PAUL JONES
HEAD OF INSIGHT
Shadow channels, valuing audits, and the intranet vs AI
October to December edition
As we head into the final quarter of the year, here are the latest top issues our clients are debating right now and our perspective on what organisations should be paying attention to in order to help resolve them.
What do we do about colleagues taking communications into their own hands?
Creating an effective internal communication channel requires budget, technical support and communications expertise. But today, anyone with access to digital content and design tools (such as Canva or AI platforms) or with editor access over the likes of Teams or SharePoint, can create something that looks and feels official in minutes.
And increasingly, that’s exactly what’s happening. Across our communication audits and employee research projects, we’re seeing departments, project teams and stakeholders create their own communication ecosystems alongside official channels.
Sometimes it’s a newsletter. Sometimes it’s a SharePoint site. Sometimes it’s a Teams channel. In one recent communications diary study, we found that 79% of the messages employees believed were coming from central communications had actually been created outside the communications function.
The result? More content and channels, adding to the noise and confusing employees about where the truth actually lives. Unfortunately, you also see the quality in communication dropping too, as poor design and subpar content make it harder for colleagues to engage with and understand messages.
So in an age when AI can give you a newsletter at the push of a button, what can internal communicators do to stop colleagues going rogue and creating their own channels?
The instinctive response might be to lock it down and shut it down. Implement more governance, more approvals and tighter control. But that’s rarely the real solution.
People don’t create alternative channels on a whim. They’re usually trying to solve a problem because central communication channels aren’t meeting their needs. Perhaps information is hard to find, or isn’t focusing on the topics they need to know about.
So we recommend working with these stakeholders to reduce the need for them to create alternatives in the first place.
Firstly, make sure you understand your wider communication ecosystem, not just the channels you own. Run research to uncover where there might be shadow channels, platforms or tools, and work to understand what purpose they’re serving and how effective they are. Why do they exist in the first place?
If you’re happy for the shadow channel to go ahead, you can guide the owner on how to create it, with parameters for what (and what not) to include, templates to ensure on-brand, user-friendly design, and tips for effective writing and tone of voice.
Or if the shadow channel is overlapping or duplicating with something else, work with the owner to weave their content into your other channel or show them where it’s already covered. That way you’re making them part of the mix, rather than shutting them out.
“Make sure you understand your wider communication ecosystem, not just the channels you own.”
If continuous listening is the future, do we still need one-off measurement?
For years now, internal communication professionals have talked about the end of the annual communications survey. We know that it makes more sense to review our communications throughout the year, leaning on real-time data from digital platforms and running regular pulse surveys to see how communications are performing right now, rather than at one fixed point in time.
“Employee listening is becoming one of the biggest trends in internal communication and across businesses.”
We’ve seen this really take off this year, with employee listening becoming one of the biggest trends in internal communication and across businesses. Organisations are aiming to develop continuous listening cultures, through the likes of leadership communication, listening groups, pulse surveys, analytics and AI insights.
The logic is compelling. Why wait a year to understand how employees are feeling when you can gather feedback every day?
But does that mean that there is no longer value in one-off larger measurement pieces, such as the traditional communications audit?
First things first, while continuous listening and one-off audits belong to the same measurement family, they are not the same thing.
Communication audits give you the ability to measure and evaluate the whole system. You can look at the big picture, such as strategy and channel mix, down to individual touchpoints, such as trust in leadership communication or an individual channel.
This can also make it quicker and easier to spot trends and relationships between issues, rather than waiting for them to emerge over time as you embed a listening culture.
We find they are particularly useful for organisations building a measurement approach from scratch. Audits provide a foundation for your communication strategy, giving you a clear understanding of where you are and benchmarks to help you set objectives for where you want to go.
On a more selfish level, they can also be invaluable when new communication or employee experience professionals need to understand an organisation quickly, such as starting a new job in an organisation with no available measurement data.
The real danger here isn’t one-off measurement: it’s one-off action. A communications audit must not be an isolated activity. It should be one part of your listening culture, coupled with the listening habits that will help to support employee voice and build trust.
Will AI assistants replace intranets?
For years, the intranet has been the centrepiece of the digital workplace. But as AI assistants have become part of everyday work, we’re increasingly hearing the same question: “Why would employees visit the intranet when they can just ask AI to find the answer for them?”
It’s a fair challenge. Employees are becoming accustomed to asking questions rather than searching for answers. Why navigate multiple systems to find a policy or form when an AI assistant can provide it instantly?
As a result, many organisations are asking us: should I be investing in an intranet when employees will just move to an AI assistant?
This is an answer with a couple of parts.
The first part is: yes, we can see AI assistants replacing the traditional intranet search. In the Microsoft 365 world for example, employees will ask Copilot to get them the maternity policy, rather than opening SharePoint and searching or navigating through the menu to find it.
But the second part is also yes. Yes, organisations should still invest in their intranet. This is because 1) we don’t know when AI assistants will take over, so we need this vital tool to be fit for purpose; and 2) the AI assistant has to pull information from somewhere, so we need to maintain its accuracy and quality. Otherwise it will be a classic case of ‘garbage in; garbage out’.
So for now, think about it this way: intranets aren’t disappearing; they’re being reimagined.
As we wait to see where AI will sit in the digital workplace, we should focus on transitioning our intranet from a content hub to more of a personalised resource for employees who are becoming more and more used to the hyper-personalised experience AI gives them.
You can do that by making the most of AI-enabled features on your platform, embedding and integrating (rather than surfacing) other communication, HR and IT tools and their data into your intranet, and – most importantly – making sure your content remains up-to-date and accurate.
“As we wait to see where AI will sit in the digital workplace, we should focus on transitioning our intranet from a content hub to more of a personalised resource”
Get in touch with Paul, our Head of Insight, at paul.jones@sequelgroup.co.uk to talk about the trends we’re seeing, and how Sequel can help you tackle your communication and engagement challenges this year.
