Small internal comms team? Here's how to maximise your impact

Are you starting the week as an internal comms team of one, or with a very limited team? You’re not alone.

But how can you make sure you’re delivering meaningful work, without burning out?

Align comms activity with business strategy

No matter the size of your team, you should prioritise your work so that it supports your business strategy. Make sure you understand what the areas of focus are for your business, and develop an internal comms strategy to support this.

Particularly when you’re a small team, you can’t afford to waste time on nice-to-have activities that don’t drive the business forward. So it’s a no to those posters for the next cake bake sale, sorry.

Got your strategy? Great! Don’t let is sit in a drawer gathering dust. Keep it up to date, refer to it often, and hold yourself – and stakeholders – accountable to it.

Set SLAs

Once you have your strategy, agree service level agreements (SLAs) with your stakeholders. This is so important, as it ensures you are all aligned around what you will – and won’t – do.

As with your internal comms strategy, once you have SLAs agreed, refer to them often and remind your stakeholders what they agreed to. This helps you avoid scope creep and ‘can-you-just’ requests.

Sweat your channels

You don’t need loads of channels to have effective internal communication. In fact, you’re better off having fewer channels, but clearly defining what each of them is for. Especially if you’re a small team, you won’t have the time to manage lots of channels.

Create a simple channels matrix that outlines what each channel is for and how it will be used. For example, you won’t drive behaviour change through email – keep that for informational updates, like newsletters.

Create a content strategy

Look at the business strategy. It’s probably broken down into themes or areas. For each of these areas there’s likely to be activity that will happen throughout the year, and there will be an owner for each area – e.g. a People pillar will be owned by the Chief People Officer or HR Director.

Now you need to find the stories in the business that bring each of these areas to life – the proof of the pudding.

But how do you do that when you don’t have a team?

Build your comms champion network

It might sound daunting to build a network of champions, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, you probably already have one – or the beginnings of one, at least.

Who always engages with your comms? Who stops you in the corridor for a chat? Who complains about comms all the time (yes, believe it or not, they’re champions, too)?

Ask for their help. Ask them to be your eyes and ears. To take the temperature of the business and give you feedback on how your messages land. They will also likely be aware of examples of colleagues living the values, for example, or delivering against those strategic pillars I mentioned earlier.

Small-but-mighty comms teams thrive because they have great relationships. You can’t be everywhere at once, but if you invest in building trust and relationships with key stakeholders and influencers around the business, you can extend your reach far beyond the comms team.

Automate what you can

Don’t be afraid to use AI to make your life easier. Need a draft comms plan to get you started? Use AI. Need to proofread comms? Use AI. Want to pull out the key points from reports? Use AI.

A word of caution: be careful when using open-source AI, such as ChatGPT. Don’t use company sensitive information. Increasingly, companies are developing their own, in-house AI, which you can confidently use knowing that the information is staying within the company.

But if you’re working on something generic, AI can certainly be useful.

Still struggling? Consider interim or agency support

We live in interesting times, and it may not be possible to invest in growing the internal comms team right now. But that doesn’t mean you have to just suck it and see.

You may not be able to bring in permanent hires right now, but can you consider interim, consultancy, or agency support? Quite often the budget for interim or agency support comes from a different ‘pot’ to permanent headcount.

Plus, you can bring someone in for a couple of months, or for a specific project, and that’s it. No worries about pension payments, holiday or sick pay. This is a great way to plug any skills gaps you may have in your team. A permanent hire can take time to get up to speed, whereas an interim or agency will hit the ground running and deliver from day one.