There are few things two digital workplace consultants enjoy more than a lengthy discussion about data visualisation. Give us eight attributes to measure, a set of scales to argue over and the opportunity to debate the merits of a box-and-whisker diagram, and we’re happy as pigs in the proverbial.
Unfortunately, on Monday we had an audience.
Somewhere in the Westfjords of Iceland, Íris Ösp Heiðrúnardóttir was listening to Jonathan and me develop our new channel fingerprinting model. I was beside a swimming pool in Morocco; Jon was at his desk in Bristol. Íris had been dispatched to take notes.
In wool.
She’s a Senior Knittaker, part of a gloriously inventive campaign from Visit Iceland in which real Icelandic knitters join your meetings and knit a summary while you get on with something more valuable. AI, in this case, stands for Authentic Icelandic.
I imagine Íris has attended some fairly tedious meetings in her time. But an hour of two consultants enthusiastically discussing the relative merits of different chart types must have tested even Icelandic reserves of patience.
We, meanwhile, were having a lovely time.
At the end of the meeting, Íris held up her finished work.
HUH?
For the first time in my professional life, I feel a meeting summary has accurately captured the experience of being in the meeting.
Bravo, Visit Iceland. Possibly my favourite marketing campaign of the year.
This week at work
HUH? wasn’t her first choice. Íris told us she’d wanted to knit ALIGN, because we’d said it so often she assumed it was the point of the meeting. She ran out of stitches.
Which is also, in my experience, what happens to most organisational alignment efforts. Everyone starts with the best intentions, then somebody runs out of patience, budget or wool.
To be fair to us, it was an alignment sort of week.
On Tuesday Jon and I presented the findings of a discovery to one client. Around the virtual table sat comms, IT, operations and senior leadership, each with a different worry.
IT wanted to know what would happen to the technical documentation. Someone who’d lived through a big reorganisation wanted a rollout that wouldn’t overwhelm teams spread across the world. Another had watched the organisation adopt hard-to-use systems before and wasn’t keen on commissioning the sequel. And the person holding the budget wanted to know how any of it would be resourced.
By the end, everyone agreed.
The next day, the client wrote to say there aren’t many meetings there that reach full alignment so quickly, and credited how “strong, convincing and practical” the assessment and recommendations were.
Lovely feedback, obviously. But there’s a point here beyond me finding an excuse to quote someone saying nice things about our work.
You can’t ask a room to align. You have to do the work that makes agreement possible before anyone walks into it.
Every hypothesis gets tested against the survey, the interviews and the analytics until it’s either validated or binned. Every recommendation has to survive the question of what it would actually mean for the people expected to implement it. And if the evidence doesn’t support your preferred answer, you need to be prepared to abandon it, however lovely the slide.
It helps when every tool you’re recommending is one the organisation already owns. That shifts the conversation away from platforms and towards the much less glamorous business of ownership.
Pages nobody maintains. Content belonging to people who left years ago. Channels that exist because somebody once set them up and nobody has since had the heart to switch them off.
A new tool without new owners will end up in exactly the same place. Just with a nicer homepage and, if you’re particularly unlucky, a three-year licence agreement.
On Wednesday, another client demonstrated why agreement sometimes means deciding not to decide.
A platform decision has been paused, sensibly, until Comms, HR and IT can agree what they want. The difficulty is that IT doesn’t yet agree with IT. One part of the department wants to stay put; another wants a proof of concept.
We came away agreeing that pausing was right, which I suppose is alignment of a kind. At least everyone now agrees that they don’t agree.
Elsewhere, the live question is who checks a request for a new online community before it goes live: the person asking for it, or the team who’ll have to tidy up after it. And at the end of the week we kicked off with a new client whose brief had already ruled out choosing any tools before we’d asked a single question.
I could have kissed them. It’s never a channels problem.
The temptation, when people disagree about technology, is to assume they need more information about the technology. Another demo, another comparison matrix, another vendor explaining how their particular collection of rectangles will transform the employee experience.
Quite often, what they need is to agree who owns what, what they’re trying to achieve and what they’re prepared to stop doing.
You can spend a great deal of money avoiding those conversations. Entire industries depend on it.
Otherwise, as Íris so elegantly put it: HUH?
Also this week
My last few days in Morocco were considerably more chilled than the first few. The first half of the trip was work: the festival, my talk, a great many conversations. The second half had no agenda at all, and for once I managed to resist the urge to give it one.
I did all the things you’d expect. Rode a camel, got pummelled in a hammam, sandboarded down some dunes, averaged about 1.3 tagines a day.
And a few I didn’t expect. Like driving through the desert in the dark, sharing a quad bike with four other people, to a bonfire party in the dunes, where we danced to Darija tunes with a wonderfully random collection of people from around the world.
Five adults. One quad bike. Night. Desert.
Somewhere, a health and safety officer woke with a start and didn’t know why.
Then home, and straight back out again: a night with my best friends to see Christopher Hall at the Comedy Cafe, with slightly more wine than is wise on a school night.
Amsterdam in autumn is a magnificent thing. The canals, the trees, the golden light on the old brick buildings. After a week of Moroccan sunshine and desert adventures, I was reminded how much I love coming home to this ridiculous, beautiful city, and to the people who make it home.
I’ve also started work on a new talk for FutuHRistIC in London later this month. Having a whole book to draw from makes the process considerably easier. It’s almost as if spending several years writing down what you think about something turns out to be useful.
Who knew?
Consuming
I watched The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s return to Facebook. I’m already familiar with the case, which may be why I found it a bit dull. It’s hard to sit on the edge of your seat for a story you already know the ending of, however briskly everyone walks down corridors delivering exposition at each other.
Its underlying point is a fair one, though. The algorithms that decide what billions of people see aren’t designed to serve those billions. They’re designed to keep us watching, clicking and reacting, because our attention is the product being sold.
Which made for an interesting contrast with the rest of my week, a good part of which I spent joyscrolling.
Hours and hours of it, watching the US midterm results come in.
There’s something deeply satisfying about watching extraordinarily wealthy arseholes discover that spending enormous sums of money doesn’t necessarily entitle them to the result they ordered.
I appreciate the irony of celebrating this while feeding the very algorithms I’ve just complained about.
Three wifi-free hours on my flight home from Morocco gave me the opportunity to indulge in one of my favourite pastimes: taking a series of increasingly vicious swings at corporate bullshit.
The result was a piece about the deteriorating deal between employers and employees, and the increasingly desperate attempts of the communications profession to make everyone feel better about it. Engagement campaigns, pulse surveys and purpose statements are all very well, but they’re not going to persuade people that a shrinking pension, stagnant pay and the creeping expectation of unpaid labour constitute an exciting employee value proposition.
I had an indecent amount of fun writing it. And judging by the response, an awful lot of people enjoyed reading it. It’s now my best-read post of the year, which suggests either that I’ve struck a nerve or that the internet has a previously undiscovered appetite for watching me take a flamethrower to an employee engagement strategy.
Possibly both.
I published it on Wednesday morning, a few hours before Canva announced its restructure. Rarely has the news cycle been so obliging.
I couldn’t have timed it better if I’d been sitting in Canva’s boardroom with a copy of the redundancy plan and a stopwatch.
Coverage
Which is presumably why, when Canva’s memo landed, Liam Moran at In.Comms asked what I made of it. Happily, I’d already spent three hours on a plane sharpening my knives.
To give Canva its due, it got more right than most. The CEO put her own name to it. The severance terms were spelled out in actual numbers, sparing employees the usual treasure hunt through phrases like “generous package” and “support during this transition”. They even get to keep their laptops, which is more than some companies manage before they’ve switched off your login and had security escort you past the pot plants.
Some 1,271 people have been told they’ll lose their jobs, change roles or be relocated, without yet knowing which. Redundancy, a different job, or a new life in Sydney? That’s quite a range of possible outcomes to leave hanging over someone’s head while the leadership team finishes rearranging the boxes on its PowerPoint.
The one thing a memo like this ought to reduce is uncertainty. Canva has instead distributed it to more than a fifth of its workforce, with a helpful note about the company’s exciting future.
And the real damage may be among everyone who isn’t on the list. The people watching their colleagues spend the next few weeks wondering whether they’ll still have a job, a manager or a postcode. They’ll keep turning up, doing their work and collecting their salaries. But they’ll also be recalculating exactly how much loyalty, goodwill and unpaid effort this particular employer has earned.
No amount of empathetic messaging, carefully calibrated leadership visibility or pulse surveys with a reassuringly high response rate can undo what people have just watched happen.
I’m home for a few days before a trip to the UK this week, then back to London the week after for FutuHRistIC.
This kind of geographical stability makes me uneasy, so I’ve dealt with it the only way I know how: by finishing the bookings for my six remaining trips between now and the end of the year.
I’ve also started planning some bigger adventures for the first half of next year, including the first part of a birthday present to myself. It will most likely end up being my 100th country.
Given my tendency to turn perfectly enjoyable hobbies into competitive endurance events with numerical targets, I suspect reaching three figures will do absolutely nothing to discourage me.
How do I keep it all organised? I’ve built myself a travel agent in Notion and Claude. It knows my preferences, pulls my itineraries together from my emails, and helps me plan routes that make logical sense.
There’s no Iceland on the list this time. But I took up knitting last year, I’ve made two scarves, and when I go back for a fifth visit, I’ve promised Íris I’ll bring one.
Employee engagement is falling. Workers are less willing to go the extra mile. Perhaps the problem isn’t their attitude. Perhaps they’ve finally read the terms and conditions.
The Financial Times reports this week that quiet quitting is real. British workers, the lazy bastards, are increasingly reluctant to go above and beyond the requirements of their jobs.
The Resolution Foundation, the Provisional Wing of Waitrose whose research prompted the story, calls it a dissatisfaction drain. Job satisfaction has fallen to its lowest recorded level, and employees are less inclined to contribute extra effort.
Same data, different framing. One version says workers have developed a troubling attitude problem. The other raises the possibility that they might have a point.
Maybe people have worked out that work doesn’t love them back.
After years of being told to live the values, think like owners, find their purpose, adopt a growth mindset, become culture ambassadors, practise radical candour, embrace psychological safety, bring (just the right amount of) their authentic selves, celebrate colleagues on the recognition platform, describe what belonging means to them in three words on a virtual Post-it note, attend a lunchtime webinar on resilience, and think of the organisation as one big family, employees have finally done something nobody in HR saw coming.
They’ve read the terms and conditions.
And it turns out this family reserves the right to change them whenever they like.
The deal has got worse
In 2015, 81% of British workers said they were satisfied with their main job. By 2025, that had fallen to 74%, the lowest level since records began in 1989, at the height of Thatcherite reforms, when dock workers were striking over the abolition of their employment protections and nobody thought to address the problem with a Headspace subscription.
The proportion who found their jobs interesting fell from 74% to 63%. Those who saw opportunities for advancement dropped from 35% to 26%.
And contrary to the prevailing view among executives, who appear to believe their workforce is powered by mission statements, most people work for money. Grubby, unglamorous money, which they exchange for things like rent, transport, trousers, associated sundries, and food: the fuel their stupid mortal bodies insist on, three times a day, every day, forever.
They would quite like more of it. In fact, 78% now say a high income is important to them, up from 67% a decade ago. Unfortunately, only 23% say their job actually provides one.
This may come as a shock to executives whose own sense of purpose is reinforced by a seven-figure remuneration package.
There’s a similarly spectacular mismatch on flexibility. While 61% consider control over their working hours important, only 31% say their current job offers it.
So people would like interesting work, opportunities to progress, decent pay and some control over their lives. And employers are increasingly failing to provide these things.
Against this backdrop, it’s hardly a surprise that the proportion willing to work harder than required to help their employer succeed fell from 69% to 55%.
Now these are stated attitudes, not measured productivity. The comparison covers a decade that included a pandemic, an inflation shock, the inexplicable global success of Dance Monkey, a mercifully brief obsession with NFTs, the collective decision to pretend matcha tastes good, and significant changes to working patterns. We can’t attribute every movement to deteriorating employment conditions, and it would be daft to try.
But you’d need to be wilfully, heroically obtuse to miss the direction of travel. Britain’s workers have read the small print of modern employment, all of it, and thought: nah, mate.
And yet, the survey also suggests that the Great British Skiver is something of a myth. Just 4% of working-age adults say they’d prefer not to work at all.
The overwhelming majority still want to work, the weirdos. They’ve simply developed some Views about the arrangement.
Quiet quitting is just repricing
I’ve always thought “quiet quitting” was a spectacularly stupid phrase. It describes people who turn up, fulfil their responsibilities and do the work they’re employed to do, while declining to hand over an unspecified amount of extra labour for free. We’ve somehow managed to rebrand doing the job you’re paid for as a form of industrial action.
Imagine applying this standard to any other commercial relationship. You hire a plumber to fix your boiler. They arrive on time, diagnose the problem, replace the faulty part, test the system and present an invoice for the agreed amount.
You wouldn’t accuse them of quiet quitting because they failed to repaint the kitchen, walk the dog and demonstrate a passionate commitment to your family’s long-term plumbing strategy.
Yet that’s what we’ve normalised at work. The good employee doesn’t just do their job. They demonstrate passion. They show commitment. They go above and beyond, volunteer for the culture committee and become an ambassador for a corporate purpose developed by a branding agency in a windowless hotel conference room.
And if they don’t? Well, perhaps we need to have a conversation about their engagement.
Clue’s in the name, lads: Discretionary effort is discretionary. It’s not a debt employees owe their employers for the privilege of dodging the dole queue for another month.
