Back to School, Back to Basics: Is It Time for an Internal Comms Health Check?

There’s something about September. Even if it’s been several decades since anyone forced you to cover an exercise book in sticky-backed plastic, September still feels like the beginning of a new term.

The holidays are over. The out-of-office replies are disappearing. The office fridge contains food with dates from this month. People have stopped pretending anything meaningful is going to happen “after the summer”.

And suddenly there are only a few months left until Christmas. (Sorry!!)

September has always had that slightly strange second-New-Year feeling. It’s a natural point to stop, sharpen the metaphorical pencils and ask: How are we actually doing?

For Internal Comms teams, that makes it a pretty good time to dust off the school report and take a proper look at the health of your communications. Because while you’ve been busy doing internal comms all year, when was the last time you properly examined whether any of it is actually working?

Welcome back to school. Your first lesson is double Internal Comms. Sorry.

‍

Why September is actually a pretty good time for this

January gets all the glory when it comes to fresh starts. New strategies. New objectives. New budgets. New gym memberships that will be used approximately four times.

But September arguably gives organisations an even better opportunity to take stock.

People are returning from summer holidays. The final push towards year-end is beginning. Plans and budgets for the following year are starting to take shape. Big projects that went into hibernation around the middle of July are suddenly appearing in calendars again.

And crucially, you now have most of a year's evidence to look at.

• What worked?
• What bombed?
• Which channels are employees actually using?
• Which channels are Comms desperately trying to keep alive despite mounting evidence that nobody has looked at them since Easter?
• What have employees been telling you?
• What has changed in the organisation?
• And is the internal comms strategy you started the year with still remotely appropriate for the organisation you've become?

Reviewing internal communications regularly isn't simply us inventing an excuse to sell you a health check, either. Gallagher recommends periodically reviewing internal communication strategy and channels, and describes an audit as an opportunity to step back and assess the impact of existing employee communications and their alignment with business objectives.

Oxford University's communications guidance similarly recommends establishing your starting point through an audit before developing a strategy for improvement.

So there. Educational AND evidence-based. Gold star for us.

‍

Your Internal Comms September Report Card

Right. School uniform on. Phone away. No talking at the back. Let's see how Internal Communications has performed this year.

And remember, we’re marking honestly. Giving yourself an A because the CEO likes the newsletter is not how this works.

‍

SUBJECT: Comms Strategy

Grade: _____

Teacher's comment: Bright and enthusiastic, but occasionally appears to be making it up as it goes along.

Let's begin with the big one. Do you actually have an internal comms strategy? Not a content calendar. Not a spreadsheet showing when the next newsletter goes out. Not:

• Monday: Intranet
• Tuesday: Email
• Wednesday: Viva Engage
• Thursday: Wonder why nobody engages with Viva Engage
• Friday: Cake

An actual strategy.

• What is your organisation trying to achieve?
• What role does communication play in making that happen?
• Who are your audiences?
• What do they need to know, feel and do?
• What are your priorities?
• What are you deliberately not doing?
• How will you know whether any of it worked?

A good Comms Strategy should connect communication activity to organisational objectives. The Local Government Association's guidance makes exactly this point: an internal communications strategy should focus activity on the issues that matter to employees and the organisation, and should link clearly to corporate objectives.

If your current strategy hasn't been looked at since January - or some time in the early 2020’s - September is a pretty good time to drag it into daylight.

Things change. Businesses restructure. Leaders leave. Priorities shift. Employees change. New technology appears. Working patterns evolve.

Your communication strategy should evolve with them.

REPORT CARD: Good potential. Must stop confusing "being busy" with "having a strategy".

‍

SUBJECT: Channels

Grade: _____

Teacher's comment: Very sociable. Unfortunately, has made far too many friends.

Let's count your channels.

• Email.
• Intranet.
• Teams.
• Viva Engage.
• Employee app.
• Town halls.
• Dital screens.
• Newsletters.
• Manager cascades.
• WhatsApp.
• Video.
• Noticeboards.
• Carrier pigeon.
• That weird SharePoint site Keith created in 2016 that nobody can delete because nobody knows who owns it.

How many of them have a clearly defined purpose? Because internal communication channels have an unfortunate tendency to reproduce when nobody is watching.

Somebody identifies a communication problem and says: “We need a new channel!” Six months later you've got another channel and precisely the same communication problem.

A health check gives you permission to ask some wonderfully awkward questions.

• Why does this channel exist?
• Who is it for?
• What should be communicated through it?
• Do employees understand that?
• Does anyone own it?
• What does success look like?
• And the killer: If we switched it off tomorrow, would anybody notice?

If the answer is no, please remain behind after class.

‍

SUBJECT: The Intranet

Grade: _____

Teacher's comment: Contains lots of information. Finding any of it remains an extracurricular activity.

