace Uncertainty" and "Change with Confidence: Answers to the 50 Biggest Questions that Keep Change Leaders Up at Night," and hosts the podcast "Change on the Run," the blog "Making Change," and the newsletter "Sharing Change."

Developing Strategic Comms Objectives

In a Staffbase IC Maturity Assessment survey of 2,000 communicators, only 40% agreed that their communication goals are defined in writing and known to everyone responsible for implementing them — a finding echoed year after year in Gallagher's State of the Sector report. Five reasons communicators don't set goals: comms is kept busy with day-to-day tactical topics rather than long-term strategy; comms often lacks the capacity to invest time in goal setting; some teams lack a clear understanding of their role and its contribution to organizational success; communicators often can't measure or demonstrate the strategic impact of their work; and comms teams often lack senior management support because the value of communication on strategy isn't understood. Setting strategic goals lets you link activities to larger strategic goals, invest resources where they'll have the most impact, develop your role as a strategic contributor and trusted advisor, and measure and demonstrate your impact to leaders. The OKR framework (Objectives and Key Results) is a proven method: objectives should be ambitious, clear, and inspiring, answering "where do we want to go?"; key results should be measurable and tangible, answering "how will we get there?" Setting goals strategically follows this order: what are my organization's main objectives, what are the objectives of my strongest stakeholders, what are my own objectives, and what KPIs will help me reach them. Organizational objectives are long-term and future-oriented, aiming to bring the company vision and mission to life — it's recommended to set a maximum of 3 to 4 objectives at the org, department, or team level, with no more than 2 to 5 key results per objective. Stakeholder objectives come next, ensuring your objectives support and align with your strongest stakeholders' goals. Your own comms objectives should answer "what do you want to achieve with your communications?" — select 3 to 4 strategic goals for the year in addition to day-to-day operational topics, which helps you prioritize and say no to misaligned requests. Key results are how you'll achieve your objectives — specific, time-bound, and measurable, such that achieving all your key results should automatically mean you've reached your objective.

Keeping Track of Your Goals

Operative measurement covers the day-to-day performance and impact of channels and content, relevant to the comms team, internal publishers, and regular channel users. Strategic measurement demonstrates your impact on larger organizational objectives to leaders, with metrics depending on the goals you've set. Every key result should have a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) — the metric selected to track progress toward an objective. For strategic measurement, focus on 3 to 4 strategic topics per year, each potentially needing a different kind of impact: Visibility (making all employees aware of a topic, measured via reach, open rate, or unique visitors); Resonance (getting employees engaged, measured via likes, shares, or actions like event registrations); Understanding (a shared understanding and common narrative, measured via survey results, comments, and focus groups); and Confidence (employees trusting leadership and the initiative's success, measured via survey results, shares, and employee advocacy participation) — comms owns visibility outright, while resonance, understanding, and especially confidence are also influenced by other factors, though comms still contributes and can track the impact. Operative measurement covers day-to-day post performance via channel and content metrics, interesting mainly to comms teams and internal publishers; strategic measurement covers the impact of communications around a key focus topic per quarter, interesting to leaders and the comms team.

Goal Setting Best Practices with Advita Patel

Advita Patel, director of CommsRebel, co-host of the podcast "CalmEdgedRebels," and co-founder of A Leader Like Me, has 19 years of experience in internal communications. She founded CommsRebel to focus on how people feel at work, is a qualified coach who helps senior leaders and IC teams build confidence to lead change and have difficult conversations, and hosted the first "Unleash Your Inner Rebel" conference in 2021 for comms and HR leaders to learn how to lead with impact.

Employee Segmentation

Segmentation is the splitting of your audience into sub-audiences to better target messages and improve relevance. The recommended process: know or create your org chart, translate your org chart into segments, match internal publishers with the management of each sub-audience, then feed new segments into your database. While every organization is different, there are common segmentation groups and sub-groups that most companies use to define their employee segments.

Best Practices With Caitlin Anderson

Caitlin Anderson, Senior Manager of Internal Communications at Autodesk, has more than 10 years of experience helping teams craft stories that resonate, working with non-profits, authors, small businesses, and large corporations. At Autodesk, she partners with executives to help employees understand the impact of their work on the company's broader business goals.

Building Employee Personas

Employee Personas are fictional characters who represent employee types within an organization. Creating them helps communicators understand audience needs, behaviors, and experience to craft better-resonating messages; simplifies audience research and lets you share key insights with leaders and executives who often lack direct access to their people and rely on communicators as trusted advisors and audience experts; and, unlike constantly updated data, personas don't need continual updates — revisit them annually, for example as part of a yearly comms audit. Creating personas is time-intensive, so use the tool purposefully to solve a specific challenge, such as increasing engagement for a group or before launching a new channel. The four steps to creating employee personas: sketch out your main persona categories, choose your persona profile information, create a rough sketch of your personas, then research and validate your personas. Segmentation and personas serve different purposes: segmentation avoids information overload by identifying sub-audiences with specific informational needs (useful when you want to split your audience, reach a new location with relevant news, or send messaging to a specific group only), while personas help craft messages that strike the right chord by accounting for motivations, pain points, and the best channel to reach someone (useful when you want to understand your audience better, introduce a new comms platform and ensure high engagement, or increase engagement for a specific group). Ideally, the two tools work together to engage your audience with relevant information.

