The power of us: How Strategic Comms Can Save Your Workplace (part 2)

7 May 2025 Reading Time: 4 minutes

by Wayne Aspland and Zora Artis:

Don’t you just love it when the stars suddenly align?

For the last few weeks, we’ve been preparing part 2 of our Strategic series on how comms can help organisations manage the challenging conditions we’re all facing.

Part one looked at how comms can help conquer employee change fatigue. Both the pace of change and the subsequent change fatigue have dramatically increased over the last few years.

This article looks at how leaders are being stressed by burnout and fracturing alignment.

* 54% of managers are suffering from work-induced stress and fatigue (Gartner).

* While 42% of C-suite leaders believe that adopting AI is “tearing their company apart” (Writer).

Anyway, there we were, diligently researching this topic when, all of a sudden, Axios HQ swooped in with all the answers to our questions. As we said, the stars aligned.

Mind you, the answers aren’t pretty. According to the Axios HQ 2025 State of Internal Communication report, the number of people who believe employees are entirely aligned with organisational goals has almost halved in just 12 months.

Let’s say that again just to let it sink in. Almost halved in just 12 months.

And this lack of alignment is playing merry hell with organisations… particularly leaders, as this chart from the Axios HQ report shows:

 

So, what’s happening here?

As shocking as these numbers are, they shouldn’t come as a surprise. Right now, every one of us is dealing with the combined impacts of four disruptive forces:

* Rapidly accelerating change

* Economic, geopolitical and regulatory uncertainty

* New ways of working… most notably, the rise of working from home and AI

* Declining trust.

And the pace of change is only going to accelerate, which suggests things are only going to get worse if we don’t do something about them.

A principal challenge: we need alignment more than ever

There’s a great irony behind this story.

On the one hand, the disruptive forces we mentioned above are dramatically weakening alignment in our organisations. On the other, we need alignment more than ever if we’re to manage these forces and be successful in this AI-enabled age.

Study after study has shown that alignment can help us achieve the performance, employee engagement, collaboration and resilience we’re clearly going to need.

It can also help organisations switch gears and manage unexpected turns… an ability that is desperately needed today. In fact, Prosci has acknowledged that strategic alignment is critical to successful change…

“The essential role of strategic alignment lies in synchronizing an organization’s overarching goals and strategies with its day-to-day operations and tactics. It bridges the gap between the vision set by leadership and the actions taken by various departments and teams. It creates a unified direction, ensuring every initiative and decision supports the broader organizational mission and objectives.”

The good news… communication can help to restore alignment

The Axios HQ report highlights better than ever what we’ve always known to be true.

It suggests there is a high correlation between communication effectiveness and alignment:

* 60% of people who believe their communication is effective also believe they’re aligned with organisational goals. That drops to just 19% for people who believe their critical comms is ineffective.

And there is a strong link between performance and communication frequency:

* 68% of high performing organisations communicate to all staff at least once a week, compared to 38% for low performing organisations.

* 79% of high performers communicate at least once a weak at a team or department level, compared to 56% for low performers.

The 2025 Gallagher Employee Communications Report backs this up. 79% of ‘thrivers’ (the most successful) are satisfied with their progress towards achieving strategic alignment. This compares to only 19% of ‘survivors’ (those facing the most challenges).

Perhaps it’s time to rethink alignment. The power of us.

While Comms teams need to focus on alignment more than ever, there is also an argument to say we need to rethink how we do it.

Over the years, comms teams have done good work connecting people to people and strategy through messaging, leader decks, and campaigns. But in today’s environment, that’s no longer enough. Alignment needs to be dynamic… built and rebuilt as conditions shift. It needs to happen in conversations, in priorities, and in the way teams work together every day.

That’s where comms leaders can make a real difference. Not just by pushing out more content but by enabling leaders and teams to find clarity together, and keep finding it, as circumstances around them change.

As our original study, Strategic alignment: how communicators can change the face of leadership  suggested, there is more to driving alignment than communicating the organisation’s narrative (although that remains critical).

There is also an important role to play in helping people leaders:

* Align their teams so they are working together.

* Ensure their team’s priorities align to the goals of the organisation.

* Ensure cross-team collaboration in an environment increasingly typified by project teams, secondments and dotted reporting lines.

* Help leaders understand how to create space for dialogue and reflection to co-create shared understanding within their teams.

This top-down, bottom-up approach means that the entire organisation is working to drive alignment… not just the C-suite.

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Zora Artis, GAICD IABC Fellow SCMP and Wayne Aspland are two of the earliest advocates for strategic alignment, having written two white papers on the subject in 2018 and 2020.

Written by: Editor