Inside the “Communicating Organization”: An Internal Influence Case Study at Spirax Sarco

Mike Klein:

For years, the internal communications function has chased the same losing argument: pleading for “a seat at the table” and a trusted “strategic partner” label despite lacking the hard data to justify it. 

Colin Archer stopped having that argument. Instead, at engineering firm Spirax Sarco, he and his team have been building something he calls “the communicating organization” — and then let the safety numbers make the case for it.

“Overall safety, both physical and psychological, is better in the parts of the organization where we’ve implemented this,” Archer told me, “because people are speaking up more and telling us about where risks are occurring and where things are happening that we could do better at.” In a business built around industrial engineering, where a missed risk isn’t an abstraction, that’s not a soft metric. It’s the hardest business finding an internal comms leader can bring to an executive committee.

Not a channel. A mechanism.

Archer coined the term “communicating organization” roughly four or five years ago, and the definition has sharpened with use — from an aspiration (“an organization where everybody can join the conversation”) to something closer to an operating system. 

“It’s a mechanism that allows us to fully integrate the capabilities of everybody in the organization through communication that is, at its very heart, an inclusive process,” he says. It taps collective wisdom, retains institutional knowledge that would otherwise walk out the door with departing employees, and teaches people how to disagree with each other online without the cruelty anonymity tends to invite.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Archer’s model runs on “connectors” — informal influencers identified across the business, organized into teams, who carry conversation in both directions between the workforce and leadership as well as across the organisation from peer to peer.. It’s a structural bet on the people organizations already listen to informally, formalized into something leadership can actually use.

That inspiration wasn’t only textual: I worked directly with Katie Macaulay and her team at AB — the world’s longest-established internal communications agency — on the design and execution of Archer’s initial pilot across the Americas. 

The numbers

Ask Archer what’s changed, and he doesn’t lead with sentiment — he leads with behavior. 

Town halls that used to end in what he calls “that tumbleweed moment”, when the leader finishes, asks for questions and is met with silence — now run out of time for Q&A, with more challenge from the floor, delivered respectfully. 

Sales teams embedded in the model show measurably better customer service figures, tapping into what other sales teams across the business already know. 

In the pilot regions where the model has run longest, colleague engagement scores sit two to three points above the rest of the organization.

That last figure is the one Archer trusts least. “I’m not a fan of those kinds of measures,” he told me, “because I feel that they don’t really tell me what’s going on.” It’s a useful admission from someone building a case for a new model: the metric he’s most skeptical of is still moving in his favor. He’s not cherry-picking the numbers that flatter him — he’s citing his own weakest evidence and letting the rest do the real work.

That real work is scale. The model launched first across North and South America — deliberately chosen, Archer says, for its size, its language complexity, and the real cultural distance between US, Canadian, and Latin American workplaces despite a shared “Western” label. It’s now rolling out across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, on track to be fully live by mid-August, with Asia Pacific scheduled for next year. Headquarters functions are included, not exempted — “because the headquarters functions are the ones that have responsibility across the organization,” Archer says, “so we want them to be able to join in the conversation.”

Where it broke, and what fixed it

The most instructive part of the conversation wasn’t the success. It was the failure Archer found early, and fixed. The connector model was supposed to surface what was really happening across the business directly — connector to leader, in real time. It didn’t work, at first. “What I discovered was that actually we hadn’t instilled enough psychological safety at that point for people to have those conversations directly,” he says.

The fix was structural, not motivational. Archer grouped connectors into teams and added a layer: one representative per team, meeting with him monthly, translating what a whole group was hearing into something someone could say honestly without being personally exposed for saying it. It also solved a problem Archer hadn’t fully anticipated — language. 

Grouping connectors by shared language let people speak Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese to each other directly, with a bilingual representative carrying the synthesis to Archer in English. “The technology does a pretty decent job of translating as you go along,” he says, “but it’s not enough. You need the human interaction.”

It’s a small design decision with a large implication: the organizations most likely to get value out of network-based, informal-influence models aren’t the ones that simply turn on the tooling. They’re the ones willing to discover where trust doesn’t yet reach, and build the human infrastructure to close that gap before asking people to speak freely into it.

Beyond the metrics

There’s a softer thread underneath all of this, worth naming before the numbers take over. The old employee value proposition, Archer says, was pay and benefits in exchange for time and labor — and it doesn’t work anymore. Engagement was supposed to be the next step, and in its familiar form, that doesn’t fully work either. 

What’s left, in his account, is closer to reciprocity: showing people, structurally, that their voice changes what happens next. He circles back more than once to a podcast on joy at work as the logical extension of the thinking on employee experience — the idea that eight hours a day is a long time to spend not feeling fulfilled, not enjoying the people around you. 

This is not the line you’d expect from someone leading a safety and customer-service case study. But it’s arguably why the case study works at all: the harder numbers only show up because the mechanism is built on that softer premise.

The pitch to everyone else

Archer’s advice to other organizations considering this path isn’t technical. It’s a challenge to a habit of mind. “You really do need to stop thinking about the hierarchy of control in your messaging and in your communications, and you need to open up to conversation,” he says. The first question his own executive team asked, when he pitched this: what if people talk about things we don’t want them to talk about? His answer has become the closest thing the project has to a tagline. “Of course they already are. But now you know about it. And you’ve got a chance to step into that conversation and steer it where you want to go.”

It’s worth sitting with what that reframes. The old engagement model asked leadership to fund a survey, wait months for results, and hope the action plan still mattered by the time it landed. 

Archer’s model asks leadership to trust a structure that surfaces what’s happening continuously — and to be brave enough to hear it. “You need to listen,” he says, “and do the things that you would do in any conversation with a group of peers, rather than thinking about communication as a process by which you tell your subordinates things you have decided they should know.”

Whether that scales cleanly to every organization willing to try it is an open question — Archer’s results, so far, are his own company’s story to tell, not an independently audited one. But the safety numbers are real, the town halls are demonstrably louder, and the customer service figures moved in a direction that predates any survey. For a function that has spent a decade defending its seat at the table, that’s a different kind of argument to walk in with.

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Mike Klein is Editor-in-Chief of Strategic Magazine and a consultant with a special focus on internal influence.