What the evidence says a good team should look like, and how to design yours
A practical guide for internal communication professionals
Your internal comms team structure decides whether the function gets to advise the business or just broadcast to it. Get it right and good communicators are freed up to do strategic work. Get it wrong, and even a talented team ends up stuck on tactical delivery.
Ask 10 internal communicators how their team should be structured and you will get 10 different answers. That isn’t a failure of the profession, but it does reflect a real truth that structure depends on the organisation. But “it depends” is a frustrating place to start when you are building a team from scratch, making a case for additional headcount, or trying to fix a structure that isn’t quite working.
This guide pulls together what the evidence actually tells us about internal comms team structure, from the sector’s biggest benchmarking studies to the profession’s own capability standards, and turns it into something you can use. It covers where IC should sit, the four structural models worth knowing, how big a team really needs to be, the roles that matter, and a simple way to choose the structure that fits your organisation.
What this guide covers
- Why your internal comms team structure matters
- Where should internal comms sit?
- Four internal comms team structure models
- How big should the internal comms team be?
- Build around capabilities, not the people you happen to have
- Common internal comms team structure mistakes
- A simple way to choose your structure
- Measuring whether your structure works
- Frequently asked questions
Why your internal comms team structure matters
Before choosing a structure, it helps to know what most teams get wrong. Gallagher’s State of the Sector, the largest global study of the discipline with input from more than 1,300 communication and HR professionals, keeps surfacing the same gap. Gallagher found that around 73% of internal communicators want to act as strategic consultants, yet only 18% say they actually do. Nearly half (49%) said their main role was still to broadcast announcements to the rest of the organisation. Gallagher calls this the “readiness gap”.
This is why your internal comms team structure is worth taking seriously. If a team is organised purely around channels and outputs, it will behave like a tactical team no matter how talented its people are. A good internal comms team structure protects time and seniority for advisory work, defines what the team will not do, and gives IC a genuine line of sight to decision-making. Everything that follows is in service of that.
Where should internal comms sit?
Reporting line is the first question people ask about internal comms team structure, and there’s no standardised answer. The benchmarking data shows the profession genuinely split. IC commonly reports into HR or people functions, corporate affairs or communications, and, in some organisations, operations or the CEO’s office via a chief of staff. Each placement pulls the team in a slightly different direction.
| Home | Pulls the team towards | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| HR / People | Employee experience, culture, change and the employee lifecycle. Close to engagement data. | Can get pulled into process and policy admin, and lose the editorial and strategic edge. |
| Corporate affairs / Comms | Narrative, reputation, alignment of the internal and external story. Strong editorial craft. | Can drift towards message control and lose closeness to the everyday employee experience. |
| CEO office / Operations | Proximity to strategy and decisions. Fast, well briefed, taken seriously by leaders. | Overlap with HR, marketing and ops can muddy ownership and accountability. |
It doesn’t really matter where you report as long as IC has a direct line to leadership and to the decisions being made. A team that hears about a change after it has been decided will always be a broadcast function. Wherever the box sits on the org chart, it’s critically important to protect that line.
Four internal comms team structure models
Most IC functions are a version of one of four core models, which come up again and again across practitioner writing and sector research. None are “better” than another as the right internal comms team structure depends on your size, geography, culture and how much control the message needs.
1. Centralised
One team owns and produces communication for the whole organisation. Every town hall, newsletter and strategic update flows through it. You get consistency, a single voice, and clean governance. The cost is speed and reach: the central team becomes a bottleneck, and a corporate hub can miss the nuance of a regional site or a frontline shift it never sees. This model works well for smaller, single-market or single-site organisations.
2. Decentralised
Business units, regions or functions each run their own communication. It is highly responsive and locally relevant, and it gives local leaders ownership. Without central governance, though, it fragments fast: conflicting messages, duplicated effort, and employees drowning in noise from competing channels. This model is rarely a deliberate choice; more often what happens when no one owns IC.
3. Hub-and-spoke
The most common model for large or complex organisations, and the one the evidence most often points to as the pragmatic answer. A central hub owns strategy, standards, the core platform and governance. Spokes, embedded in regions or business units, adapt and activate the message for their audiences and feed insight back. You get consistency where it matters and local relevance where it counts. It only works if the centre is resourced to coach and enable, not just police, and if everyone is clear on what is set centrally and what is local.
