Essays

You can’t comms your way out of a bad deal

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

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.

A surrealist painting of an empty office at dusk. A giant brass scale hangs perfectly level, with a desk chair, laptop, pot plant, folders, a mug and a dangling lanyard on one pan, balanced against a single small orange envelope on the other. A man in a navy overcoat buttons it up and looks at the scale calmly, with a blue-to-violet evening sky and rows of empty desks behind him.

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?

Gallup puts UK employee engagement at 10%, unchanged for four years. The British Social Attitudes survey shows willingness to put in extra effort falling from 69% to 55% over the past decade.

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.

Nobody buys shared

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
A surrealist painting of a crowd of identical men in navy overcoats and bowler hats, seen from behind and stretching to the horizon, each sealed under his own glass bell jar. Inside each jar is a different private sky (sunny clouds, a moonlit night, rain, an orange sunset), while the real sky above them all is a flat, empty lavender.

On the first day of UNLEASH in Paris, I asked a seven-figure AI orchestration platform how many people worked for the company.

Two minutes and 36 seconds later, it told me I wasn’t authorised to know.

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.

And finally, we need to stop treating personalisation as an unqualified good.

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.

The residue has a price

/ Sharon O'Dea / 3 Comments
Surrealist painting of an abandoned open-plan office at dusk. On a pedestal, a glass bell jar holds a small lavender cloud made of faint speech-bubble shapes, with an orange auction tag hanging beneath it. Wisps of vapour drift towards it from the empty desks.


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.

Your frontline communication problem isn’t a frontline problem

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
Surrealist painting: an empty wooden office chair floats in an electric-blue sky among white clouds. On the pale sandy ground far below, a line of small uniformed workers, including a nurse, a cleaner and a delivery rider, walk past in dark-blue silhouette without looking up.

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.

You can download the workshop toolkit and run the exercise with your own team.

Means: can they actually receive it?

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

Build for change: communication that holds when the ground moves

/ Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments
Surrealist painting of a gnarled old tree with its roots wrapped in hessian and twine, standing on a floating slab of earth high above a distant landscape. Soft white clouds drift across a blue sky, with hills and water far below.

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.

Sharon O'Dea, in a blue t-shirt and jeans, walks on a Tokyo street with a small robot on her right shoulder
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 in Digital 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 my speaking page.

The produce button

/ Sharon O'Dea / 4 Comments
A surrealist painting of a vast, pale office. On a pedestal, a small elegant machine with a single orange button pours out an endless flood of paper, screens and charts that sweeps across the room and up the walls. On the far right, a lone office worker calmly types on a laptop, almost buried.
Yes I burned a tree to generate this pic in CanvaAI, the irony is not lost on me.

At Unily’s Unite conference this week I watched someone turn a set of source documents into a podcast, an infographic and a video in the space of a few minutes.

This was Content Studio, Unily’s new AI-powered tool for taking trusted company information and turning it into different formats for different audiences: podcasts, videos, infographics and more, grounded in the original sources and with humans still in control of what goes out.

It was impressive. Genuinely impressive.

And I could immediately see the use case. Take a health and safety update written centrally, turn it into a visual explainer for factory workers, translate it into the languages spoken at that site, make an audio version for people who spend their working day away from a screen. Do in minutes what would previously have required designers, translators, video editors and several increasingly desperate emails to an agency.

There was, though, a rather lovely irony to the timing.

At the very same conference, I was running a workshop called Signal Over Noise: Winning Attention in an Age of Infinite Content. We’d expected about 40 people. More than 100 turned up.

Either internal communicators have suddenly developed an unexpected passion for information theory, or having too much stuff and nobody paying attention to it has struck a nerve.

So there we were. In one room, demonstrating how astonishingly easy it has become to produce more content. In another, communicators were crammed around tables trying to work out how to stop drowning people in the stuff.

Welcome to internal communications in 2026.

Because the interesting thing about Unily’s new Content Studio isn’t whether it’s good. It is. The interesting thing is what happens when tools like it collide with a communications system that already produces far more than people can reasonably consume.

Unily’s own framing gets to the heart of it: content is abundant, impact isn’t. And now, having identified the abundance problem, we have invented a machine for making abundance virtually free.

This is what we’ve been asking for

Credit where it’s due, because there is a lot to like here. The central argument of Digital Communications at Work is that communication needs to be designed around how people actually work. Not around the org chart, and certainly not around what’s convenient for the communications team.

A frontline employee on a twelve-hour shift does not have the same information needs, available time or working context as someone sitting at a laptop in head office. Yet for years we’ve routinely given them the same 800-word intranet article and called the job done because technically everyone could access it.

Congratulations. It’s responsive.

The problem with doing this properly has always been partly practical. Adapting communication for different roles, languages, locations, channels and contexts takes time and money. Most internal comms teams simply don’t have the capacity to make twelve versions of everything.

AI changes that equation. One source can become an infographic for a factory screen, an audio summary for someone on the move, a short article for the intranet and a translated version for a local team. The underlying information remains grounded in approved source material while the presentation changes to fit the person receiving it.

That’s not gimmicky personalisation. That’s good communication design.

For years we’ve said we should meet employees where they are. Now we actually can.

Which makes the next question rather important: How often should we?

We are already drowning

The communications problem inside most organisations isn’t that employees need more information.

It’s that they are surrounded by it.

Emails. Teams messages. Intranet news. Town halls. Newsletters. Notifications. Communities. Videos. Podcasts. Viva Engage posts. PDFs attached to emails summarising PDFs attached to other emails, with Copilot in the same window offering to summarise the summary.

Then we look at falling engagement figures and ask how we can persuade people to read more. Wrong question.

Information overload isn’t a personal failing by employees who need to manage their inbox better. It’s a design outcome.

Organisations have built systems in which hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people are independently authorised to demand everybody else’s attention. Every function has something important to say. Every project needs visibility. Every leader has an update. Every initiative has a launch. Every programme has a newsletter.

Individually, almost all of these decisions are reasonable. Collectively, they amount to being trapped in a lift with the entire organisation barking its priorities at you.

And then along comes AI and removes one of the few remaining constraints: making the stuff.

Attention is a budget.

Every communication spends some of it. Every notification asks someone to stop doing one thing and pay attention to another. Every beautifully personalised two-minute video is still two minutes in which they aren’t doing the work they’re ostensibly employed to do.

Personalisation can make each individual item more relevant.

It does nothing, by itself, to reduce the number of items.

And when the cost of producing those items approaches zero, I have a nasty feeling we’re about to discover that the natural volume of organisational communication, when freed from all physical constraints, is infinite.

The problem with removing friction

The first risk is obvious: volume.

Production cost has always acted as a crude form of governance.

Making a video used to be sufficiently expensive and annoying that someone, somewhere, had to believe the subject warranted a video. You needed a camera, an editor, perhaps an agency, a budget, and the particular form of psychological collapse that comes from hearing the same thirty seconds of Intro by The XX for the twenty-fourth time while someone adjusts a crossfade.

That’s not an especially sophisticated editorial process, but it was a brake.

Remove the friction and suddenly almost everything clears the production bar. Why wouldn’t we make a podcast version? It takes three minutes. Why not an infographic too? Why not a video? Why not six localised versions, translated into eight languages and personalised for four employee groups?

Soon the organisation hasn’t solved information overload. It has achieved information overload in twelve beautifully targeted formats, each carefully optimised for the precise demographic characteristics of the person ignoring it.

And I don’t think employees will become cynical about AI-generated communication simply because a machine made it. Most people have better things to worry about.

They’ll become cynical if there’s more of it, especially if all of it starts to sound eerily similar.

The signal that somebody bothered

The second risk is trust.

Part of the signal carried by communication is that somebody bothered. The medium is the message and all that.

Someone wrote the note. Someone chose the words. Someone stood in front of a camera and said the uncomfortable thing. Someone decided this mattered enough to spend some time on it.

