Hey there, I'm Devin!
Most of the time you can catch me deep in the world of internal comms at Workshop (yes, the Happy Mondays folks!), and while I love AI, there are just some comms questions that need a human who really gets it… that’s me!
Hi Devin,
Can you share a bit about how you might approach comm strategy for a specific department/organization within a company?
My role is less about people and culture and more about communicating process changes, department-wide initiatives, and other operational work, and a lot of the advice I see out there is targeted more towards company-wide initiatives and employee engagement professionals.
Believe it or not, this is actually some of my favorite work to communicate! Right now, my role leans more toward culture and experience. But as a team of one, I’ve had to build competency in operational comms to strike the right balance across the company. And honestly, when done well, operational comms can really have a huge impact — I mean it is the stuff that makes people’s workdays smoother and clearer.
So! When it comes to process changes and department-wide initiatives, having a single source of truth is going to be your BFF. But you want to make it easy for employees to reference and recall what they need — especially when something only becomes relevant at a certain time of year. I’m guessing you already have an intranet (most of us do!), but if adoption isn’t where you want it to be, try meeting employees where they already are. That could look like:
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Using short links or quick buttons in Slack or Teams
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Automating reminder emails tied to dates or milestones
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Pinning or bookmarking content that gets surfaced seasonally, i.e. open enrollment or security training
And even though your work isn’t focused on culture, there’s still a need to make operational updates digestible and engaging. Think TL;DR summaries at the top of messages. Swap in audio or video now and then to give people a break from reading. Use headers, bullets, and whitespace to help the info land faster. Sometimes it’s not about making the content “fun” — it’s about making it something people actually want to engage with.
If your department has regular rhythms (quarterly reviews, launches, or reporting cycles) you could build a mini comms calendar to support those. That way, the work feels more proactive and less reactive, and teams know what to expect when.
As for how I think about success — I try to be clear on the goal of each comm and pick one or two signals that help me gauge if it landed. For process-heavy updates, that might mean tracking intranet traffic or click-through rates from a reminder email. For something more behavior-driven, like a change in workflow, I’m often partnering with ops or IT to see what usage or adoption looks like. And I try to keep feedback loops open — sometimes that’s a formal pulse survey, but honestly, I learn just as much from a quick Slack message, a follow-up question in a meeting, or a pattern I’m hearing in manager conversations.
