The field of internal communications is changing fast. It’s already evolved beyond traditional intranets, top-down messages, and email-centric strategies.
Now, organizations are communicating with employees who are working at home and in the office. They’re looking for ways to engage and motivate frontline workers, who have traditionally had second-tier access to company comms.
They’re also trying to stand out from other employers by offering a stellar employee experience, giving employees the sense of purpose, wellbeing, and connection that they’re craving.
As new comms trends like these become the norm, you need to rethink your internal communications team. You need to develop a team structure that helps you achieve your communication and business goals. Otherwise, you’ll struggle to plan, deliver, and land the messages that employees need to hear.
So let’s see how you can build and scale your internal communications team in a way that maximizes your organization’s potential.
Responsibilities of an internal communications team
Before you decide on the roles and structure of your internal communications team, it’s helpful to review the kinds of tasks they are (or will be) responsible for.
Your internal communication department ensures that every piece of content is created and distributed in a way that supports company goals. But let’s get into the specifics.
Internal communication team responsibilities include the following. :
Developing an internal communications strategy
The internal comms team is responsible for devising and implementing an internal comms plan. This involves:
- Defining what you want to achieve with your employee communications
- Identifying the different segments within your audience
- Aligning internal messaging with company mission, purpose, and goals
- Setting and measuring internal communication KPIs
It all starts with assessing where you are right now. Your internal communications team will need to take stock of your communication channels and the effectiveness of your messaging, to decide how you’ll improve internal communications going forward.
Managing internal communication channels
There’s been a drive to move beyond email, which is great. It makes sense for desk-based workers, whose email inboxes were full to bursting. It also makes sense for frontline workers, who don’t always have a company email address.
But 73% of professionals say that the number of communication channels they use at work has increased over the past 12 months. And 1 in 4 workers say they experience miscommunication multiple times every day.
Having too many communication channels can be overwhelming and distracting for employees. There are lots of sets of login details to remember, lots of platforms to learn, and lots of notifications pinging.
So part of the internal communications team’s role is choosing the right communication channels, managing those channels, and ensuring employees don’t become overloaded.
Modern communication channels include instant messaging, social feeds, SMS, video conferencing, and a content hub. Your organization may benefit from some or all of these. It’s up to the internal comms team to consider the type of communications you want to share — and the best places to share them.
Implementing new technologies
For many organizations, a modern intranet or employee app now sits at the heart of their employee communication strategy. It provides the collaboration, communication, and social networking tools a modern workplace needs.
Finding and implementing the right internal communication tools is another job for your internal communication team. As part of this process, your team will look at existing comms technology, assessing how well it’s working for your company.
If improvements are needed, they’ll demo a selection of employee apps and intranets, looking for a solution that meets the needs of every employee, including those on the frontline.
They’ll then take responsibility for implementing a new employee communications tool, championing it across the organization, getting buy-in from stakeholders, and ensuring best practices when the tool is up and running.
Creating and curating content
Another key responsibility for your internal communication team is the creation and curation of content. It’s their job to keep your communication channels — particularly your news feed and content hub — active and engaging. And to ensure effective internal communication across the organization.
Depending on the size and needs of your organization, that might mean creating and managing an editorial calendar. It may involve seeking content from department heads. It may also mean creating an internal communication style guide that supports employees, managers, and leaders to write their own content.
Collaborating with other departments
An in-house internal communications team needs to collaborate across different departments. This prevents silos from developing and ensures that all teams communicate effectively with one another.
Your comms team members are responsible for supporting the leadership team, giving them insight into the best ways to share messages and build trust with employees.
The team may also work to surface or share engaging company stories. For example, they can seek positive employee stories to support the recruitment team — or share positive customer stories to support HR and their employee engagement work.
Their role may even involve delivering employee communication workshops to help managers communicate more effectively with their teams, especially during important projects or periods of change.
Tracking and improving staff engagement
As well as sharing essential updates and publishing a consistent schedule of content, an internal communications team is responsible for assessing content success.
They need to gauge the reach and engagement of their internal communications to determine what’s working — and what isn’t.
As part of your internal comms plan, your team needs to determine metrics and KPIs to track internal comms performance. The team should seek answers to questions like:
- How often are workers logging onto the company intranet?
- Are our messages successfully reaching employees?
- Are messages reaching employees on time?
- How many workers are taking the desired action after reading our messages?
By measuring and tracking staff engagement, the team can identify their best-performing content. They can also identify points of friction — or messages that are failing to get through.