Effort itself communicates importance.

If the CEO records a five-minute message after a difficult restructuring, that act carries information beyond the words themselves. They showed up. They put their face to it. They had to look into a camera and say “I know today’s news will be hard for many of you” out loud, while arranging their face into the internationally recognised expression for I am not, in fact, a sociopath.

If software turns their announcement into a jaunty three-minute podcast, the information may be perfectly accurate.

But something has changed.

Communication isn’t simply information transfer. If it were, internal comms would have been solved by SharePoint in about 2003 and we’d all be doing something else now.

Who said something, why they said it, what they chose to emphasise and how much effort they were prepared to expend saying it are all part of the message.

The cheaper communication becomes to manufacture, the more valuable those signals of human intent may become.

There’s an odd possibility here that the more polished content we can generate, the more we’ll value the slightly awkward video of an actual person saying actual words into a camera without three keywords sliding smoothly into view beside their face while ambient electronica burbles underneath.

Human imperfection may yet become a premium feature.

Month six is the bit that worries me

The third risk is complacency.

I’m actually less worried about hallucination here than I am about habituation.

In month one, everyone will scrutinise the generated storyboard. They’ll check every sentence against the source. They’ll debate the emphasis. They’ll inspect the images. Someone will zoom in to 400% and discover the reassuringly diverse group of colleagues in the background includes a woman with seven fingers and a security pass apparently growing directly from her sternum.

By month six?

Yeah, you know how this works.

You’re late for another meeting. Teams is flashing. Somebody needs this published by four. You’ve generated versions of this sort of thing dozens of times before and they’ve always been fine.

You glance.

Looks alright, dunnit?

Publish.

Grounding a system in approved sources is important because it reduces the risk of invention. But a communication can contain no invented facts whatsoever and still be wrong.

It can emphasise the wrong thing. Bury the caveat. Miss the thing employees actually care about. Turn a complicated and politically sensitive decision into something technically accurate yet completely tone-deaf.

Those are judgement problems, not generation problems, and no amount of source grounding removes the need for judgement.

Governance needs to happen before the produce button

This is why I’m not convinced the most important governance question is who approves AI-generated content.

By that point, we’ve already made it.

The more useful question comes earlier: Should this communication exist at all?

In my Signal Over Noise workshop at Unite, I used what I call the Fletcher Test: Means, Opportunity, and Motive. I stole the method from the iconic Jessica Fletcher, because I did a sufficiently wishy-washy arts degree to spend three publicly funded years of university watching an enormous amount of trashy daytime television. Murder, She Wrote taught me that every murder needs three things: the means to do it, the opportunity to do it, and a motive.

(It also taught me that Cabot Cove had a murder rate that really ought to have attracted federal attention, but this is not the time, nor is it the place).

The same test turns out to be surprisingly useful for internal communications, with fewer suspiciously well-dressed corpses.

Do we have the means to reach this audience effectively?

Do they have the opportunity to pay attention to it?

And, most importantly, do they have a motive to care?

AI makes the Means bit astonishingly easy.

That’s precisely why Motive and Opportunity become more important.

If I can make you a personalised video in your preferred language, beautifully formatted for the device you’re holding, I have solved the delivery problem. But I have not magically made you care.

I’d go further. Communications teams should start thinking in terms of attention budgets for audiences. Not simply how much content a team produces, but how much attention it’s reasonable to demand from the people receiving it.

Approval shouldn’t just ask whether something is accurate, on-brand and compliant. It should ask whether this thing is worth interrupting people for.

What if we’ve got the direction wrong?

There’s another possibility I find much more interesting. Most enterprise personalisation still starts with the organisation.

We have a message.

We have twelve audiences.

We will create twelve versions and push the appropriate one towards each person.

It’s cleverer broadcasting, really. But generative AI opens up another model entirely. Imagine a housekeeper sees that the CEO has published a long update and asks:

What does this mean for me?

The system knows enough about their role and context to answer usefully. It draws from the original, approved communication. It explains what’s relevant and leaves the rest alone. If they want more detail, they ask another question. The original remains there, intact, as the source.

That’s pull rather than push, and I think that’s potentially much more transformative.

Instead of communications teams trying to anticipate every conceivable information need and manufacturing twelve versions just in case, employees interrogate trusted information when they actually need it.

That doesn’t eliminate broadcasting. Some things genuinely need to be pushed. Emergencies exist. Mandatory information exists. Leaders sometimes need to speak to everyone. But most organisational information isn’t an emergency, however enthusiastically its owner filled in the comms request form.

Pull changes the economics of personalisation because we don’t need to manufacture every possible version in advance.

And if we’re going to personalise proactively, our understanding of audiences needs to get much better too. Personas shouldn’t simply be lovingly hand-crafted descriptions of what we imagine “frontline Fiona” wants, replete with a stock photo of a suspiciously cheerful woman in a hi-vis jacket.

We have years of behavioural and engagement data telling us what different groups actually use, ignore, search for and respond to. Use it.

The scarce skill is restraint

AI is going to have us hammering the produce button with the glassy-eyed enthusiasm of a Vegas gambler who’s three hours past bedtime and halfway through the children’s inheritance.

That’s inevitable. And, mostly, it’s useful.

But the interesting consequence is that production itself becomes less valuable. If everyone can turn a policy document into a podcast, infographic, video, article and six translations before lunch, doing so is no longer much of a skill.

Knowing whether to do it is.

Which brings me back to the bigger question I came away from Unite thinking about: what exactly is the internal communications job becoming?

A significant chunk of communications work has historically been production. We write the article. Build the newsletter. Edit the video. Create the campaign. Polish the CEO post. Turn the strategy into an infographic. Then, because we’ve made the thing, we need people to consume the thing, so we spend another chunk of time trying to persuade them to click on it.

It’s an entire professional ecosystem built partly around the fact that making things used to be difficult.

Now it isn’t. Or increasingly, it won’t be.

And I don’t think the answer is to reassure ourselves that AI simply frees everyone up to do more valuable, strategic work, as if there’s a vast strategic nature reserve somewhere waiting to receive several thousand newly liberated newsletter editors.

There may well be fewer traditional communications jobs. The production layer is getting thinner. Pretending otherwise won’t make it thicker.

But the work that remains becomes more judgement-heavy, not less.

What deserves attention?

What doesn’t?

When does personalisation make something genuinely more useful, and when does it simply manufacture more noise?

When does a leader need to show up themselves?

When should an organisation speak, and when should it make good information available and trust people to find it when they need it?

And perhaps most uncomfortably: if we no longer need quite so many people to make the content, are we prepared to define the value of communications by something other than the amount of content we make?

For a long time, communications teams were constrained by what they could produce. This week I watched that constraint disappearing in real time.

Then I walked into a room designed for 40 people and found more than 100 communicators waiting to talk about how to produce less. There’s probably something in that.

The produce button is the easy bit. The difficult bit is resisting the obvious next step: pressing it over and over until the entire organisation disappears beneath a perfectly personalised slurry of podcasts, infographics and three-minute videos explaining why nobody has time to get any work done.

Why nobody can find anything on your intranet

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
A lone figure in a dark suit stands in an enormous surreal gallery beneath a bright blue sky, surrounded by hundreds of near-identical framed documents stretching impossibly into the clouds. One document glows neon yellow among the otherwise cream, orderly rows, suggesting the difficulty of finding the right information when everything looks equally authoritative.

Every organisation with an intranet eventually performs the same ritual.

Someone runs an employee survey. “I can’t find anything on the intranet” appears somewhere near the top. Everyone nods gravely. A project is formed.

Perhaps the search needs improving. Perhaps the navigation needs another go. Perhaps the homepage needs fewer tiles, or more tiles, or the same number of tiles but in a different order. Someone suggests AI, because it is 2026 and someone always suggests AI.