Your intranet probably started with such good intentions... A digital home for employees. One source of truth. A place where everyone could easily find news, policies, resources and information.

Lovely. Then everyone started adding things. And adding things. And adding things.

Now searching for the expenses policy involves four abandoned SharePoint sites, an HR page last updated during the reign of a previous CEO and a PDF called:

Expenses_Policy_FINAL_v6_USETHISONE_REVISED2xx_FINAL.pdf

This is exactly why an internal comms review shouldn't only look at content. It needs to look at the employee experience of communication.

• Can people find things?
• Does the structure make sense?
• Is content current?
• Does search work?
• Is ownership clear?
• Does the intranet work properly on mobile?
• Is it designed around what employees need - or around the organisational chart?

Sometimes the answer is better governance and content. Sometimes it needs restructuring. And sometimes an Intranet Design project really is the answer.

But please diagnose the illness before prescribing a SharePoint redesign. Otherwise, you've just built a beautiful new house and moved all the old clutter into it.

‍

SUBJECT: Leadership Communication

Grade: _____

Teacher's comment: Clearly intelligent, but needs to participate more in class.

How visible are your leaders? And we don't mean:

“Well, the CEO writes the introduction to the quarterly newsletter.”

• Do employees regularly hear from leaders?
• Do leaders explain decisions?
• Can they communicate difficult things without disappearing behind Corporate Affairs?
• Do they sound like themselves?
• Do employees understand what matters to them?
• And when leaders communicate, is there any opportunity for employees to respond?

Because leadership visibility isn't simply about frequency. It's about connection. Sometimes a carefully written email is right. Sometimes it's a town hall. Sometimes it's a conversation.

And sometimes video is incredibly powerful because employees get to see and hear an actual human being rather than receiving another 1,300 words beginning: “As we continue on our transformational journey…”

A friendly warning: We’re all about doing it yourself when you can, but remember that putting somebody in front of a camera doesn't automatically make them engaging. [Insert hidey-face or gimmacey emoji. We love both of those.]

‍

SUBJECT: Tone of Voice

Grade: _____

Teacher's comment: Must stop swallowing the corporate dictionary.

Here's a quick test: Would any normal human being say this aloud?

“We remain committed to leveraging our strategic capabilities to deliver enhanced value across our evolving organisational ecosystem.”

No. No, of course they wouldn't. They'd be asked to leave the pub. Over time, organisations can develop strange communication habits without noticing them. Jargon creeps in. Sentences get longer. Announcements become increasingly formal. Leaders stop sounding like people.

Soon you're not “changing the structure”. You're “evolving the operating model to unlock future efficiencies.”

Your employees know what you're doing. Just say it.

A health check is a great opportunity to look at the language your organisation uses and ask whether it is clear, consistent, inclusive and recognisably human.

REPORT CARD: Capable of much better. Please use words found outside LinkedIn.

‍

SUBJECT: Employee Listening

Grade: _____

Teacher's comment: Talks considerably more than it listens.

Most organisations are very good at sending. Email sent. Newsletter published. Town hall delivered. Intranet story posted.

COMMUNICATION COMPLETE.

Except communication isn't complete simply because something left your Outbox. What comes back? Do employees have meaningful ways to ask questions, challenge things, suggest ideas and tell you when communication isn't working?

And crucially: What happens when they do?

Because asking employees for their opinion and then disappearing for six months is not employee listening. It's employee data collection. Not to mention employee irritating!

A proper internal comms health check should look beyond analytics and explore employee experience directly. That might involve surveys, interviews, focus groups, stakeholder conversations and channel data.

One real-world example comes from The Health Foundation, which used an internal communications audit involving research and workshops to understand its channel mix and audience needs. According to the resulting case study, recommendations from the audit were followed by increases in attendance at all-staff meetings, engagement with manager briefings and readership of senior leader blogs.

That's the point. You aren't collecting employee opinions because they're nice to have. You're using evidence to make communication better.

‍

SUBJECT: Comms Campaigns

Grade: _____

Teacher's comment: Excellent at sending things. Needs to work on getting people to care about them.

How many times this year have you needed employees to actually do something?

• Adopt a new behaviour.
• Understand a new strategy.
• Use a new system.
• Complete training.
• Participate in an initiative.
• Change the way they work.

And how many times was the communication plan essentially: email + intranet article + reminder email? That's not really a campaign. That's correspondence.

Great Comms Campaigns have an objective. They understand their audience. They build awareness over time. They use creative ideas. They choose channels deliberately. They make the desired action clear. And they measure whether behaviour actually changed.

So, look back at this year's big campaigns.

• Did employees notice?
• Did they understand?
• Did they act?
• What would you do differently next time?

