At this year’s IoIC Festival, we asked internal comms professionals to write down their answer to one simple question: What buzzwords or phrases have you been told that you never want to hear again?
And wow did they deliver.
If your intranet, comms strategy, or digital employee experience has ever felt like a game of guesswork, this one’s for you.
Every company wants a beautiful, brand-aligned digital employee experience. But when this becomes the brief, you’ve got a problem.
A beautiful homepage with dynamic videos that show off all of your brand colours and patterns does not fix the real problem employees have with the digital experience: Poor UX, outdated pages and duplicated content.
If your employees cannot find the content they need, no amount of glossy stock images or shiny tiles will save the day.
Tidy up what exactly? The homepage? The quick links? The 10 SharePoint sites no one’s touched since 2010?
IOIC festival goers told us that this phrase often surfaces when someone realises that things feel messy and inconvenient but can’t quite put their finger on it.
The fix: Ask the right questions. What do we mean by mess? What are we trying to achieve? Who owns that?
What this actually means is “we did something vaguely similar once and haven’t checked if it’s still working”.
This phrase was the root of much frustration at the IOIC Festival this year because it is the corporate equivalent of clinging on to your old flip phone because it still makes phone calls. Just because the thing exists doesn’t mean it’s effective, or scalable – or being used.
It’s one of the most irritating phrases for comms professionals because it shuts down new ideas before they can even get off the ground. It enables bad habits, outdated tools and irrelevant content to remain in place.
Reality check:
The fix: Seek clarity on what you “already do” before asking why and measuring its efficacy. Proving that the way things are done isn’t delivering is the best way to move beyond this buzzword.
Translation: “Can you take this off my plate?” If you’ve ever heard this phrase you’ll know you’re about to become strategic comms and ghostwriter for the person opposite, all in the name of “teamwork.” But real collaboration isn’t a game of hot potato where comms catches all the spuds.
At the IOIC Festival, comms professionals told us that true collaboration means working with the business from the outset to understand project goals then carefully plan the communications strategy and execution. Subject matter experts need to do more than make the request and disappear; they have to show up, pitch in, and help shape the message. Comms should be the strategic brain, keeping the tone right and making sure the message doesn’t sound like it fell out of a corporate jargon generator, but not the entire assembly line.
The fix: Ask the business at a regular cadence to submit project briefing documents to you that they want support with a quarter ahead of time. Be tough about enforcing this, so the business quickly learns to work with your process.
Be consistent with ground rules: business teams own their stories, and comms helps them shine (without doing it all for them).
It’s easy for leaders to say, “Let’s go omnichannel!” and expect messages to reach the right audience across multiple channels. But behind the scenes, comms teams are often wrestling with real barriers such as: there’s no audience targeting on the intranet, or there are multiple intranets with inconsistent access; publishing anything requires IT support; there’s no unified or up-to-date distribution list; and some offices can’t even access video content at all.
Instead of connecting everyone, the result is frustration and patchy reach, with more channels but not more connection.
The fix:
At the IOIC Festival we heard comms leaders tell us that this one starts small. “Can you update the homepage?”, “Do you know how to change permissions on that SharePoint site?”, “Can you just tidy up the Teams channels?”.
Before long, your comms team is unpicking old site architecture and answering questions that firmly belong in IT’s queue. You were hired to shape culture and engagement, now you’re the unofficial SharePoint helpdesk.
This is what happens when the line between Internal Communication and IT roles gets blurry.
Internal Comms directly shape the employee experience, they own the voice and manage the flow of information across the business. By managing digital channels, they drive engagement and deliver clear, consistent messages that build trust and transparency. Their efforts create a digital experience that truly meets employee needs.
IT teams own the platform; they own the technology experience required to help employees do their jobs effectively, such as whether employees can access the intranet from their mobile, whether groups are set up for content targeting and how new feature releases are managed.
The fix: Work with IT to establish clear roles and responsibilities. Be firm about sending IT queries their way.
Register now for a free intranet audit, we’ll assess your current digital environment and make some expert recommendations that you can take away with you and put to work immediately.
