Some of the best communications teams I’ve worked with are also the easiest to challenge.
They’re experienced and they know their organization inside out. They know what has worked before and, often, they have good instincts about what will work again.
But experience can create its own blind spots.
The closer you are to an organization, the harder it can be to see your communication as your audience does. Familiar language feels obvious. A channel you use every day feels visible. A message you’ve been discussing for weeks feels repetitive before most employees have even absorbed it.
Good communication isn’t only about crafting the right message. It’s about staying curious enough to question whether it’s actually working.
Here are four areas where I think even very good teams can get caught out.
1. Trust your instincts, then check the data.
I’m a big believer in communications instinct. Experience teaches you things a dashboard never will: when a message feels off, when the timing isn’t right, when a subject line needs another pass.
However, instinct becomes less reliable when we’re too close to the work. I’ve worked with brilliant, highly organized teams who know their audiences extremely well, but sometimes default to “this is how we do it” even when the data is telling a slightly different story.
That’s where data is useful. Not because every communications decision needs to be dictated by a metric, but because data gives us a degree of objectivity. Sometimes it confirms exactly what we thought. Sometimes it tells us that the channel everyone loves isn’t actually reaching people, or that the content we assumed would resonate simply isn’t.
Both outcomes are useful. The sweet spot is somewhere between instinct and evidence. Use experience to make the call, and data to keep yourself honest.
2. Remember that familiar to you doesn’t mean familiar to everyone
Internal shorthand has a way of becoming invisible to the people who use it every day.
The same goes for idioms, cultural references and expressions that feel completely natural in one language or market but become much less obvious when your audience is international.
I’m working on a campaign at the moment that uses English idioms and innuendo as part of the creative concept. The audience is international, with many non-native English speakers. The answer isn’t to strip out every bit of personality and produce bland, globally approved English. It’s to be more selective.
Which expressions are intuitive enough to travel? Which ones require such a strong command of English that part of your audience will miss the point? And where does clever copy stop being clever if people have to work too hard to understand it?
International business communication doesn’t have to be boring, but creativity only works when your audience is in on it.
3. Repeat yourself more than feels necessary
By the time an important announcement reaches employees, the people closest to it may have been discussing it for weeks or months. Employees haven’t, however.
I like to think in terms of smart repetition: the same core message, delivered consistently across the internal platforms people get their information.
Not everyone reads the intranet. Not everyone opens every email. Not everyone follows Slack or Viva Engage. Some employees will hear important company news first from their manager.
Repeating a message across those channels isn’t over-communication. It’s recognizing how people consume information.
This becomes particularly important during sensitive moments. I’ve worked on communications around large-scale employee changes where legal constraints meant every word mattered, but employees could still walk away from the same announcement with very different interpretations.
In those moments, consistency has to go beyond the initial message. Managers need clear talking points. Q&As need to anticipate the questions people are likely to ask. Leadership, HR, communications and managers need to be working from the same source of truth.
When the information is incomplete or inconsistent, people don’t leave the space blank. They fill it themselves, and the narrative they create is usually not the one you intended.