You Are Not the Company Help Desk (and It’s Time To Stop Acting Like One)

"Hi grrrl!  Can you take this manual for our new procurement process and turn it into something fun and engaging for the whole company? Like, maybe a short, viral reel that makes everyone excited about vendor management?".

Attached: A 72-page PDF full of technical processes, translated badly from Japanese.

You stare at your screen and think: “When did I become the person whose job is to sprinkle fairy dust on corporate bureaucracy to make it digestible?” 

And then you think, “Well, if I wasn't here they would just upload this PDF to the drive and go on with their life, right?”

If this scenario feels familiar, congrats, my friend, you've been demoted to running the company help desk without anyone officially telling you.

And it's time to fight your way back to the decision makers' table, where you belong. Here’s how.

Stop them from installing a ticketing system for internal communication

Yes, innovation, efficiency, and project management systems are the infrastructure of modern orgs, but sometimes they suck. As in suck the life out of you.

Some enterprise companies decided to install new ticketing systems, just like the ones used for broken laptops and password resets, for comms requests. Suddenly, your expertise in building cultures, communicating change, shaping narratives, and connecting employees to grand ideas became reduced to: "Submit ticket. Get content. Close ticket."

The requests flooding your queue read like a parody of corporate dysfunction:

"Create a campaign to make HR excited about our new travel policy." (The policy: No more travel.)

"Turn this compliance training into a fun infographic." (The training: 47-page deck about data protection in different geographies.)

"Make our layoff announcement feel positive and uplifting." (The layoff: 30% of the workforce. Ouch.)

As if the right subject line and your fine taste in emoji can make your colleagues feel good about the fact that the company got rid of coffee machines (and some engineers)  to cut costs.

You didn't apply to this job to become everyone's personal marketing department or HRIT. 

You joined to create experiences and messages that connect employees to the work, the culture, and the vision, remember?

How we got here (it’s not your fault)

The "everyone's a communicator" myth. Everyone thinks that because they send emails (and sometimes reply-all with “congrats man!!!” what’s wrong with that?), they understand communications. They don't distinguish between information distribution, engagement, and strategic narrative building.

The efficiency obsession. Companies love systems, metrics, and scalable processes. A ticketing system feels organized, measurable, controlled, and effective. The fact that it destroys creativity and strategic thinking is just collateral damage. 

The urgency addiction. When everything is urgent, nothing gets the time and thought it deserves. Tickets are perfect for urgent requests. They're terrible for strategic communication.

But there's a cost to this efficiency circus: when you operate as a ticket system, you lose the ability to do the work that actually matters.

You're too busy executing individual requests to see the bigger narrative threads across the organization. Soon enough, leaders stop consulting you on communication strategy and start assigning you communication tasks. Your expertise gets devalued, and in the end, it's employee experience that suffers the most.

Random, unconnected communications create noise, not clarity. Employees stop trusting internal channels because they're flooded with processed requests instead of strategic messages.

So raise the flag early. If someone suggests acquiring a new comms ticketing system, explain why that's the wrong model.

Strategic internal communications asks

What do employees need to know, feel, and do to be successful? 

How does this message connect to larger company narratives? 

What's the right channel, timing, and tone for this audience? 

Strategic internal communications involves research, planning, audience analysis, channel optimization, measurement, and iteration. It requires understanding company culture, employee sentiment, and business strategy.

Helpdesk communications, on the other hand, involves taking someone else's content and making it "prettier" or "more engaging" without questioning whether it should exist at all. 

But you and I know for sure that not every piece of information deserves company-wide communication.

What should you do?

Be the expert on all things communication channels.

When someone submits a ticket for "company-wide announcement" about something that affects five people, suggest they send an email, open a Slack channel, or invite them to a Zoom call. 

Before accepting any request, ask a few constructive questions such as:

• Does this connect to the company business priorities?
• Is this the right audience and the right time?
• What do we want readers to do after they read this?

Educate your stakeholders. Help them understand the difference between broadcasting information and creating engagement.

One last tip. Block time in your calendar for proactive work: employee listening, trend analysis, culture initiatives, and relationship building with global leadership. This time is for you. It's more important than finishing another small task for someone else.

You need to have this talk with leadership:

"I've noticed we're treating internal communications like a service request system. While I'm happy to support important company messages, I think we're missing opportunities to use communications strategically to drive engagement, retention, and boost performance, all areas that recent surveys suggest could benefit from attention. (Add recent stats here.)

“I'd like to suggest we take a more intentional approach to our internal communications, building in time for research, planning, and proactive storytelling, so we're not just delivering messages, but actively shaping the employee experience, and showing what’s special about our employee culture. 

“If we shift to this model, I believe we'll see better engagement with our channels, stronger alignment across teams, and measurable improvements in our culture and business results. Could we set up time to discuss how we can restructure our approach to make this happen?".

Just a reminder, my friend:

I see you juggling too many priorities while making everyone else look good, turning executives' stream-of-consciousness thoughts into coherent messages, and somehow keeping employees informed about everything from pizza parties to layoffs. You're doing incredible work with a fraction of the resources other departments get.

But you are not a content factory. You are not a corporate-to-human translator. You are not a messaging help desk with a communications degree.

You are a professional with the expertise to build cultures where people want to work, create clarity during chaos, and design employee experiences that retain talent and drive results. 

That expertise deserves respect, resources, and strategic input, not ticket requests and deadline pressure.

The shift starts with you

Employees demand transparency, authenticity, and connection and leaders are struggling to communicate effectively across distributed teams and changing priorities.

The solution isn't more tickets, more reactive requests, or more "quick asks”.

It’s all about you doing the work you were hired to do.

So stop the help desk mentality. Start being the strategic communications professional your company desperately needs.