Communication shows up on every culture survey as the thing that needs work. The reason is structural. Most companies have not actually defined what good communication is, what it produces, or how to measure it. Mara Standlund, Chief People Officer at Resilience, breaks the topic down on Reimagining Company Culture in a way that gives people teams something to build against.
Mara's career has spanned cloud computing, e-commerce, healthcare, and academia, with leadership roles across six continents. That cross-industry experience produces the right kind of skepticism: most communication frameworks travel poorly between contexts. The ones that hold up tend to share a few traits.
Why Communication Is the Hardest Part of Scaling Culture
The bigger the company, the higher the bar for communication. A team of fifteen can over-communicate badly and still stay in sync because everyone is in the room. A team of fifteen hundred falls apart on the same playbook. Communication has to be designed at scale, with explicit signals about what is important and what is noise.
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report shows that engagement scores track closely with how clearly a team understands company strategy. The teams that cannot articulate the strategy do not believe the leadership cares about them. The signal travels in both directions.
Measuring Communication With Both Quantitative and Qualitative Data
Mara argues for triangulating signals. Quantitative data: open rates, response rates, attendance at all-hands, survey questions on whether employees know the strategy. Qualitative data: skip-level interviews, focus groups, and the patterns ER teams see across cases.
The qualitative side is the part most companies skip. Stay interviews done well produce communication intelligence that no survey will surface. Pulse surveys focused on communication work as the quantitative complement.
What Are the Earliest Signs Communication Is Failing?
Repeated questions in multiple channels mean the messaging is not landing. Rumor cycles in Slack mean the formal channel is too slow. ER cases that include "I had no idea this was a problem until it was too late" mean the manager-to-employee channel is broken. Each pattern points at a different fix.
How Do You Communicate About Hard Topics Without Making It Worse?
Lead with the facts you have, name the facts you do not, and commit to a follow-up cadence. The companies that try to wait until they have all the answers usually lose the trust of the team before the answers arrive.
Linking People Strategy to Business Strategy
Mara's experience scaling across industries taught her one thing: people strategy that is not connected to business strategy gets ignored. The CHRO who walks into a board meeting with engagement scores and no link to revenue, retention, or risk gets politely thanked and moved past.
The link is operational. People team efficiency ties to operating margin. Employee engagement ties to retention. DEI programs tie to talent pipeline. The communication has to be in those terms or the work gets deprioritized.
What Actually Works for Communication at Scale
Pick the Three Things Worth Repeating
Most companies try to communicate everything and end up communicating nothing. Pick three messages every quarter. Repeat them to exhaustion in every channel. The teams will internalize them.
Train Managers on the Cascade
Most communication failures are cascade failures. Senior leadership communicates clearly. Middle managers misinterpret, omit, or rephrase. The team gets a different message than the leadership intended. The fix is not more all-hands; it is manager training on how to translate strategy.
Use Data to Catch the Gaps
Track which messages land and which do not. The ones that do not land are not failures of the audience; they are failures of the message. Iterate.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Communication failures are a leading indicator of ER cases. The patterns ER teams see often surface in communication blind spots before they show up in formal complaints. A purpose-built case management platform turns those patterns into actionable feedback for the comms team.
How AI Helps Communication Teams
Vera, the AllVoices AI co-pilot, surfaces themes across cases that no human would catch in real time. The themes feed into communication priorities. The communication priorities reduce ER intake.
Frequently Asked Questions About HR Communication
How often should leadership communicate to the whole company?
Monthly is the floor for most companies. Weekly is the right cadence for fast-moving organizations. Daily is overkill except in crisis.
What is the difference between transparency and oversharing?
Transparency means sharing the relevant facts and the reasoning behind decisions. Oversharing means flooding the team with detail that does not change their decisions. The first builds trust; the second builds noise.
Should companies use AI to draft internal communications?
For first drafts, yes. For final delivery, no. AI-generated communication that goes out unedited reads exactly as such, and the trust loss is immediate.
How do you handle communication during a layoff?
Direct, fast, and dignified. Tell people in person where possible. Provide details on next steps within twenty-four hours. The companies that delay or hide behind statements lose the trust of the team that stays.
What is the right channel mix for internal comms?
Email for formal records. Slack or Teams for fast updates. All-hands for direction-setting. 1:1s for the human side. Each channel has a job; conflating them blurs the message.
How to Run an All-Hands That Actually Works
The all-hands is the most expensive communication channel in the company and one of the worst-managed. Mara's argument is that the meeting needs an explicit purpose tied to the three messages of the quarter. If the all-hands does not advance one of the three, it should be cut. The companies that turn all-hands into a status-update reading session lose attention quickly.
The agenda matters. Open with the highest-stakes update first. Make space for live Q&A even when the questions are uncomfortable. Close with one clear ask of the audience. The companies that follow that pattern produce all-hands that people actually attend in real time, which is the truest engagement signal a company can read about its communication.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Mara's framing of communication as a measurable, multi-channel discipline is the right altitude. Most companies treat it as either a perk (more all-hands!) or a chore (the quarterly memo). The teams that have actually built communication capability tend to share a few habits: they pick a small set of messages to repeat, they train managers on the cascade, and they use data to catch the gaps. SHRM research on workplace burnout ranks poor leadership among the top three drivers of workplace stress, and most leadership-stress patterns are communication patterns.
Communication is not a soft skill. It is the operating layer that turns strategy into behavior. The companies that treat it that way close the gap between what they say and what their teams hear.
The companies that have actually built communication capability tend to invest in fewer channels and use them better. Three messages a quarter. A predictable cadence. Manager training on the cascade. The companies that try to cover everything end up landing nothing, and the engagement scores show it. Deloitte's research on workplace trust reinforces the point: trust is built through consistent, predictable communication, not through volume.
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