The Big Shift in Internal Communications and a Business Case That Works
For twenty years, internal communication leaders have struggled to prove strategic value. We’ve fought for budget, justified headcount, and defended against the perception that we’re “just” making announcements and organizing town halls.
The Big Shift changes everything.
Understanding The Big Shift
Three forces are colliding to fundamentally reshape how organizations operate:
AI-driven automation and acceleration is transforming white-collar work at unprecedented speed. Organizations are eliminating middle management layers and accelerating decision cycles. What used to take quarters now takes weeks – or minutes.
Workforce upheaval simultaneously brings layoffs and a GenZ influx. Organizations are losing institutional knowledge while onboarding a generation with different expectations about hierarchy, transparency, and meaning.
Pressure on hierarchical decision-making intensifies as AI flattens structures and distributed work scatters teams. The command-and-control escalation model breaks when thousands of employees must make aligned decisions without direct supervision.
These aren’t separate trends—they’re a convergence that gives organizations roughly 6-18 months to fundamentally transform how they coordinate work and deliver to customers.
And this convergence gives internal communication the business case we’ve never had before.
From Cost Center to Strategic Infrastructure
When Harvard Business Review reports that 95% of employees don’t understand company strategy, and MIT Sloan finds that only 28% of strategic leaders can list three priorities, this isn’t an IC problem. It’s an organizational effectiveness crisis with measurable business impact.
And internal communication is the only function positioned to solve it.
The “employee engagement” paradigm gave us weak business cases: “Engaged employees are more productive” (vague, hard to measure, and inconclusively causal). “Better communication improves morale” (nice-to-have, not need-to-have). “Our engagement scores went up 5 points” (so what?).
The effectiveness paradigm gives us something bulletproof: “Your organization is investing millions in AI transformation while laying off 20% of your workforce. But when 95% of remaining employees don’t understand strategy, you’re not coordinating thousands of decisions – you’re unleashing thousands of competing agendas.
That’s chaos at scale.
But internal comms can measure that alignment gap and show you exactly how to close it if you give us the remit to do so.
That’s a conversation that belongs in the executive suite.
It’s a COO and a CEO conversation – something that goes beyond our traditional relationships with HR, Marketing or PR.
Driving Operational Performance
In this emerging world, the opportunity presents itself to shift our focus more deeply toward directly driving operational performance.
The most forward-thinking IC functions are tracking the impact of their activities on actual organizational results. Their KPIs tie directly to things like profits, revenues, risks mitigated and safety incidents avoided, not clicks, likes, outputs and engagement scores. They’re not measuring messages sent – they’re measuring decisions aligned.
This matters because The Big Shift compresses timelines everywhere – and shifts the nature of white collar work from a emphasizing the quantity of output to the quality and speed of decisions.
Our Seat at the Strategic Table
The Big Shift repositions us from supporting function to strategic enabler—and potentially changes who we need at the table with us.
Old conversation:
“How can we improve engagement scores?” “Can you make people excited about the change?” “We need better communication about strategy.”
New conversation:
“What percentage of our leaders can articulate priorities?” “How do we coordinate decisions across 5,000 employees when AI eliminates management layers?” “What’s our decision-alignment score and how fast can we improve it?”
The first set of questions focuses mainly on the management of employee sentiment.
The second set spans operations, strategy, and organizational effectiveness. Both matter—but the second conversation moves us to the core of value creation makes us essential to operational and commercial viability.
The ROI Story That Actually Works
Engagement ROI has always been squishy. Leaders nod politely and cut our budgets anyway.
Decision-alignment ROI is concrete—and it speaks to multiple stakeholders across the organization:
Baseline diagnostic: 25% of employees can accurately state priorities
Business impact: In a 1,000-person organization that means 750 employees are making misaligned decisions
Cost of misalignment: Resources deployed against competing priorities, initiatives contradicting strategy, customer confusion
Improvement target: Increase to 75% aligned within six months
Measurable outcome: 500 additional employees making strategically aligned decisions daily
That’s not “better communication.”
That’s operational excellence.
That’s competitive advantage.
And that’s a business case that transcends any that gets the attention of senior leadership – particularly when you start looking at how properly aligned decisions can increase sales, reduce customer attrition, or accelerate business workflows and attaching some credible dollar figures.
From Defense to Offense
For too long, IC leaders have been defensive—justifying budget, proving value, explaining why we matter.
The effectiveness paradigm puts us on offense:
“Here’s your alignment gap” (diagnostic)
“Here’s what it’s costing you” (business impact)
“Here’s how we close it” (solution)
“Here’s how we’ll measure success” (accountability)
This isn’t about being better “content creators.”
It’s about being strategic advisors to senior leadership who solve organizational effectiveness challenges.
The Next 6-18 Months
AI-powered transformation is now in full swing. Organizations are investing millions while simultaneously cutting headcount and accelerating their workflows. And they’re missing the coordination piece.
We have approximately 6-18 months while this gap is obvious and painful—before someone else (consultants, operations teams, or tech vendors) claims this territory.
This is our opportunity to stop defending our function and start demonstrating its strategic necessity across the organization – to Operations, to Strategy, to the executive suite.
The question isn’t whether internal communication matters.
The question is whether we’ll seize this moment to prove it – or let it pass.
Editor’s Note: Reprinted with permission from Strategic Magazine.
