Among the first internal communication blogs (started in 2006) for #students, #practitioners and #academia
Ask a room of internal communicators how their function is seen, and many will smile and say the same thing: as the people who send the emails and organise the parties. For communicators working inside Global Capability Centres and Global Business Services organisations, that perception is more than an irritation. It decides whether they are […]
Recently I was asked whether AI is costing us the human touch in internal communication. The research says the risk is real, and it is more specific than ‘AI feels cold’. 1. Trust predicts AI readiness better than the technology does McKinsey found that employees with low trust in their organisation’s support during AI transformation […]
Global Capability Centres are being asked to do far more than run processes reliably and cheaply. As AI, automation and hybrid work reshape what enterprises expect from them, the real test is whether a centre can build new capability while bringing its people, and its stakeholders across many cultures, along with the change. In this […]
Why does inclusive communication so often show up as a checklist applied at the end of a plan, instead of the reason the plan looks the way it does? Because most teams still treat it as a compliance add-on, not a design discipline. My book Inclusive Internal Communications sets out the INCLUSIVE framework specifically to […]
If AI can write your update in ten seconds, what was the rest of your job supposed to be? Gallagher’s 2025/26 State of the Sector report found 75 per cent of communication functions are still stuck in early-stage, ad-hoc AI experimentation with no formal framework behind it. What that number is really showing is a […]
If you ran the same engagement survey next quarter and changed nothing based on the last one, would employees notice, or would they just assume that’s how it works? For most organisations, they’d assume that’s how it works, because it usually is. A single post-campaign survey mostly tells you what people remember reading, not what […]
If a third of your employees never open a company email, why does a 66 per cent open rate still get reported to leadership as a win? PoliteMail’s 2026 Internal Email Benchmark Report, drawn from two billion internal emails, puts the average unique open rate at 66.2 per cent. That’s the industry ceiling, and it […]
What happens to a channel once you’ve used it for a minor process update with the same urgency you’d use for a merger? Employees stop trusting the alarm. That’s the real cost of over-communicating small things at full volume: the channel loses its meaning right when you need it most. I weigh every initiative against […]
If a message tells employees what changed but never tells them what to do next, is it communication or is it just documentation? An informing message answers what is happening. A connecting message answers what does this mean for me, and what am I supposed to do about it. Most corporate change comms is the […]
At what point does audience segmentation stop being rigour and start being a way to avoid deciding? I’ve seen change plans with segmentation grids so granular they take longer to build than the campaign itself, and most of that detail changes nothing. A segment only earns its place if it clears three tests: does this […]