Part 2 || Internal Comms Has A New Job: Make The Organization Behave Differently

Part 2 of a four-part series on the forces reshaping work — and the operating models built to survive them.

For years, internal communications has been treated like the in-house newsroom: executives decide, comms writes, employees receive. That model didn’t work brilliantly even when careers were linear, the office was the centre of gravity, and culture could be managed with a decent slide deck and a quarterly town hall.

Now it’s borderline malpractice.

If the employment deal has been repriced by distrust, skills volatility, and AI-driven changes to what work is worth, then internal comms can’t remain a broadcast function. It has to become a behaviour-change function—working with HR and the C-suite to get people doing the right things, in the right sequence, with the right energy.

This is where marketing comes in. Not “branding” in the abstract. Marketing as an operating discipline: segmentation, proposition design, journeys, channel strategy, testing, and measurement. The kind of work that assumes attention is scarce and belief is earned.

The shift: from message distribution to behaviour design.

Organisations keep announcing change as if saying it makes it so. But most companies aren’t going through a transformation anymore—they’re in continuous transformation. That requires orchestration, sequencing, and a repeatable operating model, not periodic “big moments.” Harvard Business Review: Transformations That Work (March–April 2024).

Which means internal comms has to move upstream. Less “how do we announce this?” and more “what must be true for people to actually change?”

Start with behaviour, not values

Values are too abstract to change Tuesday. Behaviours are specific. The work is to translate strategy into the decisions employees face in real life.

One useful method is dilemmas. Instead of telling people “we value innovation,” give them a scenario that forces the trade-off: speed versus rigour, autonomy versus standardisation, candour versus harmony, experimentation versus risk control. HBR’s culture research shows how dilemmas make culture actionable — because they tell people what to do when values collide. Build a Corporate Culture That Works (July–August 2024).

This is the point where comms becomes practical. Not lofty. Not poetic. Operational.

Because if the strategy requires different decisions in the field — different escalation habits, different meeting discipline, different ways of handling mistakes, different standards of accountability — then comms has to help define those decision rules and make them socially normal.

Stop treating employees as an audience. Treat them as a market.

If you want behaviour change, you need to think like a marketer:

• Segment the workforce by what they need to believe and do (not by org chart).

• Define the value exchange: what does the employee get, concretely, if they change?

• Design the journey: what’s the first small action you want, and what comes next?

• Choose channels and messengers that match trust realities (often: managers and peers, not HQ).

Measure behaviour, not sentiment.

This is also where internal comms and HR either become a power couple, or keep stepping on each other’s toes. HR owns systems (performance, learning, mobility, rewards). Comms owns attention, narrative, and activation. Behaviour change needs both.

Build adoption like a discipline — not a one-off launch

Most internal change fails because organisations treat adoption as a launch problem. They assume that if people “understand”, they will “do”. Shhh…They won’t!

People do what the system rewards, what their manager reinforces, and what their peers treat as normal.

So the job becomes designing conditions for adoption:

• A plain-English proposition that earns the change (for employees and for managers).

• A sequenced set of asks that respects capacity rather than overwhelming it.

• A manager layer that’s genuinely enabled, because managers are the route through which most behaviour is reinforced (or quietly killed).

• A cadence of reinforcement, because belief decays under workload.

Frontier Communications’ “Frontier Forward” programme is a good example of that mindset: development and mobility weren’t treated as a nice-to-have announcement, but embedded into the employee experience, with ongoing reinforcement rather than a single “ta-da” moment.

Protect organisational energy, or you’ll get polite sabotage

Transformation isn’t failing because employees “hate change.” It fails because companies stack initiatives like plates and act surprised when the organisation drops them.

The transformation research is blunt: when organisations try to change too many routines at once, the odds of failure rise sharply.

This is where internal comms earns its keep with executives. Not by “owning sequencing” (that’s COO territory), but by forcing coherence:

• What routines are we changing this quarter?

• Who is taking the hit?

• What are we stopping to make room?

• What’s the single, repeatable story that ties it together?

When people feel coherence, they lean in. When they feel chaos, they tune out — or worse, comply performatively while behaving exactly as before.

The new mandate: comms as the glue between strategy and behaviour

Internal comms used to be measured by output: newsletters shipped, intranet updated, leader talking points polished.

In the new world, that’s like measuring marketing by how many ads you ran.

The new measure is outcome: did people adopt the behaviours the strategy requires?

To get there, comms has to sit at the same table as HR and operating leadership — not downstream of them. Not to “communicate the change,” but to shape the conditions that make change stick: decision clarity, value exchange, sequenced asks, credible messengers, reinforcement cadence, and behavioural measures.

Or, less diplomatically: if you’re still “broadcasting what executives said,” you’re not managing communications. You’re managing nostalgia.

About the Authors:

This workforce management series was developed by Peter Lyall of Ascent Advisory Services and Ed Davis and Kevin Beagley of Agency X, and published in partnership with Strategic.Magazine (Media Partner).

The work was created in cooperation with Malcolm O’Neal — Chief Human Resource Officer and advisor to boards and executive teams in complex, global B2B and B2C companies.