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, we have communication functions across multiple departments, and it can be challenging to determine who “owns” a communication when it’s so cross-departmental. Should all communications be in one department?
Funny enough, I would’ve answered this question completely differently before I worked at Workshop.
I used to be on a team where internal comms owned everything. We were the only ones who actually sent anything out. At the time, that 100% felt like the most effective way to do it. But working at Workshop (and being so close to an internal comms platform being built!) where pretty much everyone has the ability to send out comms because of our platform, has genuinely changed my mind. It makes a huge difference when the people who are actual subject matter experts can just go ahead and send something themselves, instead of relaying it to comms to translate on their behalf.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean everyone sends their own comms — just the people it makes sense for. Our CEO and exec team send their own updates. Marketing has a newsletter. Product has a newsletter. Even our finance lead sends one out every so often — which, years ago, would’ve terrified me! Haha! I’ve learned that when someone owns communication about the thing they live in every day, it’s going to sound and land better, because it’s coming from the person who actually knows it — not from me trying to transcribe their notes into something that sounds like them.
So no, I don’t think it needs to live in one department. But comms should still be the one setting the tone. That means owning the content calendar so five departments don’t all send on the same Monday, showing people what a good email actually looks like, building templates, maybe even running a lunch-and-learn on the basics. You’re less the one holding the only key to the door, and more the strategic advisor everyone checks in with before they walk through it.
A recent example of this in practice: our Head of People Ops wanted to run a four-part “back to school” series for employees — things like personal branding, finances, that kind of professional development mix. She came to me and asked how to communicate it, and we built a little plan together: an All Hands to explain why it mattered, a follow-up email with the actual dates and logistics, calendar holds so nobody missed it. That’s the model — comms as the partner in the room, not the department scrambling to execute someone else’s idea.
Early on I really did think it was safer if I just did it all myself. But once a company gets big enough, there’s no version of that where it actually scales. What scales is trust — training people to come to you as an advisor, not a task-taker, so the whole company gets better at communicating, not just your team. Hope this helps!!
