Ask any leadership team whether they communicate enough internally and they will say yes. Ask their staff and they will describe silence punctuated by announcements. That gap is what an internal communications strategy exists to close.
Start by cutting channels
Most organisations have accumulated five or six: email, intranet, chat, noticeboards, town halls, a newsletter nobody edits. Pick two primary channels and demote the rest to archive. Ambiguity about where important information lives is the single biggest cause of people missing it.
Set a cadence and defend it
- Weekly: short, factual, from the team doing the work.
- Monthly: leadership update — what changed, what we learned, what is next.
- Quarterly: performance against the plan, honestly, including what missed.
Predictability is the whole mechanism. People read things that arrive when they expect them.
Brief managers before the all-staff message
Line managers are the channel; everything else is broadcast. Give them the message, the reasoning and the three questions they will be asked — at least two hours before the wider send. A manager hearing news alongside their team cannot lead through it.
Write for the sceptical reader
Assume your reader is busy, mildly cynical and has heard optimistic messaging before. That means:
- Lead with the decision, not the context.
- Name what is hard. Unacknowledged difficulty reads as spin.
- Say what you do not yet know, and when you will know it.
- Ban the phrases that signal evasion: "streamlining", "right-sizing", "going forward".
Change and bad news
During restructures, acquisitions or cost programmes, increase frequency even when there is nothing new. "No decision yet, next update Friday" is a real message and it stops the rumour cycle. Silence is filled instantly, and rarely accurately.
Measure something real
Open rates measure formatting. Better indicators:
- Can staff state the top three priorities without prompting? Sample ten people a quarter.
- Time between a decision being made and being understood on the floor.
- Volume of questions arriving through informal channels rather than official ones.
The link to external reputation
Employees are the most credible source of information about any organisation. Everything you tell the market is checked, informally, against what staff say. An internal communications programme is therefore not a soft function — it is the foundation your external reputation is tested against.
Fewer channels. Firmer rhythm. Honest content. That is most of it.