Smarter Signage Strategies for Higher Ed –
Join the Session!By Tim Vaughan
— July 31st, 2025
Employees today face a constant barrage of information yet still struggle to find what truly matters. They are simultaneously overloaded and underinformed, with profound consequences. The holy trinity of trust, engagement, and productivity are all undermined.
There’s no single answer, of course, but if there were one, it would be: dial down the information deluge and create better, more relevant content. Messages that are clear, relevant, human, and respectful of employees’ time and attention. That “human” bit is already critical but in the age of AI, the need for authenticity becomes even more crucial. Organizations must take care to ensure that AI tools support, rather than dilute, the humanity of internal communications. (And, yes, full disclosure, AI has been enlisted to support the creation of this blog)
To meet the challenges outlined below, organizations must fundamentally rethink their approach to communication, prioritizing quality over quantity, empathy over noise, and purposeful storytelling over scattershot updates. In the sections that follow, we delve into today’s most pressing internal communication hurdles and share how they can be overcome through smarter strategies, a people-first mindset, and the right tools.
#1. Why Internal Comms Must Evolve
Internal communication has entered a new era, one defined by hybrid work, digital transformation, and a fundamental shift in how attention is earned. As Andrew Hubbard, Poppulo’s Director of Communication, puts it, internal communicators are no longer just competing with busy workdays. They’re up against Instagram Reels, TikToks, YouTube Shorts, and a dopamine-fueled scroll engineered to entertain, distract, and captivate.
And the data confirms it:
- The average attention span for an email is just 8–12 seconds
- 74% of employees feel they miss important company news, yet over half say they’re overwhelmed by too much communication
- Poor communication costs large companies $62.4 million annually in lost productivity
- 47% of email recipients open emails based solely on the subject line
Why It Matters:
It matters because when employees are drowning in noise but starved of clarity, trust and business performance inevitably decline.
The Cost:
The consequences are real, as the statistics above highlight: employees missing information despite being overwhelmed with communication; workplace messaging that’s not relevant to recipients; poor communication resulting in lost productivity. And more.
How to Fix It:
- Start with purpose: As Andrew Hubbard suggests, don’t publish until you can answer: Why this message? Why now? And why should anyone care?
- Be ruthless with relevance: Segment and personalize. Not everyone needs everything; noise is the enemy of attention.
- Keep it human in the age of AI: As AI tools increasingly shape content, employees will quickly spot and distrust messaging that feels mechanical or inauthentic, especially when it’s supposed to come from leaders or managers. Trust is everything and it’s built through tone, empathy, and a genuine human voice. AI can assist, but human communicators must remain the voice.
- Say less, better: Keep messages focused. Use simple, human language and clean formatting. One core message per piece.
- Invest in visual design: Make it beautiful. Compelling layouts and design boost engagement. Think scannable structure and strong visuals, including video.
- Measure what matters: Views are vanity. Prioritize behavioral metrics—what did employees do after engaging with the message? Respect the scroll because your people are overloaded. You earn their attention with value, not volume.
#2. Understanding Internal Communication Barriers
1. Information Silos
The Challenge:
Information silos form when departments or teams operate in isolation, hoarding knowledge, duplicating work, and failing to share insights across the organization. While silos may arise from rapid growth, geographic dispersion, or legacy systems, their impact is cultural as much as operational.
Why It Matters:
Silos slow down workflows and fracture the employee experience. When teams lack visibility into each other’s work, they miss opportunities for collaboration, innovation, and alignment. Employees begin to identify more with their department than with the organization, leading to tribalism, resistance to change, and a lack of shared purpose.
The Cost:
According to McKinsey, siloed organizations are slower to respond to change and less likely to innovate. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace shows that disengaged employees—often a byproduct of siloed communication—are 18% less productive and 43% more likely to leave.
How to Fix It:
- Create cross-functional rituals: Regular town halls, shared OKRs, and interdepartmental retrospectives foster transparency and alignment.
- Use unified platforms: For example, Poppulo centralizes employee communication across email, mobile, intranet, and signage, ensuring consistent comms across teams and geographies.
- Model collaboration from the top: When leaders share updates across departments and celebrate cross-functional wins, they signal that collaboration is a strategic priority.
