The Seven Deadly Sins of Internal Comms

Internal Comms people are, generally speaking, good people. (I mean, I would say that, wouldn’t I?!)

We try our best. We explain complicated things. We wrestle with SharePoint. We persuade senior leaders that a 1,900-word email is perhaps a touch ambitious. We receive “tiny amends” that involve rewriting an entire campaign. We make PowerPoint decks look presentable despite having absolutely no control over what Dave from Finance does to them afterwards.

And yet... Sometimes we sin. Sometimes we create another channel when we already have 14. Sometimes we ask employees for feedback and then vanish into the night.

Sometimes we send something to 8,000 people because targeting it properly seems like quite a lot of admin.

And sometimes - may the communications gods forgive us - we use the phrase “leveraging strategic synergies”.

So today, we're entering the confessional. No judgement. No shame.

(Well, maybe a little judgement.)

Here are the Seven Deadly Sins of Internal Comms - why we're all occasionally guilty of them, and how to repent before employee engagement descends permanently into the fiery pits of Outlook.

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1. Pride

“Our comms are bloody brilliant.”

Are they, though? Or does the Internal Comms team think they're brilliant? Because there is a difference.

Perhaps your newsletter looks fantastic. Your intranet homepage is immaculate. Leadership loves the town halls. Your latest campaign won an award involving a pleasingly heavy piece of glass.

Wonderful.

But what do employees think? Can they find information? Do they understand the organisation's priorities? Do frontline employees feel included? Are managers properly equipped? Do people trust what they're being told? And does your communication actually help employees do their jobs?

Pride becomes dangerous when Internal Comms starts measuring success from inside the Internal Comms department.

“The campaign went really well.” How do we know? “Everyone loved the creatives.” Who is everyone? “The project team.” Ah.

This is precisely where a Comms Health Check can be so useful. It introduces evidence into conversations that otherwise rely heavily on assumptions.

Analytics. Employee feedback. Stakeholder interviews. Channel performance. Content reviews. Focus groups. Benchmarking.

Sometimes that evidence confirms you're doing a brilliant job. Sometimes it reveals that the weekly newsletter you've lovingly produced for seven years is mainly being opened by the Internal Comms team and someone's mum.

Both are useful discoveries.

Penance: Ask five employees what they actually think. You are not allowed to explain why they’re wrong.

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2. Envy

“Have you SEEN their intranet?”

The grass is always greener on somebody else's SharePoint. You visit another organisation and everything looks magnificent. Beautiful intranet. Shiny employee app. Professional video studio. Gorgeous campaigns. Personalised content. AI-powered everything.

Suddenly you return home and your own intranet looks like it needs putting down.

And somebody says the most dangerous words in Internal Comms: “We should get one of those.”

Maybe you should. But what problem are you solving?

A new platform doesn't automatically create good communication any more than buying a Peloton automatically gives you Chris Hemsworth's torso.

Trust me. Ive checked.

Before investing in technology, start with the employee need, the communication problem and your Comms Strategy. Otherwise, you're not solving anything. You're just purchasing a considerably more expensive way to have the same problem.

Penance: Step away from the shiny new platform. Write down the problem you’re actually trying to solve. No demos for a week.

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3. Greed

MORE. CHANNELS.

Greed is perhaps the easiest Internal Comms sin to spot…

Email isn't working? NEW CHANNEL!

Employees aren't visiting the intranet? NEW APP!

Managers aren't cascading information? NEW NEWSLETTER!

Nobody's engaging with Viva Engage? ANOTHER TEAMS CHANNEL!

Eventually the organisation has email, Teams, an intranet, Viva Engage, an employee app, digital screens, newsletters, town halls, manager briefings, WhatsApp groups, SharePoint sites, SMS and a noticeboard next to the broken vending machine.

And employees still say: “Nobody tells us anything.”

Which seems impossible. You’ve told them in fourteen different places.

That's the problem. Communication greed creates fragmentation. Employees don't know where to look. Messages are duplicated. Different versions appear in different places. Channel ownership becomes unclear. And Internal Comms spends increasing amounts of time feeding the enormous communication monster it has accidentally created.

A sensible channel strategy isn't about having fewer channels simply for the sake of minimalism. Different audiences genuinely need different approaches. A factory worker, field engineer and hybrid head-office employee may have completely different communication needs.

The important thing is that every channel has a job.

• What is it for?
• Who is it for?
• What belongs there?
• Who owns it?
• And, crucially: What doesn't belong there?

The same applies to Intranet Design.

Sometimes organisations come to the conclusion that they need a new intranet when what they actually need is better governance, clearer information architecture, improved search and somebody brave enough to delete 11,000 pages of archaeological debris.

New technology can absolutely transform employee communication. But strategy first. Shiny thing second.

Penance: Delete one pointless Teams channel and say ten “we don't need another app”s.

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4. Lust

Don't worry. We're keeping this workplace appropriate. This is technology lust. That intoxicating feeling when somebody demonstrates a shiny new communications platform and suddenly you can't imagine how the organisation has survived without it.

Look! It personalises content! It integrates with everything! It has AI! It creates analytics dashboards! It probably makes toast!

Internal Comms has always been susceptible to shiny things, but the current explosion of AI and workplace technology has turned temptation up considerably.

And technology can be fantastic. We're not standing outside Microsoft headquarters shouting at the cloud. Used well, technology can improve targeting, accessibility, measurement, collaboration and employee experience.

But the question shouldn't be: “What can this tool do?” It should be: “What do our employees need?”

Those are very different starting points.

The same principle applies to Video Production. Video is brilliant when it helps you show something, humanise leadership, explain complexity or tell a story.

