Lessons learned from turning internal communications into a public affairs advantage
Employees have opinions. That’s not new.
What’s changed is how willing they are to share those opinions publicly, including about their employers’ social and political positions. Sometimes they agree. Sometimes they push back. Either way, they expect to be part of the conversation.
That shift in employees’ mindsets has made internal communication an integral component of public affairs strategy. That reality creates a real opportunity to mobilize one of your most valuable audiences: employees.
Engage employees well, and you build a workforce that understands your positions, trusts your reasoning and is willing to act on your behalf. Miss the mark, and you spend your time fighting rumors and resentment.
I recently presented on this topic on a Public Affairs Council webinar, “Communicating Public Affairs Issues to Your Employees,” alongside my client, Lizzie Chuplis, Director of Public Affairs at HCA Healthcare. Sachs Media has partnered with HCA Healthcare since 2014 to support its public affairs communications. A big part of our partnership has been helping activate their employee advocacy network. Today, that network includes more than 300,000 employee advocates.
Here are some of the lessons we learned by turning internal communications into a public affairs advantage.
Talk With Them, Not At Them
The most impactful shift we made was also the simplest: we stopped treating internal communications as a series of announcements and started treating them as conversations with employees.
For years, we drafted a policy issue message, sent it out and moved on.
When we shifted to inviting questions, acknowledging that some of these issues were personal, and framing messages around shared purpose and mission rather than corporate talking points, the response changed. Employees didn’t just open the emails. They wrote back. They shared the messages with colleagues. And they responded to legislative action calls.
Connect the Right Message to the Right Audience with the Best Messenger
Before sending a message, we identified the people who need to hear it first: leaders, managers and the internal communicators who will field questions from their teams. We wrote talking points and drafted language they can use so the message stays consistent across the organization.
We started choosing messengers strategically.
For a long time, HCA Healthcare’s policy communications came from a generic government relations inbox. When we switched to sending them from actual people (real leaders that employees recognized and trusted, with responses still routing to the GR team), open rates and engagement went through the roof.
The messenger is just as important as the message itself.
Say Less, Mean More
To quote Aaron Burr from the musical Hamilton, “Talk less, smile more.”
Good employee messaging follows a few rules. Write short. Write plain. Don’t assume employees already understand the policy issue, and don’t bury them in legislative details or an alphabet soup of acronyms or jumbled up jargon.
Avoid language that sounds like a crisis. Fear-based framing makes people anxious, not engaged.
What does work: connecting the issue back to the mission. At HCA Healthcare, that meant framing policy issues around patient care and community impact. Most employees joined the team because they believed in the mission. When a policy issue threatens something they already care about, they are more willing to engage.
Build a Network That Carries the Message for You
Most organizations already have internal communicators who are trusted voices on their teams. We found that organizing these people into a loose collaborative (regular meetings, shared best practices, a real-time channel for urgent asks) advanced public affairs goals. With HCA Healthcare operating over 180 hospitals across 20 states, we couldn’t rely on a single email from headquarters to reach everyone. We needed local voices carrying the same message.
But we didn’t just ask them to forward emails. We gave them ready-to-use assets: social media captions, talking points, graphics and sample emails they could adapt for their own audiences. The easier you make it for someone to carry your message, the more likely they are to actually do it.
Create a Conversation
When you open the door to feedback, people use it.
Some good: After calls to action, we received replies from employees sharing personal stories about why the issue mattered to them. Some thanked us for making it easy to participate. Others encouraged their teams to take action too. That kind of peer-to-peer push is something you can’t get from a company-wide email.
Some bad (but very informative): We sent an election recap email that got negative reactions, so we changed our approach. A bad response to one message doesn’t mean the whole effort is broken. It means that particular tactic didn’t land.
Getting Started
- Map your internal channels and communicators. Know who’s already talking to employees and through what platforms.
- Pick a real person to be the face of each message. The messenger is just as important as the message.
- Give other departments the tools to amplify your message.
- Use more than one channel when the ask is important. Important asks need to be made several times.
- Read your employee replies (all of them).
- Run small experiments with timing, format and sender so you can learn what works for your organization.
This is the kind of public affairs work I love most: where strategy meets real people. If you’re an organization and you’re not talking to your employees about the issues that matter most, someone else will. Engage your employees and create advocates for your mission.