4. Internal agency
In this model the team operates like an in-house agency, taking briefs from stakeholders across the business and delivering against business priorities. It balances central control with flexibility and forces prioritisation, since work comes in as briefs rather than open-ended demand. The risk is becoming an order-taker: a delivery shop that never gets to the advisory work. It needs strong intake discipline and the seniority to push back on and reshape briefs.
Use the table below to match an internal comms team structure to your organisation at a glance.
At a glance
| Model | Strength | Weakness | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Centralised | Consistency and control | Slow, can miss local nuance | Smaller, single-site orgs |
| Decentralised | Responsive and local | Fragmented, conflicting messages | Loose federations (with caution) |
| Hub-and-spoke | Consistency plus local relevance | Needs a well-resourced centre | Large, complex or global orgs |
| Internal agency | Flexible, prioritised by briefs | Risk of becoming an order-taker | Orgs with diverse stakeholder demand |
How big should the internal comms team be?
There is a widely repeated rule of thumb of roughly one full-time communicator per 1,000 employees. It’s a useful opening reference, but treat it as a starting point rather than a target. As the IC practitioner Liam FitzPatrick has pointed out, no one can reliably source that figure, and his own crowd-sourced analysis found no clean ratio that holds across organisations.
The factors that actually matter are:
- Complexity and spread: number of sites, countries, languages and business units to serve.
- Workforce mix: a large frontline or deskless population is harder and more resource-intensive to reach than an all-desk workforce.
- Scope: change and transformation, leadership communication, and measurement all add load beyond “business as usual”.
- Operating model: a hub-and-spoke with active local spokes needs fewer people at the centre than a fully centralised team doing everything.
Two patterns are worth knowing and understanding when you size an internal comms team structure. Below around 2,000 employees, team size barely changes: once an organisation decides it needs an IC person, it has one, and numbers only really start to climb past the 2,500 mark. And the most effective lean teams don’t try to produce everything themselves. They multiply their reach by enabling managers, leaders and local champions to communicate, and by using platforms that let others contribute safely.
Don’t benchmark headcount on employee numbers alone. Benchmark on complexity, reach and scope, then sense-check against peers of a similar shape.
Build around capabilities, not the people you happen to have
The most common structuring mistake is designing the team around current people rather than the capabilities the business needs. The IoIC Profession Map, the profession’s global standard, is a useful anchor here because it frames internal communication across six areas, including strategic thinking, understanding the people experience, creating narrative and content, building mutual understanding, influencing and stakeholder relationships, and professional capability, and across four levels of practice: delivering, managing, advising and leading.
A strong internal comms team structure is built from capabilities, not job titles. Translated into a team, most functions need some version of these roles, scaled up or combined depending on size:
- Head of Internal Communications: sets strategy, holds the budget, advises the C-suite on change and difficult messages, and has a genuine seat at the table.
- Channel / platform manager: owns the editorial calendar, the tech stack and governance, and reports on what’s actually landing. They stop messages colliding and make sure the right thing goes out on the right channel at the right time.
- Content strategist / storyteller: turns dry updates into things people want to read, and guards the internal voice and narrative.
- Multimedia / creative: video, audio, design and visual content, now core rather than nice-to-have as attention shifts away from long emails.
- Business unit / regional leads (the spokes): translate global strategy locally, advise local leaders, and feed frontline insight back to the centre.
- Insight / measurement: increasingly its own role, turning listening and analytics into decisions. If the strategy depends on data, staff for it deliberately.
In a team of one or two, these are hats, not necessarily headcount. But the point stands either way: decide which capabilities the business strategy demands, then hire, develop or borrow for the gaps, rather than stretching existing people into responsibilities that do not fit their skillset.
Common internal comms team structure mistakes
A few patterns quietly turn a promising internal comms team structure into a stretched, reactive one. Whatever structure you land on, watch for these:
- Structuring around channels, not outcomes: organising the team by newsletter, intranet and events all but guarantees a broadcast mindset. Organise around audiences and business goals instead.
- No stated boundaries: if you never define what’s out of scope, the team quietly becomes the company’s copy editors, party planners and slide formatters. Boundaries protect strategic time.
- A hub with no spokes, or spokes with no hub: a hub-and-spoke model falls over when the centre is too thin to enable, or when local communicators work with no shared standards.
- Sizing on employee numbers alone: a headcount case built on a per-1,000 ratio ignores complexity, and usually under-resources the frontline.