There are good reasons for organisations to want people to contribute beyond their formal responsibilities. Collaboration, initiative and mutual support make workplaces function. Better people than I find genuine satisfaction in helping colleagues and improving things.
But those behaviours emerge from relationships, trust and reciprocity. They aren’t something you can extract indefinitely through motivational messaging and a quarterly pizza lunch.
If people are withdrawing their discretionary effort, perhaps they’ve simply looked at what they put in, looked at what they get back, and decided the exchange rate no longer works in their favour.
That’s not quiet quitting. It’s repricing.
Loyalty (terms and conditions apply)
Last week, Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its global workforce. Two days later, it announced quarterly profits of $36.6 billion on revenue of $92.3 billion, up 19%. With a brass neck you could stop a train with, it described the buyouts as offering employees “greater flexibility” and “a new choice”. To be fair, these are voluntary offers, not 60,000 compulsory redundancies. And those data centres won’t pay for themselves.
If you’re nearing retirement with a decent pile of stock, you’d be mad not to take the money and run. Spend your last working years doing what you actually want: travel, opening a restaurant, an ill-advised post-divorce relationship with someone half your age, or methodically pissing your ungrateful children’s inheritance up the wall in a Las Vegas casino.
But consider the view from the desk of someone ten years into their career. The company is making obscene amounts of money. Its executives are queuing up to explain the transformational potential of AI. And a quarter of their colleagues have just been invited to consider pursuing their personal growth journey somewhere else. Nobody has said “you’re optional”, but nobody’s needed to. The people who stay have received the message loud and clear, and it wasn’t the one in the press release.
Microsoft is hardly alone in explaining the new economics of employment. Amazon’s Andy Jassy told staff last year that AI would reduce its total corporate workforce. Shopify’s Tobi Lütke told teams to prove AI couldn’t do the work before asking for another carbon-based unit.
There are legitimate business arguments for all of this. Organisations have to evolve. Technology changes how work gets done. Businesses aren’t charities, and nobody is owed a job for life. But here’s the rub: employees aren’t charities either.
For decades, employers have encouraged people to see work as something more than a transaction. A relationship. A community. A shared endeavour. A family, even. Something worth emotional investment, personal sacrifice and loyalty. Meanwhile, the employer has kept the right to treat that relationship as a line in a spreadsheet, to be deleted when the numbers say so.
Now employees have started applying the same commercial logic to their side of the arrangement, and we’re calling it a crisis.
You can’t spend years telling people they’re your greatest asset, then act surprised when they notice you’re treating them as a depreciating one. The company is entitled to make rational decisions about how much labour it needs. So are the people providing it.
We’ve spent decades trying to fix engagement
Employee engagement has been one of the great corporate obsessions of the past twenty years. We’ve measured it, benchmarked it, segmented it, action-planned it, cascaded it to line managers, bolted it onto executive scorecards and bought software to display it in reassuringly expensive shades of red, amber and green.
We’ve commissioned employee value propositions, culture transformations, listening strategies, recognition platforms, pulse surveys, purpose campaigns and networks of engagement champions, each with a badge. We’ve built detailed personas to help us understand why Sarah, 38, busy working mum, Operations, isn’t sufficiently thrilled about the company’s strategic priorities. We’ve given Sarah a refreshed values lanyard, invited her to a webinar called Navigating Change, and asked her, on a scale of one to ten, how likely she is to recommend the organisation as a Great Place To Work.
Sarah, meanwhile, wants a pay rise, enough colleagues to cover the afternoon shift, and for Brian to stop microwaving fish in the office kitchen. Sadly, none of these is available as an option in the engagement platform’s campaign template.
So, after twenty years of all that, how’s it going?
These are different measures, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Nor can anyone know what would have happened without all those initiatives. Perhaps they prevented things getting even worse.
But after decades of effort, the question deserves asking: what if we’ve spent twenty years mistaking a diagnostic for a treatment?
Engagement tells us something about people’s experience of work. That’s worth knowing, in the same way it’s worth knowing about customer satisfaction, staff turnover, or whether the roof is leaking.
But imagine discovering water pouring through the ceiling and responding by appointing a Head of Ceiling Sentiment. You survey the occupants. You develop a compelling narrative about the organisation’s commitment to hydration. You launch a recognition programme celebrating colleagues who show exceptional resilience in damp conditions. Within a year, you achieve a statistically significant improvement in attitudes towards rain.
The roof is still leaking. Someone’s desk now has a mushroom on it.
This is the trap internal communication has built for itself. We’ve let engagement become something we’re expected to deliver, as though employee sentiment were a product we could manufacture with the right mix of storytelling, leadership visibility and Canva templates.
Once engagement becomes a performance target, the incentive shifts. Instead of improving people’s experience of work, organisations can end up managing the appearance of employee satisfaction. The survey score becomes the thing to fix, while the conditions producing it remain untouched.
And because the people tasked with improving the score frequently have no authority to change those conditions, the answer is more communication. Another campaign. Another town hall. Another listening exercise. Another carefully curated set of employee stories proving this is a wonderful place to work.
All while the people we’re supposedly engaging are wondering whether they’ll still have a job next quarter.
The people in the middle have noticed too
The most interesting finding in the research is where the enthusiasm has drained fastest. It isn’t among TikTokkers who’ve supposedly decided that effort is a tragic Boomer affectation, like cheque books or eye contact. It’s managers and professionals: the experienced ones, the grown-ups, the people organisations have spent decades relying on to stop the whole thing falling over. Their willingness to go the extra mile fell further than anyone’s. And it isn’t just Britain; Gallup’s global figures show manager engagement sliding from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025.
This is a problem for internal communication, because these are the people the entire model runs on. The manager is supposed to translate strategy into local relevance, explain difficult decisions, model the culture, motivate the team, cascade the leadership messages, listen empathetically, feed insights upwards and keep a brave little smile on their face while being told to deliver 15% more with 10% fewer people. Ideally all of this happens in the fifteen minutes between their eighth Teams call of the day and a LinkedIn Learning module on psychological safety, which they’ll watch at double speed with the sound off.
And when they fail to radiate the required enthusiasm, our diagnosis is always the same: they need more communication training. Or a toolkit. A lovely toolkit, with key messages, suggested talking points and a handy FAQ explaining why the restructuring is an exciting opportunity to accelerate our journey.
Maybe, just maybe, managers understand the strategy perfectly well – well enough to hate it. They know what the cuts mean for their teams, because they’re the ones doing the cutting. They can see the gap between the corporate narrative and what is actually happening, because they live in it. They’re the ones explaining to exasperated colleagues why the business can afford a shiny new AI chat interface for the service desk but not a replacement for Sandra, who left in March and whose job is now being done, badly, by three people and a shared mailbox.
The manager cascade only works if the people doing the cascading can make the organisation’s intent sound credible. So what happens when the translators no longer believe the translation?
The deal is the message
So where does this leave internal communication? In a pickle, that’s where.
We’ve spent years arguing that communication is essential to engagement. And it is, up to a point. Good communication reduces uncertainty, helps people do their jobs, makes organisations easier to navigate and gives employees a voice in decisions that affect them.
But it cannot manufacture trust in an organisation behaving in untrustworthy ways. It cannot create security while people watch their colleagues disappear one by one, like a slasher film directed by McKinsey. And it cannot persuade employees they’re valued when every decision suggests they’re a cost to be minimised.
This is where the familiar know/do/feel model drives headlong into a wall marked reality.
We can help people understand what’s happening, what they need to do and why decisions have been made. But you can’t communicate people out of a reasonable response to what they see with their own eyes.
Which raises an uncomfortable question about our own profession.
Every time we accept a brief to ‘improve engagement’ without asking why people are disengaged, we risk becoming part of the machinery that disguises the problem. We take an organisational failure and rebrand it as a communication challenge. We treat the workforce’s entirely reasonable response to its circumstances as something to be corrected with messaging. We’re the crime-scene cleaner, mopping up so efficiently that nobody asks about the body.
And then we wonder why nobody invites us into the room as strategic advisers.
The alternative is harder. It means telling leaders that employees aren’t confused about the strategy – they understand it perfectly well, and they don’t like what it means for them. It means challenging decisions before they’re announced, not just finding a more appealing way to announce them.
Sometimes it means telling the CEO that the fastest way to improve the next engagement survey is to stop commissioning sodding engagement initiatives and start fixing the things people have been complaining about for years. That’s a considerably more useful contribution than another campaign about purpose.
We’ve spent years obsessing over whether employees are prepared to go the extra mile.
Perhaps it’s time to ask whether employers are prepared to meet them halfway.
The deal is the message. And if the deal is shit, no amount of communication is going to make it smell of roses.
There are two ways to make something simpler. One is to understand it well enough to work out what matters. The other is to bin everything that makes it complicated and hope nobody notices.
I’ve spent much of this week attempting the first approach. Three discovery projects have reached the point where we stop collecting information and start deciding what it means. This involves taking a giant pile of evidence, much of it contradictory, and reducing it to something someone else can reasonably be expected to read, understand and act on.
Too much detail and you’ve produced an expensive filing cabinet. Too little and you’ve produced a confident-looking PowerPoint presentation with scant relationship to reality.
Outside work, I’ve been thinking about the stories we simplify, too. At a digital nomad festival in Morocco, I heard experiences that made the familiar narrative of location-independent work look embarrassingly narrow. I’ve started reading Cory Doctorow on what happens when we optimise work for machines and leave humans to deal with the consequences. And I’ve been writing about an AI industry that’s getting extremely good at making individual employees more productive without necessarily making organisations work any better.
Different examples of the same problem. When we simplify something, who decides what matters? And what happens to everything – and everyone – that doesn’t make the cut?
This week at work
At the start of every discovery project, somewhere around slide six of the kick-off deck, Jon and I show clients a diamond.
It’s the Design Council’s Double Diamond, or at least the first half of it. The shape widens as we explore the problem from every angle we can find: interviews, surveys, analytics, card sorts, the shared drive nobody has opened since 2019 but which contains the definitive version of the communications strategy. Then it narrows again, as we make sense of what we’ve found and work towards a decision.
We warn clients that the widening part will feel messy. It’s meant to. The urge to jump straight to a solution is strong, particularly when somebody has already seen a demonstration of a platform they quite fancy buying. Resisting that urge is much of the job.
What we don’t dwell on is the line down the middle.
This week, three projects reached it at once. Interviews wrapped. Platforms reviewed. Surveys and card sorts done. And the charts. My God, the charts. AI-assisted data visualisation of such exquisite filth that I briefly considered marking the report NSFW.
The widest point of the diamond is also the point where you’re holding the most information you’ll ever have. Then you have to put most of it down.
That’s what synthesis actually is. Not adding things up, but taking things away so the remainder makes sense.
Six themes become five, because two of them were the same theme wearing different hats. A category that everyone insisted was essential turns out to be needed by nobody, because something else already does the job. Another gets a new name, because the old one described the furniture rather than the reason anyone goes looking. Two slides get hidden because they say what the slide before them said, only less well.
Twenty-five people tell you, each with complete confidence, which channel is for what. Unfortunately no two of them agree.
And somewhere in there, a score out of five has halved itself on the journey from spreadsheet to slide. You catch it at the last minute and resolve, again, to stop doing maths after nine at night.
None of this shows up in the finished report. Clients see the five themes, not the sixth one that didn’t make it. They don’t see the hours spent deciding whether something is a finding, a symptom, a cause, an unresolved territorial dispute between two departments, a grudge dating back to the 2018 restructure, or just a thing somebody said very insistently in an interview.
You can put a cover page on a transcript, but it doesn’t make it insight. Although I’ve seen people try.
The right-hand side of the diamond ends in a word we put on the slide in the same size font as all the others, as if it were equally easy: decide. Next week the readouts begin, and the hard part becomes someone else’s.
Also this week
The rest of the week went the other way.
I went to my first digital nomad festival. I spend about half my life on the road, entirely by choice, so I suppose I qualify. But I’ve never quite fitted the digital nomad mould. The usual proposition is to earn a Western salary while living somewhere considerably cheaper. I maintain a home in Amsterdam and an office I use about 40% of the time, while spending half my life travelling. All the inconvenience of a nomadic lifestyle, with the economics of a particularly badly run property portfolio.
I’ve also avoided the events. Too many seem to involve digital nomads selling courses on marketing, personal branding and making money remotely to other digital nomads, who presumably intend to make their money by selling courses on marketing, personal branding and making money remotely to yet more digital nomads. It’s a business model with the structural integrity of a pyramid scheme but considerably better weather.
Arab Nomad Fest, in Taghazout, was different. Less about helping privileged graduates speed-run gentrification by taking their European salaries to low-cost beach towns. More about bringing opportunities to people who might otherwise be shut out of them.
On Tuesday I gave my talk, on working out loud and treating asynchronous work as a discipline rather than a hack. Afterwards, someone thanked me for reframing working across time zones as a strength to sell, instead of a problem to solve.
Me speaking at Arab Nomad Fest
Then I sat back and let other people widen the aperture.
Nasser Saqer Almohannadi has been to 218 countries. He managed this over forty years without quitting his job in Qatar’s energy sector: two big trips a year, carry-on only, printed copies of every document, and a wife who ran the logistics and has passed a hundred countries herself. I’m somewhere short of half his total, and had been feeling quite pleased with myself. He’s completed the game, and my immediate response was to start calculating how many countries a year I’d need to visit to match his score. I’ve turned someone else’s lifetime achievement into a personal performance improvement plan.
