Somewhere in your organisation there is a person wearing one organisation’s uniform, carrying a second organisation’s lanyard, and logging into a third organisation’s systems with a password only the first can reset.

They are doing a job that at least two of those organisations believe belongs to somebody else.

They are not an edge case. Not any more.

Research by SAP and Oxford Economics, surveying 2,050 executives across more than 20 countries, found that only 58% of workforce spend goes on employees. The other 42% buys contingent workers and service providers: contractors, agencies, IT outsourcers, consultancies. More than half of those executives said their organisation couldn’t conduct business as usual without them.

And yet we still draw the organisation as a pyramid.

One person at the top, everyone else arranged obediently underneath, solid lines and dotted lines and a surprising amount of money spent arguing about where they should go. Then we design internal communications for that picture: one intranet, one all-staff email, one audience, one direction of travel.

The picture was always a simplification. What’s changed is how much of the actual organisation now sits outside it.

The organisation on the slide isn’t the organisation people work in

Real organisations are messy.

Work runs through partners, contractors, shared services, joint ventures and outsourced back offices. Two organisations can share a finance function and approximately none of a culture. A team is fully shared across two employers while HR is shared only transactionally. Someone is employed by one entity, works exclusively for another, and consequently can’t see either one’s internal communications properly.

This isn’t unusual, and it isn’t a temporary state of disrepair on the way to something tidier. It is the organisation.

In Digital Communications at Work, Jonathan Phillips and I describe today’s internal audience as including contractors, freelancers, agency staff, suppliers and partners: people who sit inside the working life of an organisation without sitting on its payroll.

The boundary around “internal” has got very fuzzy indeed.

Then add all the people your internal communication channels were never particularly good at reaching in the first place. Frontline and deskless colleagues make up around 80% of the global workforce, and many have no corporate email address and no reason to spend their working day lovingly browsing the intranet.

Access is uneven. Context is uneven. Someone who has worked there for fifteen years has a completely different map of the place in their head from someone who has worked fifteen shifts.

Enterprise software doesn’t much like any of this, because enterprise software has generally been designed for an organisation tidier than any organisation that has ever existed. Even now, major platforms struggle with someone holding multiple affiliations inside a single institution, never mind across several (working across two or more instances of Teams, for example, remains a PITA).

So we design channels for the diagram and then wonder why the people who don’t fit neatly inside the diagram aren’t using them.

This is an internal communications problem before it’s a technology one

When the channel estate isn’t working, the instinct is usually to go shopping.

New intranet. Better search. Employee app. AI assistant. Something with a reassuringly expensive implementation partner attached.

But a systematic review of 77 studies of digital internal communication found the same problem recurring: channels rolled out top-down without enough attention to whether they fitted how people actually worked.

The tool was rarely the interesting bit. The assumptions underneath it were.

And the bar for changing people’s behaviour is high. Gourville’s rule of thumb suggests people need to perceive a new system as roughly nine times better than the habit it replaces before they’ll switch.

Against an existing workaround — a WhatsApp group, a noticeboard, asking Sandra in Finance because Sandra actually knows — nine times better is a demanding standard.

Against nothing at all, the bar is practically on the floor.

Which is worth remembering before spending a year replacing something that works reasonably well for the people at the centre while leaving the people at the edges with bugger all.

Complexity doesn’t make channel design impossible. But it makes guessing impossible.

Start with what communication needs to do, not which platforms you own

The trouble with mapping your internal communications channels as a list of tools is that it tells you what you’ve bought.

It doesn’t tell you whether any of it works.

You get an inventory when what you need is a diagnosis.

The five-layer model we use in the book maps the capabilities a communication ecosystem needs rather than the products that happen to deliver them:

• Plan: where campaigns, priorities and editorial calendars get coordinated. Invisible to employees; essential to communicators.
• Collaborate: where content gets drafted, reviewed and signed off.
• Publish: the source of truth. Structured, accurate and searchable.
• Distribute: getting the right thing to the right person at the right time.
• Discuss: dialogue, feedback and sense-making.

These aren’t five little boxes into which you must now dutifully sort Microsoft 365. They overlap. They reinforce one another. A single announcement might pass through all five.

The useful thing about thinking in layers is that the layers survive the platform churn.

Tools come and go. Names change. Products get bundled, rebranded, sunsetted and occasionally transformed into an AI assistant nobody remembers asking for. But these five jobs still need doing somewhere.

And in a complex organisation, the model lets you ask a much more useful question than should we have one intranet or several?

You can ask: what actually needs to be shared?

Shared or local? It depends what you’re sharing

Every complex organisation eventually has this argument.

Central control gives you accuracy and consistency, but can feel distant and generic. Local ownership gives you nuance, relevance and speed, but also duplication, contradiction and the occasional page last updated during the Cameron administration.

Choose entirely one or the other and you lose something you need.

At the level of “should we have one intranet or two?”, this is almost impossible to resolve because it isn’t really a technology question. It’s a question about identity, brand, budget, power and who gets to decide things, wearing a SharePoint hat.

Break it into layers and it gets much easier.

I ran this exercise recently with communications, HR, digital and transformation leaders across two organisations that shared much of a back office and very little else. The resulting pattern is one I’d expect to see in a lot of complex organisations.

