Outsizing Your Impact: Tips for Small or Under-Resourced Internal Comms Teams

Often, internal communications teams are small, under-resourced, and under-valued. So, if this sounds like your team, don’t worry – you’re in the overwhelming majority.

However, in internal communications, size really doesn’t matter. Regardless of how many people you have or the budget you’ve been given, your team can punch above its weight and have an outsized impact on your organization.

Having worked in this field for 25 years and headed up numerous IC teams, I’m going to share my top five tips to help small and under-resourced groups deliver incredible value to your business.

1. Focus on strategic communications

In any company strategy, there should be a few core business priorities that make the biggest difference to its commercial results. These are the areas that, if the organization focuses on and delivers against, will really move the needle in terms of performance.

For lean IC teams, my number-one tip is to focus on communications that will enable better understanding, engagement, and connection among your employees with your company’s strategy. If you don’t know or are uncertain what these strategic priorities are, ask your CEO and senior leadership team.

Strategic communications (more on this here) are all about influencing employee behavior in support of business goals, which will add directly to your organization’s bottom line, improve perceptions of the value IC can bring, and ensure you are directing your resources toward what matters most.

Focusing on strategic communications isn’t easy. It’s common for IC teams to fall into the trap of simply being busy at the behest of various stakeholders, with little time to stop and consider the strategic impact of your activities. But you need to treat your people, time, and budget like the precious resources they are. If not, you run the risk of them disengaging, burning out, or leaving.

2. Set Service Level Agreements

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are contracts (more here) between your IC team and the business about the level of support you will provide to a specific program, project, function, or even stakeholder (e.g. the CEO).

For example, your ‘gold-level’ service could mean dedicating a whole person, or even people, from your team to support, and might be based on the scale and impact of a project or the seniority of the stakeholder.

Your ‘silver’ service may be attached to those projects that are region or function-specific, but not organization-wide. And ‘bronze’ could be for day-to-day communications (e.g. recognition) that can be handled locally, enabled by self-service templates created by your team.

Regardless of how you arrange your SLAs, they must be documented and agreed by both parties. In my experience, the best SLAs are based on three Cs:

• Clear criteria
• Consistently applied
• Communicated regularly

In tiering your services in this way, you are managing your resources effectively in alignment with the business, educating your organization that your team cannot support everything, and managing expectations about what exactly you can provide, to whom, and on what basis.

Many other departments in organizations work on this same basis, and IC teams would do well to follow their example.

3. Eliminate or limit business partnering

I have written before about the perils of the business-partnering model of IC. In teams with slim resources, its impacts are even more keenly felt. It means invaluable time and energy is dedicated to functions or leaders who don’t really need it, it reinforces silos and inhibits collaboration, and diverts attention away from strategic work. In short, it’s unsustainable.

My tip is to remove any business partnering roles, or if they are deemed necessary, limit how much of a team member’s capacity is dedicated to them and back this up with a robust SLA. Small IC teams should pool their minimal resources so they can work collaboratively, be more creative, and put their full weight behind driving the priorities of the business.

Bringing your team together like this will also unlock better ways of working, for example more sharing of ideas, improved planning, enhanced communication, and smoother processes. All of these will positively impact the quality of service your team provides to your organization.

Don’t dilute the value of your already small enough team by giving undue resources out just because a senior leader thinks they ‘need a comms person’. Because in my experience, they rarely do.

4. Make use of AI

Of course, we couldn’t have an article about IC in 2024 without mentioning AI. Joking aside, AI is a godsend for small and under-resourced IC teams. Here are just some ways it can help:

• Automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks – for example, updating distribution lists
• Provide a kickstart to creativity – by giving ideas for content and messaging
• Graphic design support – for videos, animations, presentations, etc

AI is there to help us all save time on low-value and repetitive activities so we can focus on the areas humans are best at – emotional intelligence, creativity, problem solving, and more.

IC teams often bemoan their inability to add full strategic value because they feel stuck by low-level demands generated by stakeholders. These requests trap IC teams into work that while visible, does not deliver strategic outcomes, and as such, results in them being under-valued, and in turn under-resourced.

AI offers a way to break this cycle. If your IC team can upskill on AI, you can automate away at least some of this low-grade work. That will free up the time you need to do deeper strategic thinking, get ahead with proactive planning, and engage with stakeholders in new ways. No matter how small your IC team, AI is going to help you do more of the work you should be doing. Embrace it.

5. Track your time

Not always the easiest thing to do, I admit, but tracking how your team spends its time is important for a number of reasons, including…

• Visibility – Where is most your team’s time being spent? Is it primarily working on strategic communications, or set pieces such as town halls etc?
• Quantifiable – Time is a resource, so you need to understand how you’re spending it. This is especially true for small and under-resourced teams. Unless you measure, you won’t have an accurate picture of how long any activity is taking, or how much manpower it consumes. (Spoiler alert – it’s usually more than you think.)
• Making informed decisions – If you have data on how your team spends its time, you can make better decisions about what activities need to be stopped, dialled up or down, or continue as they are. Without this data, it’s impossible to make an informed decision.
• Lobby for more resources – It can be a shock to find out just how much time certain activities take. But once you have the data, you can share this with senior leaders to push the case for more resources – with a clear strategy and plan for how you would spend them.

With the way the world is right now, many IC teams will continue to be small and under-resourced.

However, that shouldn’t automatically equate to limited impact. By focusing on being strategic, clearly contracting with stakeholders, utilizing AI, and tracking how you spend your time, you can still deliver business outcomes that add huge value to your organization.