How to find and fix the REAL communication problems

How to find and fix the REAL communication problems in your organisation

Calling Out Hidden Gaps Sabotaging Your Organisation Message, Undermining Your Leadership...And How to Fix Them for Good

🚨 When communication fails, everything stalls 🚨

You’ve invested time, money and effort in communicating - meetings, emails, town halls, intranet overhauls - but somehow, the message isn’t getting through.

Leaders share key updates, but employees seem disengaged or oblivious.
Internal teams misinterpret strategic priorities and work at odds with each other.
Critical initiatives stall because no one knows who’s responsible or care.

If this sounds familiar. You’re not alone.

Most leaders assume the problem lies in the communications function itself - maybe the messaging isn’t clear enough, or the team isn’t delivering updates effectively.

The comms team gets the blame...
but the REAL issue is deeper

There is a fundamental misalignment between what’s said, by whom and how it’s received.
Communication problems are rarely just about words; they’re about structure, leadership behaviour and how information flow through the organisation.

This is a fixable problem. You just need to know two things

1. How to pinpoint the problem

2. How to fix it.

Pinpointing the problem

Why your communications aren’t landing

Most organisations diagnose and audit communication problems at the surface level.

➤ They audit channels.
➤ They tweak the messages.
➤ They send the team on another course.

But when communication consistently fails to drive clarity, action or alignment, it’s not an output issue, or even just a comms team issue...it’s a system issue.

How to pinpoint the problem

Our review looks at four interconnected layers - each one critical to whether communication succeeds or stalls inside your organisation.

We use a variety of means to flush the information out including stakeholder interviews, multi-layer surveys, material and channels review, op model review and a strategic landscape review.
From here, we then triangulate all the information we have gathered, seen and heard into our diagnosis of what is wrong.

While yes, we have had years of experience doing this you could construct your own way of using all these methods as is indicated at the bottom of the page if you want to do it in-house.

1. Self - Leadership behaviours and belief

What you are trying to find out:

✔ Do senior leaders see communication as a core part of their leadership or a delivery task for comms?
✔ Do they model clarity and consistency, or broadcast and retreat?
✔ Do they seek out comms support or avoid it until there’s a crisis?
✔ How well do they understand their personal impact on how messages land?

2. Structure - Comms function and information flow

What you are trying to find out:

✔ Is the communications team positioned as a strategic partner, as a task and finish function or just a clean-up crew?
✔ Where does comms sit in the org chart? Does it have authority and access or constant bottlenecks?
✔ Do change, engagement, people and strategy functions work with comms from the beginning or bring them in at the end?
✔ How is internal communication structured and set up to deliver? Where is AI in this?

3. Skills - Communication capability across the organisation

What you are trying to find out:

✔ Do your leaders and managers have the skills to communicate in a way that creates trust and momentum?
✔ Is communication seen as a core leadership behaviour, or an afterthought?
✔ Does your comms team have the right capability not just content production, but coaching, influencing, strategy, and facilitation?
✔ Are these skills embedded into development pathways or treated as soft skills?

4. Story - Narrative, message and cultural relevance

What you are trying to find out:

✔ Do you hvae an overall strategic narrative? Is your strategic narrative coherent, alive, and lived or stale, scattered, and siloed? Does what you are currently sending out align with it?
✔ Do your messages align with what people see and feel inside the organisation?
✔ Are you using storytelling deliberately or defaulting to announcements and jargon?
✔ Does every team understand how they fit into the big picture?

What Comes Next?

Now that you have pinpointed the root cause, it is time to look at how to fix it.

The Solution

How to fix your communication gaps

It’s probably becoming clear that tweaking the message alone won’t solve the problem. The real fix lies deeper – in the structures, skills, and leadership behaviours that determine how messages are created, shared, and acted upon.

Having already diagnosed the problem using the Self, Skills, Structure, and Story model, the next step is to apply the same lens to identify the right solutions. This ensures that any intervention is targeted, strategic, and built for long-term impact rather than just another short-term fix.

1. The Self Level : Aligning leaders and communicators

Why It Matters
If leaders aren’t self-aware, engaged, and accountable for communication, nothing else will work.

What Needs to Change
Before improving messaging or training, leaders must:

Recognize their role - communication is leadership.
Engage in self-inquiry - assess how their style impacts clarity and trust.
Identify and own their skill gaps- before training even begins.
Commit to improvement - ensuring communication is seen as a leadership responsibility, not an outsourced task.

Our Approach

Leadership Self-Inquiry & Alignment – Helping leaders reflect on their communication habits and role in driving clarity.
Skills Gap Identification – Facilitating honest assessment of communication weaknesses and securing commitment to improve.
Leadership Communication Charter – Establishing a baseline standard leaders must uphold, ensuring accountability before moving to skills development.

Only once leaders are aligned and motivated do we move to the next stage - building their skills to communicate effectively.

2. The Skills Level: Setting the baseline for communication competency

Why It Matters
Communication isn’t just a function—it’s a skill that must be developed and embedded at all levels.

