How internal comms can help drive business results
For internal communicators seeking a fresh start in 2025, now is the perfect time to begin laying the groundwork.
Read on for three steps to make your department’s efforts essential to your company’s overall success in the new year.
See the big picture
Before doing anything else, it’s important to get a clear understanding of what your leadership team hopes to achieve in the coming months. Are they planning to debut a new product? Expand into a new market? Pivot to a new business model?
While the strategy might be obvious today, that can change tomorrow. World events, advances in technology, and shifts in consumer trends can bring about risks and opportunities that no one anticipated at the last board meeting.
Perhaps the aim is to slow employee churn by improving workplace satisfaction. In that case, internal communicators may want to incorporate the digital employee experience, also known as DEX. A report from Gartner® describes the situation as follows: “Historically, IT organizations would create a broad set of worker categories based on their roles or departments. Now, employees expect a more personalized digital experience, and meeting these expectations is becoming integral to attract and retain talent.”
Therefore, make sure you’re as up to date as possible on where your company intends to go. Ask, listen, and ask again, leaving no room for doubt or confusion.
Once you have a solid grasp of the business’s goals, it’s time to make some tough decisions.
Interrogate your current strategy
With a view of the road ahead, the next step involves an honest assessment of your day-to-day activities. What is your team doing—and why? How, if at all, do your current tactics get the company closer to completing its mission?
This is a good moment to clean house. Unsubscribe from tools that no longer produce results. Focus on the channels that do.
Indeed, data from PoliteMail’s Internal Communications Trends for Success in 2025 survey reveals, more than any other objective, internal communicators intend to optimize their communication channels in the new year. A portion of participants said one way to do this was by reducing them.
At the same time, better aligning with your organization’s goals may require adopting innovative ways of reaching employees. This could mean introducing a podcast featuring members of the C-suite, for example. Or displaying messages on TV screens located throughout a factory or warehouse.
If you haven’t already, it could also mean embracing generative artificial intelligence before your department falls behind. According to research from Gartner®, “By 2028, GenAI will be so tightly woven into personal and team productivity applications that it will scarcely merit comment by employees and will require little, if any, oversight.”
Whatever the case, the point is to take a hard look at what’s working and what’s not, given your company’s present ambitions. Be flexible on the means, yet rigid about the ends.
Measure your progress
The final step in refining internal communications to help generate desired business outcomes is to measure your progress. Use benchmarking to show you’re keeping pace with industry standards. Monitor your activities to prove, in no uncertain terms, that your initiatives are contributing to the company’s bottom line. This can include gauging workforce morale with internal email read rates or text-based analysis of employee messages.
But remember: It’s crucial that your KPIs make sense to your boss. When presenting your accomplishments to the leadership team, your metrics must line up with the metrics that matter to them, such as higher revenue and lower cost.
Otherwise, expect to speak to a room filled with deaf ears and end the meeting feeling more unaligned than the minute it began.