So how can you buck the trend and communicate to engage and excite? How can you get your message to land with drier internal comms? How do you take it across the whole lifecycle? What’s the role of storytelling? How can you equip your managers to be more effective communicators? And who’s doing it well and how?
Here are 6 principles we discussed at our recent event:
Internal communication shouldn’t begin on an employee’s first day. People start forming opinions about an organisation long before they join, especially during recruitment, and these early impressions shape expectations that continue throughout their employment. Looking at communication through the lens of the employee lifecycle helps organisations create a more consistent and authentic experience from attraction and onboarding through to development, retention and beyond.
Authenticity is essential at every stage. During recruitment, employees’ own voices and stories are often the most credible way of demonstrating what it’s really like to work somewhere. Having created HSF Kramer’s employer brand proposition, ‘Your growth. Our ambition.’ we brought it to life for their early careers campaign using films and photography of their people giving prospective recruits an honest insight into the firm’s culture.
Once people join, communication helps them feel welcomed, informed and connected. This is particularly important when an organisation is going through change. When the National Grid launched a new strategy to transform the energy sector, they launched a campaign to help employees understand the change and how their individual contribution supports a much bigger ambition.
When communication is embedded throughout the employee lifecycle it doesn’t simply inform people; it builds trust, confidence and belonging.
One of the simplest ways to improve internal communication is also one of the most powerful: make it feel more human.
People connect with people and are far more likely to engage with genuine stories, conversational language and authentic imagery than formal corporate messaging.
IKEA demonstrates this well through its employee communications. Its “Life at IKEA” content uses a warm, approachable tone of voice alongside documentary-style photography and stories from co-workers across the business. Rather than focusing solely on the organisation, it focuses on individuals, sharing personal experiences of career development, belonging and long-term commitment. The result feels relatable and credible because it reflects real people rather than presenting a carefully constructed corporate narrative.
The same principle applies to content formats. Norse Group’s One Magazine, created by employees for employees, feels more like a lifestyle publication than a traditional staff magazine. It celebrates achievements, wellbeing initiatives and community impact while showcasing the people behind the organisation. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly capable of generating content, these human qualities become even more valuable. Authentic voices, genuine experiences and thoughtful storytelling are what create emotional connection and engagement.
Too much internal communication still assumes people are waiting to read another email or intranet article. In reality, employees experience communication through the environments they work in, the conversations they have and the moments that capture their attention. The most creative internal communication happens when we think differently and design experiences rather than simply producing outputs.
The Bank of England transformed its physical space to launch its cyber security campaign by adding graphics resembling cracks to its walls before revealing the question, “How safe is the Bank of England?” This unexpected approach created curiosity and invited employees to an immersive film experience that dramatically increased engagement with the organisation’s new information security hub. It succeeded because it interrupted routine and encouraged participation, was memorable and drove action.
EY’s immersive early careers platform, Adventure awaits invites candidates to explore different career paths in a non-linear way through interactive content rather than simply reading standard recruitment information. It’s got a quirky gamified feel that has really worked with its target audience.
In today’s digital world print stands out and its content can feel more valuable. We created a printed workbook for M Group to convey the key attributes needed to become a successful business partner. The workbook contains information about the attributes, but also note-book style pages to write in. Used in a variety of ways it encourages their employees to reflect, write and revisit their learning over time.
Different formats create different behaviours. Creativity in internal communication isn’t just about making things look different; it’s about making people notice, think and act differently. The most memorable communication is often the communication people actively experience rather than simply receive.
Storytelling can be a really effective way to bring communications to life and enhance engagement: making dry communications more memorable or more believable.
As part of their business transformation and rebrand, M Group had defined a new people strategy. They wanted to launch it internally at an in-person event and get people excited and engaged, but didn’t have the budget for films, experiential elements and so on. So, we developed a storytelling concept to bring it to life in a thought-provoking and interesting way telling ‘A story of our future and how we’re going to build it together’. The communications leading up to the event started to hint at what that future might look like. And the presentation on the day painted a full story of what that future would look like and how the people in the room would help achieve it. So rather than a dry piece of strategy, it felt exciting, future-facing and inclusive and was really successful in generating engagement and excitement.
When LeasePlan celebrated their 50th anniversary, they put storytelling right at the heart of their year-long campaign. With their brand promise being ‘It’s easier to LeasePlan’, they used the campaign to ‘tell the story of easier’. At the heart of this was a digital timeline – an online resource where everyone was invited to upload personal stories of things they’d done to make life easier for clients or colleagues, so that they could build the whole story collectively. One storyline made up of many individual stories. They then used those stories as a rich source of content throughout the year and showcased them around different offices – to celebrate the individuals, but also to encourage people to keep going back to the timeline and upload more.