It is considerably less brilliant when the brief is: “The CEO wants to do a video.” Why? “He likes video.” What does he want to say? “We're not sure yet.” Who is it for? “Everyone.” What should they do afterwards? “Can we come back to you on that?” Excellent. Lights! Camera! Lack of strategic purpose!

Channels, video, apps, AI and platforms are tools. The communication objective comes first. Otherwise, you're simply lusting after solutions in search of a problem.

Penance: Step away from the demo. Drink some water. Write an objective.

5. Gluttony

If Greed is about having too many channels, Gluttony is about putting far too much stuff in them.

We see you, 26-story employee newsletter.

Nobody needs this:

• The CEO update.
• New HR system.
• Charity challenge.
• Quarterly results.
• IT security reminder.
• Office refurbishment.
• Pension changes.
• New starters.
• Seven vacancies.
• Learning opportunities.
• Mental health webinar.
• Photos from the volunteering day.
• Something about Procurement.
• And finally, congratulations to Claire from Accounts whose dachshund, Biscuit, has won a regional agility competition.

By the time employees reach the information you desperately needed them to know, they're borderline comatose.

Internal Comms often behaves as though employees have an unlimited appetite for organisational information. They don't. They have jobs.

Every message competes with customers, colleagues, meetings, deadlines, notifications and the sudden realisation at 3:47pm that they've eaten nothing except a Twix.

So, prioritisation matters.

• What genuinely needs attention?
• What is useful but not urgent?
• What can employees find when they need it?
• What can be targeted?
• What doesn't need communicating at all?

This is particularly important for Comms Campaigns. A campaign becomes considerably stronger when it has one clear objective rather than 14 stakeholders each adding “just one key message”.

There comes a point where adding another key message makes absolutely nothing key. Be brave. Cut things. Internal Comms isn't a storage facility for everybody else's information.

Penance: Remove 300 words from your next newsletter. Claire's dachshund may stay.

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6. Wrath

And now we arrive at our favourite. “WHY HAVEN'T THEY READ IT?”

Because you sent a 1,400-word email entitled Important Business Update, Deborah. They thought it was a threat.

Wrath emerges when employees fail to respond in the way the communication plan confidently predicted.

Nobody clicked. Nobody completed the survey. Nobody watched the video. Nobody understood the new process. Managers didn't cascade the briefing. Employees keep asking questions that were CLEARLY COVERED ON PAGE EIGHT OF THE PDF.

And eventually somebody says: “People just don't engage.” Careful. Because that sentence conveniently makes communication failure the audience's fault.

Maybe employees aren't interested. Or maybe the message wasn't relevant. Maybe the subject line was terrible. Maybe the timing was wrong. Maybe the channel was wrong. Maybe the call to action was buried. Maybe the video was nine minutes long. Maybe employees have received 17 other corporate messages this week. Maybe nobody explained why they should care.

When communication doesn't work, curiosity is considerably more useful than wrath.

Ask why. Look at the evidence. Talk to employees. Change the approach.

This is especially important in Change Comms, where organisations sometimes interpret resistance as employees being “difficult”.

Resistance is information. People may be confused, worried, exhausted, unconvinced. Or they may have spotted something the project team hasn't. Don't immediately reach for another reminder email. Understand the behaviour first. Then communicate accordingly.

Penance: Before blaming the audience, read your own email on a phone while somebody sends you six Teams messages.

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7. Sloth

Finally, we arrive at Sloth. Sloth doesn't necessarily mean laziness. Internal Comms teams are usually anything but lazy. It means defaulting to what's easiest because there isn't time to think differently.

“Can you communicate this?” Yep. Copy. Paste. Email. Send. Next.

The annual campaign uses last year's campaign. The leadership message uses last quarter's format. The newsletter exists because the newsletter has always existed. The town hall happens monthly because someone once decided town halls happen monthly. The intranet homepage follows the organisational structure because that's how it was built in 2018.

And eventually your entire communication ecosystem becomes a collection of habits. Some good. Some harmless. Some shambling around like zombies because nobody has ever asked whether they should still exist.

This is why periodically stepping away from delivery matters.

• Review the strategy.
• Look at your channels.
• Talk to employees.
• Challenge assumptions.
• Examine what you're measuring.
• Ask whether the things consuming the most Internal Comms time are producing the most value.

A Comms Health Check can be particularly revealing here because an outside perspective is allowed to ask the question internal teams sometimes struggle to “Why are you doing this?”

And occasionally the answer is brilliant. Sometimes it's: “Because Helen started it.”

When? “2016.”

Does Helen still work here? “No.”

Right. We may have found something.

Penance: Stop doing one thing purely because you've always done it.

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Absolution

So, there we have it. The Seven Deadly Sins of Internal Comms. Are you guilty? Of course you are. So are we.

Every organisation occasionally sends too much. Uses the wrong channel. Gets distracted by technology. Writes something horrendous. Launches a campaign without enough thought. Keeps something alive beyond its useful life.

The important thing isn't achieving some mythical state of communication purity. It's noticing. Internal communications should evolve as the organisation evolves.

That means periodically examining your Comms Strategy, channels, content, employee experience, Intranet Design, Video Production, Comms Campaigns and Change Comms rather than simply continuing to produce more of everything.

And that's really what a good Comms Health Check should do. Not arrive carrying stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments of Internal Communication. Not tell your team everything they've done is wrong. Not recommend buying seventeen new platforms. It should help you understand what's working, what's getting in the way and where communication could have a greater impact.

Then you can make sensible decisions about what to improve. What to invest in. What to change. And, just as importantly, what to stop doing altogether.

Because perhaps the greatest sin in Internal Comms isn't jargon. Or channel overload. Or sending an 18-page newsletter. Perhaps it's knowing something isn't working and continuing to do it anyway because: “That's how we've always done it.”

Repent. Review your comms. And please, for the love of God, stop leveraging synergies.

Amen.

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