Internal communication and strategy

The relationship between internal communication and strategy is the topic of the CERC Dialogue between Alessandra Mazzei, Università IULM, and Alessandra Cappello, Unipol Group.

A dual perspective, academic and professional, that addresses a crucial issue for the legitimacy of internal communication within organizations.

The opinion of Alessandra Mazzei, Professor of Corporate Communication, Università IULM

Internal communication is strategic. This assertion is supported by professionals and scholars and indicates that intentional, planned, and structured communication has the potential to contribute to the strategic results of a company. This means that it unleashes long-term effects across a broad range of action beyond the more typicical short-term and project-specific ones. When strategic, internal communication contributes to generate valuable intangible resources that are crucial to the overall success of a company, such as employee engagement and knowledge.

Internal communication must be guided by a strategy to be effective. This second statement highlights that internal communication itself requires strategic guidance, that is, oriented toward shared, broad-based objectives. This second meaning emphasizes that those who govern it have a managerial role that includes listening, planning, management, and evaluation.

Internal communication is an enabler of all strategic processes. Thus there is yet another expression that connects the two terms we are discussing. Anyone who decides on a strategy and wants to make it effective can take advantage of internal communication to make the strategy known, understood, shared, and implemented. This means that it activates awareness and actions of people. This is a crucial element in a rarefied work environment like the hybrid one, where structures are barely visible: the organization requires invisible, weak connections, as well as those that are truly strong and allow for mutual adaptation. A well-communicated strategy is also shared and functions like constellations for navigators of the past.

In these reflections, I'd like to add yet another nuance to this connection: internal communication is strategy; it makes it, creates it, formulates it, and brings it to light. It vividly illustrates the transition from a planned strategy to strategy as action. In English, we have a term not found in Italian: strategizing. The actual strategy adopted is not always known to the actors who deliberate it. Strategy also emerges thanks to retrospective processes of reconstructing meaning and the action of communication.

Therefore internal communication and strategy have a circular and recursive relationship: they coexist, they feed off each other, and they are indispensable to each other.

The opinion of Alessandra Cappello, Internal Communication and Digital Workplace Manager, Unipol Group

Internal communication contributes to building corporate direction, purpose, and cohesion. Therefore, today more than ever it holds strategic value within organizations, acting as a glue between the single units of a company, shaping community and unity within the context.

It's increasingly a real control room, bringing together those who deal with business and people, culture and digital: it's a crossroads of ideas and projects that are then channeled through multichannel communication strategies, contributing to change and the adoption of tools and new ways of working. It creates a unified whole that acts in unison: because when people understand and share the trajectory of the company, their participation becomes more aware and oriented.

Internal communication can also be defined as the compass that guides a company through complexity and in the continuum of small and large organizational changes: it translates strategic choices into daily actions, makes what might seem abstract understandable, transforms objectives into concrete behaviors, and creates continuity between what is decided at the top and what happens in operational practices. As Karl Weick emphasizes, organizations need sense-making processes to bring order to what appears chaotic, and internal communication has precisely this ability to build shared meaning while attempting to reduce the sense of uncertainty. It is therefore also a lever of resilience, capable of accompanying change and strengthening cohesion.

Narratives, increasingly multimedia-based, are one of the ways Internal communication works: it translates business into stories, transforms projects into shared narratives, and shapes a wealth of collective experiences. Stephen Denning has shown how stories are among the most powerful tools for disseminating strategies, stimulating innovation, and strengthening a sense of community. In this sense, corporate life becomes a shared narrative, in which each employee recognizes their role.

For all of this, internal communications plays a strategic role within organizations: it is the director who transforms objectives into experiences, strategies into narratives, and the future into shared possibilities.