Publish pulls hard towards shared.

Policy, terms, anything with legal or regulatory weight: you want one authoritative version. Copying the same information across multiple estates is how you end up with two confidently contradictory answers to the same question.

This is the layer I’d consolidate first.

AI has made this more important, not less. When an assistant starts surfacing intranet content directly, stale and duplicated pages don’t merely sit quietly being wrong somewhere nobody visits. The machine can now fetch them and be wrong on your behalf.

Discuss stays stubbornly local.

This is where culture lives. You can establish minimum standards for conduct and moderation, but you can’t centrally procure a community.

People have an irritating tendency to decide for themselves who they want to talk to.

Design this with them, not for them.

Plan sits awkwardly in the middle, because of course it does. Different leadership cycles, priorities and approval chains make fully shared planning difficult even where everyone is notionally committed to it.

Collaborate follows the work. Different brands, different style guides, different approval processes. Making all of that shared generally requires senior decisions considerably bigger than “where shall we put the Word document?”

And then there’s distribution.

Your distribution problem is really a people-data problem

Distribution is the layer that catches people out because its unit isn’t an organisation.

It’s a person.

A particular person, with a particular contract, role, location, device and set of permissions, who may work for two organisations and be properly represented in the directory of neither.

Which means distribution becomes an identity and employee-data problem long before it becomes an internal communications channel problem.

If you can’t reliably answer who is this person, what should they be able to see, and how can we reach them?, then targeting is mostly decorative.

You can spend weeks designing beautiful audience segments. If the finance officer employed by Organisation A but working full-time for Organisation B isn’t correctly represented in the underlying systems, no amount of clever channel strategy will make them magically appear on the right list.

Get identity right and all sorts of things become possible: one publishing estate with personalised views, targeted distribution that actually reaches contractors and frontline staff, and clear rules about who gets access to what.

Get it wrong and you can rebuild the intranet every three years until retirement and remain faintly disappointed by the results.

The bit of the digital workplace nobody sells you

There is a part of all this no vendor will quote for: Identity. Navigation. Search. A shared design language. The connective tissue that makes a collection of separately procured tools feel, to the unfortunate person trying to use them, like one place.

You can buy an ITSM platform, an HR system, a CMS and an employee app. You can give each of them a cheerful name and launch them with cupcakes.

But you can’t buy coherence.

The average organisation now runs well over a hundred applications, each perfectly sensible on its own terms and together producing an experience like an orchestra warming up: every instrument playing its own tune, quite competently.

In the book we describe the intranet as the wrapper, not the chocolate bar. I’d go further: the important bit isn’t any single platform. It’s the experience created at the joins.

Somebody has to own that.

Not each tool. The whole.

Because choices made in isolation get paid for at the joins, and the joins are where employees actually live.

Design an internal communications ecosystem that survives the next reorganisation

Complex organisations reorganise. It’s practically a hobby.

Shared services get created, merged, renamed and unpicked. Partners arrive and leave. Business units combine. Someone unveils a new operating model with pleasingly rounded rectangles and announces that it will make everything simpler.

If your internal communications architecture depends on the current organisation chart remaining true, start the countdown.

There are five principles I’d design around instead:

• Adaptability: assume the organisation chart will change and the channels shouldn’t have to
• Accessibility: including the version that means frontline, deskless and low-bandwidth access, not just WCAG compliance
• Clarity of ownership: “who looks after this?” should be a question with an answer
• Interoperability: content and state need to be able to leave the system they were created in.
• Cognitive simplicity: every additional interface is a tax, and employees pay it

And I’d add a sixth, less comfortable one: mandate.

Skills you can hire. Time you can, eventually, carve out. But someone needs the authority to make decisions across the boundaries.

In a shared or complex organisation, the person responsible for the digital workplace without the authority to say no to senior stakeholders on either side owns the blame and none of the levers.

No amount of elegant architecture makes organisational politics disappear. But being explicit about who has the mandate to make decisions is usually the difference between a channel strategy that survives contact with reality and one that gets quietly negotiated into beige.

Design for the organisation you actually have

The useful shift is a small one.

Stop treating organisational complexity as a defect to be tidied away before the real design work starts. Treat it as the design constraint.

Because the mess isn’t evidence that there’s no system.

Quite often, the mess is the system.

It’s running on local knowledge, friendships, workarounds, favours, WhatsApp groups and hundreds of tiny negotiations nobody has ever written down. It’s the person everybody knows to ask. The spreadsheet somebody maintains because the official system doesn’t quite work. The contractor who’s been there eight years and still can’t open the link in the all-staff email.

Designing a beautifully logical channel architecture that ignores all of that doesn’t simplify the organisation.

It simply gives people one more thing to work around.

Nobody experiences a tool. They experience a task.

Design for the task, and for the person trying to get it done — whichever organisation’s lanyard they happen to be wearing today.

This essay draws on ideas from my book, Digital Communications at Work: Designing channels for employee engagement and experience, written with Jonathan Phillips and published by Kogan Page.

If you’re wrestling with this in your own organisation, my consultancy practice, Lithos Partners, runs discovery, designs channels and develops digital workplace strategy for organisations that don’t fit the neat diagram.