2. Cultural and Language Differences
The Challenge:
In global organizations, communication must transcend borders, both linguistically and culturally. A message that resonates in New York might fall flat in New Delhi. Tone, hierarchy, humor, and even color symbolism vary widely across cultures, and failing to account for these differences can lead to confusion or offense.
Why It Matters:
Cultural misalignment undermines trust and clarity. It can also alienate employees, particularly those from underrepresented or marginalized groups.
The Cost:
A report from The Economist Intelligence Unit found that 42% of workplace miscommunication stems from differing communication styles.
How to Fix It:
- Localize with intelligence: Use Poppulo’s ground-breaking AI-powered translation to scale multilingual messaging while preserving nuance.
- Design for inclusion: Avoid idioms, use inclusive visuals, and apply plain-language principles.
- Co-create with local voices: Partner with regional leaders or ERGs to vet sensitive content and ensure cultural resonance.
3. Feedback Deficiencies
The Challenge:
In many organizations, communication still flows in one direction: top-down from leadership to employees. But in a world of rapid change and rising employee expectations, this model is no longer sustainable.
Why It Matters:
Feedback is a mechanism for improvement, but more importantly it’s a signal of respect. When employees feel their voices matter, they’re more engaged, more innovative, and more loyal.
The Cost:
According to Gallup, highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability, and 17% higher productivity compared to disengaged teams.
How to Fix It:
- Embed feedback into the flow of work: Use pulse surveys, live polls, and Poppulo analytics to gather real-time sentiment.
- Close the loop: Acknowledge feedback publicly and act on it.
- Train managers as feedback amplifiers: Equip people leaders to surface team insights and escalate them constructively.
4. Inappropriate Communication Channels
The Challenge:
Even the most well-crafted message will fail if it’s delivered on the wrong channel. When critical updates are buried in inboxes or lost in chat threads, employees miss out.
Why It Matters:
Channel misalignment leads to confusion, duplication, and disengagement. It also wastes time—both for communicators and employees.
The Cost:
Only 32% of employees say the information they receive helps them do their job better (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2023).
How to Fix It:
- Map message to medium: Use video for change communication, mobile for urgent alerts, and email for detailed updates.
- Use data to guide distribution: Poppulo’s analytics identify which channels drive behavior change.
- Consolidate and coordinate: Avoid channel sprawl by centralizing publishing calendars and aligning comms across departments.
# 3. Strategies to Overcome Communication Barriers
Implementing Structured Dialogue
The Challenge:
In many organizations, communication is reactive rather than intentional. Messages are sent when something goes wrong, when leadership needs to push a change, or when HR needs to tick a compliance box. But without a structured approach to dialogue, communication becomes fragmented, inconsistent, and often one-sided.
Why It Matters:
Structured dialogue is the foundation of a healthy communication culture. It ensures that employees not only receive information but also have opportunities to respond, reflect, and contribute. This two-way flow builds trust, strengthens alignment, and fosters a sense of ownership.
The Cost:
According to a Harvard Business Review study, unstructured communication, especially in meetings, leads to wasted time, unclear decisions, and employee frustration. Moreover, when employees don’t know when or how they’ll be heard, they disengage.
How to Fix It:
- Establish communication cadences: Create predictable rhythms for updates, feedback, and dialogue. Weekly team huddles, monthly town halls, and quarterly strategy sessions help employees stay informed and aligned.
- Use structured formats: Tools like Poppulo allow you to standardize message formats, schedule recurring updates, and ensure consistency across channels.
- Facilitate upward communication: Encourage employees to ask questions, share concerns, and propose ideas through live Q&As, digital suggestion boxes, or moderated forums.
Leveraging Appropriate Communication Tools
The Challenge:
The modern workplace is saturated with tools—email, Slack, Teams, Zoom, intranets, mobile apps, and more. While each tool serves a purpose, the lack of integration and strategy often leads to confusion, duplication, and missed messages.
Why It Matters:
The right tools, used the right way, can dramatically improve communication efficiency and effectiveness. But when tools are misaligned with message type or audience, they become part of the problem.
The Cost:
According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, employees spend an average of 57% of their time communicating—yet only 32% say the information they receive helps them do their job better.
That’s a massive productivity gap.
How to Fix It:
- Audit your communication ecosystem: Identify which tools are being used, by whom, and for what purpose. Eliminate redundancies and clarify tool usage guidelines.