This data gives your internal communications team the insight it needs to improve messaging and refine your employee communication strategy.
Roles needed for an internal communications team
So now we know what an in-house internal communications team does, let’s look at the essential roles you’ll need to fill. Just remember that every organization is different. So how you assign these roles and responsibilities will vary.
In a small and nimble internal comms team, you may have one team member wearing multiple hats. Larger organizations with more extensive internal communications needs are likely to have at least one person responsible for each of the following roles.
Internal communications head/lead/director
Every great team needs a great leader. Within your internal communications team structure, this person will be in charge of planning, implementing, and measuring the performance of your organizational communication strategy.
Internal communications business partner
Your internal communications business partner acts as a bridge between internal comms and other parts of the business.
They connect different locations and business units with your central messaging and communication strategy, empowering them to produce or share content and ensuring key messages are communicated consistently.
Internal communications channels coordinator
Your communication channels coordinator can be one person — or lots of people. It all depends on how many channels you’ll be using and how much content you’ll be producing.
The channels coordinator is responsible for managing communication channel strategy, ensuring channel standards are met, and creating a communication calendar. They’ll also distribute messages on the relevant channel to the relevant audience.
Internal communications multimedia executive
Visual content gets 94% more views than text-only content. So to ensure high levels of employee engagement on your communications platform, you should add visuals to your posts. To do this, you’ll need someone who can turn plain-text content into engaging infographics or videos.
How to build and scale your internal communications function
The following best practices will help you make the most of the resources you have as part of your internal communications team.
Step 1: Understand organizational goals
You can’t build or restructure your internal communication team without understanding business requirements first. So think it through.
How will your communication strategy support the overarching business strategy? What should internal communications do for your business? How does your comms strategy need to flex and change as you grow?
For example, if a part of your sales strategy is expanding to new locations, your communication practices, tools, and team structure should take this into account.
Step 2: Plan roles and responsibilities
Now that you’re clear on business goals, consider the different roles you’ll need to fill. Refer to the roles we shared above to decide which people you’ll need for your internal communication team.
Place these roles in an internal communication team org chart so it’s clear who reports to who. Also, assign responsibilities to each role so everyone knows and understands their remit.
Step 3: Invest in your internal communication team
To get the best from your internal communications team, you need to invest in their professional development. The better their skills and knowledge around workplace communications, the better for your company.
Even if you have a limited budget, there are plenty of free resources out there, created to help comms professionals get better at their jobs.
Step 4: Lead by example
If you’re the head of employee communications at your company, set the example you want your team to follow. Champion open communication, build trust, and recognize hard work.
As a comms leader you should, of course, ensure that communication within your own team is flawless. Establish protocols and a cadence for how you’ll communicate and collaborate with your internal communications team.
Step 5: Focus on efficiency
Internal communications teams often have to act fast. There are sometimes urgent situations that need to be addressed or communicated quickly. So your team needs to be ready to step up and hit the Send button.
Try to build a chain of command that isn’t hindered by bottlenecks. But, equally as important, put a review and approval process in place to ensure no misjudged messages go out to employees.
Communications team structure FAQs
How do you build an internal communication team?
If you want to build an internal communications team, you need to do the following:
1. Identify your team structure. Do you need assistants? Co-ordinators? Who will these team members report to? What are their responsibilities?
2. Recruit. Put together a job description and start advertising the agreed positions. Get your interview questions ready.
3. Hire. Evaluate applicants and select the one you think will fill the role the best.
You then need to evaluate your team's output and identify where you need support. This will be an ongoing process.
How should a communications team be structured?
The ideal communications team includes a head of internal communications, an internal communication business partner, an executive, an assistant, a co-ordinator, and possibly an internal communications multimedia executive. Depending on the size of your organization you may also need an Internal Communications director.
What does an internal communications team do?
An internal communications team looks after all communication within an organization.
They decide which communication channels and tools are best suited to the organization. They also develop and send employee communications, covering everything from C-suite updates to safety alerts to posts celebrating the latest company away day.
The work of an internal communications team has an impact on business operations, company culture, safety, employee engagement, and even employee retention.
Building and scaling a successful internal communications team
Internal communications vary a lot from one company to another. The structure of your internal communications team will depend on your organizational goals and the size of your business.
But no matter how big or small, the purpose of an internal communications department remains the same. To craft engaging employee communications that reach the right audience at the right time.
The tips we’ve included above will help you build a team with the skills and expertise to achieve that purpose. The right internal communication tech will help, too.