- No route to leadership: however the team is structured, if it’s not in the room when decisions are made, it will always be playing catch-up.
Most of these trace back to the same root: a structure built to deliver outputs rather than to advise. Fixing the structure is usually cheaper than hiring your way out of the symptoms.
A simple way to choose your structure
Pull it together in five steps to design an internal comms team structure that fits your organisation.
- Assess what the business actually needs. Audit channels, ask employees whether they feel informed, and find the disconnects. Let the gaps tell you where to put resources.
- Define scope and boundaries. Write down what the team owns and, just as important, what it’s not responsible for. This is what protects strategic time and prevents the slide into copy-editing and slide formatting.
- Match the model to your organisation. Single site and simple points to centralised. Large, global or complex points to hub-and-spoke. Diverse internal demand may suit an agency model. Let size, spread and culture decide.
- Map capabilities to the model, then resource. Identify the roles the strategy needs, benchmark on complexity rather than headcount alone, and make the case in terms of risk, productivity and retention.
- Govern it. Set clear standard operating procedures: who approves an all-company message, who has platform access, what the publishing rhythm is. Structure without governance collapses back into noise.
Measuring whether your structure works
A structure is working when the team spends more time advising and less time firefighting. Track a few signals: the share of team time going to strategic versus tactical work, how early IC is pulled into big decisions, manager confidence in cascading messages, and how far communication reaches into the frontline. If those move in the right direction, your internal comms team structure is doing its job. If they stall, revisit the boundaries and the reporting line before you reach for more headcount.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best internal comms team structure?
There’s no single best internal comms team structure. For most large or complex organisations the hub-and-spoke model works best, pairing central strategy and standards with local activation. Smaller, single-site organisations are usually better served by a centralised team.
How big should an internal comms team be?
There’s no reliable ratio. A rough starting reference is one communicator per 1,000 employees, but internal comms team size depends far more on complexity, workforce mix, scope and operating model. Benchmark on those, and against peers of a similar shape, rather than on employee numbers alone.
Where should the internal comms team sit?
IC commonly reports into HR, corporate affairs, or the CEO or operations office. There’s no standard, and reporting line matters less to an effective internal comms team structure than a direct line to leadership and to decisions, wherever the team sits on the org chart.
What roles does an internal comms team need?
A modern internal comms team structure usually needs a head of IC, a channel or platform manager, a content strategist, a multimedia or creative role, regional or business-unit leads, and increasingly an insight and measurement role. In small teams, these are hats worn by one or two people rather than separate posts.
What is the hub-and-spoke model in internal comms?
A central hub owns strategy, standards, the core platform and governance, while spokes embedded in regions or business units adapt and activate messages locally and feed insight back. It gives consistency where it matters and local relevance where it counts.
The takeaway
Ultimately there’s no universal blueprint, but the evidence does point somewhere. To get your internal comms team structure right:
- Design the team to advise, not just publish.
- Protect a direct line to leadership wherever IC reports.
- Favour hub-and-spoke as organisations grow.
- Size on complexity rather than a headcount rule.
- Build around the capabilities the strategy needs.
- Multiply reach by enabling others.
Get those right, and the structure will do what it is supposed to: free good communicators to do the strategic work, instead of trapping them in only tactical deliverables.
Sources and further reading
Gallagher, State of the Sector 2026 (Employee Communications Report). https://www.ajg.com/employeeexperience/state-of-the-sector/
Sociabble summary of Gallagher’s 2026 report (strategic vs broadcast findings). https://www.sociabble.com/blog/employee-communications/gallagher-employee-communications-report-2026/
Ragan Communications, New research shows 3 major challenges for internal comms pros (73% / 18% / 49% figures). https://www.ragan.com/internal-comms-gallagher-2026/
Workvivo, The Ideal Internal Communications Team Structure for 2026 (models and roles). https://www.workvivo.com/internal-communications/team-structure/
IoIC Profession Map, the global standard for internal communication. https://www.ioic.org.uk/learn-develop/the-profession-map.html
Liam FitzPatrick / Working Communication, How many staff should you have in your IC team?. https://working-communication.com/organising-communication/how-many-staff-should-you-have-in-your-ic-team-2/
Poppulo, Why IC should sit in HR (reporting-line debate). https://poppulo.com/blog/heres-why-ic-should-sit-in-hr-and-what-we-should-be-doing