- Adopt a multi-channel centralized comms strategy: In today’s complex workplace— especially in large organizations—no single communication channel can meet the needs of every employee. A purpose-built platform like Poppulo enables organizations to deliver the right message on the right channel, personalized for relevance. That means using email for office-based staff, mobile for frontline and on-the-go workers, and digital signage for factory floor teams. By targeting communications based on audience and context, companies can ensure critical messages are seen, understood, and acted upon.
- Match tool to task: Use video for storytelling, mobile for urgent alerts, and intranet for policy updates. Let the message dictate the medium—not the other way around.
Ensuring Clarity and Consistency in Messaging
The Challenge:
Inconsistent messaging is one of the fastest ways to erode trust. When employees hear different things from different leaders, or receive conflicting updates across channels, they begin to question the credibility of the message and the competence of the organization.
Why It Matters:
Clarity and consistency are the bedrock of effective communication. They reduce confusion, accelerate decision-making, and build confidence—especially during times of change.
The Cost:
A Holmes Report study found that poor communication costs large companies an average of $62.4 million per year in lost productivity. Much of this stems from misalignment, rework, and delays caused by unclear or conflicting messages.
How to Fix It:
- Use messaging frameworks: Develop templates and tone-of-voice guidelines to ensure consistency across departments and channels.
- Coordinate timing and content: Poppulo’s publishing calendar helps communication teams avoid overlap, manage campaigns, and align messaging with business priorities.
- Start with the “why”: As Andrew Hubbard advises, don’t publish until you can answer: Why this message? Why now? Why should anyone care?
#4. Promoting Open Communication
Encouraging Regular Feedback
The Challenge:
Many organizations still rely on outdated feedback mechanisms: annual surveys, static suggestion boxes, or top-down reviews. These approaches are too slow, too narrow, and too disconnected from the day-to-day realities of employees.
Why It Matters:
Regular feedback is essential for agility, innovation, and morale. It helps leaders identify emerging issues, spot opportunities, and build a culture of continuous improvement. More importantly, it signals to employees that their voices matter.
The Cost:
It’s generally accepted that employees who receive regular feedback are more likely to be engaged at work but several studies highlight how infrequently employees receive feedback.
How to Fix It:
- Make feedback continuous: Use pulse surveys and live polls to gather real-time input on everything from morale to messaging effectiveness.
- Close the loop: Communicate what was heard and what actions are being taken. This builds trust and reinforces the value of participation.
- Empower managers: Equip people leaders with tools and training to give and receive feedback regularly and constructively.
Fostering an Inclusive Culture
The Challenge:
Even well-intentioned communication can excluded people. Whether through language, imagery, tone, or timing, messages that don’t reflect the diversity of the workforce can alienate employees and undermine trust.
Why It Matters:
Inclusion is about voice as much as it is about representation. When employees feel seen, heard, and respected, they’re more likely to contribute, collaborate, and stay.
The Cost:
According to Deloitte, inclusive companies are 2x more likely to meet or exceed financial targets, and 6x more likely to be innovative. Yet many organizations still struggle to embed inclusion into their communication practices.
How to Fix It:
- Audit for bias: Review language, visuals, and formats for inclusivity. Avoid jargon, idioms, and stereotypes.
- Co-create with ERGs: Involve employee resource groups in shaping and reviewing key messages.
- Localize with care: Use Poppulo’s AI-powered translation to ensure messages resonate across cultures and languages.
# 5. Enhancing Workplace Transparency and Trust
Establishing Clear Communication Protocols
The Challenge:
Without clear protocols, communication becomes chaotic. Messages are duplicated, missed, or misaligned. Employees don’t know what to expect or where to look.
Why It Matters:
Protocols create clarity. They help employees understand who communicates what, when, and how. This reduces confusion, builds confidence, and ensures consistency.
The Cost:
A lack of communication governance leads to inefficiencies, rework, and disengagement.
Organizations with clear communication structures are more likely to outperform their peers.
How to Fix It:
- Define roles and responsibilities: Clarify who owns what types of communication, from crisis updates to cultural storytelling.
- Use centralized calendars: Poppulo’s publishing tools help teams coordinate timing, avoid overlap, and align with business priorities.
- Standardize formats: Templates and tone-of-voice guides ensure consistency across departments and channels.
Building Trust through Consistency
The Challenge:
Trust is fragile. It’s built slowly through consistent, honest communication, and lost quickly through mixed messages or broken promises.