Identifying Stakeholders

Stakeholders are individuals or groups affected by or interested in an organization's activities — employees, managers, executives, and external partners — typically with influence, power, or specific communication needs. Stakeholder management involves identifying, understanding, and meeting the needs of all affected parties to minimize risks, foster collaboration, improve communication, and help achieve project goals. Best practices: access an org chart to identify stakeholders' roles, build relationships with key stakeholders' personal and executive assistants, and determine the best channel and language for communicating with each. A successful stakeholder collaboration features open and transparent communication where all parties are informed and can express perspectives; a relationship built on mutual respect, trust, and understanding of each other's goals, priorities, and constraints; and shared goals and outcomes that benefit all parties, including meeting milestones and maintaining a positive relationship for future work. Stakeholders don't always need a primary role in a project — reaching out for their expertise alone can be valuable.

Stakeholder Mapping for Communicators

A stakeholder map is a four-part influence-interest matrix used to organize stakeholders based on how much influence and interest they have in a project. High Interest, Low Influence stakeholders are "communication champions" — keep them informed and equipped to share positive news. High Interest, High Influence stakeholders (including the CEO and internal influencers) are the crucial group — actively involve them and control the timing and tone of communication. Low Interest, Low Influence stakeholders should be monitored for feedback without investing too much time. Low Interest, High Influence stakeholders' needs should be understood and satisfied even if they aren't actively involved. For projects needing input from many stakeholders, organize a stakeholder workshop — engaging key influencers early to encourage collaboration. Workshops clarify objectives and expectations, build relationships and trust, include diverse perspectives for better problem-solving, help identify risks early, and give everyone a clear understanding of the project's objectives, scope, timeline, and responsibilities by the end. Preparing for one involves understanding stakeholder needs and expectations in advance, developing clear communication materials and a detailed agenda, and facilitating open dialogue with interactive sessions, ground rules, and a skilled facilitator. Engaging C-level executives specifically requires clarity on your goals for the collaboration, gathering relevant materials (strategic plans, market reports, financial projections), fostering an environment where they openly share ideas and ownership of outcomes, and evaluating the workshop afterward to improve future sessions.

Best Practices with Kate Isichei

Kate Isichei, founder of Where to Look Communications, is a global communications leader with over 15 years of experience, specializing in communication support for neurodivergent employees (autism and ADHD) and influencing and coaching executive-level management. She helps global organizations build neurodivergent-friendly internal communications strategies to foster collaboration, build trust, and improve productivity, and hosts the podcast "Engagement Express."

Starting with Comms Audits

A comms audit is an examination of how well your communication channels are working, giving you the big picture of your comms strategy. It gathers data from interviews, surveys, metrics, and feedback to answer the question: is comms doing what the business needs it to do? Gallagher's State of the Sector 2024 found impact measurement is becoming increasingly important to communicators, who use the data to tailor content and build a business case for additional comms investment. Before starting, plan like you would an international trip: decide your expectations and deliverables, your timeline, and your budget. You can run a company-wide audit or focus on a specific location or department — tailor the audit to your objectives. Run audits regularly as best practice, or whenever it feels necessary, such as after a major organizational change (mergers, acquisitions, leadership changes) or in response to a crisis (cybersecurity attacks, workforce challenges, negative PR). Before starting, keep in mind your budget, resources, and timelines; your stakeholders' expectations and deliverables; who your audience is; and design a step-by-step process for the audit.

Audits in Action

A channel audit gives a holistic overview of your communication methods — formal channels as well as informal ones like company meetings, town halls, network conversations, posters, and traditional mail, which don't provide concrete metrics but still offer valuable insight into effectiveness, sentiment, and leadership perception. A content audit has four main metrics: Attention (who the content is for and its potential reachability), Interest (how much of the audience actually saw it), Engagement (how impactful it was to the target audience), and Action (whether it inspired specific actions) — low engagement might point to a mismatched audience segment, poor timing, or confusing messaging (fixable through examination), or to a deeper issue requiring a better understanding of your organization and audience; high engagement shows what's working, but nuances can still vary between audiences (e.g. New York vs. Hong Kong). Research methods to choose from include surveys (gathering data from a sample via paper, phone, online, or face-to-face), digital metrics (readily available data on reach, effectiveness, and audience behavior), focus groups (insights and opinions from a selected group), a channel matrix (compiling and reviewing all channels at once), empirical observation of informal channels lacking metrics, and benchmark studies (industry trends and performance benchmarks). A channel matrix lists all existing channels with columns for categories like channel owner, frequency of use, intended audience, purpose, metrics, and content, helping you see strengths, weaknesses, and room for improvement — commonly built when planning next year's editorial content. Six steps for a comms audit: determine the scope (which channel or content, and which audience); conduct executive interviews (interview three or four key executives to understand what leadership needs from comms); ask your employees (surveys are most common — keep them to 10 questions or fewer and focus on behavior and perceptions rather than hypotheticals); ask your network (your team, line managers, and informal leaders each offer a different vantage point); audit your existing communication channels via a channel matrix, including informal ones; and consolidate findings and create recommended actions, sharing them with stakeholders, acting on them, and using the results as a benchmark for your next audit.

Best Practices with Tammy Nienaber

Tammy Nienaber, Director of Global Communications at Anytime Fitness, leads a team that partners with business leaders to develop strategic communication plans, create engaging content, manage digital channels, and measure impact. She also owns TLN Communicate, an independent consultancy providing strategic communication advice to franchise brands, small business owners, and nonprofits.