Maria Cuesta, who runs a community app for nomads, pointed out that nomads tend to cluster. They find other nomads, work alongside other nomads, and rarely get to know the places they’re actually living in. She talked about Facebook groups with 18,000 members, where the main thing people have in common is that they’ve joined the same Facebook group. That’s a flimsy foundation on which to build a community.
And then there was Arab Nomad Fest founder Muhammed Alard, who grew up in Damascus and talked about the invisible tax of a weak passport. A Syrian passport gets you into just 26 countries without a visa. Every application means weeks of paperwork. Payments don’t go through. Potential clients decide it’s easier not to bother. For most of the room, remote work is a lifestyle choice. For him, it was a means of survival.
“The internet didn’t ask for my passport,” he said. “It asked for my skills.”
Last year he returned to Syria for the first time in fifteen years, and made a film about it.
When he finished speaking, he didn’t try to sell the room a course. He asked us to hire people from places like the one he grew up in.
Consuming
I’ve started Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. A centaur is a human using a machine to extend their capabilities. A reverse centaur is a machine using a human to extend its own. Same ingredients, different employment prospects.
It’s a useful way of thinking about the increasingly fashionable promise to keep a ‘human in the loop’. This sounds reassuring, conjuring up an experienced professional exercising judgement, asking difficult questions and occasionally pressing a large red button marked STOP. In practice, the human may have neither the authority to challenge the machine, nor the expertise to understand what it’s doing, nor the time to check before the next automated decision arrives.
Congratulations. You’ve created an accountability sink with a login.
I’ve only read the opening chapters, but it’s already made me think differently about the workplace AI conversation. We spend an enormous amount of time asking what can be automated, and considerably less asking who gets to decide, whose work gets better, and who inherits the mess when the machine has finished being efficient.
Within three weeks I attended two very different conferences. At Unily Unite in London, the reassurance was everywhere: on panels, in presentations, over coffee. AI might change the tools, but the fundamentals of communication would endure. We’re special smol beans, you see, and our spectacular people skills will protect us from disruption.
At UNLEASH in Paris, among 7,000 HR people, I didn’t hear anything remotely like that. When SAP said its recruiters were now doing 95% less admin, the room applauded.
Same technology. Two professions. One discussing what was already changing, the other reassuring itself that it probably wouldn’t have to.
Of course the purpose of communication doesn’t disappear because we’ve invented new tools. But confusing the enduring purpose of a profession with the permanence of its current jobs, methods and skills is a dangerous mistake. And it’s one thing to tell yourself that comforting story. It’s quite another to stand on a conference stage and encourage thousands of other professionals to believe it too.
We’ve somehow managed to turn professional development into a group therapy session for people who don’t think they need to develop.
The editor told me to let rip. I did, within the bounds of professional decency. But I seem to have kept some in reserve.
Published
Nobody buys shared. Workplace AI is being built to make individuals more productive and processes more efficient. What’s missing is the layer underneath: the shared facts, decisions and understanding that allow an organisation to function as something more than a collection of individually optimised employees, each enjoying a bespoke relationship with their own little robot.
There’s a perfectly good commercial reason for this, if by ‘good’ you mean ‘entirely predictable and deeply unhelpful’. Vendors sell to functions. Functions buy with their own budgets. Shared understanding belongs to everyone, which means nobody has a cost centre for it, a business case to fund it, or a vice-president whose bonus depends on its existence.
Meanwhile, we’re building systems that can give every employee a personalised answer without ensuring they’re all working from the same reality.
Still in Morocco. Outside the festival, this has been my first proper experience of the country. Sleepy seaside surf towns, cats everywhere, camels, street dogs, and a quantity of tagine that must surely put me on some sort of national register.
One evening I was reading on the roof terrace of my little hostel when the owner came over and announced that I must have dinner with them. I explained that I’d already eaten. He considered this information entirely irrelevant. I’m now familiar enough with Moroccan hospitality to know that further resistance would be both futile and impolite. I was having another tagine whether I liked it or not.
I liked it.
On Saturday I went to Paradise Valley. Not quite as paradisiacal as the name suggests, but pleasant enough. I swam in the river, slid along the rocks with childlike, leisure-centre glee, and was deposited in a pool at the bottom. Ate another tagine, obviously.
Shortly after this goes out, I’ll be face down in a hammam, being pummelled by someone who presumably knows what they’re doing. If I emerge with any skin left, I’ll consider it a success.
The day after giving a talk on how to make working across time zones a competitive advantage, I sent the same meeting invitation three times because the clocks had gone back and I’d lost track of what day it was. In desperation, I asked Google what time it was in Morocco. It gave me three different dates, two different times, and a confident AI-generated explanation of a time-zone change that hadn’t happened.
So that’s me and a trillion-dollar technology company, both defeated by the concept of Tuesday.
In the intervening 156 seconds, this marvel of enterprise technology had rummaged through Workday, interrogated a knowledge base, consulted assorted other systems and burned through enough tokens to make a small woodland nervous. All to establish that I lacked the necessary permissions to access a number published in the company’s annual report.
I was watching a machine capable of coordinating multiple autonomous agents, navigating complex workflows and integrating with virtually every enterprise system known to humankind. Yet ask it how many people work here (something I could Google in seconds) and it behaves like a particularly officious receptionist at a Soviet-era government ministry. Your request has been considered and, alas, you do not have the appropriate clearance to know how many of you there are.
I laughed (obviously). But the more I thought about it, the less funny it became.
Because the agent hadn’t simply got an answer wrong. It had exposed something fundamental about how we’re designing workplace AI.
It understood the individual. It could identify me, retrieve my records, check my permissions and help me complete a task. It understood processes, too: the workflows, approvals and transactions that keep an organisation functioning.
What it seemingly couldn’t recognise was a fact about the organisation itself.
It had a model of me. It had a model of the machinery. It had no model of us.
After several days wandering around UNLEASH, watching vendors demonstrate increasingly sophisticated ways to optimise individual employees and automate the processes connecting them, I began to wonder whether this wasn’t the defining blind spot of the industry.
We’re building extremely clever systems for managing the parts. But who’s making sure the whole still works?
Two layers, both sensible
Walk the exhibition floor at an HR technology conference in the Year of our Lord 2026 and you’ll find an industry smearing AI all over two parts of organisational life.
The first is the individual. Copilots that draft emails, agents that book leave, skills engines that plot your next career move, platforms that personalise your working experience down to your role, location, circadian rhythm and presumably your Myers-Briggs type, if somebody can find a way to charge for it.
The promise is productivity. Save everyone a few hours a week, multiply by salary and number of seats, and, BINGO, you’ve got an ROI calculation that bangs in PowerPoint. Whether anyone actually gets to go home earlier is another question.
The second is the system. Orchestration, workflow automation, agents handing tasks to other agents, the slow extinction of the ticket queue. Nobody will mourn filling in a form to request permission to fill in another form (except possibly the person who designed the forms, who’s now Head of AI Governance).
The promise here is efficiency: faster resolution, fewer handoffs, lower costs. Ker-ching.
I’m not dismissing either. Some of what I saw in Paris was seriously impressive, and a depressing proportion of working life consists of exactly the administrative nonsense these tools can eliminate.
But both layers have a buyer, a budget and a business case. And somewhere between the productivity gains and the efficiency savings, we’ve mislaid the organisation.
The layer nobody owns
Between the individual and the system sits a third layer: the shared one. It’s what allows thousands of people to behave as an organisation rather than as independent contractors with matching lanyards.
Part of this is factual. How many people work here? What do we actually do? What do we sell, and to whom? How do we do it? Where do I find the current policy? What are we trying to achieve this year? These are questions any reasonably curious new starter might ask in their first week. And questions any AI claiming to understand the organisation ought to be able to answer.
These aren’t facts about me, or instructions for completing a transaction. They’re facts about us.
The other part is identity. What are we trying to achieve together? Why does this organisation exist, beyond providing a convenient administrative arrangement for distributing salaries? Facts establish a common picture of reality. Identity gives people a reason to care about it.
Consider my unfortunate orchestration agent. It had access to an impressive range of systems, but apparently no understanding of what constituted common organisational knowledge. It treated a published headcount figure as though I’d asked for somebody’s confidential personnel file.
That was a design failure. But it points to a wider organisational problem: in many companies, nobody has been given the job of deciding what the organisation knows about itself, where that knowledge lives and which version is authoritative.
Headcount sits in an HR system behind permissions designed for personal records. Strategy exists as a presentation, a town hall recording and fourteen departmental interpretations, each progressively more convenient for the department concerned. Decisions disappear into email threads. Policies survive in three versions, two technically obsolete but still enjoying a devoted following.
Gallagher’s 2026 Employee Communications Report offers a useful indication of the problem. For five of the seven foundational communication assets it examined, including strategic narratives and employee value propositions, more than half of responding teams lacked an agreed, documented standard. The asset either didn’t exist or lived in someone’s head. Just 15% reported an EVP that was active and socialised.
Having a strategy and having a shared, operational understanding of it are two very different achievements.
And you can’t ground an AI agent in a story nobody has written down.
Nobody buys shared
Why is the shared layer so neglected? Not because anyone is actively opposed to shared understanding. You’d struggle to find a CEO willing to announce that organisational coherence was being discontinued as a cost-saving measure.
It’s because the economics favour everything else.
Software vendors sell seats, transactions and measurable efficiency. The individual productivity story is easy to demonstrate. The process automation story is easy to price. Both produce numbers that can be entered into a spreadsheet and presented to a finance director without requiring an extended philosophical discussion about the nature of collective endeavour.
Shared understanding is harder to package. There’s no obvious licence for everyone knowing the same thing. No straightforward metric for the value of employees understanding why the organisation has changed direction, or recognising that another team’s priorities are connected to their own.
That doesn’t mean these things have no economic value. Their value is distributed across the organisation, while purchasing decisions tend to be made within functions.
There’s a principal–agent problem lurking here: vendors are rewarded for satisfying the people who sign the contracts, whose priorities don’t necessarily match those of the employees using the technology, still less the organisation as a whole.
But workplace AI adds another twist. Even when the buyer is happy and the users are happy, the organisation as a whole may be worse off.
HR buys employee experience. IT buys orchestration. Operations buys efficiency. Communications buys channels. Everyone gets a dashboard showing their investment is working. Nobody gets a dashboard showing whether the organisation still makes sense.
We pour millions into optimising the parts and leave the whole to chance.
And personalisation introduces another problem: it makes organisational inconsistency harder to spot.
Imagine two employees asking their AI agents what the company’s most important priority is. One receives an authoritative answer about reducing costs. The other is told that growth is paramount.
Both answers draw on genuine company documents. Both are plausible. Both are fluent, confident and appropriately personalised.
Neither employee knows the other has been told something different.
In the old world, they might have read the same badly written intranet page, disagreed about what it meant and had a row. That row was useful. It exposed the ambiguity, giving somebody an opportunity to resolve it.
Twenty thousand private conversations with twenty thousand AI agents don’t necessarily produce that moment of discovery.
Every employee gets a perfectly coherent version of reality. Unfortunately, they’re not all living in the same one, and nobody’s checking.
For decades, organisations have tried to break down silos. Now we’re building a bespoke, AI-powered silo around every employee, and congratulating ourselves on the user experience.
The cost of being individually right
As anyone who’s ever had the misfortune to disagree with me will attest, I fucking love being right. But even I can see that twenty thousand people being individually right is no guarantee of an organisation getting anything right.
We’ve known for decades that collective performance depends on more than individual competence. In a 2010 meta-analysis of 65 studies, Leslie DeChurch and Jessica Mesmer-Magnus found that shared understanding within teams contributed to performance over and above how people behaved and how motivated they were. Being good at your job is one thing. Knowing how your job fits with everyone else’s is another.
Jody Hoffer Gittell found something similar in her research on airline operations. At American Airlines, employees understood their own tasks but had limited awareness of the wider departure process. They could do their individual jobs without necessarily understanding how those jobs fitted together. Her subsequent work on relational coordination found that shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect help people coordinate work across organisational boundaries.
Which is worth remembering the next time someone demonstrates an AI agent that can complete an employee’s entire workflow without requiring them to speak to another human being. Removing unnecessary handoffs is excellent; removing the understanding of how your work connects to everyone else’s is something else entirely.
You need shared understanding to coordinate. Without it, one team is cutting costs, another is investing in growth, and a third is explaining to the board that both are happening simultaneously. Everyone hits their targets and nobody can explain why the organisation is going backwards.
You need it to disagree productively, too. There’s a massive difference between arguing about what to do and spending three meetings establishing what was actually decided in the first place. The former is how organisations make progress – the latter is how you end up with a steering committee.
And there’s another dimension that productivity metrics don’t capture: belonging.
People need to understand what they’re part of, how their work connects to their colleagues’ and why any of it matters. A personalised AI agent might make my working day easier. It might even make me happier. But it doesn’t necessarily help me understand what we’re doing together.
Nobody raises a service ticket saying, ‘We appear to have lost our collective sense of purpose.’ And if they did, they’d receive an automated response confirming that their sense of purpose was important to us, followed by a link to the employee assistance programme. The individual productivity dashboard can be glowing glorious green while the organisation becomes progressively less capable of acting as one.
We know how to measure whether AI makes an employee faster. We’re much less interested in whether it makes twenty thousand employees better at being an organisation.
Building for the whole
Before we spend another seven figures teaching AI agents to think, perhaps we could establish whether the organisation has managed to think anything through itself.
This doesn’t require a new category of enterprise software (which I know comes as devastating news to several hundred people currently preparing pitch decks). It requires someone to take responsibility for what the organisation knows, what it’s decided and which version of reality employees are expected to inhabit.