Things are moved around. Search is upgraded. The new navigation is launched with considerable ceremony.

Eighteen months later, someone runs another survey.

“I can’t find anything on the intranet.”

And round we go.

The problem is that organisations tend to treat findability as a technology problem. Sometimes it is. Quite often the technology is simply the place where a much messier organisational problem has chosen to make itself visible.

Before you start dragging things around the navigation again, it’s worth working out which problem you actually have.

Search matters. But it can’t perform miracles

Let’s get this out of the way first: bad enterprise search absolutely exists.

Search can be badly configured. Synonyms can be missing. Important results can be buried beneath ancient PDFs. Promoted results can point proudly to something nobody has used since Theresa May was prime minister. Pages can have titles written entirely in the language of the team that owns them.

If your expenses page is called “Expense Management Policy and Procedures” while everyone in the organisation searches for “claim expenses”, you have given your search engine an unnecessarily difficult afternoon.

As Jonathan Phillips and I put it in Digital Communications at Work, enterprise search is not Google with a lanyard.

Google has an almost unimaginably large pool of behavioural data from which to infer what you probably meant. Your intranet has Hannah from Procurement looking for the travel policy twice a year.

So yes: configure your search properly. Use synonyms. Look at what people are actually typing into the box. Write page titles for humans. Retire the promoted result for the 2018 office move.

All of that’s important.

But search can only work with what you give it. And “I can’t find anything” can mean at least five quite different things.

Five reasons employees can’t find information on your intranet

1. The information isn’t there

The simplest problem is also the one no search engine can fix. Sorry.

Someone wants to know how to request a new laptop. There is no page explaining how to request a new laptop.

They search for “new laptop”. Nothing useful appears. They try “replacement computer”. Nothing. They browse IT. They try Help. Eventually they message someone on Teams, who messages someone else, who sends them a link to a form they have inexplicably had bookmarked since 2021.

From the employee’s perspective, the intranet has failed.

This is a content gap, not a search problem. But search data can help you find it. Repeated searches with no useful result are a pretty good signal that people expect information to exist that doesn’t.

That makes zero-result searches some of the most interesting data your intranet produces. They’re people submitting content requests without knowing they’re doing it.

Does better search help? Not really. Search can tell you where the hole is. It cannot fill it.

2. It’s there, but called something unexpected

This one is more fixable.

The information exists, but the person who published it and the person looking for it use completely different language.

HR has published a page about “Family Leave”. Your employee searches for “maternity leave”.

Finance has “Travel and Expense Management”. Everyone else wants to “claim expenses”.

IT has an “End User Device Replacement Process”. Dave just wants a new laptop.

This is where search configuration, synonyms and better content design genuinely earn their keep. If hundreds of people search for “holiday” and your organisation insists on calling it “annual leave”, your search engine should be capable of holding both thoughts in its head.

But there’s a content lesson here too. Internal language has a habit of leaking into intranets. Department names, programme names, operating-model terminology and acronyms make perfect sense to the fourteen people who use them every day and considerably less sense to everyone else.

Organisations then compound this by insisting the technically correct term is the right one.

It may be. Your employees are still typing something else.

Does better search help? Yes. This is exactly the sort of problem it should help with. Better titles and content design help too.

3. It lives somewhere they wouldn’t think to look

Now things get more interesting.

The page exists. It has a perfectly sensible title. Search can probably find it.

But the employee is browsing.

Where should information about parental leave live?

Under Benefits? Policies? Working Here? Life Events? HR? People? Family?

There may be a perfectly logical answer from the perspective of the team that owns the content. Unfortunately, nobody has informed the employee of that logic.

This is how intranets end up reproducing the organisation chart in clickable form. Information is grouped according to who owns it rather than why someone needs it.

Finance owns expenses, so expenses live under Finance. IT owns collaboration tools, so guidance on Teams lives under IT. HR owns flexible working, so flexible working lives under HR.

Administratively, this is beautifully tidy. But all it asks of the employee is that they understand your operating model before they can book a train, which is simply not a thing people actually do.

Search provides an escape hatch here, but it doesn’t make the underlying structure good. And people don’t always search. They browse, particularly when they don’t know what the thing they need is officially called.

Does better search help? Sometimes. But this is fundamentally an information architecture problem.

4. Several plausible versions exist

This is where search can actively make things worse.

Someone searches for the travel policy.

Excellent news: the intranet has found it. In fact, it has found six of them.

There’s the current policy page, a PDF from 2024, another PDF attached to an old news story, a version sitting in Finance’s SharePoint site, a regional variation and a PowerPoint deck from somebody’s manager briefing.

All contain roughly the right words. All look plausible. One is correct.

Possibly.

Your search engine has done exactly what you asked it to do. It has found things matching the query. You cannot really blame it for the fact your organisation has spent seven years quietly breeding travel policies.

This is not a search failure. It is a content management failure.

Organisations accumulate information because creating content is easy and retiring it is not. A new version gets uploaded but the old one stays where it was. Teams create local copies because they don’t trust the central one to remain available. PDFs escape into document libraries and spend the next decade popping up in search results like administrative ghosts.

The result isn’t a lack of information; it’s an excess of it.

Does better search help? Potentially the opposite. It can surface all the duplication with tremendous efficiency.

5. Nobody has agreed which version is authoritative

And now we reach the problem search cannot touch.

Imagine there are three pages explaining how a particular process works. Not three old versions of the same thing. Three current versions.

Operations says the process works one way. HR describes it slightly differently. A regional team has adapted it because the central process doesn’t quite work for them.

Which one should search rank first?

There is no technical answer to that question, because the organisation has not agreed what is true.

This is the point at which “findability” stops being an intranet problem at all. You can tune search weights, tidy the metadata, redesign the navigation and put a shiny AI assistant over the top of the whole lot.

The AI assistant will still need to decide which of your three contradictory answers to believe. That isn’t artificial intelligence. That’s asking a chatbot to referee your governance dispute.

Search can only help you find the wrong answer faster.

And that distinction’s kinda critical, because all five problems feel exactly the same to the employee: I can’t find the bloody thing.

Underneath that one complaint might be a technology problem, a vocabulary problem, a structural problem, a content problem or a governance problem.

Treat them all as “search” and you can spend quite a lot of money solving the wrong one.

Intranet findability is a set of trade-offs

I’ve been working recently on information architecture for an organisation we’ve worked with, on and off, for several years.

They have an intranet. It works. People still struggle to find things.

That’s less damning than it sounds. In an organisation of any real complexity, findability isn’t a problem you solve so much as a set of trade-offs you choose deliberately.

Ten teams can have a legitimate claim on the same page. Three of them call it something different. The structure that makes perfect sense to the person responsible for maintaining the information may make no sense at all to the person who needs it once every eighteen months.

Take parental leave.

HR might think of it as a policy. A benefits team might think of it as part of the employee offer. The employee concerned may be thinking “having a baby”. Their manager may be looking for “what do I need to do when someone goes on maternity leave?”

None of these people is wrong. Which is, frankly, inconvenient.

This is why information architecture gets difficult surprisingly quickly.

You cannot simply ask people where something “belongs” and expect one correct answer to emerge. Nor can you hand the problem to the content owners, because content owners know too much. They understand distinctions, structures and organisational boundaries that ordinary employees have neither the time nor inclination to learn.

Once you have worked somewhere long enough, all sorts of absurd things start to feel self-evident. Of course Expenses sits under Corporate Services. Of course Flexible Working is in People Policies rather than Ways of Working. Of course P&C means People and Culture and not, say, something involving procurement.

Then someone joins the company and ruins everything by having no idea what any of it means.

The job isn’t to discover the perfect structure. It’s to find the compromises that create the least friction for the greatest number of people.

And to do that, you need evidence.

How to diagnose intranet findability problems

The useful question is not “How should we reorganise the intranet?”

