Turning internal comms into ROI amid constant change

03 June 2025 / Neil Pendrey

Internal comms is about more than sharing information. It’s about influencing the way people think and behave, helping them to navigate change. In the past few years, this challenge has intensified. Employees face more change than ever before, especially with new technology and ways of working. To continue to deliver strong ROI and real strategic value, internal comms needs to change, too.

But with underfunded comms teams and HR leads, output can often be plain and direct. We end up sharing accurate information, but not the kind of rich storytelling and creative that demands attention and gets people excited. To maximise your impact and ROI, you need to focus on the needs of your most important assets—your people.

Treating your people like customers of your brand

Workshop’s 2025 Internal Comms Trends Report revealed that 66% don’t believe they have a dedicated budget for internal comms this year. However, the demands on internal comms teams are continually increasing.

Conventionally, organisations ramp up internal comms activity in periods of change—but, today, change is constant. Without the right support and enablement, this can quickly lead to fatigue and lost productivity. According to Gartner, employees feeling change fatigue are less likely to be engaged (35%) and less likely to stay (44%). Like your customers, they need alignment, engagement, reassurance and clarity on an ongoing basis.

The answer is a more strategic approach to internal comms that maximises your impact. With the right blend of creative and storytelling, designed around the needs of your people, you can get more engagement from your budget—and effectively support the people whose hard work affects your bottom line.

Taking a human-centred approach to internal comms

Originating in engineering, Design Thinking is a framework for problem solving that’s routinely used in areas from UX design to marketing strategy. In short, the framework follows five key stages:

1. Empathise: Understanding what the people you’re designing for actually need
2. Define: Defining the core problems you’re trying to solve
3. Ideate: Coming up with multiple potential ways to solve the problems
4. Prototype: Quickly bringing potential solutions to life
5. Test: Validating how the prototypes perform and finding opportunities to iterate

We’ve previously written about how Design Thinking applies to UX: an area of internal comms that’s commonly overlooked. But the same user-centric approach can inform everything from your strategy and comms plan to the fine details of an individual message.

Crucially, it’s connecting with your employees on an emotional level. Beyond deciding what information you need to communicate, Design Thinking and empathy can help you forge a closer connection and elicit the feelings you’re after: excitement, interest, engagement and confidence.

According to McKinsey, this employee-centric approach is notably more effective than simply crafting a ‘good to great’ story that explains how change will help you grow as a business: in their words, “What motivates you doesn’t motivate most of your employees.”

Using storytelling and visuals to engage employees

In your wider marketing, you’ll already be thinking in terms of emotional impact. But everyone is a customer of your brand—your employees included—and this emotive quality is vital for effective comms.

Communications science and psychology support this. As far back as 1969, researchers have understood the potent relationship between narrative stories and memory. Offered a list of words, just 13% remembered the content. Organised within a narrative, this percentage soared to 93%.

Of course, visuals also have an important role to play. In general, people remember visuals more effectively than words alone. This so-called ‘picture-superiority effect’ is theorised to be the result of remembering something twice: we remember the image, but also the word we used in our internal monologue when we saw it.

It’s clear, then, that simply keeping employees up-to-date with new information is missing the potential power of internal comms. It takes the right blend of storytelling and visuals to maximise your impact and, ultimately, ensure people act on the information they receive.

Turning internal comms into organisational impact

According to research from Workshop, 68% of internal comms professionals see supporting overall business goals as the primary purpose of internal comms. These business goals include improving processes and boosting the bottom line. By engaging employees and aligning how they work, there’s a real opportunity to unlock the true power of internal comms as a strategic lever.

Effective, employee-centric internal comms is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a vital part of how organisations grow and succeed. Ignore it at your peril.