
Employee communications teams face several barriers that hold them back from making decisions on how to effectively reach their employees. Many of these barriers can be tied back to human behavior, the expectations of employees today, uncertainty in business, limited resources, and the fear of messing up. And often, these barriers prevent communicators from making the right decisions about communications strategy—or even making any decision at all.
But a greater understanding of the barriers blocking comms strategy and the impact that human behavior can have on communications effectiveness can help communicators shape their comms strategy accordingly and add value to the business.
We explored the strategies to overcome these key barriers and behaviors in a webinar with Lindsay Kohler, Lead Behavioral Scientist at scarlettabbott, Sarah Meurer, VP Global Internal Communications at Elsevier, and Joss Mathieson, Chief Encouragement Officer at Change Oasis.
During the webinar, the panelists shared the top challenges and barriers that they’ve faced in their experience as internal communicators, the strategies they’ve used to overcome these barriers and drive communications forward, real-world success stories and best practices for transforming your approach to communication, and insights gleaned from the Poppulo Communications Maturity Model. Check out the webinar on-demand here.
This guide delves into the key insights and takeaways from the panel discussion, plus shares some resources and approaches to help inform your communications strategy.

Internal communicators measure plenty. Open rates, click-throughs, attendance, views, and reach—most IC teams have dashboards full of the stuff. What they struggle with is proving that any of it made a difference to the business. And business impact is the only measurement their leaders genuinely care about. It's a gap most IC practitioners feel acutely. Gallagher's 2026 Employee Communications Report found that seven in 10 internal communicators still measure only basic activity metrics, and fewer than one in eight measure business impact. Measurement is the weakest capability in their global readiness model, and teams relying only on activity data are the ones struggling most to demonstrate their value. This is a two-part guide built to close that gap. Part One is the Masterclass. It sets out why outcome measurement matters, the frameworks that make it manageable, and the principles separating measurement that proves impact from measurement that just fills a dashboard. Part Two is the Playbook. It's the templates, the worked example, and the sample dashboard—the practical tools you'll need for a successful comms campaign. Read the Masterclass for the thinking. The Playbook is where you'll find the tools to put it into practice. We hope you find them useful. Tim Vaughan Editorial Director, Poppulo

Many IC teams measure and report on what's easy to count: email open rates, video views, all-hands attendances. Outputs that leadership don’t much care about. They want to know whether communications actually changed anything—whether people understood something important and whether behavior looked different afterward. Leaders want proof of impact, they want to see results. Outputs don't give them that. Outcomes do. Part One of this paper, the Measurement Masterclass, clearly showed why. Here, Part Two gives you the tools to measure outcomes: four templates you can fill in for your own campaigns, plus a full worked example showing all four completed together, so you can see how they fit before you use them yourself. What’s inside: The Know/Feel/Do Framework. Defines what a specific audience needs to know, feel, and do as a result of your communication—specific enough to measure. One template per audience segment. The Outcome/Output/Measurement Plan. For each outcome, sets out the communication tactic you'll use and how you'll measure whether it worked. This is the template you'll use most. The SMART Objectives Worksheet. A short exercise for turning a vague goal into a specific, measurable one, with a number and a deadline attached. The Power/Influence Grid. Maps your audience by power and attitude—champions, supporters, blockers, detractors—so you know where to put your effort. A worked example. All four templates completed end-to-end for a company-wide AI policy rollout, so you can see the whole process applied to one campaign from start to finish. A sample measurement dashboard. A one-page example of how to present outcome data to leadership. Written by Andrew Hubbard, Senior Director of Communications at Poppulo, and Joanna Hall of Afire Consulting.

Lost in the AI Lingo? Here’s your cheat sheet to bots, buzzwords & brainy tech, made simple for internal comms pros.