It’s “Why are people struggling to find things?”

Different research methods let you see different bits of the problem.

Analytics and search logs show you what people do

Start with behaviour. What are people searching for? Which queries produce no results? Which searches are repeatedly reformulated? Where do people bounce backwards and forwards?

Search logs are particularly useful because they capture people expressing a need in their own language, rather than the language you’ve thoughtfully invented for them.

If 600 employees search for “payslip” every month and your payroll team calls the page “My Compensation Statement”, you have learned something.

If they repeatedly search for something that doesn’t exist, you may have found a content gap.

If they search for a policy that exists in seven places, congratulations: you may have found an entirely different problem.

Analytics tell you what happened. They don’t necessarily tell you why.

Interviews show you how people think

Talk to people and you begin to understand the mental model behind the behaviour.

What words do they use? Where would they expect something to live? What do they do when they can’t find it? Who do they ask instead?

This is often where apparently obvious organisational logic begins to wobble.

A content owner may tell you that something “obviously belongs under Operations”. An employee may reveal that they have no idea what Operations actually does.

Both are useful findings. Only one of those people is trying to find the page.

Open card sorting shows how people group things

In an open card sort, you give participants a collection of content items and ask them to group them in whatever way makes sense to them, then name the groups.

The important thing here is that you are not holding a referendum on the navigation.

If seven out of ten people put something under “Working Here”, democracy does not require you to put it there.

What you’re looking for is pattern.

Which things repeatedly end up together? Where is there broad agreement? Where do people diverge wildly? What words do they naturally use for categories?

And, often most usefully, which distinctions that seemed enormously important to the project team turn out to be invisible to everyone else?

Closed card sorting tests your proposed categories

A closed card sort starts from the other direction.

You provide the categories and ask people where they would expect particular items to sit.

Now you’re testing your homework.

If almost everyone puts an item where you expected, lovely.

If participants scatter it across five categories like confetti, also useful.

It tells you that the distinction which looked beautifully crisp on the workshop whiteboard may not survive contact with anyone who wasn’t in the workshop.

Again, the result does not tell you what you must do.

It gives you evidence.

Tree testing tells you whether people can actually navigate it

Once you have a proposed structure, tree testing lets you test the hierarchy without all the distracting furniture of an actual intranet.

Give someone a task: You want to find out whether you can work from another country for a month. Where would you go?

Then watch.

Can they reach the right destination? Do they take a direct route? Do they wander around? Does everyone confidently choose the same wrong branch?

That last one is particularly valuable. One person getting lost might be a person getting lost. Twenty people getting lost in exactly the same place is a design decision waving at you.

And it is considerably cheaper to discover this before launch than six months afterwards, when the navigation is live, the project team has disbanded and everyone has developed strong emotional attachments to the nouns.

Test the structure before you build the bloody thing.

None of these methods gives you the whole picture.

In Digital Communications at Work, we use the analogy of reconstructing an extinct animal from fossils. You rarely have a complete skeleton laid obligingly in front of you. You have fragments and traces from which you build the most plausible picture.

The same is true here.

Analytics cannot tell you about the page someone never found. Interviews tell you what people say they do, which is not always what they actually do. Card sorts strip away much of the context in which real information-seeking happens. Tree tests tell you whether people can navigate your proposed hierarchy, not whether the content waiting at the end is any good.

Every method gives you a partial view.

The useful stuff happens when you put them together.

Research still doesn’t give you the answer

This is the bit that tends to disappear from neat diagrams of the UX process.

You can run interviews, analyse search data, conduct card sorts and tree-test your proposed navigation.

At the end of all that, the computer does not flash up:

CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE DISCOVERED THE CORRECT INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Annoying, really. You still have to make decisions.

Research gives you evidence with which to make better compromises. It shows you where people’s mental models converge and where they don’t. It gives you grounds for pushing back when a team insists its content absolutely must have a top-level navigation item because it is Very Important Indeed. It helps you distinguish an edge case from a widespread need.

But there is no objectively perfect taxonomy sitting somewhere in the data waiting for a sufficiently diligent consultant to uncover it.

At some point, someone has to choose.

And sometimes the research takes you straight back to the organisational questions you were hoping the intranet project would allow you to avoid.

Who owns this information?

Who is allowed to change it?

Which version takes precedence?

Who decides when two parts of the organisation disagree?

Those are not search questions.

Bad search is a technology problem. Bad structure is a design problem. Duplication is a content problem. Authority is a governance problem.

To the employee, they all look exactly the same: I can’t find anything on the intranet.

That’s why curiosity is more useful than certainty here. Don’t begin with the solution you already wanted to implement and work backwards until the research agrees with you. Work out which problem you actually have.

If people can’t find anything on your intranet, don’t start by moving the navigation around.

At Lithos Partners, we help large and complex organisations work out what is actually going wrong before jumping to the solution: using research, analytics, card sorting, tree testing and good old-fashioned conversations with the people who have to use the thing.

And if you’re not quite ready to have that conversation, Jonathan Phillips and I go into considerably more detail about search, information architecture, governance and designing channels around employee needs in Digital Communications at Work: Designing Channels for Employee Engagement and Experience.

Digital nomads aren’t the problem. Your ways of working are.

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

How to communicate with employees working across locations and time zones

Surrealist scene of a suited worker facing three open doors leading to an office, a tropical beach and mountains, beneath a large clock and blue sky.

Last year I spent a couple of months living and working in Nagasaki, as part of a programme that brought together digital nomads from all over the world.

We lived in the same apartment building, worked from the same spaces and gradually got to know one another. After a while, something occurred to me.

Almost nobody had a job.

We worked, obviously. Quite a lot, in most cases. But out of a group of around 20 people, only one had what you might call a conventional job with an employer. Everyone else was freelance, self-employed or running their own business.

I don’t think that’s because freelancing is intrinsically more appealing. You certainly don’t choose it for the pension. Or the security. Or the tremendous thrill of doing your own accounts.

They had chosen self-employment because, for many people, it’s still the only door through which that degree of flexibility is available.

That’s beginning to change. More employers now offer some version of “work from anywhere”: perhaps a few weeks a year in another country, within whatever tax, legal and employment restrictions apply. For someone with family overseas, that can mean spending meaningful time with them without burning through a year’s annual leave. For others, it’s simply an opportunity to live somewhere else for a while without having to resign first.

But the prospect of employees working from Japan, Johannesburg or just somewhere inconveniently far from head office tends to make organisations nervous. How will we communicate? How will their manager know what they’re doing? What about meetings? What about culture?

Earlier this week I hosted a discussion for IABC EMENA with communicators and people who work in and manage distributed teams about exactly these questions. And the more we talked, the clearer something became.

Digital nomads aren’t really a communications problem. They’re a stress test for all the communication problems you already have.

We bought the tools. We didn’t redesign the work.

Most organisations now have everything they technically need to work across locations and time zones.

Teams. Slack. Zoom. SharePoint. Google Drive. Pick your particular collection of tabs.

But when those tools arrived — particularly during the great everyone-go-home scramble of 2020 — we mostly poured our existing ways of working into them.

We took the meeting, put it inside Teams and congratulated ourselves on the digital workplace. The desk-side interruption became a chat message. The attachment became a SharePoint link nobody could open. And the working day remained stubbornly organised around the assumption that everyone important was awake at the same time.

We changed the interface without changing much underneath it.

I remember working for a global bank before video calls became routine. I would schlep all the way into the City for 8am in order to sit at a desk and get on the phone to colleagues in India, China and Singapore.

On reflection, this was absolute madness. But the office was considered the place where work happened, even when everyone I was actually working with was thousands of miles away.

Some of that assumption survives. We have distributed technology but surprisingly location-dependent habits. We still organise work around everybody being available at roughly the same time. We still use meetings to transfer information that could have been written down. Decisions still happen in rooms, then travel by osmosis to everyone who wasn’t there.