Not every document, conversation and half-remembered decision. That way lies an enterprise knowledge management transformation programme, three reorganisations, a consultancy-led maturity assessment, an entirely preventable exodus of competent people, and a steering committee that eventually decides to buy SharePoint.
I mean a relatively small set of facts, decisions and priorities that ought to be consistent wherever an employee encounters them, with clear authority over who can change them.
Those facts need authoritative sources, named owners and a process for keeping them current. And if we’re expecting AI agents to answer questions about the organisation, they need to know which sources to trust. Giving an agent access to seventeen systems isn’t the same as giving it the ability to distinguish an approved policy from a PowerPoint somebody abandoned in 2023.
We also need to distinguish between information about an individual and information that belongs to the organisation.
My salary, performance review and medical records are personal. They should be protected accordingly. The company’s published headcount, strategic priorities and approved policies are shared knowledge. They need appropriate access controls too, but they shouldn’t be treated as though every question is a request to rummage through someone’s personnel file.
This is partly a technical problem of classification, permissions and retrieval. But it’s also an editorial one. Someone has to decide which version of a fact is authoritative, what it means, when it changed and how employees should understand it. AI can’t resolve a disagreement the organisation hasn’t bothered to settle.
Of course a warehouse worker and a finance director need different information. Of course a colleague in Austria needs different employment policies from someone in Australia. Nobody is arguing for the return of the homepage carousel, where the CEO’s latest thoughts on quarterly earnings compete for attention with the lunch menu.
But some things need to be shared. A strategy isn’t much use if every employee receives a bespoke interpretation that happens to flatter their department’s existing priorities. Nor is a policy if the answer changes depending on which agent you ask.
Personalisation should change how people receive the truth, not give everyone their own version of it.
This ought to be familiar territory for internal communication professionals. Establishing a common understanding of priorities, decisions and organisational identity is – or should be – a big part of the job.
Let’s not pretend that spending two decades publishing leadership announcements nobody asked for has somehow qualified us to become the guardians of organisational knowledge. Earning that role requires editorial judgement, content governance, the ability to challenge contradictory leadership messages and the willingness to tell someone that their lovingly crafted departmental strategy is incompatible with the one the organisation supposedly agreed.
It’s hard to sell a product that tells a senior executive their strategy contradicts another senior executive’s strategy. Much easier to sell them both an AI agent that will explain each strategy with total, glassy-eyed, Elizabeth Holmes conviction.
The organisation-shaped hole
We may be heading towards a world where employees rarely visit an intranet, navigate a page tree or even know which system holds the information they’re using. They’ll ask a question, an agent will find an answer, and the machinery behind it will become invisible.
Fine by me. I’ve spent twenty years watching people struggle to find things on intranets. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not emotionally attached to the experience.
But somebody still has to maintain the common knowledge that makes those answers trustworthy: resolving contradictions, keeping decisions current and making sure there’s an authoritative version of what the organisation knows.
That task doesn’t disappear because we’ve replaced the interface. If anything, it becomes more important when employees stop visiting a shared destination and start receiving answers through thousands of private conversations with AI agents.
Otherwise, we’ve just built a more sophisticated system for distributing organisational nonsense. Faster, more personalised nonsense, delivered with the confidence of a machine that has never once wondered whether it might be talking bollocks.
An organisation exists because people working together can achieve things they couldn’t achieve separately. Right now, every meat puppet is being optimised for productivity and the machinery connecting them for efficiency. Both are worthwhile.
But the value of an organisation isn’t simply the sum of its employees’ completed tasks. It’s what those people can understand, decide and achieve together.
We risk building workplaces where every employee has a brilliant AI assistant, every workflow runs beautifully, and the organisation itself has absolutely no idea what it’s doing.
Every organisation has a woman who knows where everything is. Let’s call her Anya.
Anya knows which version of the expenses form actually works, why the procurement process described on the intranet bears only a passing resemblance to the procurement process in practice, and who to call when something needs doing by Friday. She’s survived three restructures, two digital transformations and a knowledge management programme designed, in part, to make her unnecessary.
None of this is in her job description. Nobody has allocated her any time to do it, and it certainly won’t feature in her performance objectives. But she’s helpful, she’s competent, and she’s a woman, so naturally she’s become the organisation’s unofficial helpdesk, institutional memory and emotional support animal.
The place would fall apart without her. Her manager thinks she’s excellent at teamwork.
The organisation, meanwhile, has spent a small fortune trying to make Anya unnecessary. It has built knowledge bases, implemented enterprise search, launched chatbots and is now enthusiastically investigating whether an AI agent can answer the questions that currently land in her inbox. The business case is compelling: think of all the time Anya could save if people would just stop asking her things.
Except the reason people ask Anya isn’t simply that she knows where the information lives. It’s that she knows what it means, whether it’s right, and what to do when the official answer doesn’t quite fit the question. She also knows the person asking, which turns out to be extremely useful.
This week I found myself working on several versions of the same problem, across organisations with almost nothing in common except employees, information and an impressive collection of digital tools.
The question wasn’t really how to get people to stop asking Anya. It was how to make sure everyone has an Anya.
This week at work
Some weeks I do one thing. This was emphatically not one of those weeks.
On Monday I was helping a firm switch on a new community platform: posters, desk drops, content plans, senior leaders posting on day one, and the niche, nerdy joy of watching membership climb into the hundreds before lunch. NGL, I love this bit. Months of planning for the worst, hoping for the best, and then watching theory turn into practice, as people start finding answers, finding each other and, inevitably, finding the GIF button.
The best bit is what happens next. You can spend months plotting use cases, building adoption plans and modelling benefits in Excel, but give people the means to connect and they’ll invariably find uses you hadn’t imagined. Sometimes those turn out to be more valuable than anything you’d think to put in the business case.
Over the rest of the week, Jonathan and I interviewed people at a global organisation about how work and communication actually move around a distributed network of smart, engaged people. Elsewhere, we tested how researchers expect to find things on a university intranet. And on Thursday afternoon I read back our discovery findings to an international NGO from a corner of a conference centre in Paris.
Different sectors, different sizes, different tools, different problems. And yet, everywhere we looked, people kept asking for the same thing: other people.
At the university, the most common request in the open comments wasn’t a better menu or a smarter search. It was: who do I ask? At the NGO, almost nobody uses search, because colleagues are the search engine. At the conference, a European telco showing off its new intranet admitted that more than half of what people typed into the search box was, essentially, the name of someone in HR.
And at another organisation, people would rather message a colleague directly than post in a channel set up specifically for asking questions. Because asking in public feels a lot like being caught not knowing, and nobody wants four hundred colleagues to witness them asking where the expenses form lives.
If you’ve ever watched Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, you’ll recognise the dilemma.
On paper, Ask the Audience is the better lifeline. In the studio, the crowd is usually right. Wisdom of the crowd and all that. And at work, a well-functioning community can be extraordinary: someone, somewhere, knows the answer, and a good network makes it possible to find them. But putting four hundred people in an Ask channel doesn’t magically produce collective intelligence. Particularly when most have muted it, two reply ‘following’ and the only person who knows the answer left in 2022. Nor does a search box offering you a policy from 2019, three versions of the same form and a page called Useful Links containing no useful links.
So people phone a friend.
The catch with Phone a Friend is that you don’t pick your friend when the question comes up. You nominate them before the show starts. The whole lifeline depends on knowing, in advance, The Person Who Knows Things.
And there’s the problem. If you already know the right people, the system works fine. If you’re new, remote, in a different country, or simply outside the right WhatsApp group, I’m afraid you’re on your own. The organisation has a wealth of expertise, but access to it depends on whether you happen to know someone who knows someone. Less a knowledge management strategy than the Freemasons with Microsoft 365 licences.
And even if you do know Anya, there’s only one of her. She’s got an actual job, alongside her unpaid secondment as the organisation’s institutional memory, unofficial helpdesk and human workaround for three business processes nobody has bothered to document. Making her easier to find is useful. Making her personally responsible for explaining the procurement policy to eight hundred people is not a sustainable operating model, even if she’s been given a £15 Love2shop voucher in recognition of going above and beyond.
That’s the task for the digital workplace. Not to replace the friend with a page, nor to turn the friend into a permanently available human helpdesk. It’s to make expertise discoverable, answers reusable and routes to help clear enough that knowing the right person isn’t a prerequisite for getting anything done.
Sometimes the answer should be a well-written page. Sometimes it should be a conversation with someone who knows what they’re talking about. And sometimes the most useful thing the technology can do is help the first person who asks a question leave an answer that saves the next fifty people from having to ask it again.
Digital feeds the personal. It doesn’t replace it. But it ought to make the personal a little less dependent on luck, proximity and whether Anya happens to be on holiday.
Which is why, at a mock funeral for the intranet in Paris this week, I was the one at the back quietly suggesting the deceased had been misdiagnosed. We’ve been burying intranets for twenty years, and every time they turn up at their own wake, asking who’s responsible for updating the staff directory.
Also this week
Paris, for UNLEASH. On Tuesday evening I was on a panel at People Connect Club, talking about communication for people who don’t spend their working lives sitting in front of a laptop. On Wednesday I spent an hour and a half on the Flip AI stand signing copies of the book for people who, astonishingly, wanted them signed.
I’m still not entirely accustomed to the idea that people are sufficiently interested in my niche professional obsessions to read a whole book of them, let alone queue up to have me write something in the front. It remains both deeply flattering and faintly surreal.
Full disclosure: my time in Paris was a paid partnership with Flip AI. Cheers, guys. It was a blast.
The Eurostar home was late, and deposited me back in Amsterdam at 11pm, in the middle of Amsterdam Dance Event. There was a rave on the tram. I declined to participate, preferring to trundle home with my suitcase like a woman whose idea of a wild night now involves remembering to put the bins out.
My own contribution to ADE came at 7pm the following evening: a spin class, stone cold sober. Forty-six is going brilliantly, thanks.
Before I left Paris, I had lunch at Chez Fernand Christine. I go every time I’m in town, because it tastes like my Nan’s cooking.
She was Parisienne, and came to London at the start of the 1950s. By the time my mum was at school, British food was still largely beige and boiled. So mum’s friends treasured an invitation to Chez Marguerite’s, where they could eat proper cordon bleu.
While Elizabeth David was busy introducing Britain to French provincial cooking, my mum’s friends were getting the real thing round Nan’s kitchen table. And for my entire childhood, I did too.
Nan died four years ago, just shy of 100. Every time I go to Paris, I make a beeline for this restaurant, order the boeuf bourguignon, and think about her. It’s not quite her cooking, of course. But it’s close enough to bring her back for an hour. Grief’s a funny old thing.
Connections
In Paris I caught up with Liz Hartley from HSBC. It had been long enough since we last met that she’s had two babies in the meantime. I’ve had a book. Hers involved less editing but considerably more cuteness.
UNLEASH was also a chance to catch up with friends from the HR world, including finally meeting Allie Nawrat, my editor at UNLEASH, in person. I’ve been writing for them for five years, during which we’ve managed an entire professional relationship without ever occupying the same room. A pleasingly analogue development at a conference devoted to the future of work.
My answer started with what a town hall can do that nothing else in the channel mix can: put a leader in the room, speaking in their own voice, with people who can actually respond. If all they do is read out the financials, they’ve thoroughly earned the eye-roll every office worker knows. This meeting could have been an email. An expensive one, given the cost of gathering hundreds of people to hear someone read aloud.
It ended somewhere a little more uncomfortable: not every leader should automatically get a town hall. An audience isn’t a perk of the pay grade. And if you’re going to put a leader in front of people, brief them on what those people have already heard, what they’re actually worried about, and which questions everyone in the rehearsal room is desperately hoping nobody asks.
Around 80% of the world’s workers don’t sit at a desk, yet most internal communication is still designed for the ones who do. When it doesn’t land, we call the people on the shop floor “hard to reach”, as though they’ve deliberately hidden themselves behind the stockroom shelves to avoid the CEO’s latest thoughts on transformation.
But the problem isn’t them. It’s design: communication built around the sender’s convenience rather than the conditions of the work, from the device to the time to the shift pattern. Which is why the reflex fix, another app (possibly with badges, because apparently we’re all eight), so rarely works.
An app can put information in someone’s pocket. It cannot put five spare minutes in their shift.
Travel
This weeknote comes to you from Taghazout, Morocco. Country 95, a very normal number of countries to have visited.
I’m here for ten days, for Arab Nomad Fest, working as a digital nomad for clients back in Europe while giving a talk on how to make that work: working out loud, treating asynchronous communication as a discipline rather than a hack, and accepting that flexibility requires rather more planning than simply taking your laptop somewhere with better weather.
So if you need to phone a friend, I’m here. I’ll answer eventually.
We seem to have decided that the ultimate purpose of technological progress is to eliminate the inconvenience of being alive. Every click is one too many, every pause a productivity leak, every interaction an opportunity to shave another three seconds off the crushing administrative burden of existing. Why read a book with your own eyes when a machine can extract five key takeaways, sparing you the tedious business of encountering an argument, considering it, and perhaps even changing your mind? Why have a conversation when you can have a summary? Why experience anything at all when you could receive a concise, actionable digest of what you would have experienced, had you not been so terribly busy optimising your life?
The logical endpoint is presumably a world in which machines do all our reading, writing, thinking and talking, freeing us to devote our remaining hours to watching strangers reorganise their fridges on TikTok. Somewhere, a management consultant is preparing a slide deck explaining why this represents a 40% improvement in human flourishing.
