Internal Comms: Do We Believe Our Own Story? A Strategic Conversation with Åsa Scherling

25 June 2026

Mike Klein:

Sweden rarely features in global internal communication conversations. It’s a substantial market with sophisticated organizations, but it tends to operate in its own orbit – its research published in Swedish, its debates conducted within a national professional community that doesn’t export much to the broader international discourse. 

Which is exactly what makes it interesting to me. 

When you find the same structural dysfunctions in a market that’s been largely invisible to the international conversation – the same vague relationship to engagement, the same gap between strategic ambition and operational reality – it reinforces the case that these are not local pathologies. They’re features of the profession itself.

That gap – between how communication leaders describe internal communication, how the work is actually organised, and what they measure  – is the central finding of Åsa Scherling’s latest research. 

Scherling is a Sweden-based strategic advisor specializing in internal communication, leadership communication and strategy implementation, who has been studying the internal comms profession across three successive research cycles. I spoke with her shortly after she completed her most recent study: 40 in-depth conversations with senior communication leaders, focused on how they think about value, implementation, and business impact.

What makes Scherling an unusually valuable interlocutor is her willingness to be blunt. 

She’s not in the business of producing flattering portraits of the profession. She’s in the business of figuring out why internal communication keeps falling short of its own declared ambitions – and she names the reasons without much diplomatic cushioning.

Her findings track closely with what critics of the engagement paradigm have been arguing for years – but with a specificity and clarity that comes from direct observation at the coalface of practice.

“Everyone sees internal comms as a business value,” she says. “There’s no doubt about that. But when you then ask how internal comms creates value, the answer becomes more vague. And then, if you go to their own company, their own situation, it gets even more vague.”

“Engagement”, she found, fills that vagueness. Not as a defined concept, but as a placeholder – a word that lets communication leaders sound strategic while describing something they can’t quite specify. 

“Most of them referred to engagement as a measurement within employee surveys,” she observes. “But definitions varied, and the connection to business outcomes was often assumed rather than explained.”  More tellingly, in the conversations, Scherling rarely saw a clear line being drawn from their internal communication activity to any change in those engagement scores. The two existed in parallel universes that were never formally connected.

The explanation one of her interview subjects offered was almost too candid to be comfortable: engagement is widely used because management talks about engagement. It’s not a measure of communication impact. It’s a vocabulary currency – something comms leaders can use in the management conversation. That’s it.

The central issue is not engagement itself. It is the broader gap between how internal communication is described, how it is organised, and how success is measured.

The Ambition-Practice Gap

What Scherling’s research reveals isn’t simply a measurement problem. It’s what she calls a gap between ambition and practice – and it runs deeper than most discussions of the topic acknowledge.

Communication leaders describe their work in strategic terms. They talk about business impact, behavior change, strategy activation. But look at what they actually do and you find content production, information distribution, event management, and anchoring decisions that have already been made. Look at what they actually measure and you find reach, opens, and sentiment-based “understanding” scores.

Communication leaders describe internal communication in strategic terms. But when I compare that with how the work is actually organised, I see something much more operational. And measurement still remains primarily on communication outcomes.”

She illustrates the gap with a particularly sharp example: communicative leadership. 

In Sweden, developing leaders as communicators is a significant strategic ambition – often positioned as a lever for culture and performance. 

But examine what organizations actually do, and you find education programs measured by whether leaders found them useful. Not whether the leaders communicated differently. Not whether their teams understood strategic priorities better. Not whether decisions improved. “That is perception,” Scherling says plainly. “That’s not business.”

The implication she draws is pointed. The gap isn’t just operational. It’s a credibility problem. You have organizations where the narrative about internal communication – the ambitious, strategic, business-impact narrative – is sustained by a measurement regime that can’t actually support it. “The ambitions are even more when it comes to language. It’s been how it’s been described rather than how it’s done.”

Change Communication’s Parallel Track

One of the more intriguing observations from Scherling’s broader work concerns change communication. It was not a main finding from the study, but something that came up in a few conversations and aligns with her advisory experience.

“I have talked to interim communication managers working previously within communication departments, and then they now work within projects as change managers. And they say it’s so much easier to work with internal comms in a project than it is when working within the communications team.”

The reason, she suggests, is structural. Projects have defined goals. Project managers are trained in communication. Communication is seen as an asset rather than a support function. And the project scope protects practitioners from the accumulation of ad hoc requests that dilutes most in-house IC roles.

But Scherling is clear that project-embedded change communication is not the long-term solution. “Isolated change competence in a project is not the solution. The solution is when we, as an organization, have the system and the competence to change and adapt.” Change is no longer something that happens in discrete projects. It’s the operating condition of every organization. Internal communication needs to be positioned as the ongoing infrastructure for adaptive capacity – not a resource you parachute in when a transformation program needs support.

Getting Into the Core Business

The most radical part of Scherling’s argument concerns where internal communication should actually live – not in the organizational chart sense, but in terms of what work it does.

Her own consultancy practice puts her very close to core business operations: working with top management to translate strategy into behavior, helping organizations standardize processes in ways that connect previously isolated silos, setting goals that are measured by what happens after communication interventions, not what people thought of the event.

“I see that’s not where the main part of communication teams are. They haven’t taken the step to core business. They are on this side.”

That separation, she argues, is not inherent to the function. It’s a choice – or more precisely, an accumulated set of defaults that communication teams have never explicitly challenged. “Why not step up and make sure that the purpose is to actively participate in business success? If our goal is understanding, how do we know we succeeded if we never follow through and see what actually happened afterwards?” 

She describes a current engagement with a fast-growing company where the communications team has redesigned its flagship management event. The old goal was professional-grade execution. The new goal is to get managers to take a specific action afterward and make it a habit – a habit that the CEO and top team believe will change how the company is run and what it delivers. “The result is not measured by how did you find this day. It’s measured by what happened afterwards.”

That’s a small example, but it contains a complete rethinking of what internal communication is for. Not acknowledgment. Not sentiment. Not even understanding. Behavior – countable, observable, connected to outcomes.

What Needs to Change

Scherling does not traffic in pessimism. She’s frustrated by the profession’s stagnation, but she’s also been in enough organizations to know that the movement toward something more rigorous is real, even if it’s a minority position for now.

What’s missing, in her view, is twofold: success stories that mid-level practitioners can actually learn from, and measurement frameworks that create a direct connection between communication work and specific performance outcomes. “If we don’t have this in place, if we don’t really follow it through and see what happened, then we don’t know.”

I raised a case study from Denmark that illustrates what this could look like in practice: a hospital that measured hand sanitizer use before, during, and after an internal comms campaign, creating a behavioral proxy that was then used to justify embedding communication into other operational initiatives. 

Scherling recognized it immediately. Simple. Specific. Connected to something the organization actually cared about. No engagement score required – and, notably, the kind of measurement that a small team with limited budget could actually replicate.

The profession has the expertise to do this work. The challenge, Scherling argues, is translating strategic ambitions into corresponding ways of working and measuring success. That gap between how internal communication is described, how the work is organised and what is measured is not just a technical problem. It’s a question of whether the profession believes its own story.

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Åsa Scherling is a communication strategist and researcher based in Sweden, specializing in the connection between business strategy, organizational behavior, and internal communication effectiveness.

Mike Klein is Editor-in-Chief of Strategic.