A digital nomad six time zones away makes those weaknesses obvious.

But they didn’t create them.

If you have to be there to know, you have a documentation problem

One of the most interesting points in our discussion was about what happens after a hybrid meeting.

The remote person can see the slides. They can hear the conversation. With decent facilitation, they can contribute perfectly well.

Then the call ends. The minutes record the decision. Three people walk towards the coffee machine, carry on talking and change it.

Congratulations: your source of truth is now a conversation nobody else knows happened.

For the people who were physically there, this is almost invisible. They know the extra context. They heard the objection raised afterwards. They know that when everyone said “yes” in the meeting, what they apparently meant was “yes, unless Dave catches me by the Nespresso machine.”

The remote colleague gets none of that.

That’s an influence gap, but it’s easy to interpret it as evidence that remote work doesn’t work.

I’d argue it shows something else: too much organisational knowledge and influence is still travelling informally.

The same problem affects people who work from home, people in regional offices, colleagues in other countries, part-time workers and anyone who has the temerity to leave the office before the boss does.

I’ve seen this close up. In one organisation, proximity to senior people had a surprisingly large effect on who got pulled into interesting pieces of work. Something came up, a senior person looked around, and the person sitting nearest got the juicy project.

Do that often enough and proximity starts to compound. Interesting work brings exposure; exposure brings opportunities; opportunities bring more interesting work.

Meanwhile the person doing the nursery pickup has committed the career-limiting offence of being somewhere else at 5.37pm.

That’s not collaboration; it’s rewarding familiarity.

If important decisions only exist in the heads of people who happened to be present when they were made, location isn’t your problem. Documentation is.

Not every meeting should be an email

I am temperamentally attracted to asynchronous working, not least because I have spent enough of my adult life in meetings to have developed Strong Opinions about them.

We’ve spent years talking about paperless meetings. But what if we look at it the other way round, as meetingless papers? Write the thing down, let people read it when they’re awake, and use everyone’s overlapping time for something more useful.

Nobody needs 45 minutes in a calendar to watch somebody read aloud from a slide.

But the discussion challenged me on this, rightly.

The question isn’t really whether we should have fewer meetings. It’s what synchronous communication is uniquely good at.

If the purpose is simply to transfer information, write it down. Your calendar does not need to become a theatrical venue for information that already exists elsewhere.

But if the quality of the outcome depends on interaction, that’s different.

High ambiguity. High emotional load. Conflict. Urgency. Several people needing to build on one another’s thinking. Creative or strategic problems where the friction between different views is part of the work.

Those are good reasons to be together at the same time.

There’s another one which is easier to dismiss because it sounds fluffy: sometimes humans need to see other humans.

If every interaction in a distributed team is transactional, people become a collection of avatars who materialise when they need something from you. The small conversations that build familiarity matter. They give us context. They help us understand someone’s tone. They make us more likely to give a slightly brusque message the benefit of the doubt rather than spending the afternoon constructing an elaborate theory about why Deborah in Procurement now hates us.

Culture needs some of what Tony Stewart called “squishy human stuff” too.

The answer isn’t meetings or async. It’s designing deliberately for both.

Async isn’t automatically equitable

There’s a comforting idea that asynchronous communication democratises work. And it can.

Writing things down removes some of the advantages enjoyed by the loudest person in the meeting. People in different time zones can contribute. Everyone can see the same information. People have time to think before responding.

But writing creates hierarchies of its own.

The person working in their first language may be able to formulate an argument faster than someone working in their second, third or fourth. Confident writers can sound more authoritative than people who think best by talking an idea through.

Then there’s the colleague who apparently has Slack surgically attached to their central nervous system and manages to respond to every question before the rest of the team has opened it.

Their answer becomes the starting point. Everyone else’s thinking bends around it.

Async cultures can still reward availability. If the same people always respond first because they’re permanently online, we’ve simply replaced proximity bias with notification bias.

Good distributed communication isn’t about declaring everything asynchronous and going home. It’s about sequencing.

Give people material in advance. Let them think and contribute independently — sometimes even without seeing everyone else’s answers first. Bring people together when interaction will improve the outcome. Then document the decision so nobody needs to have been there to know what happened.

That’s not a remote-work trick. It’s just good communication design.

Time zones are a design constraint, not a personal failing

If your team stretches from Japan to California, there is no magical meeting time that works for everybody.

Someone is getting the bad end of the deal. The question is whether it’s always the same someone.

Global organisations have a habit of discovering that “the time that works best globally” bears an uncanny resemblance to 10am wherever the most senior person sits. Funny, that.

Everyone else gets a recording and an invitation to feel included.

That isn’t an equivalent experience. If one group gets to ask questions, react, challenge and participate while another gets to press play eight hours later, you haven’t run a global event. You’ve run an HQ event with international distribution.

Sometimes the fairest answer is to run something twice. Sometimes you rotate the inconvenience. Sometimes the answer isn’t a global meeting at all, but stronger regional communities connected by good documentation and handovers.

And sometimes the time difference itself becomes useful.

When my business partner is in the UK and I’m working from Asia, we can use the gap almost as a superpower. I work through my day, hand something over, and he picks it up as his begins. With the right handover, we can fit two working days into one calendar day.

But that only works if the handover is good.

“Over to you!” followed by a mysterious SharePoint link and six hours of radio silence is not a handover.

Distributed work makes the quality of your communication infrastructure visible very quickly. Ambiguous ownership, missing context and decisions buried in someone’s inbox become much more expensive when the person who can explain them has just gone to bed.

Flexibility doesn’t have to mean the same thing for everyone

There is an obvious challenge here for employers.

If one employee can spend six weeks working from Lisbon, what do you say to someone whose job requires them to be physically present?

This matters because flexibility can very easily become another laptop-class perk: something available to senior people whose work can be done from a rooftop in Barcelona while everyone else is told that flexibility is one of the company’s core values and could they please confirm their Saturday shift.

But equity doesn’t require identical arrangements.

One of the points from our discussion that has stuck with me is that for someone working shifts, flexibility might actually mean certainty.

Knowing your rota far enough in advance to organise childcare, appointments or the rest of your life around it can give someone more meaningful control than a vague promise of “flexible working”.

For someone else it might mean more control over start and finish times. For another person it might be the ability to swap shifts more easily.

The useful question isn’t “can everybody work from Bali?”

It’s “how much autonomy can we reasonably give people over where, when and how they work, given the actual requirements of their role?”

And if the answer is none, organisations should at least be capable of explaining why.

“We’ve always done it this way” is an explanation. It’s just not a very good one.

Managers need object permanence

Technology is only part of this.

Some managers are excellent at managing distributed teams. Others are like toddlers, or possibly dolphins: they haven’t quite developed object permanence. If they can’t see you, they struggle to conceive that you continue to exist.

You disappear from view and, apparently, cease producing work.

Presence then becomes a proxy for performance. The green dot is good. A bum on a seat is better. Being within a two-metre radius of someone senior at precisely the moment they remember a project exists is best of all.

None of this is really about productivity. Visibility is simply easier to observe than outcomes.

And distributed work is deeply inconvenient to that style of management because it removes the comforting visual cues. You can’t glance across an office and see someone looking industrious. You have to know what they’re supposed to be doing, whether they’re doing it and whether the work is any good.

Which sounds suspiciously like management.

Distributed teams force managers to do more of that work explicitly: setting expectations, creating clarity, facilitating communication, connecting people, documenting decisions and judging contribution by something more meaningful than whether Teams thinks you’re available.

That takes more intentionality than walking around an office and assuming communication will happen by ambient magic.

But intentional doesn’t mean complicated.

Teams can agree where different kinds of communication belong. They can decide what requires a meeting and what doesn’t. They can establish handovers. They can create space for the non-transactional squishy human stuff. They can ask colleagues in different regions what would actually make participation easier rather than announcing that the global town hall will be at 3am their time and helpfully providing a recording.

