10 Ways Internal Comms Teams Can Do More With Less

Year after year, internal communication professionals rank one particular thing as their biggest barrier to success – a lack of time and capacity.

Despite the continuing challenges this presents, many of us feel pressure to do more with less. We work in an ever-evolving field with new technologies, shifting employee expectations, and ongoing organizational change. Our budgets are never guaranteed, and demands from internal stakeholders are unrelenting.

It’s time for us to make some key changes and start thinking about how we can work smarter, not harder.

I’ve compiled 10 tried-and-tested things that can help us to do more with less. Let’s go.  

1. Outsource some of your admin to AI

We’ve heard it before, and we’ll certainly hear it again… AI is the future. 90% of those already using AI say it has saved them time and reduced mistakes, and 89% say they have fewer repetitive tasks.

But how can IC professionals get the most value from artificial intelligence?

A lot has already been written about how AI tools, such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, can assist with content creation. They can be an excellent resource for creating first drafts of written updates or announcements, which you can then edit and refine. But I think one of the more valuable use cases for AI in IC is for support with employee listening.

This is where AI can really come into its element and save us hours. We all have the potential to save huge amounts of time and budget by using an AI tool to support with things like:

• Drafting question sets for employee surveys 
• Analyzing feedback – taking raw data and automatically creating pivot tables, graphs, or charts 
• Automatically sorting through qualitative data to thematically group 
• Generating recommendations and insights based on a broad analysis of the feedback

For more AI tips and suggested use cases, take a look at the AI Cheat Sheet that Dafna Arad recently created for the blog.

2. Invest in an employee experience platform

Introducing an employee experience platform (EXP) can completely transform the way an IC team functions.

Clunky, outdated tools are one of the biggest drains on time and resources for internal communicators. Constant glitches, expensive updates and a frustrating user experience make a recipe for disaster, and a platform that is supposed to enable effective communication can often do more harm than good.  

Replacing an outdated intranet with a modern, intuitive, mobile-first platform that people actually use makes work simpler for frontline and desk-based teams and delivers a very real return on investment in the long run.

Workvivo is a great example of an all-in-one solution that puts employee experience in the spotlight and can free up a significant amount of capacity for IC teams. Get the ball rolling by scheduling a free demo if you’d like to see if the platform could be a good fit for your organization.

3. Define a clear scope of work

While lots of our time and resource constraints stem from outdated platforms and a high admin burden, managing endless stakeholder requests can make our jobs feel almost impossible.

Requests like “Can you just help with drafting…”, “I just need this to be sent to …” or “Could you create a presentation on …it’ll only take an hour!” are all too familiar for anybody in an IC role. And while we’d love to be able to agree to all of these requests for support, we lose strategic direction when we say ‘yes’ to absolutely everything. Our objectives go out of the window, and we end up prioritizing everybody else’s needs over our own work.

We need to define a clear scope of work that sets out what is – and what is not – within our remit. Not only to protect our own time and workload, but also to protect employees from being bombarded with messaging that isn’t aligned.

One participant of Gallagher’s State of the Sector 2024 report summarized it perfectly when they explained:

My biggest current challenge is expectation versus capacity. Everyone wants to communicate, and their ‘thing’ is the most important. Employees only have a certain amount of headspace to take things in – so balancing what we have to say and what we think people will take in is difficult.

4. Repeat and repurpose, wherever possible

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel with every employee update or campaign. While I’m not suggesting copy-and pasting last year’s CEO New Year communication every January, certain templates and structures can be recycled.

Creating an annual content calendar highlighting your hero campaigns and key messaging will save time throughout the year and can be tweaked and reused over and over again. The same goes for things like All Hands structures, PPT decks and strategy templates.

We can be tempted to start from scratch with every single thing that we do. But it can be a great time (and budget!) saving hack to look back through your archives and see what you can update and recycle instead.  

5. Turn line managers into comms allies

84% of internal comms professionals rate manager team meetings and manager one-to-ones as two of the most effective communication channels within their organizations. And it’s been widely reported that line managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement.

So, it’s in everyone’s best interest to ensure the line-management population is set up for success and empowered to communicate effectively with team members. Because when they’re not, IC teams find themselves being overloaded with requests for support and questions from managers right across the company, who don’t have the resources or guidance they need to be able to communicate effectively.  

The following things can help turn line managers into IC allies:

• Creating a ‘Leader Zone’ or ‘Manager Hub’ on your intranet to share updates, templates and downloadable resources 
• Publishing a weekly ‘Team Leader Brief’ with key updates for them to cascade 
• Delivering formal and informal training opportunities to help line managers develop their communication skills 
• Organizing quarterly ‘Line manager communication huddles’ to encourage peer-to-peer support and sharing of best practice  

One of our latest ‘Communicating with Confidence’ blog posts shares more suggestions on how you can transform your line managers into comms allies.  

6. Bring in external support during peak times

As a self-employed freelance internal comms specialist, I’ll admit that I may be slightly biased on this one! But I genuinely believe that bringing in external support during peak times is one of the most efficient ways to manage resource in an in-house IC team.

External consultants or freelancers who specialize in internal communication can jump in to provide temporary support to in-house teams when they’re operating at maximum capacity. It can be a much more cost-effective solution than recruiting for an additional year-round headcount in the team, and allows for the peaks and troughs that organizations experience.

There are lots of experienced IC specialists out there, many of whom you can find via LinkedIn, who will happily dip in and out of your team, supporting you with the heavy lifting in peak times and invoicing only for the time needed.  

7. Lean into workplace tech

On top of a modern intranet, there are other platforms that contribute to a 2025-worthy digital workplace. And yes, it can definitely be hard to find the time to pause and reflect on the tools that you’re currently using. But doing so will allow you to think about what is slowing you down and where changes might be needed.

There are so many different team collaboration tools out there – is the one you’re using fit for purpose? Does it effectively connect your team and enable you to work at pace? And what about workflow management? Could your team benefit from the introduction of a tool like Monday.com to help you plan, manage and delegate tasks?

For more ideas, check out our list of the 20 best internal communications tools for 2025 and beyond!

8. Create digital templates and request forms

This might seem like an obvious one, but creating downloadable templates and digital request forms is a simple way to save you and your team LOADS of time.

I’m talking about things like content request forms, departmental Town Hall agenda templates, event support request forms and team newsletter templates.    

The digital forms and templates may take a bit of time to set up, but having the processes in place and ready for stakeholder requests will save you receiving heaps of emails and calls!  

9. Slow down to speed up

Slowing down to speed up feels a little counterintuitive, particularly when we’re feeling the pressure to deliver more and more. But, as internal communicators, working at a rapid pace is not always the most efficient way to manage things. It can lead to more mistakes, a longer editing process, more back-and-forth with stakeholders, and longer rewrites.

Operating at a slightly slower and more intentional pace will help you and your team deliver higher-quality work that’s more thought through and better aligned to your objectives. Which, as we all know, saves a lot of time in the long run!

10. Be strategic

One of the best ways to ‘do more with less’ is to stay laser-focused on strategy. It’s time to get strategic, as Simon Rutter wrote in one of his blog posts last year.

Reactive internal communications are a thing of the past. We need to act in a proactive and intentional way that enables us to deliver on our objectives in line with the organization’s overarching strategy.

Effective communication is underpinned by a clear alignment between internal comms and business strategy. And aside from the obvious benefits to employee engagement levels, becoming a genuinely strategic function gives clear direction to the internal comms team, helping you to ‘say no’ to ad-hoc requests that don’t fit with the bigger picture.