You’ve sent out the content. But has it been seen and acted on?

Most businesses run two kinds of communication channels, and one receives a significantly larger amount of focus, investment, and strategy than the other.

The first is external, customer and prospect-facing communications marketing and advertising. These functions have the aim of capturing the attention of paying customers and maintaining it. Companies tend to have a healthy budget, a robust strategy, an entire team, and/or agency support. Theories and ideas are planned, A/B tested, reported on, and executed within seasonal and segment-driven campaigns. If it works, it's iterated and tweaked; if it doesn't, someone is responsible for explaining why, based on the data.

The second is internal—employee-facing communications. For desk-based workers, executing this is a relatively straightforward ask: pull on channels such as intranets, email, Slack, or Teams. For the deskless majority, the only channel they'll see—screens—is populated with JPEGs or clunky templates, made in an afternoon or whenever the commsperson responsible has a spare moment to create it. Has it been sent? Tick. Has it been seen, understood, and acted on? Not sure.

To be clear, the disparity here isn't anyone's fault necessarily. It's a skewed resource issue, one that is heavily upweighted to new customers.

Global advertising spend is forecast to hit $1.3 trillion in 2026, up 9% year-over-year, and roughly double what it was pre-pandemic*. That money buys a very specific kind of knowledge: what makes a distracted person notice something, remember it, and act on it. The knowledge exists. It's published, taught and tested constantly. It's time this was applied to our own employees.

Where the gap shows up

The cost of this gap shows up in five places, and they're all things the business already reports on and cares about:

1. Content without a proven strategy. In a busy environment, where passers-by only give three-second glances, information never gets absorbed properly, or people don't understand it. The result is no reliable assurance that messages will get across—about operational updates, shift patterns, productivity, or new ways of working. The time internal comms teams took to generate the content in the first place is wasted.
2. Company culture, employee engagement, and recognition aren't felt as much as they should be. The result is higher churn and more days lost to unplanned absence—costing businesses an estimated $3,600 per year per hire for every hourly worker.**
3. Crucial operational updates around shift patterns, priorities, and process changes don't reach workers on the floor. Mistakes are made, miscommunication occurs and output is compromised, so productivity levels fall.
4. Safety incidents and risk levels increase. This is due to messages being delivered then forgotten. The organisation may be compliant, but if behaviours don't change, risk will only increase.

Finally, without the data, organisations have no benchmarks to improve on, and these costs compound month on month.

The action steps to take

The good news is that none of this requires new science. The principles that make advertising work—what earns a glance, what gets remembered, and what changes behavior—are well documented, academically tested, and proven commercially at a trillion-dollar scale. They're not locked away in agency IP or waiting on some emerging technology.

In fact, these principles are already working on your employees every single day. On the commute, on their phones, in every feed they scroll—they're on the receiving end of decades of behavioural science, whether they notice it or not. This approach doesn't need to be invented. It needs to be pointed at a different audience.

Which makes this an unusual kind of gap to have: the science exists, the channel already exists, and the audience is already standing in front of it, screen in view. Nothing needs to be built from scratch. What's missing is the decision to apply what we already know.

Somewhere to start

The place to begin isn't a strategy document. It's standing in front of the screen or noticeboard your employees pass most often, at the busiest point in the day, and asking three honest questions:

• Who is in front of this right now? Not just ‘staff’—which shift, doing what job, with how many seconds to spare, and at what point in their day are they viewing these screens?
• What is it asking them to do? If the answer is ‘be aware of X’ it isn't asking for anything, and awareness isn't a behaviour you can check.
• How would I know if it worked? If there's no answer, you don't have a true channel yet. Most organisations can't answer all three the first time they try. That's not a failure, it's the same skewed-resource issue at the root of everything above, just visible up close. It's also the most fixable problem on this list, because none of it requires new investment to start finding out.

Next week in our series, we’ll highlight the four numbers that explain most internal communication failures - and how you can diagnose, overcome, and mitigate them.

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