If I asked you right now how your communications strategy aligns with the overall business strategy, could you tell me clearly? Not vaguely, not “it kind of does,” but clearly and with confidence?
I was on a call recently with a potential client who wanted support in understanding where the gaps were in their communications strategy. When I asked that exact question, they told me it didn’t align. And honestly, it wasn’t surprising, because it’s a conversation I’ve had more times than I can count.
Research from Axios HQ found that 80% of leaders believe their internal communications are helpful and relevant and give teams the context they need to do their jobs, but only 53% of colleagues agree. That gap, between what leadership believes is happening and what colleagues are actually experiencing, is where communication really struggles. And yet the default response in most organisations is to produce more content, channels, and campaigns, as if that’s the answer to address a challenging culture.
When your internal communications strategy doesn’t align with the business strategy, you have to ask yourself what the function is actually for because internal comms isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. But somewhere along the way, too many of us have found ourselves delivering tactics that don’t reflect the real contribution we’re making to the organisation and its culture.
We become order-takers rather than strategic advisors, and we produce content because someone senior asked for it rather than because it serves any meaningful purpose. That frustrates me, because we are so much better than that.
Our role isn’t to execute whatever comes into our inbox. It’s to challenge and ask the uncomfortable questions that nobody else in the room may be willing to ask.
When communication becomes noise
But when psychological safety is ignored, even the most well-crafted comms strategy becomes background noise. Colleagues may read the words, but they don’t believe them because what’s communicated doesn’t match what’s experienced inside the organisation.
Leadership talks about inclusion while senior teams stay homogeneous. Values get published on the intranet while behaviours that directly contradict those values go unchallenged. Change gets announced with enthusiasm before anyone has genuinely addressed the concerns of the people most affected by it.
Gallup’s research shows that employee engagement hit an 11-year low in 2024, with 29% of employees citing a lack of clear, honest, or consistent communication from leaders as a key reason. Over time, this doesn’t just erode trust, it teaches people that the organisation’s communication can’t be relied on. And once that lesson is learned, no amount of carefully worded messaging will undo it.
The uncomfortable conversation nobody wants to have
One of the most common situations I often encounter is a senior stakeholder who is absolutely convinced that what their colleagues need is another all-colleague email, another town hall, or another awareness campaign. And the path of least resistance is to nod, produce the content, and move on.
But that’s a delivery service, not strategic communications.
The IC professionals who genuinely understand what it takes to build a confident culture are the ones willing to sit across from a leader and say, “Before we produce more content, can we talk about what behaviours you want to achieve or improve?”
They ask curious questions like: What are people feeling right now? Where are the trust gaps? What does the employee experience tell us about what’s actually needed here?
Those conversations can be uncomfortable and feel risky, especially when you’re not sure whether your organisation truly values IC as a strategic function. But they’re the most important conversations you can have and having them is what separates a communications professional from a communications technician.
A strategy disconnected from culture will always fail
If your internal communications strategy isn’t anchored in the real, lived employee experience, not the aspirational version that leadership believes exists, it will consistently miss the mark. It will speak to an employee experience that doesn’t exist and celebrate progress that hasn’t actually been felt.
The organisations that get internal communications right don’t start with the channel or the content plan, but start with an honest understanding of where people actually are. What do employees trust? What are they sceptical about? Where has communication previously let them down, and what do they genuinely need to feel informed, included, and valued? These are the most strategic questions a communications professional can ask.
Inclusion isn’t a comms topic. It’s a condition.
Nowhere is the gap between communication and culture more evident than in the way organisations approach inclusion. Too many treat it as a subject to communicate about, a campaign to run, an awareness day to mark, a values statement to publish.
But inclusion isn’t a topic for your comms strategy, it’s a condition that your comms strategy either reflects or actively undermines. A strategy that consistently centres the same voices, uses language that excludes certain groups, or announces change without accounting for how differently employees will experience it isn’t just a comms problem, it’s an inclusion problem, whether the organisation recognises it or not.
And that’s a conversation worth having even when, especially when, it makes people uncomfortable.
Building an internal communications strategy
An effective internal communications strategy isn’t measured by how much content gets produced or how many channels get managed. It’s measured by whether employees feel informed, heard, and genuinely connected to the organisation’s direction, and whether that feeling holds consistently across different roles, levels, and identities.
Building that kind of strategy requires three things:
a genuine understanding of the current employee experience, not what leadership believes it to be, but what employees actually report;
clear alignment between the comms strategy and the organisation’s cultural priorities so that every piece of content is working towards the same goal, and the discipline to focus on
being deliberate about what to communicate, to whom, through which channels, and why.
It also requires IC professionals who are willing to be the person in the room who asks the difficult question, not to be difficult, but because that’s what genuine strategic value looks like.
This is about doing less much better and being brave enough to say so when the pressure to do more comes from every direction.
Ready to build a strategy that actually works?
At CommsRebel, this is exactly the work I do with comms and HR teams. One of the tools I use is a comms strategy on a page, a focused, practical framework that helps teams cut through the noise, get genuinely clear on what their strategy is for, who it serves, and how it connects to the organisation’s wider goals. It’s one of the simplest and most effective ways I know of shifting a team out of reactive output mode and into real strategic thinking.
Need help developing an internal communications strategy that supports your business goals? Get in touch to find out how CommsRebel can help.