Storytelling also ran through how they captured the year’s activities – from a series of films (some professionally shot and some using user-generated content from their people); through to a toolkit of stories and content that could be used across all 31 countries; and finally with a beautiful coffee-table style storybook that was given to all employees at the end of the year.
Employee communications are often about empowering managers to cascade messages effectively – and that’s important – but it’s important to empower everyone. Here we look at different ways of doing this.
When Balfour Beatty rolled out a new set of values across the whole organisation, it was no mean feat: 26 operating companies, 53,000 people, spanning 100 countries. Although the programme was developed at Group level, it couldn’t be fully implemented by Group. They had to empower the operating companies (opcos) to take it, embrace it and create nuanced programmes appropriate for their people.
Each opco nominated two values leaders, who would immerse themselves in the programme, take ownership of it and who were provided with a comprehensive toolkit of communications and guidance. But key to making it stick was bringing the values leaders together for two days of intensive immersion, briefing and training. They came together in one location and bonded as one team. They were fully briefed on the programme, saw the presentations being presented, had a chance to practice themselves and trial-run facilitating workshops. Bringing them together and empowering them to go back and ignite the programme within their opcos was key to the programme’s success.
At a smaller scale, the law firm Morrison Foerster ran an internal communications campaign when they needed their partners and associates to help promote a piece of external research they were about to launch. Respecting that their people were busy, they wanted each person to do just one small thing. The whole campaign was built around “small actions, big outcomes”. Rather than it feeling overwhelming, it felt do-able and therefore empowering. And different communications vehicles were developed for different cohorts to make it as easy as possible for them.
But what about empowering everyone? Google holds TGIF (“thank God it’s Friday”) meetings every Friday, which they feel are a key part of having such active and engaged people in their business. They happen every single Friday and start with senior managers presenting relatively private information – much more than you might expect a company to share. For example, updates on products that haven’t launched yet, or failures and tech issues they’ve had. The idea is that by being very open and transparent, trusting people to use that information judiciously, they create a real sense of trust and ‘we’re all in this together’. There’s then an open Q&A: anybody can ask the senior managers anything, on any topic – whether that’s something big-picture and strategic, or about the food in the canteen. Everybody has the opportunity to have their say – a great example of empowering everyone.
We’ve talked about several fairly big-picture employee communications. But what about the really nitty-gritty pieces — the low-profile communications that don’t get much attention? There are many consumer brands that do these functional communications really well – for example Octopus Energy. But this shouldn’t be the sole preserve of consumer brands talking to their customers. We think it’s just as important to bring that quality to the drier pieces you need to communicate to your people. And that’s exactly what we did for M Group.
As part of their business transformation, they went from 18 businesses and brands to one core business and brand. So, there was a practical need to streamline all their different HR policies and create one consistent set. But there was also a real opportunity to make them work much harder as pieces of communication. By making them truly on-brand, easy to read, succinct and engaging – reflecting their new values and tone of voice: responsible, open, together, ambitious.
We reviewed a cross-section of their policies and came up with a new structure that could be applied to all – clear, consistent, succinct and using everyday language. We changed the tone, moving from a ‘rulebook’ style to an adult-to-adult tone, in line with the tone of voice. The writing style was collaborative and supportive, using active language, framed around joint responsibilities, written person to person — ‘you’ and ‘we’ — and energised by focusing on actions.
We then trained their HR team on how to write the policies in the new style so that they could be self-sufficient when more were needed.
In the end the new set of policies were much more than just some ‘HR policies’. They showcased the brand in action, demonstrated it was being embedded everywhere and further emphasised the fact that they were now one business and one brand, launched with the headline: ‘One M Group. One set of people policies.’
So, in summary, there are many ways to ensure your employee communications are as engaging as their counterpart external flagship communications. By considering how your communications play out across the full employee lifecycle; by making them human in tone and content; by creating memorable experiences; by using storytelling to bring them to life; by empowering everyone to be communicators; and by not forgetting to also focus on the drier day-to-day communications that demonstrate real commitment and attention to detail. We’ve all been on the receiving end of employee communications and know the impact of receiving a great piece (vs. the alternative). When your people are your brand and your business, the quality of your employee communications matters and has impact, and is therefore worth investing in.
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We created a new name, brand and employer brand to realise the firm’s independence and ability to move ‘As the world moves’.
What should we take into 2027? What are the trends we should be aware of? And how do they apply to the world of B2B?
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