Except some of the best things about this week were spectacularly inefficient. I travelled to an actual office to meet actual people, schlepped across the Netherlands to watch three Japanese men make an unconscionable amount of noise, and spent an evening with old friends without generating a single piece of content to prove it happened. Meanwhile, at work, I found myself arguing for deliberately making a digital experience less effortless. Not because inconvenience is inherently virtuous — anyone who’s ever tried to change a password on a government website knows otherwise — but because sometimes the bit we’re so desperate to eliminate is the bit that makes the whole thing worthwhile.
Perhaps the problem isn’t that we haven’t yet managed to make everything effortless. Perhaps it’s that we’ve become so obsessed with removing the effort that we’ve stopped asking what any of it was for.
This week at work
One client asked a question this week that sounds like a policy question but is really a design one: can I post this?
The answer we landed on fits on a Post-it. If it could go in the newsletter, it can go in the community. If it couldn’t, it can’t. No flowchart, no twelve-page acceptable use policy, no appendix clarifying whether a thumbs-up emoji constitutes formal endorsement. Just a small, well-placed moment in which someone has to stop and think about who’s going to read what they’re about to publish.
That moment is friction. And friction has had a terrible press.
Anything that slows a user down is a defect to be eliminated, preferably by a product team with a reassuringly expensive job title. Which is all very well until the thing you’ve made effortless is sending the board pack to the wrong Sarah.
Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic engineer, spent much of his career taking things away. In Drachten, he removed the traffic lights from the town’s busiest junction, which carried around 22,000 cars a day, and replaced them with a roundabout, a cycle path and somewhere for pedestrians to cross. By one account, crashes fell from thirty-six in the preceding four years to two in the following two. “The trouble with traffic engineers,” he said, “is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something.”
Which is a devastating assessment of several other professions I could name.
Monderman hadn’t made the road frictionless. He’d moved the friction out of the signage, which drivers had long since learned to obey without thinking, and into their heads, where it could do some useful work. Without a green light assuring you that the universe has granted you right of way, you have to look at the cyclist. The cyclist looks at you. Somebody slows down. Everybody has to acknowledge that other people exist, which is a radical proposition in traffic engineering and, increasingly, online.
Amsterdam (where I spent an entire week, for once), offers a working demonstration of the full range. The red tarmac of a cycle lane tells you where you are without demanding anything of you. A tram bell interrupts you just long enough to prevent you stepping off the kerb into several tonnes of public transport. A speed bump on a bike path makes you reconsider your enthusiasm. The barrier at a level crossing dispenses with persuasion altogether. Cue, pause, confirm, gate. And for most of the journey, nothing, because most of the journey should be nothing.
The skill is knowing which moment deserves which intervention.
Get it wrong in one direction and you end up with the security warning: an interruption so routine that people have trained themselves to dismiss it before they’ve finished reading. In one study of more than 25 million browser warnings, users clicked straight through 70% of Chrome’s SSL warnings and around a third of Firefox’s. Same risk, different design. A useful reminder that the presence of a warning is not the same thing as the presence of thought.
Get it wrong in the other direction and people simply go somewhere else. At another client, there’s an entirely sensible push to lock down a video tool, because AI note-takers can wander into meetings unannounced, like a wedding guest nobody quite remembers inviting but who appears to be recording the speeches. The same team is wisely leaving WhatsApp alone for now, because the people who are rarely at a desk practically live in it. You can block a tool with the best of intentions, but if you’ve made someone’s job harder without giving them a workable alternative, the work doesn’t stop. It just moves somewhere you have even less control over. Congratulations: you’ve improved compliance by making the non-compliance invisible.
So perhaps frictionless was the wrong ambition all along. The goal isn’t to remove every obstacle, or to introduce a confirmation dialogue every time someone so much as looks at a button. It’s to make the ordinary things easy and the consequential things just difficult enough that someone has to engage their brain.
Monderman put it more bluntly: treat people like idiots, and they’ll behave like idiots.
An observation with applications well beyond Dutch roundabouts.
Also this week
Last week I promised an unsettling experiment in geographical continuity. The results are in: seven consecutive nights in the same bed, and the faint suspicion that I was getting away with something. No airports, no baffling hotel lighting, no trying to remember which country’s plug sockets I was dealing with. An almost indecent level of domestic stability.
I even had a face-to-face meeting with a client. In their actual office. Here in Amsterdam. I signed in at reception, acquired a visitor badge and sat in a room with other human beings, like it was 2018. Going to client offices used to be the tedious bit of consulting, an occupational hazard to be endured in exchange for the interesting work. Now it happens so rarely that I found the whole thing rather thrilling. I came away more energised than I have from any video call this year, which is perhaps something we ought to consider before commissioning another eighteen-month study into the future of hybrid work.
Without an airport to get to, the week filled up with the things I keep meaning to do when I’m not living out of a suitcase. I went to boxing. I went to HIIT. I bought tickets for two gigs at Paradiso in March 2027, which is either the mark of a settled, organised life or a spectacular act of optimism from someone whose travel diary routinely resembles a game of Risk. Apparently there are people who make plans five months in advance and simply expect to be in the country when the date arrives. Fascinating way to live.
And at the weekend, my best friend Marie turned fifty.
There’s something rather disconcerting about watching your friends reach their half century. Partly because I am quite certain we all turned thirty approximately five years ago, and somebody needs to explain where the intervening two decades have gone. But mostly because it’s wonderful. Here we all still are, with decades of shared history, a frankly unreasonable quantity of stories and absolutely no intention of behaving like respectable middle-aged people.
It was glorious. There are almost no photos, because we were all too busy having a lovely time. Imagine that. An entire social occasion that wasn’t organised around producing evidence of itself.
Consuming
Electric Eel Shock, Japanese garage metal, at Willem Twee in Den Bosch. On a Sunday afternoon, because the live music industry has finally discovered its most lucrative demographic: people who still want their faces melted off by loud guitars but would also quite like to be in bed at a reasonable time.
The band came on at half four. Ninety minutes of filthy riffs at a volume sufficient to rearrange your internal organs, and a drummer who still performs wearing nothing but a strategically placed sock. That’s a level of commitment to the bit most of us couldn’t sustain through a single quarterly business review, never mind an entire international touring career. I can only assume the venue’s risk assessment made for interesting reading.
And then, at six o’clock, it was over. Even after schlepping home from Den Bosch, I was on the sofa with a takeaway by quarter to eight and tucked up in bed by nine. All the joy of a proper metal gig, none of the inconvenience of being awake when the pubs close. No queuing for the night bus, no standing on a platform at midnight wondering whether the last train is a philosophical concept rather than an actual service.
Getting old is fucking brilliant.
Coverage
For UNLEASH, I wrote about AI’s latest change of name, because apparently the technology hasn’t generated quite enough confusion without somebody deciding it needs rebranding. My instinct is to roll my eyes and get on with my life, but unfortunately the people responsible for enterprise technology procurement don’t always have that luxury. My argument: name the tool, not the technology. A useful name tells people what something does. A grand one mostly tells you what somebody would like you to think of them.
Jon and I also joined the Digital Workplace Group’s Digital Workplace Impact podcast to talk about designing channels people actually use. A deceptively simple ambition which, judging by the state of the average digital workplace, remains surprisingly controversial.
Diane Coyle has published a paper arguing that as AI makes knowledge increasingly cheap to copy, relationships become the asset that matters. Meanwhile, the archive of bankrupt Spirit Airlines, including 100 million emails and 500 million Teams messages, has attracted bids from Google and an AI start-up. The accumulated detritus of working life is now a commodity, and a potentially rather valuable one.
Put those two developments together and you have an uncomfortable problem for everyone who spent the past decade encouraging employees to work out loud, share what they know and leave a useful record of their working relationships. We sold people the benefits of transparency without necessarily explaining who might eventually own the transparent bits.
The court hearing has since been pushed to 6 November, so this one has some way to run.
An organisation can own the archive. It can’t compel the candour that made it worth having.
Travel
I’m writing this on the train to Paris, which is certainly an interesting time to visit. The French are once again demonstrating their commitment to making political instability a participatory national sport, though I suppose nobody can accuse them of being indifferent.
It’s People Connect Club tonight, then UNLEASH World, where I’ll be signing copies of the book with Flip. If you’re there, come and say hello. I promise not to make you discuss friction, unless you start it.
In August I wrote a piece for Reworked about the extraordinary afterlife of Spirit Airlines. The airline had gone bankrupt, leaving behind 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, and the files, calendars and other records of its working life. Google bid $10 million for the archive. Then micro1, a startup building AI agents designed to work inside simulated companies, made a late offer of $12.5 million.
The airline was dead. Its employees had lost their jobs. But the corporate corpse still had a few organs worth harvesting.
My argument was that an archive holds the residue of work, not the work itself. And that you don’t need to believe the residue is valuable for it to change how people behave. You only need to believe that someone else does.
This week, Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy at Cambridge, published a working paper that arrives at roughly the same place from the opposite direction. I came at it from twenty years of watching people decide what to put in writing. She comes at it from the economics of intangible assets.
Coyle explains why relationships become more valuable as AI makes everything else easier to replicate. Spirit shows what happens when someone decides to strip-mine the evidence of them. And in a particularly elegant piece of economic self-sabotage, the prospect of extraction may make people rather less willing to leave anything worth mining.
Relationships are the moat
Coyle’s paper, The business of business is relationships, opens with a number most comms people will find faintly vindicating. By WIPO’s estimate, intangibles accounted for between 77% and 90% of the enterprise value of large companies in the top ten economies in 2024. Not factories, not stock. Stuff you can’t drop on your foot.
She proposes distinguishing between two kinds of intangible capital.
Knowledge capital is the codified, transferable stuff: software, data, brands, patents, designs. It can be owned, licensed, protected and sold. Its value often depends on being able to prevent other people from using it.
Organisational capital is harder to pin down. Management know-how, internal routines, the relationships that make things happen, and the vast body of knowledge about how the organisation actually works, as opposed to how someone in Transformation thinks it works after spending six months drawing boxes. It’s tacit, contextual and difficult to separate from the organisation that created it.
Her argument is that generative AI will put pressure on the value of codified knowledge while making organisational capital relatively more important.
When everyone has access to the same models, the same automation and the same ability to produce suspiciously familiar PowerPoint decks, competitive advantage has to come from somewhere else.
She models work as a chain of complementary tasks, where the weakest link determines what the whole system can achieve. Making one link spectacularly efficient doesn’t help much if the next one still involves persuading someone in Procurement to reply on Teams.
Who knows whom. Who can get something unstuck. Who understands why a particular process exists, even though nobody has documented the reason since 2014. Who you actually need to speak to in Finance.
These aren’t decorative features of organisational life. They’re part of how economic value gets created.
It’s the most rigorous economic case for internal communication and collaboration I’ve read in years. And it never once uses the phrase “internal communication”.
The afterlife of an airline
Coyle recognises that some organisational knowledge can be digitised and transferred, although much of its value depends on the context in which it was created. AI complicates that distinction because it can learn from digitally recorded activity, acquiring something that looks remarkably like tacit knowledge.
Spirit offers a rather grisly demonstration.
Google’s $10 million bid was selected at auction, although the sale still requires court approval. micro1’s higher late offer has not displaced Google as the selected buyer. And the approval hearing, originally scheduled for 14 October, has now been postponed until 6 November, following objections about employee privacy.
In a letter to Spirit and Google, 121 US lawmakers warned that removing names and other direct identifiers might not be enough to prevent individuals being identified from the records. Unions have also challenged the proposed transfer. Google says personal information will be excluded or de-identified by an independent third party before it receives the data.
There is a particularly revealing distinction in the proceedings. A court-appointed privacy ombudsman has recommended approval following additional safeguards for consumers. Employee privacy, however, fell outside the scope of the assessment.
The passengers have a privacy assessment. The people whose conversations helped run the airline are still fighting over what happens to theirs.
The hearing has been delayed, but the commercial proposition remains: records of an organisation’s working life have attracted substantial bids from companies interested in what AI might learn from them.
That doesn’t mean Spirit’s organisational capital was worth $12.5 million. It means a bidder believed it could extract that much value from the records. Those are different calculations.
An archive might tell you that everyone went to Jane in Finance whenever a procurement decision got complicated. It can’t necessarily tell you why. Was Jane the expert, the person with authority, the person everyone trusted, or simply the only human being who knew how to make SAP behave?
A model might learn to reproduce the pattern without understanding what made it work. Which, come to think of it, is a reasonable description of several corporate reorganisations I’ve witnessed.
This is the distinction that matters. The relationships were valuable because they enabled people to do things together. The records may be valuable because they allow a machine to simulate how those people behaved.
Relational value, recorded value and extractable value are not the same thing. But they overlap, and AI is making the boundaries between them commercially interesting.
The Enron email archive has been used by researchers for more than two decades. The idea that old workplace communications might be useful to outsiders isn’t new. What Spirit makes unusually visible is the market price attached to those communications, and the question of who gets to decide what happens to them.
Which is a problem for everyone who has spent the last decade persuading employees to put more of their working lives into the record.
The bit that goes first
In my Reworked piece I argued that when people suspect their words might become someone else’s asset, the first thing they stop writing down isn’t the decision. It’s the reasoning.
The trade-off. The reservation. The objection that got overruled. The explanation of why an apparently sensible proposal was rejected because somebody tried it three years ago and the results were catastrophic.
You end up with immaculate archives of decisions, stripped of every doubt, disagreement and inconvenient fact that might explain how anyone arrived at them. A corporate memory consisting entirely of the minutes, with none of the meeting.