None of this requires a new platform.

Which is unfortunate news for anyone hoping to solve it by buying one.

Digital nomads are the edge case that reveals the system

This is why I think organisations are asking the wrong question when they ask how to communicate with digital nomad employees.

You don’t need a digital nomad communication strategy.

You need ways of working that don’t depend on everybody being in the same building, in the same time zone, with the same working pattern and the same access to the boss.

Because the benefits extend far beyond the person answering Teams from Sarajevo (hi! 👋).

They extend to the parent doing the school run. The colleague working in their second language. The regional office six hours ahead of HQ. The person working part-time. The field worker who doesn’t spend all day looking at a laptop. The employee who thinks better before they speak. And, yes, the person who would quite like to spend six weeks closer to family without having to quit their job to do it.

Digital nomads make the cracks easier to see. But the cracks were already there.

And if your communication only works when everybody is in roughly the same place at roughly the same time, digital nomads aren’t your problem.

Your ways of working are.

The communication mismatch: Why risk-averse sectors struggle with social media

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A businessman in a dark suit stands at a podium reading financial compliance documents; the documents flow from his mouth toward a bright neon social media feed on the right, marked with repeated "REJECTED" stamps. The feed displays viral content (dogs, travel, coffee, emojis) with high engagement numbers. The composition contrasts formal financial communication with the algorithm's preference for engagement-driven content.

Platforms engineered to make you angry, envious or unable to stop scrolling are, it turns out, not ideal places to get financial advice.

And yet here we are.

I’ve spent nearly two decades working around this problem, from the early days of social through my time as Head of Digital Comms at a global bank, to a decade advising fintech, insurance, legal and other regulated sectors.

The pattern is remarkably consistent. Organisations want to be on social media. They believe they should be there. Someone senior has noticed a competitor doing suspiciously well on LinkedIn. A strategy is commissioned. A content calendar appears. Somebody says we need to “humanise the brand”.

And then everyone discovers that the platforms reward almost exactly the opposite of what the organisation is built to do.

This isn’t really a content problem. It’s a structural mismatch between the communication social platforms reward and the communication risk-averse organisations actually need to do.

And no amount of making the logo bigger will fix it.

The incentives are almost perfectly backwards

Social platforms reward certainty, novelty, outrage and aspiration. They like strong opinions, simple answers and people who became financially independent at 23 through a combination of waking up at 4.30am, owning seven Airbnbs and selling a course explaining how you can too.

Nuance has a tougher time.

Good financial communication is slow, qualified and probabilistic. It contains sentences like “this depends on your circumstances” and “the value of your investment may go down as well as up”. Nobody has ever screenshotted a risk disclaimer and captioned it THIS 👏.

The same tension exists across regulated sectors. Insurance has edge cases. Law has liability. Pharma has uncertainty and adverse effects. Financial products contain actual financial risk. These aren’t unfortunate communication wrinkles awaiting a sufficiently talented copywriter. They are the nature of the thing being communicated.

The platform says: make it fast, certain and shareable.

The sector says: it’s complicated, and we’re legally required to explain several ways this might go wrong.

Then someone in Marketing asks if we could make it a carousel.

The organisation isn’t built for this either

There is a second mismatch, and this one happens inside the building.

LinkedIn rewards what we like to call authenticity, although what it really rewards is a very particular performance of authenticity: personal, frequent, opinionated, immediate and just controversial enough to generate comments without requiring a meeting with HR.

Risk-averse organisations are not built like this.

They’re built around governance, approval, consistency and the management of reputational risk. This can be maddening if you’re waiting three days for someone to approve a post saying you’re delighted to be attending a conference. But these things aren’t necessarily organisational pathologies. A bank should care more about whether something is true than whether it is trending.

Put that organisation onto a platform demanding speed, personality and opinion and one of two things generally happens.

Either it moves at organisational speed and nobody sees it.

Or it learns to imitate the people who are getting attention.

Thus we arrive at one of the stranger artefacts of modern corporate life: the professionally produced spontaneous thought.

The CEO selfie accompanied by a surprisingly well-structured personal reflection. The employee story which has passed through six pairs of hands and somehow acquired three brand messages. The executive who independently decides, at exactly 8.07am on Tuesday, to share precisely the same campaign hashtag as 46 colleagues.

The more carefully authenticity is manufactured, the less authentic it becomes.

Now make the employees do it

This is where employee advocacy enters the chat.

The logic is seductive. Corporate accounts don’t travel very far. People trust people more than logos. Employees have networks. Employees are authentic! Excellent! Let’s get the employees posting!

And this is roughly where a perfectly sensible observation about how trust works turns into a programme with a toolkit, a webinar, some Canva templates and an Excel sheet tracking who has posted this month.

Because organisations tend to want the benefits of employee voice without the awkward bit where the employee has to have a voice.

Thought leadership only works if somebody has a thought. Advocacy only means anything if people have some agency over what they advocate for.

Give 400 employees the same approved copy and branded graphic and you haven’t created 400 advocates. You’ve created one corporate account with 400 passwords and family photographs. And trust me, audiences can tell the difference.

The people who are genuinely good at this aren’t good because they attended a 45-minute personal branding webinar. They’re good because they know something. They have opinions. They have experience. They can connect what they know to what other people care about.

And, crucially, they feel sufficiently trusted by their organisation to say something that hasn’t first been passed around a Teams chat called FINAL_SOCIAL_COPY_v7.

That makes employee advocacy much less of an external communications problem than it first appears.

There isn’t really an inside and an outside any more

Once upon a time, internal and external communications could at least pretend to be separate.

Employees were over here. Customers and the public were over there. Internal Comms had an intranet; External Comms had journalists; Marketing had campaigns. Everyone had their own mailing list and, with luck, their own budget.

Social media has made that distinction largely fictional. An employee can read an announcement on the intranet at 9am, discuss it on Teams at 9.15, and post their interpretation of it on LinkedIn before lunch.

Meanwhile, the CEO’s supposedly personal LinkedIn post may have been drafted by Corporate Affairs, polished by an agency, checked by Legal and then read by more employees than the CEO’s actual internal communication.

The inside is outside. The outside comes straight back in.

Which creates a fairly obvious problem if the story you’re telling externally bears little resemblance to what people are experiencing internally.

You can spend a fortune telling the world you’re a wonderful employer. Your employees are also on LinkedIn.

Also, they have met you.

This is why I think we need to stop treating employee advocacy as essentially a distribution strategy. Its success depends on what happens long before anybody opens LinkedIn.

Do people understand what the organisation is doing and why? Do they know where their work fits? Do they trust what they’re being told? Do they have access to useful information? Do leaders trust them to exercise judgement?

If not, another advocacy toolkit is unlikely to be the breakthrough.

You can’t manufacture externally what doesn’t exist internally. Employee advocacy isn’t really a social media strategy, it’s an organisational trust strategy with a social media output.

Perhaps being bad at social is useful information

We tend to treat poor performance on social media as a problem requiring intervention.

Perhaps it is information.

If your organisation struggles to communicate effectively on a platform, that tells you something about the organisation, the platform or, usually, both.

But because we’ve spent the past 15 years treating social media presence as more or less axiomatic, we rarely ask the obvious question.

Why are we doing this?

Instead we ask how to improve the strategy.

We need a LinkedIn strategy.

We need an employee advocacy programme.

We need more video.

We need our leaders posting.

We need thought leadership.

But y tho?

Nobody wakes up wanting their bank to have better LinkedIn engagement. They want to know whether they can afford the mortgage.

So: FFS start there.

The boring stuff is often boring because it works

For some communication, the answer is deeply unfashionable.

A clear piece of long-form guidance on a channel you control can be read, revisited, checked and shared. Email remains remarkably effective at putting information in front of a known group of people. Documentation lets complexity exist without being squeezed into six slides with enormous numbers on them. An intranet can provide context, provenance and somewhere to find the bloody thing again next Tuesday.

