Like many of us, I have been reading and digesting the latest Gallagher’s Employee Communications Report. And I’ve got to be honest, reading through it feels like ground hog day.
Now first up I’m absolutely not taking anything away from the study and the repot itself – it’s great insight into the IC profession. But honestly I can’t be the only one feels frustration that the same issues appear year after year after year:
· Communication overload.
· Burnout.
· Managers struggling to communicate.
· Teams wanting to be strategic but stuck reacting to requests.
· Employees overwhelmed by constant change.
I guess if you’ve worked in internal communication for any length of time, none of this will feel surprising. But when the same challenges and findings appear in industry reports year after year, we have to take a long hard look at the profession don’t we? And ask some big and difficult questions.
Is the problem really capability?
Or is the operating model of internal communication itself no longer fit for the world of work we’re operating in?
Because here’s the thing, I love this profession. I started my career in internal communication back in the late 90s and spent ten years working in-house. And honestly, I loved it. I loved the creativity, the people, the ability to make a real difference to how organisations felt and worked.
But somewhere along the way, the spark dimmed a bit. Not because the work didn’t matter, in fact quite the opposite. But because I got frustrated seeing the same things over and over again.
The same battles.
The same frustrations.
The same conversations about needing to be “more strategic”.
The same complaints about managers not communicating.
The same struggle with overload and disengagement.
The same requests for a ‘seat at the table’
At times it felt like we were running harder and harder, producing more and more communication, but never really changing the system we were working within.
What brought that spark back was realising something important. The problem wasn’t internal communication. The problem was the way we had come to practice it.
In around 2010, I first came across design thinking, thanks to Sally Camm and the folks at Capital One who I was fortunate to be working with at that time. And the lightbulbs started going off – more of that later, but I finally got around to writing about this journey and the approach and tools in People First IC with Lee Smith. It was a watershed moment for me and underpins much of my work.
But let’s go back to the report and understand where we are today and more importantly where we need to move to if we want to break the groundhog day cycle and ensure we are still around for years to come.
The broadcast problem
One of the clearest signals in the Gallagher report is the gap between aspiration and reality. Most communication teams want to operate as strategic partners, but very few actually do. Many are still operating as centralised broadcast functions – distributing messages, managing channels, responding to requests.
Organisations today are navigating constant change, complexity, uncertainty and emotional strain. And this model just doesn’t work anymore. Employees are being asked to process more information, adapt faster and make sense of ambiguity in ways that previous generations of work rarely required.
And yet the dominant response from organisations is still… more communication.
More updates.
More campaigns.
More channels.
More content.
Now increasingly, more AI-generated content. But the data suggests something uncomfortable, which if we are honest, we all know – more communication does not necessarily create more understanding. In fact, in high-volume environments the opposite often happens.
Overload increases.
Trust erodes.
Burnout rises.
Which raises another uncomfortable possibility…
….maybe the problem isn’t that we need to communicate better. Maybe the problem is that we have never properly designed the communication experience of work.
The Myth of “Change Communication”
Another theme in the report is the rising importance of change communication skills. But if we’re honest, communication has always been about change. We communicate because we want something to happen.
We want people to adopt systems.
Live the values.
Deliver the strategy.
Improve safety.
Serve customers better.
Work differently.
The idea that “change communication” is a special category separate from everyday internal communication was always a bit of a fiction. All internal communication is about helping people move. The real question is whether we are designing communication in ways that actually help people do that. And that requires a different mindset.
From Messages to Experiences – this is the big one!!
Internal communication has traditionally been organised around content and messages.
What do we want to say?
Which channels should we use?
How do we cascade it?
But employees don’t experience organisations through messages. They experience them through work.
Through their manager.
Through decisions.
Through processes.
Through everyday interactions.
Communication is not just what is sent. It is what people experience as they try to make sense of what’s happening around them. This is where the idea of People-First Internal Communication comes in. Not as a softer or nicer version of communication, but as a fundamentally different starting point.
Instead of asking:
How do we communicate this?
We start by asking:
- What is this comms experience like for our people?
- And what should it be like?
And then we design communication around that.
AI Won’t Solve This
The report also talks about the rise of AI in communication, and of course AI will change the way we work. But AI doesn’t fix operating models, in fact it accelerates them.
If communication is defined by producing messages, AI will make us faster at producing messages.
- Faster at generating content.
- Faster at filling channels.
But speed is not the same as clarity and machines can generate content by the bucket load. But they can’t feel cognitive load, or sense emotional undercurrents in an organisation. They can’t judge whether this is the right moment to send another message. That still requires human judgment and human design.
A Call to the Profession
Reading this year’s report, I didn’t come away thinking the profession needs better tools, or more channels, or even better messaging. What I came away thinking was this – internal communication is at a crossroads. We can continue refining the broadcast model, producing more sophisticated messages, faster content and better campaigns.
Or we can evolve the profession. And start designing communication experiences that actually help people navigate the reality of modern work.
Because if the same problems continue to appear year after year, it’s usually a sign that the issue isn’t capability – it’s the system. And the organisations that will thrive in the future won’t be those that simply communicate more. They’ll be the ones that design communication around people.
That’s the uncomfortable truth.
But it’s also the opportunity.
If you’d like to find out more about the approach we take, and how we’ve helped many organisations to truly make an impact with their IC approach, drop us a line – we’d love to hear from you!