Read through Coyle’s framework, this is more than a records-management problem. The reasoning is part of what allows organisational knowledge to survive beyond the people who originally developed it.
And when people stop recording it, the reasoning doesn’t necessarily disappear. It goes back into phone calls, coffees, private messages and the heads of people who happened to be in the room. Which is fine until one of them leaves, another gets promoted, and a third decides they’ve explained the same thing to six successive managers and can no longer be bothered.
What disappears is the organisation’s ability to inherit that knowledge.
Access becomes a matter of proximity again: who you know, which meetings you’re invited to, whether you happen to sit next to the person who remembers why the policy says something apparently insane.
Digital working was supposed to make that knowledge more widely available. Instead, we risk rebuilding the old hierarchy with better software.
And there’s a nasty feedback loop here. The more organisations try to extract value from the records of work, the more reasons employees have to keep the interesting parts of work off the record. The archive becomes cleaner, the organisation becomes less capable of learning from itself, and everyone congratulates themselves on their information governance.
Of course, this isn’t an argument for recording everything. Quite the opposite. A permanent, searchable record of every workplace conversation would be an extraordinary resource, provided your ambition is to create the world’s most comprehensive database of things people wish they hadn’t said.
People need room to think aloud, change their minds, disagree and occasionally say something stupid without wondering whether it will become training material for a future product.
The challenge is to preserve the knowledge organisations genuinely need without treating every interaction as something to be harvested.
That requires judgement about what gets recorded, why, for how long and for whose benefit. Not merely another exhortation to work out loud.
Measuring the wrong thing
Coyle ends with a measurement agenda, because economists, like comms professionals, have an unfortunate tendency to want numbers for things that resist being counted.
Her proposed indicators of organisational capital include organisational structures, management practices, employee ratings and investment in technology. They’re a starting point for research, not a definitive framework, and she acknowledges the difficulty of measuring something so contextual.
The trouble with proxies is that they’re wonderfully easy to count, which makes it tempting to forget what you were trying to measure in the first place.
An organogram can tell you how many layers separate the CEO from the warehouse floor. It can’t tell you whether anyone on the warehouse floor trusts a word the CEO says.
We have more sophisticated instruments in the digital workplace: collaboration patterns, organisational network analysis, employee listening. But these have their own limitations. A Teams graph can show you who talks to whom. It can’t tell you whether they’re collaborating brilliantly or engaged in a six-month argument about who owns the spreadsheet.
Interaction isn’t necessarily collaboration. Activity isn’t necessarily value. And a record of communication isn’t necessarily a record of what mattered.
There’s another complication. Measurement changes behaviour, particularly when the people being measured know that their conversations might be analysed, retained or repurposed.
If people become more guarded about what they write, the resulting data may still look comprehensive. There will be messages, meetings, documents and beautifully coloured network diagrams. But the record will increasingly reflect what people are prepared to make visible, rather than how the organisation actually works.
The instrument isn’t necessarily broken. The behaviour it’s observing has changed.
That matters because we are increasingly tempted to treat digital traces as a complete representation of organisational life. AI makes it possible to analyse them at a scale that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. It doesn’t make them a neutral or complete account of reality.
And the more commercial value we attach to those traces, the less neutral the process of producing them becomes.
Who owns the residue?
There’s another question running through Coyle’s paper that Spirit brings into focus: who benefits from organisational capital?
Among the relationships she expects to become more important are those between employers and employees, including the negotiation over how productivity gains from AI are shared.
It’s a pleasingly civilised arrangement, assuming the employees still have jobs, somebody has invited them to the negotiating table, and the table hasn’t already been sold to Google.
At Spirit, the people who produced the archive are no longer working for the airline. The proposed transaction is being negotiated through bankruptcy proceedings, with the potential proceeds forming part of the estate. The people whose conversations make up the archive don’t individually control its sale, and there’s no reason to assume they will personally benefit from the value their records might create for an AI company.
Organisational capital is collectively produced, but the rights to its digital remains are not necessarily collectively held.
This isn’t entirely new. Employers have long controlled substantial amounts of the information produced in the course of work. What has changed is the range of things that information might be used for, and therefore what someone else might be prepared to pay for it.
Spirit makes that imbalance unusually visible. And the privacy objections demonstrate that ownership of an archive does not automatically settle the question of what may lawfully or legitimately be done with everything inside it.
For anyone running internal comms or a digital workplace, this creates an awkward problem.
We’ve spent years trying to persuade people to share what they know, explain their decisions and make work visible. We did so because organisations lose an enormous amount of knowledge when everything happens in private conversations and the heads of people who eventually leave.
We weren’t wrong about that. But we built the systems on an assumption that now looks increasingly quaint: that the record of working life would remain primarily useful to the people doing the work.
So the answer cannot simply be better transparency about retention policies. Telling employees that their conversations might one day be sold to train AI models is admirably candid. It is not necessarily going to encourage them to keep talking.
We need to make deliberate choices about which knowledge deserves a lasting record, how long informal communications should survive, what secondary uses are acceptable, and what meaningful limits apply to the exploitation of workplace data.
Trust isn’t something you can retrofit with an engagement campaign after you’ve designed a system that gives people every reason to keep their mouths shut.
Just because storage is cheap and someone in IT thinks the archive might be useful to an AI model in 2031 doesn’t mean every half-formed thought deserves to be preserved for posterity.
We also need to recognise that employees have legitimate interests in what happens to the records of their working lives, even when those records sit on corporate systems.
Coyle makes a compelling economic case that relationships will become more valuable as AI commoditises knowledge. Spirit shows that the digital remains of those relationships may have a quite separate commercial value. And the people creating both are beginning to notice.
The challenge now isn’t simply to persuade employees to write more things down. It’s to give them good reasons to believe that doing so won’t eventually be used against them, or turned into somebody else’s product.
Because an organisation can own the archive. It can’t compel the candour that made it worth having.
Around 80% of the world’s workers don’t sit at a desk. That’s roughly 2.7 billion people, per Emergence Capital’s much-quoted estimate. They drive, build, nurse, serve, stack, fix and deliver.
And yet almost everything we call “internal communication” was designed for the other 20%. The intranet, the all-staff email, the leadership video, the Teams post: each assumes a screen, a login, a reliable connection and a working day with a few spare minutes in it.
We then describe the majority of the workforce as “hard to reach”, as though the problem were their working conditions rather than our design choices. The workers themselves have noticed: in Microsoft’s survey of 9,600 frontline employees, 63% said messages from leadership simply don’t reach them.
There’s a particular kind of organisational optimism that believes this can be fixed with another bit of tech.
Frontline employees aren’t reading the intranet? Give them an app. They’re not opening emails? Push notifications. They’re not engaging with leadership messages? Perhaps some gamification. A leaderboard, possibly. Everyone loves a leaderboard, particularly when they’re finishing a twelve-hour shift.
The frontline communication problem isn’t really a frontline problem, it’s a design problem. Specifically, we’ve designed communication around the convenience of the sender rather than the circumstances of the person expected to receive it. And the sender, almost without exception, sits at a desk.
It’s a pattern Jonathan Phillips and I kept running into while writing Digital Communications at Work, in hospitals, retailers, charities and manufacturers alike. The sector changes. The assumption doesn’t.
The desk is doing more work than you think
Most internal communication practices carry a set of assumptions that are so deeply embedded we barely notice them.
Employees have an email address. They have a device on which they can access comms. They can check messages during the working day. They can follow a link to the intranet, answer riddles three to authenticate, sacrifice a goat to the god of multifactor authentication, and spend a few minutes reading something that mattered enormously to the person who commissioned it.
For many office workers, these assumptions are broadly reasonable. Even if they don’t always have the inclination to read the latest leadership update, they have the ability to do so.
Now consider someone driving a bus, serving customers, working on a production line or halfway through a hospital shift.
“Check the intranet” is not a neutral request. Neither is “we sent an email”.
Both make assumptions about the employee’s device, access, connectivity, attention and, crucially, who gets to decide what they do with the next five minutes of their working day.
An office worker can usually glance at a notification between meetings. A nurse cannot necessarily interrupt a medication round because Corporate Communications has published an exciting update about the organisation’s strategic priorities.
And this isn’t simply a question of access. It’s also about what people actually need to get their jobs done.
The employee on the production line may need to know that a safety procedure has changed, that tomorrow’s shift starts earlier or that a particular piece of equipment is out of service. They may be less interested in a video of the CEO discussing the organisation’s transformation journey, however handsomely produced.
That doesn’t mean they are disengaged. It could just mean they’ve correctly identified which information is useful to them.
Utility, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And we’re often too happy to mistake our own priorities for everyone else’s needs.
An employee app solves access, not opportunity
The employee app market has done a good job of recognising that traditional corporate channels don’t work equally well for everyone.
Mobile access can be transformative. It can put shift information, payslips, policies, operational updates and support services into people’s hands without requiring a desk or corporate laptop. For employees who previously relied on printed notices or information passed down through managers, that’s a genuine improvement.
But there’s a difference between making communication technically accessible and making it practically usable. In the same Microsoft research, a third of frontline workers said they lacked the tools to do their jobs, rising to 41% among those without management responsibilities, and more than half had been handed new digital tools with no training at all. The access problem hasn’t been solved, it’s just been handed to the employee.
You can give a warehouse employee an app. You cannot assume they are allowed to take out their phone while operating machinery. You can send a notification to a retail worker. You cannot assume they can read it while serving a customer. You can publish a beautifully accessible article for a care worker. You cannot conjure up ten spare minutes in an already overstretched shift.
An app can put information in someone’s pocket. It cannot put five spare minutes in their shift. So an app only succeeds if it’s designed for the ninety seconds someone actually has between tasks, not the fifteen minutes we wish they had.
This distinction gets lost when organisations measure the success of frontline communication primarily through downloads, registrations and monthly active users.
As we say in the book, there is no ROI in launch. It’s all in sustained adoption and use, and use only pays off when it helps people do something. So the question isn’t how many people have the app, but whether they can find what they need, at the moment they need it, in a form they can use. That changes what you measure. How long does it take someone to find tomorrow’s shift pattern? How many “where do I find…” questions still land on supervisors? Did the safety update reach people before the shift it applied to?
A million app downloads would be a magnificent achievement… unless the million people who downloaded it still have to ask their supervisor where to find things.
Those are useful measures of whether the technology is being adopted. They tell you somewhat less about whether employees can access the information they need, at the moment they need it, in a form they can use. It’s the distinction we draw in the book between outputs and outcomes. Downloads tell you whether people have adopted the technology. Outcomes tell you whether it’s made their working lives any easier.
A million app downloads would be a magnificent achievement… unless the million people who downloaded it still have to ask their supervisor where to find things.
Stop confusing communication about work with communication that helps people work
In Digital Communications at Work, Jonathan and I distinguish between broadcast communication and communication aligned with the work people actually do. We separate news from operational and reference content, because each has a different purpose, a different audience and a different lifecycle, and treating them as one undifferentiated stream serves none of them well.
Both have a place. Employees need to understand their organisation, its direction and the decisions that affect them. But they also need information that helps them complete a task, solve a problem, make a decision or respond to something happening right now.
Corporate communication tends to be organised around the former. Frontline employees often have much more immediate needs relating to the latter.
We have reached the peculiar point where an organisation can burn electricity, consume water and summon the full might of generative AI to ensure a warehouse worker receives a hyper-personalised video of the CEO explaining the company’s purpose, while remaining apparently unable to tell that same worker whether they’re on the early shift tomorrow.
The answer isn’t to abandon organisational communication. It’s to recognise that communication which helps people do their jobs can be an important foundation for everything else. A channel that reliably solves real problems earns a place in someone’s working day. A channel that primarily creates additional demands on their attention has a harder case to make.
Means, motive and opportunity: the Fletcher Test
In Digital Communications at Work, Jonathan and I introduce the Fletcher Test, borrowing the detective-story formula of means, motive and opportunity to ask three questions about any piece of communication.
Does someone have the means to receive it? A motive to engage with it? And an opportunity to do so within the reality of their working day?
Frontline communication is where the distinction becomes particularly important. Organisations have a habit of treating the first question as though answering it automatically settles the other two.
At Unily Unite recently, we put the test to work with more than 100 communications and digital workplace professionals. We gave them a fictional organisation, a week’s worth of internal communications and employee personas ranging from lorry drivers to head-office finance staff. Their job was to judge each message from the employee’s perspective, not the sender’s.
Does this person have access to the channel? Do they have the right device, permissions, connectivity and language support? Can they authenticate without navigating a sequence of systems designed for someone sitting in front of a company laptop?
And does the format work in their environment?
A long article may be appropriate for someone who spends much of their day reading documents. It’s considerably less useful to someone who needs a short operational instruction between tasks.
Means is where technology can make a real difference. But it requires an understanding of the working environment before choosing the technology.
Motive: why would they care?
This is the question communicators sometimes find uncomfortable.
Not “why does the organisation want them to know this?” but “what reason does this employee have to engage with it?”
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
An update to a safety procedure has an obvious connection to someone’s work. A change to shift arrangements may affect their pay, childcare or journey home. Information about a new employee benefit may have direct personal value.
The announcement that the organisation has launched a refreshed set of corporate values may be very important to the people who spent six months developing them. Whether it deserves three minutes of a warehouse worker’s attention is another question. Particularly if the warehouse worker wasn’t consulted about the values, doesn’t recognise them in their own experience of the organisation, and has rather more pressing concerns about next week’s rota.
And motive is shaped by more than the message itself. It’s shaped by the relationship between the employee and the organisation.