None of this will make anyone at a marketing conference gasp, but that is not a serious argument against it.

Then there are people. Financial advisers, branch staff, lawyers, medical teams, managers, subject-matter experts: people who can explain the awkward bit, answer the follow-up question and understand why the answer for one person might not be the answer for another.

Some of those people will also be your best external communicators. Not because you’ve successfully transformed them into Brand Ambassadors™. But because expertise travels.

Someone who is useful, knowledgeable and trusted inside an organisation has a decent chance of being useful, knowledgeable and trusted outside it too.

Good thought leadership is often simply organisational knowledge with a name and a face attached to it. Comms doesn’t need to manufacture the thought. It needs to help the person who had it get it out of the building without sanding off everything interesting on the way.

Governance is critical, too. I know “governance is good, actually” is unlikely to get me booked for many tech conferences, but approval processes aren’t inherently communication failures. Sometimes they’re how organisations make sure what they say is accurate, lawful and trustworthy.

The answer isn’t zero governance. It’s governance proportionate to the risk, and quick enough that the information remains useful by the time it escapes.

Why do we keep doing this, then?

Because social media is wonderfully visible.

Followers! Impressions! Engagement!

A graph goes up and everybody gets to feel something happened.

“We posted 37 times this quarter and reached 1.2 million people” sounds reassuringly like achievement.

“We made our guidance considerably easier to understand” is harder to put on a dashboard.

This is one reason organisations repeatedly over-invest in things they can easily count. Social media provides abundant evidence that communication was distributed. It provides rather less evidence that communication did anything useful.

There is FOMO too, obviously.

Our competitors are there. Our customers are there. Our employees are there. The CEO is there and has started asking why a man he went to business school with gets more likes.

But “people are there” isn’t the same as “this is where this communication should happen”.

People are also in pubs. Most banks have resisted developing a pub strategy.

And social media isn’t really social media any more

There is another reason to revisit all this: the thing we’re calling social media isn’t really the thing organisations originally signed up for.

The promise was connection. Conversation. Communities. Organisations could talk directly to customers and employees; people could talk back; useful things might happen in public.

What we increasingly have instead is an advertising system wrapped around a feed.

Algorithms decide what gets seen. Organic reach has been squeezed. Platforms have become exceptionally sophisticated at identifying which bits of human behaviour will hold attention for long enough to put another advert beside them.

Advertising is useful.

Distribution is useful.

Discoverability is useful.

But advertising isn’t conversation, and attention-capture isn’t connection. We should stop pretending we’re still buying the thing in the 2012 brochure.

This matters particularly in regulated and high-trust sectors because social media doesn’t simply distribute their communications: it fundamentally changes them.

It encourages organisations to be more certain, more immediate, more personal and more provocative because those are the behaviours the system rewards. Then it provides a lovely dashboard showing how well the more provocative version performed.

The metric becomes the brief, and somewhere along the way, “is this useful?” becomes “did it engage?”

Use social where it earns its place

None of this means regulated organisations should delete LinkedIn, retreat behind the compliance manual and communicate exclusively through 47-page PDFs.

Social media can be extremely useful.

It can be good for discovery, recruitment, campaigning, customer service and professional reputation. It can help expertise travel beyond organisational boundaries. It can connect people who genuinely have something useful to say with people who genuinely want to hear it.

Those are jobs. “Being on social” isn’t one.

So start with your actual communication system. Where do people go when they need information they trust? Who do they ask? Which channels work for which tasks? Where does information get stuck? Where does it get distorted? What happens when something moves from internal to external and back again?

Then make those things work brilliantly.

And if you want employees to participate externally, don’t confuse enabling people to communicate with turning people into channels.

The former means giving people context, confidence, permission and access to good information, then trusting them to exercise judgement.

The latter means emailing everyone some suggested LinkedIn copy at 10am and wondering why 47 people are simultaneously “thrilled to share” the same news by lunchtime.

The channel should fit the job

For years we’ve treated social media presence as almost axiomatic. Of course an organisation should be there. The only questions were which platforms, how often and who gets the password.

I think that assumption deserves another look.

Not because social media is universally bad. Not because regulated organisations are uniquely incapable of being interesting. And not because everything was better when corporate communications involved a fax machine and a man called Nigel.

But because channels have characteristics. Organisations have characteristics. Communication tasks have characteristics.

Good communication happens when those things fit.

And the boundaries have changed. Employees are simultaneously audience, expert, commentator and public voice. What happens inside the organisation shapes what can credibly be said outside it. The external story comes straight back into the building to be judged by people who know whether it’s true.

Which means the answer isn’t simply to get better at feeding the platforms.

Sometimes the strategic decision is to stop trying to win a game whose rules require you to become worse at the thing people trust you to do.

Use social media where it earns its place. Trust knowledgeable people to have actual thoughts. Build the communication infrastructure that gives them something worth saying.

And stop assuming every communication problem needs to be solved in the feed.

This piece was prompted by commentary I contributed to Finextra’s “How Social Media Became a Fintech Antihero,” published in September 2026. The mismatch between social platforms and regulated sectors is one I’ve been working around for nearly two decades

The record without the reasoning

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
Surrealist painting of a wide steel filing cabinet drawer floating unsupported against a blue sky with scattered white clouds. Inside, a neat row of buff-coloured file folders has large rectangular sections cut away, revealing the same cloud-filled sky through the empty spaces.

Somewhere in your organisation there is a decision that everyone works around and nobody can explain.

It might be a field on a form that absolutely has to be filled in. An approval that must come from one particular team. A platform choice that constrains six other things. A rule about who can publish where. Something mildly annoying, surprisingly consequential and apparently ordained by God.

Ask why and you’ll get a shrug and a name, usually the name of someone who left in 2021.

The decision itself is in the record. It’s probably in several records. There’s a PowerPoint about it. A Teams thread. A project page nobody has looked at since launch. Possibly a PDF called FINAL_v7_APPROVED tucked lovingly into SharePoint.

What isn’t in any of them is the useful bit: why.

What trade-off was being made. What constraint applied at the time. What other option was considered and rejected. Whose objection was overruled and on what grounds. Which apparently permanent principle was, in reality, “we had £40k left in the budget and it’s use it or lose it.”

That part existed for about a fortnight, in the heads of four people and a meeting that wasn’t minuted properly, and then it evaporated.

This is something I think internal communicators — and anyone responsible for the digital workplace — need to take much more seriously.

We’ve spent fifteen years making work more findable, but we have not made it any more explicable.

Those are quite different problems. Worse, solving the first has made it easier to ignore the second, because a beautifully indexed archive of outcomes looks so much like organisational memory that we kinda stop noticing it isn’t.

Why the reasoning goes first

Every organisation loses knowledge. What’s less obvious is that it loses it in a pretty predictable order.

The decision survives because it has to. Someone needs to act on it, so eventually it becomes a policy, a configuration, a process map, a field marked mandatory.

The artefacts survive too. The deck. The paper. The approval email. The minutes saying “the group agreed to proceed with option B.”

What disappears first is the reasoning, and there are three mundane reasons for that:

The first is that reasoning is the only part that feels unnecessary to record at the time. When you’re in the middle of a decision, the logic is so obvious that writing it down feels faintly ridiculous. Of course we’re doing it this way. Everyone knows why.

The problem is that “everyone” is a group with an aggressive rate of attrition. Four years later, half of them have left, one has changed role twice, nobody can remember which supplier caused the problem, and a new person is staring at the resulting process wondering why on earth anyone would design it like this.

The second reason is that the reasoning is often awkward, embarassing even.

Real decisions are made under constraints. Budgets. Politics. Supplier relationships. Deadlines. Personal preferences. Compromises. A senior person who really, really liked option B.