Why It Matters:
Employees watch what leaders do as much as they listen to what they say. Perhaps more so.
When communication is consistent with action, trust grows. When it’s not, skepticism sets in.
The Cost:
According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, 1 in 3 employees don’t trust their employer to do what’s right. This lack of trust leads to lower engagement, higher turnover, and reputational risk.
How to Fix It:
- Align words with actions: Don’t overpromise. Communicate transparently, especially when the news is difficult. People want to know the truth, even if it’s hard for them to hear.
- Reinforce key messages: Use Poppulo’s multi-channel delivery to ensure consistency across formats and functions.
- Track and report progress: Use data to show how the organization is delivering on its commitments.
#6. Encouraging Collaboration
Facilitating Cross-Departmental Interaction
The Challenge:
Many organizations talk about collaboration but that’s as far as it goes. Teams remain siloed, and cross-functional work is the exception, not the norm.
Why It Matters:
Collaboration drives innovation, accelerates problem-solving, and improves the employee experience. It also helps organizations respond more effectively to change.
The Cost:
Harvard Business Review emphasizes that cross-silo collaboration is essential for revenue growth and customer satisfaction, especially in complex, fast-moving industries.
How to Fix It:
- Create shared goals: Use OKRs or KPIs that require input from multiple teams.
- Celebrate collaborative wins: Recognize and reward cross-functional success stories in internal channels.
- Facilitate connection: Use Poppulo’s platform to spotlight team projects, share learnings, and build visibility across departments.
Utilizing Collaborative Platforms
The Challenge:
Disconnected tools and workflows make collaboration harder than it needs to be. Employees waste time switching between platforms, duplicating work, or searching for information.
Why It Matters:
The right platforms make collaboration seamless. They reduce friction, increase transparency, and help teams move faster together.
The Cost:
According to Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index, employees spend 60% of their time on “work about work”—like searching for information or managing tools.
How to Fix It:
- Integrate communication and collaboration: Poppulo integrates with tools like Microsoft Teams f to streamline workflows.
- Use shared dashboards: Make goals, progress, and updates visible to all stakeholders.
- Enable asynchronous collaboration: Support flexible work by allowing teams to contribute on their own time, across time zones.
#7. Monitoring and Adapting Communication Strategies
Regular Assessments of Communication Practices
The Challenge:
Too many communication strategies are set once and forgotten. But employee needs, business priorities, and workplace norms are constantly evolving.
Why It Matters:
What worked last year—or even last quarter—may not work today. Regular assessments ensure that communication remains relevant, effective, and aligned with organizational goals.
The Cost:
According to Gallagher, 60% of organizations lack a long-term internal communication strategy.
This leads to reactive messaging, missed opportunities, and inconsistent employee experiences.
How to Fix It:
- Conduct quarterly audits: Review message clarity, channel performance, and employee sentiment.
- Use Poppulo’s analytics to track engagement, behavior change, and feedback trends.
- Benchmark against industry standards: Compare your performance to peers using tools like Gallagher’s State of the Sector or Gallup’s engagement index.
Adapting to Evolving Workplace Needs
The Challenge:
The workplace is changing—fast. From AI and automation to hybrid work and generational shifts, employee expectations are evolving in real time.
Why It Matters:
A static communication strategy is a vulnerable one. To stay relevant, internal comms must be agile, data-driven, and employee-centric. The
Cost:
Organizations that fail to adapt risk losing top talent, falling behind competitors, and missing opportunities for innovation.
How to Fix It:
- Stay close to your audience: Use feedback tools and sentiment analysis to understand what employees need—before they ask.
- Experiment and iterate: Pilot new formats (like short-form video or interactive newsletters) and refine based on results.
- Involve employees in strategy: Co-create communication plans with input from across the business.
Conclusion
Trust and authenticity must be the bedrock of internal communication in the age of AI. Employees will quickly disengage if messages feel machine-generated or lack the warmth and credibility of a real human voice. To truly connect, organizations must deliver communications that are not only human but also highly relevant, targeted, and personalized— so employees receive the information they need to excel in their roles without being distracted or frustrated by irrelevant noise.
Achieving this requires communication technology that can navigate the complexity of reaching and understanding a diverse workforce—technology like Poppulo, which has long been a leader in employee communications and is now redefining the field with agentic AI that empowers organizations to connect with their people in smarter, more meaningful ways.