What Needs to Change

Leaders and managers need a baseline level of communication capability.
Employees should understand and apply core communication principles.
The organization must invest in skills that prevent misalignment before it happens.

Our Approach

Communication Training & Masterclasses – Giving leaders practical skills in behaviour, communication, influence, and messaging.
Skills Benchmarking – Defining a clear standard for leadership communication and ensuring no one falls below it.
Coaching & Real-World Practice – Embedding communication training into actual leadership situations, not theoretical exercises.

3. The Structure and Process Level: Fixing the communications function and operating model

Why It Matters
Even great messages fail if the structure, systems, and processes aren’t designed to support effective communication.

What Needs to Change

The communications function should have a clear mandate, not just produce outputs.
Communication channels must be used strategically, not just as content repositories.
Decision-making about communication should be aligned, not bottlenecked.
AI should be side by side with everything that comms does, is and creates.

Our Approach

Functional Review – Assessing whether the current structure supports effective communication.
Operating Model Redesign – Clarifying who owns what in internal and external communication and future proof it for the coming AI organisational reset.
Channel Strategy Development – Mapping the right messages to the right platforms to reduce noise, including personalised messaging.

4. The Story Level: Fixing the messaging and employee engagement Issues

Why It Matters
The best communication structure means nothing if the messages don’t engage, inspire, or make sense.

What Needs to Change

Messages need to connect with people emotionally, not just push out information.
Employees must be able to see themselves in the story of the organization.
Communication must become a two-way process, not just a broadcast.

Our Approach

Strategic Narrative Development – Develop an overall narrative for the vision and strategy of the organisation. This helping leaders and teams create messages that resonate.
Storytelling Training for Leaders – Teaching leaders how to simplify and humanize messages – not just the central corporate ones but their own.
Feedback and Listening Loops – Embedding two-way communication channels to test and refine messages.

How this works in practice

We take organisations through a structured process. You could replicate this in your organisation.

1. Scoping & Setup

Define the scope, terms of reference, and key focus areas.
Detail the scope of work so it is agreed upon, ensuring alignment on priorities.
Understand what the sponsor of the review "thinks" the problem is, what they may hope to find or not, and why this review is being commissioned.

Reviews can be neccessary for any number of reasons - your change comms may be failing, your team may need a reset, comms as a function may need repositioned, you know you will have a big piece of work on AI enablement across the organisation and your comms team needs to be on point or simply...you need to sound like the organisation you are!

2. Stakeholder & Communications Review

Map the communications ecosystem - leaders, teams, and channels.
Map how information flows through the organisation.
Conduct stakeholder interviews, document and comms output analysis, and surveys.
Analyse findings against frameworks.

3. Insights & Recommendations

Synthesise findings into a comprehensive communications diagnostic report with options for senior management to make decisions.
Report should highlights:
- Key weaknesses and opportunities
- Actionable recommendations based on evidence and best practice
- Immediate vs. long-term fixes
- Above all, make sure you suggest who should own actions.

4. Implementation & Support
Organisations can either implement the plan themselves or work with us, or another company, for ongoing support.
We provide:

Training for Leaders.

Training for Communications Teams
In-house Renewal Packages
Ongoing coaching and advisory support.

The Bottom Line - Why this works

Most communication problems don’t exist in isolation. They are symptoms of deeper leadership, structural and messaging misalignments.

This way of conducting reviews gives organisations a clear roadmap to identify and fix the misalignments - so that communication doesn’t just exist but actually drives action and engagement.

Two Ways to Fix Your Communication Gaps

By now, you’ve identified the cracks in your organisation’s communication. You understand why messages aren’t landing, where misalignment is causing friction, and what it’s costing your business in terms of clarity, engagement, and action.

So - what are you going to do about it?

You have two options:

📌 OPTION 1:- Implement this strategy yourself

If you have the internal resources and expertise to assess, realign, and fix your communication, here’s what you need to do next:

Conduct an internal review using the above Model to diagnose gaps.
Map your communications ecosystem - who owns what, where bottlenecks exist, and how messages flow.
Clarify leadership’s role in communication - ensuring alignment at the top before pushing messages down.
Rebuild or reaffirm the structure and systems - ensuring teams, tools, and channels are working for communication, not against it.
Fix the messaging - eliminate jargon, enhance storytelling, and embed two-way communication processes.
Embed continuous improvement - set up mechanisms for feedback, testing, and iteration to ensure communication remains effective.

This process requires time, strategic focus, and a deep commitment from leadership to change the way communication works within the organisation.

If you’re ready to take this on, go for it.

📌 OPTION 2:- Let us do it for you

If you want a faster, expert-led approach that removes the guesswork and delivers real results, let’s talk.

With Rewired Work’s Sound and Signal Communication Review, we take the heavy lifting off your plate.

We’ll:

✔ Diagnose your exact communication challenges - pinpointing where breakdowns occur and why.
✔ Provide a clear, structured plan to fix issues at the self, structure, and story levels.
✔ Work directly with leadership, teams, and stakeholders to implement that plan and effective changes.
✔ Deliver a comprehensive communications strategy designed for long-term impact.

🚀 Want to get started?

Let's Chat!