None of this looks at all elegant six months later, so the rough edges get sanded off. What enters the official record is a rationale: tidy, retrospective and strategically aligned.

What happened was reasoning: contingent, human, occasionally embarrassing and considerably more useful.

And then there’s memory itself.

Six months later, ask the people involved why they made the decision and they will generally give you an answer. They’ll probably believe it, too. Humans are extremely good at constructing coherent explanations backwards from outcomes.

Which means there is a fairly short window in which you can capture why something actually happened. Miss it and you don’t preserve the reasoning later. You preserve a plausible replacement.

We touched on this in Digital Communications at Work as “shrinking organisational memory”, alongside hybrid working patterns and rising employee expectations as conditions tightening around communicators.

I’ve come to think this one has the longest tail. Hybrid arrangements will settle into something. Organisational memory won’t magically improve, because almost nothing in the way we’ve designed modern work is intended to preserve it.

Quite the opposite.

The expensive consequences of forgetting why

None of this appears as a line item in a budget, which is convenient, because it costs organisations a fortune.

Decisions become permanent by accident.

A decision with a recorded reason can be revisited. You look at the original constraint, ask whether it still applies and, if it doesn’t, change your mind.

A decision without a recorded reason has only two possible statuses: permanent or arbitrary. Neither is terribly useful.

In practice, organisations tend to choose permanent, because overturning something when you can’t explain why it exists feels reckless. So temporary constraints acquire the status of ancient law.

This is how you end up with an intranet governed in 2026 by the ghost of a licensing arrangement that expired in 2019.

Platform decisions are often driven by a single technical constraint: it has to be SharePoint, because…

The “because” deserves far more scrutiny than it usually gets. But if nobody writes the “because” down, three years later there is nothing to scrutinise. The organisation inherits the conclusion, assumes some clever person once had an excellent reason for it, and carries on.

It’s an extraordinarily efficient mechanism for turning temporary compromises into strategy.

New people can’t learn from the record

“We decided X” teaches you nothing.

Onboarding someone properly into a function is largely about teaching them the shape of decisions already made: why things work the way they do, which obvious alternatives have been tried before, where the bodies are buried and which bits of received wisdom are still true.

If none of that exists in the record, it has to be transmitted person-to-person.

Organisational knowledge then moves at the speed of coffee. And worse, it only reaches people who get invited for one.

This is one reason informal networks matter so much more inside organisations than org charts suggest. The person who knows why the process is like that becomes part of the infrastructure. Lose them and you haven’t just lost a person. You’ve deleted part of the manual.

Discovery becomes archaeology

When I go into an organisation to work out what’s actually wrong with its internal comms or digital workplace, a surprising amount of the work is reconstructing why the system looks like this in the first place.

Why are there three intranets? Why does this team own that channel? Why is this audience excluded? Why is everyone still producing a weekly PDF? Why is there a separate platform for seventeen people in Belgium?

Sometimes the archaeology is the discovery. The reason something happened five years ago turns out to explain a great deal about why it isn’t working now.

But it’s slow. And there is something a little absurd about paying an outside consultant to interview twelve people in order to reconstruct a decision your own organisation made.

Teams with decent decision records get to spend that time solving the current problem instead.

Please don’t create another database

The obvious response to this is to write a policy saying decisions must be documented. But really, please don’t.

“Document decisions” already appears in thousands of governance frameworks, where it sits alongside “ensure stakeholder alignment” and other phrases that are technically instructions but provide no clue what anybody should actually do.

It fails because it has no threshold, no format and no home, and in the real world, where I am forced to live, you need all three.

Set a threshold

Don’t document everything. That’s how you create another repository everyone resents.

Instead, record the reasoning behind decisions that will outlive the person making them, cost money or credibility to reverse, or constrain somebody else’s choices later.

That’s a much smaller number than it sounds. For most communications and digital workplace teams, you’re probably talking about a handful a quarter.

It also gives everyone permission not to document the other 97% of things they currently feel vaguely guilty about.

Give the record a fixed shape

Four lines will do it:

  • What we decided
  • What we chose it over
  • What made the difference
  • What would make us revisit this

That last line is the clever bit.

It turns a historical record into something useful. Whoever inherits the decision knows not only why it was made, but under what circumstances they have permission to change it.

It also improves the decision itself. A room full of people forced to answer “what would make us revisit this?” has to confront how certain it actually is.

“We will never reconsider this” sounds considerably sillier when someone has to type it into a box.

Put the reasoning next to the thing it explains

The most reliable way to lose a decision record is to create a dedicated Decision Log in a worthy corner of SharePoint and announce its existence in Teams.

Six months later it will contain eleven decisions, seven made by the person who created it.

Reasoning needs to live with the thing it explains: in the governance space where the platform decision sits, in the channel framework, in the standing papers for the group that made the call.

In Digital Communications at Work we describe programme governance as needing “just enough structure”: a steering group, a standing agenda, records that are actually kept and remain visible.

Most organisations already have somewhere this could live.

You almost certainly don’t need another tool.

One of the counterintuitive benefits of doing this properly is that you can actually write less down.

Teams that don’t capture the why tend to compensate by capturing everything else. Status updates. Meeting recaps. Partial summaries. Deck after deck explaining where we’ve got to, because nobody is entirely confident that the important thing has been retained.

Four honest lines about an actual decision can replace an awful lot of anxious documentation.

And a note on ownership: this isn’t a communications job in the sense that comms should become the organisation’s official minute-taker. It is a communications job in the sense that communications people are often among the few who sit across enough of the organisation to notice when a decision has gone feral and nobody can account for it.

That’s an argument for a seat at the governance table, not for taking the minutes.

And now we’re making the archive intelligent

There is one reason this perennial problem has suddenly become more urgent.

Until recently, people wrote things down on the assumption that the record was essentially inert. Yes, the organisation retained it. Yes, technically someone might find it. Yes, lawyers occasionally appeared carrying the word “discovery” when someone uses a DSAR as leverage.

But most of the time, the Teams chat you wrote in 2022 sat on a server doing nothing.

That assumption is disappearing.

I wrote about this recently for Reworked, prompted by the proposed sale of Spirit Airlines’ workplace data during its bankruptcy. The interesting thing about that story wasn’t simply that workplace messages had survived. We always knew they did.

It was that the archive had acquired value in its own right.

Emails, chats, documents and other traces of organisational life aren’t just records any more. They’re material that can be searched, analysed, synthesised and used to teach machines something about how organisations actually work.

Which creates an tricky tension.

At precisely the moment technology is becoming extraordinarily good at reading the organisational record, humans have more reason to be cautious about what they put into it.

You don’t have to believe your company’s Teams archive is going to be sold in a bankruptcy auction for that to change behaviour. You only have to think your colleagues believe their words may eventually be read by audiences they cannot currently imagine.

And people won’t respond by writing nothing down. They’ll do something much more rational. They’ll keep recording the decision. The project update. The agreed position. The clean version.

What they’ll become less inclined to record is the messy, contingent, human explanation of why one option won and another didn’t.

The politics. The uncertainty. The compromise. The constraint. The thing everyone in the room understood but nobody particularly wants appearing in an AI-generated summary three years from now.

In other words, exactly the part of organisational memory that was already starting to disappear.

That, my friends, is the paradox.

We’re building tools capable of searching almost everything an organisation has ever written at the same time as we’re creating stronger incentives for people not to write down the bits that would make the archive genuinely useful.

The result may be organisations with an almost perfect record of what they did and progressively less idea why they did it.

A decade of impeccably searchable history and no memory at all.

And it won’t happen because somebody forgot to switch on retention.

It’ll happen one perfectly sensible individual decision at a time.

I help organisations — usually large, usually complicated, often regulated — work out what their communication system is actually doing and how to make it hold together. That’s the work I do through Lithos Partners. If any of the above sounded uncomfortably familiar, get in touch.