How to align internal comms with business strategy

The difference between a comms plan that gets approved and one that gets championed? The second one speaks senior leader language.

There's a version of internal comms planning that goes like this: list the channels, fill the calendar, add a line about “supporting the employee experience”, submit for sign-off.

It usually gets approved, but it doesn't really get anyone excited.

But there’s a better version. The one where the internal communication strategy reads like it was written by someone who understands what keeps the executive team awake at night. Where every activity traces back to something the business is trying to achieve. That version is more likely to get budget and a seat at the table.

With planning season creeping up on us, here's how to write the second version.

Start with the business plan, not the comms plan

This sounds obvious, but you’d be shocked at how rarely this happens.

Before you set a single internal communication goal, get hold of the business strategy and read it like a communicator. What’s the organisation trying to do in the next 18 months: grow into new markets? Integrate an acquisition? Improve safety performance? Retain talent?

Every one of these ambitions has a human dependency. Growth needs people who understand the direction. Integration needs two cultures learning to trust each other. Safety needs behaviour change. Retention needs colleagues who feel connected to something worth staying for.

Fix up. Look sharp. This is your territory. Communication doesn't sit alongside the business strategy. It's the vehicle in which the strategy travels from a slide deck into 10,000 minds.

Translate ambitions into comms objectives 

Here's a simple test for every objective in your plan: could you explain to your CEO why it matters to them?

“Increase intranet engagement by 15%” fails the test. Engagement with what? To what end?

But “Ensure every colleague can explain our three strategic priorities in their own words” passes. So does “reduce the gap between head office and frontline understanding of the change programme”.

These are objectives a leadership team can care about, because they describe business outcomes with communication as the mechanism.

If you're not sure where the gaps are, that's what an audit’s for. We've written a companion piece on how to conduct an internal communications audit. Do that first, and your objectives write themselves.

Measure what the business measures

Internal communications KPIs can have a credibility problem, and it's often self-inflicted. Opens, clicks, and likes are activity measures. Useful for tuning channels but lost in a board pack.

Better measures connect communication to things the business already counts. Awareness and understanding of strategy, tracked over time. Movement in engagement survey scores for the audiences you targeted. Adoption of the new system. Uptake of the safety behaviour. Time-to-productivity for new joiners.

You don't need dozens of measures, but it's useful to have a handful that the SLT recognise and with communication's contribution visible. 

If you want to go deeper here, discover 25 of our finest measurement tips drawn from more than 60 years of internal communications experience.

Make the narrative do the heavy lifting 

Once you understand business priorities, they can become your editorial spine. 

Every story you tell should be doing a job for one of them. The logistics team who found a better way of working isn't just a nice story; it's proof your values and culture programme are hitting the spot. 

The graduate describing why she joined isn't filler. She's a fine example of employer brand.

This is how to improve internal communication without adding a single channel. Stop broadcasting information and start telling stories in service of the strategy. We're forever making this case, most recently in our 60-second guide to IC storytelling.

What alignment looks like in practice 

When Spirax Group set out to build what they called The Communicating Organisation, the ambition was to make communication a core business capability, something every leader and manager owned, measured and improved, because the business's global growth depended on it. 

That's the truest expression of alignment: communication treated not as a support function but as infrastructure. Every organisation can benefit from moving in that direction, and planning season is the time to take the first step.

Listen to Colin Archer, Spirax’s Head of Internal Communications, talk to Katie Macaulay about The Communicating Organisation on The Internal Comms Podcast.

The confidence to plan like a strategist

One last thing:

Aligning with business strategy isn't about justifying your existence as an internal comms team. You don't need permission to be strategic. The organisations that communicate best are the ones where the IC team walks into planning season with a point of view about what the business needs and the evidence to back it.

That's the plan that gets championed.

If you'd like a thinking partner for yours, that's what we do. A communication audit to build your evidence base, an internal communication strategy that aligns comms with business priorities and sets outcomes you can measure, or, if transformation is the story your plan needs to encompass, we're experts in change communication that turns a programme into a movement. We're ready when you are.