In the UK alone, 1.2 million people are on zero-hours contracts, close to the highest figure on record, and over half a million of them are under 25. Asking people in that position to demonstrate commitment to an organisation that has gone to considerable lengths to avoid committing to them is quite an ask. Particularly when the proposed solution is a push notification about company values.
This doesn’t mean every communication must offer an immediate personal benefit. Organisations have legitimate reasons to explain their strategy, culture and decisions. Employees also deserve to understand the wider business they are part of.
But attention isn’t something an organisation is automatically entitled to because it pays someone’s wages. And if the employment relationship gives people little reason to trust what they’re being told, no amount of channel optimisation will manufacture that trust.
We should be able to articulate why a particular audience needs a particular message, rather than assuming that because it matters to the sender it must matter equally to everyone else.
Opportunity: is there a realistic moment when they can engage?
This is the one I think we neglect most.
Even when someone has access to a channel and a decent reason to care, there must be an opportunity to encounter and act on the information.
That might mean building communication into shift handovers, team briefings, existing operational routines or the systems employees already use to do their jobs. It might mean providing paid time to complete essential training or read important updates. It might mean recognising that some information is best communicated by a manager in person, while other information should be available on demand.
And it might mean deciding that a message doesn’t need to be sent at all. As we put it in the book, the most powerful distribution decision is often not sending.
This is the awkward part of the exercise. Communications teams are usually asked to improve reach, increase engagement and make messages more compelling. Much less often are they given permission to question whether the communication deserves to exist in the first place.
Yet attention is a finite resource, and frontline employees have particularly little discretion over how they spend theirs.
If you’re asking someone to stop doing the job they’re paid to do so they can consume something you’ve been paid to produce, the burden of proof is very much on you.
Stop treating frontline employees as one audience
There’s another problem with the phrase “frontline workforce”: it describes a relationship to the organisation, not a coherent set of information needs. And given it covers most of the working population, it’s a remarkably unhelpful one.
A brain surgeon and the person cleaning the operating theatre are both frontline workers. So are an airline pilot bringing 300 people into Heathrow, the bloke delivering your Ocado order, the woman checking tickets on the 7.42 to Waterloo and the person trying to persuade a drunk man to leave Wetherspoons. Their working lives have almost nothing in common, beyond the fact that none of them spends the day sitting in head office being invited to webinars about employee engagement.
They differ in what they need to know, how often it changes and what happens if they don’t know it. They differ in skills, expectations and digital confidence. They differ in the devices they’re issued (or not issued), and in how much say they have over their own time.
And they differ in their relationship with the organisation, even when they work in the same building.
Take the surgeon and the cleaner. One may be a permanent employee with considerable professional autonomy, access to clinical systems and a well-established relationship with the hospital. The other may work for an outsourced facilities contractor, on a different set of systems, with different reporting lines and little access to the organisation’s internal channels. They may work on the same ward, encounter the same patients and be affected by the same operational decisions, yet belong to entirely different information ecosystems.
This is all extremely pertinent when you’re designing communication. Who is responsible for telling the cleaner that a ward has closed? Does the hospital communicate directly with them, or through the contractor? Can they access the relevant information without a hospital login? And if the answer is that their supervisor will tell them, what happens when that supervisor is off sick?
The surgeon needs the safety alert before the operating list starts. The cleaner needs to know which areas require enhanced infection-control procedures before beginning their shift. Both are operationally important. Neither is particularly well served by a generic weekly newsletter announcing that the hospital is delighted to unveil its new strategic vision.
Some frontline workers operate alone. Others are constantly surrounded by colleagues. Some work predictable shifts in one location; others move between sites or spend their days travelling. Some will download an app the moment they’re asked; others haven’t been issued an email address, let alone a login.
The opportunities to communicate are different. So are the consequences of getting it wrong.
A retail worker might receive information through a daily team briefing. A field engineer might need an update integrated into the job-management system. A driver might need something available at a depot or during a scheduled break.
Treating all of them as a single audience because they don’t sit at desks is about as useful as treating everyone who does sit at a desk as having identical needs. Nobody writes a communication strategy for “people with chairs”.
The distinction between desk-based and deskless work matters, but it is only the beginning of segmentation.
Good communication design starts with the work: what people do, where they do it, which systems they use, who they interact with, who actually employs them, how much control they have over their day and what information helps them make decisions.
Only then should we start discussing channels.
Your managers are not a free distribution network
When digital channels struggle to reach frontline employees, organisations often fall back on managers.
“Cascade this to your teams.” Corporate shorthand for making someone else responsible for the bit where communication has to work.
Managers are expected to receive corporate messages, interpret them, decide what matters, translate them into something meaningful for their teams and deliver them consistently, usually alongside the small matter of running the operation.
This assumes a great deal about the people we’ve made managers. Many got there because they were excellent at their previous jobs. The best engineer became the engineering manager. The most experienced nurse became the ward manager. The person who could keep a warehouse running through a minor apocalypse was rewarded with responsibility for twenty other people. Whether any of them could lead, coach or communicate effectively was sometimes a secondary consideration, if it was considered at all.
Some turn out to be excellent managers. Others are indifferent, inept or actively dreadful. Plenty have never received meaningful management training. Yet we construct elaborate communication cascades on the assumption that every one of them possesses the judgement, confidence and interpersonal skills to translate corporate strategy into something useful for their teams. This seems an optimistic foundation on which to build anything, let alone an organisation’s primary means of reaching its workforce.
Even the good ones are stretched. Gartner puts it bluntly: the average manager has 51% more responsibilities than they can effectively handle. And in Microsoft’s frontline survey, 69% of frontline managers said their own leaders don’t communicate with them effectively, which rather undermines the idea of the cascade before it has started. Information is expected to flow effortlessly down a management hierarchy in which the people halfway down don’t know what’s going on either.
Managers can be an exceptionally effective communication channel because they provide something an app cannot: context, interpretation and the opportunity for a conversation. A good manager can explain what a decision means locally, answer questions and spot confusion before it becomes a problem.
But that is precisely why they should not be treated as human forwarding services. In Digital Communications at Work, we treat managers as a channel with its own requirements, including briefing, timing, capability and the authority to adapt the message, rather than the default fallback when digital reach runs out.
If a message requires local interpretation, give managers the information, training, authority and time to provide it. If it simply requires employees to know a fact, consider whether making that fact directly accessible would be more reliable. And if the same information must pass through four management layers before reaching the person who needs it, perhaps the problem isn’t that managers need another briefing pack.
Perhaps it’s that you’ve built a distribution model which only works if every manager is a competent communicator, despite having done remarkably little to ensure that they are.
What a frontline communication strategy should actually do
Before commissioning another platform, I’d suggest establishing what problem you’re actually trying to solve. An unfashionable approach, admittedly, but cheaper than discovering afterwards that you’ve solved the wrong one.
What information do different groups of employees actually need to do their jobs? Which messages require immediate action, which need to be available for reference, and which are primarily intended to build understanding or connection?
Where does information currently move successfully? Where does it get stuck? Which informal routes have employees developed because the official ones don’t work?
What access do people genuinely have during paid working time? What constraints are imposed by safety, security, location, language, devices and working patterns?
And perhaps most importantly, who has the authority to decide what gets communicated, through which channels and how frequently?
These are the questions discovery is meant to answer, which is why Digital Communications at Work opens with discovery rather than with platforms. I’ve also written about how to start with discovery, including a real example of why giving frontline workers access to an intranet isn’t the same as making it useful.
Because a communication strategy that doesn’t make choices about volume isn’t really a strategy. It’s a distribution plan.
The answer may involve an employee app. It may involve digital signage, improved intranet access, operational-system integrations or something as unfashionable as a well-placed noticeboard. It may mean investing in the communication skills of managers and supervisors, giving them proper training, support and time to do the job, rather than another briefing pack and a cheery instruction to cascade.
Most likely it involves a combination, because different information needs call for different approaches.
The important thing is that the channel follows the need, rather than the organisation buying a channel and then searching for enough content to justify it.
There is a particularly expensive form of organisational self-deception in which a new communication platform becomes successful because people are persuaded to use it, rather than because it makes their working lives materially easier.
Adoption is not the same as value. A launch is the starting line, not the victory lap.
Design around the work, not around the sender
An employee can be brilliant at their job, trusted by colleagues, knowledgeable about customers and proud of what they do, while remaining blissfully unaware of whatever the CEO had to say about the organisation’s exciting transformation journey last week.
This is not an engagement crisis. It may simply mean they’ve got a job to do, and are getting on with it. Which, given that you’re paying them to do precisely that, seems a peculiar thing to hold against them.
We’ve spent years measuring whether employees engage with our communication, and less time asking whether our communication engages with their work. When the numbers disappoint, we reach for another platform, another campaign, another nudge. Anything, apparently, except the possibility that what we’re asking people to pay attention to isn’t worth the interruption.
Perhaps the problem isn’t that your frontline employees are hard to reach. Perhaps it’s that you’ve designed communication around a working day they don’t have, priorities they don’t share and time nobody has given them. Then, when they fail to respond as expected, you’ve diagnosed a problem with their engagement rather than your assumptions.
Your frontline employees aren’t hard to reach. You’ve just spent an extraordinary amount of time, money and effort trying to reach them where they aren’t.
A note on interests, and an invitation:this post is part of a paid partnership with Flip AI. I’m working with them as a creator partner around People Connect Club Paris and UNLEASH Paris next week. Flip AI reviewed this piece before it went live, but the argument is mine, including the bits about apps. I’d have written it anyway; the subject has been on my mind for years.
If you’re an in-house communications professional,come and join the argument on the Seine on 20 October, where I’ll be in conversation with Flip AI’s Luke Talbot. I’m particularly interested in hearing where you think I’ve got this wrong. Writing is how I work out what I think; finding people prepared to disagree with me is how I find out whether any of it survives contact with reality.
And if you’re at UNLEASH, come and find me at Flip AI’s booth on 21 October, where I’ll be signing copies of Digital Communications at Work from 14.00-15.30
This year’s Dan PR conference was themed A World Without Stability, which is an awkward brief to hand to someone who has built their entire personality around never staying still. I rarely work in the same place two days running. And the conference photos came back showing me mid-keynote, arms flung out in every direction, like a woman attempting to guide a small aircraft onto the runway.
So: a talk about instability, delivered by a fairly reliable source of it.
I took a couple of days away from client work to deliver the keynote in Ljubljana, taking the audience on a journey around Japan to explore how the future is already here — just, as William Gibson put it, not evenly distributed. We can’t know exactly what’s coming, but we can prepare for a range of possible futures by building resilience and adaptability into our communication channels and professional practice. Not by predicting the next crisis, but by making sure the next crisis doesn’t require us to invent an entirely new way of talking to one another.
Which turned out to be rather more relevant to the rest of my working week than I’d anticipated.
This week at work
Part of the keynote involved asking the room to do something faintly cruel to their communication channels: try to break them. For every layer — where you plan, publish, distribute and discuss — ask three questions. What do we use? What if it’s gone tomorrow? And where do people go instead?
Then, back on client work, I spent two days hearing the answer to that third question.
Jon and I are in the thick of discovery work at the moment, which means a lot of interviews, a lot of listening, and in my case a succession of video calls from a hotel desk in Ljubljana. And nobody needed a hypothetical outage to tell us where people go instead.
They’d already gone.
Across organisations, the patterns are remarkably familiar. The official collaboration platform that everyone has access to but nobody particularly wants to use. The informal group chat that started as a convenience and yet became essential infrastructure. The knowledge base that accumulated so much information it became easier to ask a colleague than even attempt to navigate it. The shared drive where documents breed, acquire version numbers, and eventually disappear into the sediment. The important information that’s technically available to everyone, provided you know the right person to ask.
Nobody designed this system. It doesn’t feature in anyone’s channel strategy. And yet it’s how a colossal amount of work actually gets done, held together with pipe cleaners, sticky tape and goodwill. An enterprise architecture that would struggle to survive a stiff breeze, but has somehow kept the organisation running for years.
Nobody’s complaining, exactly. They’d simply taken the shortest route. Faced with a choice between following the official process and getting an answer before the heat death of the universe, people had made a rational decision.
And that’s useful intel. Where people go instead isn’t the failure; it’s the insight. One distinction that emerged from the conversations that I’ve been mulling since: different channels carry different social expectations. An email suggests someone has thought about what they want to say. A chat message can feel like someone tapping you on the shoulder and expecting an immediate answer. That’s not a preference about software. It’s a design brief, and a more useful one than anything you’ll get from a vendor’s feature comparison spreadsheet.
On Tuesday I told a conference audience that a crisis is not the moment to discover whether your communication systems work. By Friday I’d been reminded that most organisations have already been told exactly where their systems fall short. The evidence is there in the workarounds, the unofficial conversations and the people everyone knows to ask. You just have to go looking for it.
Also this week
The conference finally got me to Ljubljana, and I’m already certain I’ll be back. It’s a beautiful, relaxed city and — for now — less overrun with tourists than it has every right to be. I’m aware that announcing this on the internet is precisely how the rot sets in, so please consider this paragraph strictly entre nous.
I don’t usually rank my own talks, but Tuesday’s was the best keynote I’ve ever given. Afterwards, the programme director wrote to say I hadn’t simply delivered a keynote, I’d “brought the whole theme of this year’s Dan PR to life”, which I have since reread a number of times that would embarrass me if I were capable of embarrassment.
I also got to hand a copy of the book to Dr Dejan Verčič, whose academic work I cite in it. There’s a very particular feeling that comes from presenting an academic with a book that quotes them: pride, accompanied by the sudden fear that you may have misunderstood everything they’ve ever written. German almost certainly has a word for this.
