It's 8:52 a.m. on a Monday. Someone—let's call her Hannah—opens her laptop for a 9 a.m. call. The VPN won't connect.

She gives up, joins on her phone, and spends the meeting half-listening because she's also trying to find last week's deck, which lives somewhere between three platforms.

Afterwards, she opens the benefits portal to change her pension contribution and is told to "raise a ticket." Then she clears 14 all-staff emails, none of which were meant for her.

By 10 a.m., Hannah has formed a single, simple judgment: work is harder than it should be.

What she has not done—what no employee has ever done—is itemize that morning's tasks by department. She didn't think the VPN is IT, the portal is HR, the email deluge is internal comms, the flaky meeting room is facilities. She just had a bad start to her week.

To the people living it, the experience of work is seamless in exactly the wrong way: every friction blurs into one continuous feeling of low-level annoyance, and that feeling attaches to the organization, not the org chart.

Built Up in Layers

The lines Hannah keeps hitting are real enough from the inside. The experience of work gets carved into neat territories—Workplace Experience, Digital Experience, Employee Experience—each with a different owner, different priorities, and, crucially, a different budget.

IT owns the tools. HR owns the people stuff. Internal comms owns the narrative. Facilities owns the building. Everyone does their job conscientiously, and the result is still a mess.

To understand why, it helps to think geologically. Organizations aren't really designed; they're deposited. Every reorg, every new platform, every newly minted function lays down another layer of sediment.

Over time those layers compact and harden into something that looks permanent and inevitable: the org chart. Call it organizational lithification—structure formed not by intent but by accumulation, pressure, and age.

But people don't experience these strata. The lived experience of colleagues like Hannah is a cross-section through the strata. They experience the seams and fault lines where the layers meet—and the seams are precisely where ownership runs out.

Why the Rock Holds

If the diagnosis is this obvious, why does the rock hold?

Partly because rocks are solid. Stable. You only blow them up if you really need to. And no single leader is incentivized to do that. Fixing a cross-functional problem means spending your own budget and political capital to improve someone else's metrics.

Partly because "experience" is easy to claim and hard to own—appoint a Head of Employee Experience and you've often just deposited another layer rather than cutting through the existing ones.

And partly because the friction is invisible from the summit. Every function's dashboard reads green. The red only shows when you stand where Hannah stands and look up through the whole formation at once—and almost nobody measures from down there.

So the fragmentation isn't a failure of effort or goodwill. It's the natural state of accumulated rock. Left alone, organizations tend toward strata the way ground tends toward layers. Coherence is the thing you have to deliberately cut—and keep cutting.

Cutting Through

The fix isn't another reorg, and it certainly isn't another tool, as both just add layers. It's treating the employee experience as a single system, with shared infrastructure running through the strata, and making someone genuinely accountable for the seams rather than the segments.

The clearest place to start is how information actually reaches people, because that's where the layering shows most and erodes most easily. Most organizations run their channels as competing megaphones: every function broadcasts on its own platform, on its own schedule, to its own logic—sediment, endlessly added to.

The alternative—proper channel infrastructure—is to publish once to a canonical source and distribute through targeted channels that point back to it. One version of the truth, reached deliberately, through the least intrusive channel that does the job. It sounds modest. It quietly dissolves the email deluge, the conflicting versions, and the "did you see the thing?" tax that eats Hannah's morning.

Infrastructure alone won't hold, though. It needs three things wrapped around it: shared principles every function signs up to, common metadata so the layers actually connect, and aligned roadmaps so IT, HR, comms, and facilities stop boring parallel tunnels into the same hillside.

That isn't bureaucracy—it's the opposite. Good governance here is clarity: it shows people what good looks like, then gets out of the way. Guardrails, not gates.

None of this means dynamiting the organizational layers. Specialists should stay specialists; the strata have their uses. What's missing is someone whose dashboard is Hannah's Monday—a role that understands the column matrix and manages the experience.

Until that exists, coherence is left to emerge by accident from people who are each, quite reasonably, optimizing for something else. You're asking folks to forgo their KPIs for the good of employees, and unless that comes with senior sponsorship, that doesn't seem likely.

Hannah doesn't need a better help desk or a slicker portal or fewer emails, exactly. She needs the morning to make sense. That's not one department's job to deliver. It's everyone's—which is exactly why it has to be designed, owned, and measured as one thing, cut clean through the layers rather than bolted on top.

She doesn't care which department broke her day. The organizations that understand this—and are willing to drill through their own rock to fix it—are the ones she'll actually want to keep working for.

• Digital Communications at Work by Sharon O'Dea and Jonathan Phillips (Kogan Page, 2026) goes deeper on building the channel and distribution infrastructure that makes a coherent employee experience possible — available here.

Sharon O'Dea is co-founder of Lithos Partners, a consultancy specialising in digital workplace and internal communications strategy for complex, regulated organisations. Before co-founding the firm she was Head of Digital Communications at Standard Chartered, and she has since advised the likes of HSBC, A&O Shearman, the University of Cambridge and Shell.

A LinkedIn Top Voice and regular contributor to outlets including Reworked, she is co-author of Digital Communications at Work (Kogan Page). She is based in Amsterdam.

Jonathan Phillips is co-founder of Lithos Partners, where he helps organisations cut through the noise to make internal communications actually work.

Formerly Head of Digital Communications at Coca-Cola, he brings an operator's eye to the practical end of the digital workplace: turning strategy into change people will adopt, and measuring whether it landed. Based in Bristol, UK, he has advised clients including NATO, the UK Treasury, Oxford University and the National Trust, and is co-author of Digital Communications at Work (Kogan Page)