If your answer is: “Send another reminder”, I'm afraid that's detention.

‍

SUBJECT: Change Communication

Grade: _____

Teacher's comment: Works well under pressure, mainly because it is permanently under pressure.

Take a look at how much change your organisation has experienced this year.

• Restructures.
• New systems.
• New leadership.
• Office moves.
• Mergers.
• New processes.
• AI.
• Cost-saving programmes.
• Transformation programmes.
• Programmes transforming the previous transformation programme.

How much of your internal communication workload is now Change Comms? And more importantly, is it joined up? Employees don't experience organisational change according to your project structure.

They don't think: “Ah yes, this is Transformation Programme B, Workstream Four.” They think: “Oh crap. Another thing is changing.”

A health check can expose where multiple change programmes are competing for attention, where managers are overloaded, where messaging conflicts and where employees simply don't understand how everything fits together. That becomes particularly important as you start looking ahead.

• What changes are already coming in 2027?
• What will employees need?
• What needs communicating early?
• What can be joined together?
• And which project team needs gently persuading that its initiative perhaps isn't the most important thing happening to every employee in the entire organisation?

Good luck with that last one.

‍

SUBJECT: Measurement

Grade: _____

Teacher's comment: Very good with numbers. Occasionally struggles to explain what they mean.

“We had a 62% open rate!” Lovely. And?

• Did employees understand the message?
• Did it change anything?
• Did they do what you needed them to do?
• Was the other 38% the audience you desperately needed to reach?
• Did people open it because the subject line said IMPORTANT: PAYROLL UPDATE?

Measurement matters enormously. But internal comms can become obsessed with measuring what's easy rather than what's useful.

Email opens, page views, video views, likes & clicks… All useful indicators. But they're not the same as understanding, behaviour or business impact.

A health check gives you the opportunity to look at what you're measuring and ask:

Does this actually tell us whether our communication is working?

Much less exciting than a dashboard. Far more useful.

‍

So, what's your overall grade?

Add it all together. Perhaps you're sitting comfortably at an A. Congratulations. You may have a sticker.

Maybe you're somewhere around a B-. Strong work, but there's room for improvement.

Or perhaps you've discovered:

INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS - C-

Strategy: B
Good ideas. Needs to show its workings.

Channels: D
Has difficulty concentrating because there are 47 Teams notifications.

Intranet: C-
Contains all the required information somewhere.

Leadership: B-
Would benefit from speaking up more.

Employee Listening: D+
Must listen to others.

Campaigns: C
Tries hard but relies too heavily on email.

Tone of Voice: D
Please stop saying “leverage”.

Overall teacher's comment:

“Shows considerable potential but would benefit from clearer direction, fewer channels and occasionally communicating like a human being.”

Parents' evening should be fun.

‍

A health check isn't about finding fault

And this is important. A Comms Health Check shouldn't be an exercise in marching into an Internal Comms team, dramatically opening a cupboard and shouting:

“AHA! AN OUTDATED NEWSLETTER!”

Internal Comms teams are often juggling enormous workloads, limited resources and competing requests from practically every part of the organisation. The point is to step outside the day-to-day activity and understand the bigger picture.

• What's working brilliantly and should be protected?
• What's working but could be improved?
• What's creating unnecessary work?
• Where are employees struggling?
• Where are there gaps?
• Where are you duplicating effort?
• And where could communication have a much greater impact?

An audit replaces assumptions with evidence. That's particularly valuable when you subsequently need to make the case for investment, whether that's a new Comms Strategy, an Intranet Design project, better Change Comms, more creative Comms Campaigns, or investment in Video Production.

Because: “We think the intranet's a bit rubbish” is one thing.

Evidence showing why employees struggle with it, what impact that's having and what needs to change is rather more persuasive when somebody asks for the business case.

‍

September is your chance to do something about it

And that's ultimately why we like September for this. There is still time.

• Time to understand what's happened this year.
• Time to speak to employees.
• Time to review your channels.
• Time to challenge things you've always done because you've always done them.
• Time to identify what's missing.
• Time to stop doing things that aren't working.
• And, crucially, time to turn those insights into a proper communication strategy for the year ahead.

Staffbase recommends cleaning up an internal comms strategy once or twice a year so that channels remain aligned with it, while its audit framework specifically looks at employee feedback, channels and next steps.

So, before the final months of the year disappear into budget meetings, year-end announcements and somebody asking Internal Comms to make the Christmas party invitation “really pop”...

Take stock. Ask the awkward questions. Look at the evidence. Talk to employees. And find out what grade your internal comms actually deserves.

Because there's still plenty of time to turn that C- into an A.

Although, if you've created another Teams channel while reading this article, we're knocking a mark off.

See us after class.

‍