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! How do you develop a brand voice for internal comms? This would be for comms coming from “corporate” going out to our franchisee, general manager, and team member audience. Comms brand voice feels different from a marketing brand voice, but we want it to feel consistent, transparent, and trustworthy. I just don’t know where to start defining this.
Oooh! This is such an easy trap to fall into — just sounding like whatever your company sounds like externally, because that voice already exists and it’s right there. But internal and external are doing two different jobs, so I’d start somewhere else entirely: listening.
Things like: how does your CEO talk when he’s standing in front of the whole company? How do your department leaders and people managers sound when they’re sending out general comms — email, Slack, whatever the channel? You’re basically compiling all of that into one picture. At Workshop, we’ve got a pretty strong external brand voice (practical, optimistic, warm, that kind of thing!) and we gave it a real personality externally a while back. I wanted to do the same thing internally, just built from a different set of inputs.
After you’ve done some listening, try personifying the way your company talks internally. If that voice were a person, what adjectives would you use to describe them? Once you’ve got 3-4 words, you’ve got something to check your comms against and if you’re using a tool like Claude or ChatGPT to help draft, drop your new brand voice and tone guidelines right into your prompts so you can run things through and ask, “does this actually sound like us?”
You already gave yourself a great start, by the way — consistent, transparent, trustworthy are all really strong. I’d just push a little further into your company’s actual culture. What does it feel like to work there? Those words have a feeling behind them, and you want your voice to carry a little more personality and warmth than “consistent” and “trustworthy” convey on their own.
One more thing worth naming: internal comms voice tends to run more casual than marketing voice, and that’s a good thing, not a compromise. You’re not writing to convert anyone — you’re writing to people you work with every day, so it should sound like that. The second your comms start reading like a buttoned-up corporate memo, you’ve lost the plot a little. Casual doesn’t mean sloppy — it means nobody has to dig through layers of jargon to figure out what you’re actually telling them.
So: listen first, personify second, then let it be a little more human and fun than you might expect a “brand voice” document to allow. That’s usually where the good stuff lives!