Slovenia then did its best to make the case for not working. The Vintgar Gorge was autumnmaxxing so aggressively it looked as though someone had turned the saturation up to a level normally associated with estate agents’ photographs. Naturally, I spent an unreasonable amount of time examining the rock formations and thinking about clients. I’m told some people visit places of extraordinary natural beauty and simply appreciate them, without attempting to draw lessons about organisational change. I wish them well.
Lake Bled looks exactly like the photographs, which is the highest compliment I can pay a view.
And once the last call of the week had wrapped up, I spent an afternoon wine tasting in the Alps, which strikes me as the correct way to conclude several days of discovery interviews. I’ll be proposing it to Jon as a standard part of our methodology. There’s probably a legitimate business case to be made for it, if I can find someone willing to fund the research.
On Friday, Belgrade. Again. Three weeks ago I visited Serbia entirely by accident, when my flight to Mostar couldn’t land and the pilot took us back to Belgrade instead. This earned me an unexpected night in a hotel apparently last refurbished during the Tito administration, complete with the lingering aroma of several decades of indoor smoking. This time I went on purpose, for the weekend, which I guess counts as giving the city a second chance despite it having done absolutely nothing wrong. The plane landed where it was supposed to, and I celebrated with a pub crawl. A considerable improvement on my previous visit, although admittedly the bar was somewhere beneath the shag-pile carpet.
Consuming
Not much, frankly. Work, travel and an unreasonably scenic country accounted for most of my evenings. The exception was Thursday’s Celebrity Traitors, which I streamed live on my phone over a solo dinner, propped against the water jug like a small, treacherous dining companion. I regret nothing, although I now suspect everyone at the next table of being a Traitor.
Coverage
Jon and I kick off the new season of Katie Macaulay’s Internal Comms Podcast with Why better comms starts with discovery. We get into infobesity, writing for AI readers, why the things people can’t find are often more revealing than the things they can, and the peculiar corporate ritual of commissioning an exhaustive inventory of everything in the intranet before asking whether anyone needs any of it. Katie’s a superb interviewer, and she got one of the best conversations about the book out of us yet. If you take one thing from it, make it this: start with the appetite, not the fridge. Otherwise you’ll spend six months cataloguing the contents, reorganising the shelves and buying a very expensive new fridge, only to discover everyone wanted a sandwich.
I also made it into Slovenia’s Marketing magazin, talking about why there isn’t one future of work, but hundreds of them. A longer interview will appear in a forthcoming issue, which I’ll share when it’s out. My Slovenian is limited to hvala lepa, so I’m taking their word for what I said.
Travel
Home today. Then an entire week in one country, which will be an unsettling experiment in geographical continuity, before Paris for UNLEASH.
Most internal communications planning operates on the charming assumption that organisations are fundamentally stable places, occasionally interrupted by change. There’s business as usual, with its newsletters, intranet stories and meticulously colour-coded content calendars, and then there’s The Crisis, during which everyone abandons the calendar and runs around looking for the emergency distribution list. Half the people on it have left, the other half haven’t opened an email all week, and someone from Legal would like to review the holding statement.
This was always a deranged way to think about organisations. Now it’s bordering on wilful denial. Instability isn’t an unfortunate interruption to business as usual. It is business as usual. Yet we continue to talk about transformation as though it’s a journey with a destination, rather than a series of wearyingly unpredictable events punctuated by steering committees. Nobody knows what’s coming next, and the reassuringly precise roadmap presented at last month’s town hall isn’t going to change that.
The job, then, is to build communication that can flex: channels people already use and trust, in a digital workplace designed to adapt as the organisation changes around it. That work happens in the good times. You can’t build trust once the crisis has started, however enthusiastically you update the CEO’s talking points.
This was the argument of my recent keynote at Dan PR in Ljubljana, organised by Marketing magazin under the bracingly honest theme A World Without Stability. I can’t give anyone stability back. Nobody can. What we can do is build communication that holds anyway.
The future arrived wearing a knitted hat
In Nihonbashi, Tokyo, I was once shown around by a tour guide who sat on my shoulder. It was a small robot in a knitted hat, from a café called DAWN, and the person guiding me was a pilot working remotely: someone living with a disability that would make a conventional job difficult or impossible.
Japan has a labour shortage. It also has people who want to work and have been shut out of work. DAWN connects those two problems. Walking around Tokyo with a robot on my shoulder should have felt futuristic. It didn’t. It felt completely ordinary, which is generally how the future turns up: not with a fanfare, but on your shoulder, wearing a hat.
Being shown around Tokyo by a robot guide (photo: Sharon O’Dea)
I wrote much of Digital Communications at Work, the book I co-authored with Jonathan Phillips, in Japan. Many of the forces starting to reshape work in Europe — ageing populations, labour shortages, automation — aren’t the future there. They’re already the present. Japan is a useful corrective to the sort of futurism that involves putting 2035 on a PowerPoint slide alongside a stock photo of someone prodding a holographic interface.
And these forces aren’t arriving one at a time. Demographic change, geopolitical volatility, AI, eroding institutional trust and the fragmentation of work are accumulating and colliding. None is going to wait for the previous transformation programme to finish, or for the steering committee to approve the next phase.
Look at who counts as ‘internal’ now. Employees, yes, but also contractors, frontline workers, supply-chain partners, remote workers and people who move between organisations and projects. Access to information becomes uneven. Context becomes inconsistent. Some people feel close to the organisation; others barely feel part of it at all. Yet plenty of internal communication still assumes an employee sitting at a desk, logged into a company laptop, with enough control over their working day to read a message whenever we decide to send one.
As we put it in the book, “A communication strategy that assumes equal access will, inevitably, exclude.”
The robot in Tokyo wasn’t interesting because it was a robot. It was interesting because somebody had designed a way for a person to participate who would otherwise have been excluded. The technology was infrastructure, not the purpose. Any industry rather more interested in selling technology than asking who it actually helps might want to reflect on that.
Build something that holds
Many organisations still approach communication as a publishing operation. They have messages to distribute, channels to fill and calendars to maintain. The success measures tend to reflect that: how many things went out, how many people opened them, how many clicked. We’ve become tremendously sophisticated at measuring the production and distribution of material without really establishing whether any of it made a blind bit of difference.
But when the ground moves, nobody cares how many intranet stories you published last quarter. They care whether they can find out what’s happening, understand what it means for them and reach someone who can help. An impressive open rate tells you very little about whether someone understood the message, trusted it or could do anything useful with it. You can open an email halfway through a shift, discover you need to complete a task on a system you can’t access, and still count as a communications success story on somebody’s dashboard.
That’s an infrastructure problem, not a copywriting problem.
In Digital Communications at Work, we describe five layers of a communication ecosystem: Plan, Collaborate, Publish, Distribute and Discuss. It’s a way of seeing how information moves around an organisation, rather than looking at each channel in isolation, which is what happens when every department has its own platform, its own budget and a persuasive account manager.
Once you’ve mapped those layers, you can ask an uncomfortable question: what if one disappears tomorrow?
We worked with a human rights charity whose people operate across countries run by authoritarian regimes. They know that social networks can be switched off, sometimes along with the entire internet. For them, relying on a WhatsApp group wasn’t just a question of convenience; it was a vulnerability.
They reduced their dependence on platforms most likely to be withdrawn and made regular local backups of essential materials, so people could still access what they needed without a connection.
Most organisations aren’t operating under those conditions. But the underlying question applies to everyone. If email and Teams disappeared tomorrow morning, where would your people go? If your intranet was unavailable, how would you reach your people? And how many of your supposedly business-critical processes turn out to depend on a spreadsheet maintained by someone who’s currently on holiday?
If the answer is ‘I’m not sure’, you’ve found something worth fixing (ideally before the next incident review).
Resilience isn’t something you buy during an emergency. It’s built through the dreary work of mapping dependencies, agreeing fallbacks and testing whether they work. Nobody gets excited about a backup distribution list until the day they need one, by which point it’s a little late to discover that nobody owns it.
Holding isn’t enough
It’s relatively easy to notice when something breaks. Far harder to notice when it stops being useful. Communication also has to adapt to changes that happen slowly enough for everyone to convince themselves that nothing much is changing.
Working patterns shift. New technologies appear. Organisations merge, restructure and acquire new populations of employees. The channels that worked brilliantly five years ago become less useful, while the people responsible for them continue filling them with content because that’s what the communications plan says they should do.
This is where organisations tend to confuse the channel with the job it was supposed to perform. The intranet, the newsletter, the employee app: these are ways of meeting people’s information needs, not ends in themselves. Yet we become extraordinarily attached to them, particularly after spending eighteen months and a substantial amount of money getting them approved.
In Digital Communications at Work, we argue for separating publishing from distribution. Keep a reliable source of truth, with content that’s accurate, owned and maintained. Then allow the channels carrying that information to change as people’s needs and working habits change. The information should be dependable. The means of reaching it should be adaptable.
That matters even more as AI assistants and agents become another way people access workplace information. Your content may increasingly be consumed and interpreted by machines before it reaches a human. If your policies are duplicated, contradictory or three years out of date, AI won’t magically fix the problem. It may simply repeat the wrong answer more efficiently, with the sort of confidence previously reserved for a senior manager explaining a system they’ve never used.
Flexibility isn’t an annual technology strategy exercise. It’s a habit of asking whether the channels you have still serve the people using them, and being prepared to stop doing things that no longer earn their place. Which sounds straightforward until you discover how many apparently indispensable communications exist primarily because somebody important once asked for them.
Resilience without adaptability leaves you maintaining an increasingly obsolete system. Adaptability without resilience gets you chaos with a new logo.
You need both.
Prepare the ground before you move the tree
On the Goto Islands, I stayed at Ako House, an old Japanese house restored by a man who bought it for one reason: to save the enormous old ako tree in the garden. He didn’t buy a house and happen to get a tree. He bought the tree and took on the house to protect it.
Japanese has a word for preparing a tree to survive being moved: nemawashi. Literally, it means digging around the roots, loosening the soil and preparing the tree so it has the best chance of surviving the move.
In organisations, the same word describes the work of consulting people before a decision becomes official. Talking to the people affected, understanding their concerns and allowing their input to shape what happens next. Not the ceremonial consultation that takes place once the decision is effectively irreversible, but the kind where somebody might actually have to change their mind.
We tend to do this backwards. Leaders make a decision, communications is brought in to prepare the announcement, and the people whose working lives are about to change hear about it once everything is settled. Then everyone is terribly surprised when they resist, and comms is asked to develop an engagement campaign to address the negativity. Perhaps with a colourful graphic explaining the benefits.
The groundwork isn’t the announcement. It’s the conversations that should have happened before it.
This is where trust becomes infrastructure too. People are more likely to believe what they hear during uncertainty if they’ve had reasons to trust the organisation when things were relatively calm. That means channels that work, information they can rely on and leaders who communicate even when they don’t have a polished answer. It also means being prepared to tell people things they might not want to hear, rather than treating every difficult message as a problem to be solved with more positive language.
Three sentences do an enormous amount of work: here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know yet, and here’s when you’ll hear more.
‘We don’t know yet’ isn’t weakness. In a period of instability, it can be one of the most reassuring things a leader says, provided they do follow through on the third sentence. It’s certainly more useful than an elaborately worded assurance that the organisation remains committed to its people while declining to explain what is actually happening to them.
The same principle applies to the communication systems themselves. Agree what people absolutely must know, how you’ll reach them and who’s responsible for making sure it happens. Do it before the emergency, because when everything is moving, there won’t be time to build the relationships, the governance or the distribution mechanisms from scratch.
And no, buying an emergency notification platform is not a substitute for people believing the messages it sends.
Our robots are not AI
Back in Tokyo, there’s one detail about the robot in the knitted hat that I haven’t mentioned. The café’s website makes a point of saying: “Our robots are not AI.”
In an industry currently determined to put AI into absolutely bloody everything, including things that were working perfectly well before, this feels positively subversive.
Everything valuable about that tour was deeply human: the planning, choosing what to show me, the conversation we had, the connection we built. The technology’s job was simply to carry a person to where they were needed.
That’s a useful way to think about workplace communication, too. Technology can carry information further, faster and in more formats than ever before. AI is making that easier still. But carrying information isn’t the same as helping people make sense of it, and producing more content isn’t the same as building trust. If it were, the average organisation would have achieved perfect mutual-understanding nirvana by now.
I can’t tell you which change is coming for your organisation. Neither can your CEO, your IT department or your favourite LinkedIn futurist, although the latter will probably sell you a framework for it. What you can do is prepare for a range of possibilities, rather than betting everything on one prediction.
Build channels people actually use. Keep the information behind them reliable. Make sure the system can survive the loss of a platform and adapt when working habits change. And establish the relationships that will carry communication when people most need to trust what they’re hearing.
None of this can be bolted on after the ground has moved. It’s built in the calm, through the deeply unglamorous groundwork that rarely makes it into a conference keynote but determines whether communication works when it matters. It’s considerably less exciting than announcing a new platform or launching a transformation programme, which is probably why organisations keep doing those instead.
The ground will keep moving. The question is whether what you’ve built can move with it.
This essay draws on my keynote at Dan PR 2026 and ideas explored inDigital Communications at Work, co-authored with Jonathan Phillips. If you’d like me to explore these ideas at your event or with your leadership team, see myspeaking page.
![Me and [name?] raising espresso martinis at the Recognition Café, a lilac-walled bar on the UNLEASH show floor.](https://i0.wp.com/sharonodea.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/13-1.jpg?ssl=1)
