patel.leo•2d agoMost Upvoted

Spent $200 on a corporate messaging audit and it showed me I was talking to myself

I work at a mid-sized accounting firm, and we've been doing these monthly internal newsletters for years. Nobody ever said anything about them, so I figured they were fine. Last quarter I finally caved and paid $200 for an outside consultant to do a quick audit of our internal comms. She sat in on a few meetings and looked at our emails. Turns out we were using all this jargon nobody understood, like 'synergize deliverables' and 'leverage cross-functional alignment.' The new hires told her they felt lost. The audit was just one person for a day, but her feedback was brutal and specific. She gave us plain language templates that cost nothing extra. I'm curious if anyone else has ever paid for an outside look at their internal messaging and what you got out of it.

2 comments

2 Comments

xenan641d ago

Yep, been there. I had our team do the same thing with our route update memos. Cut out half the words and suddenly drivers actually read them. Plain language templates are worth their weight in gold.

alice_wilson731d ago

@xenan64 nailed it with the plain language thing. Most people don't realize that internal comms audits often just reveal how much corporate speak is actually a defense mechanism - if nobody understands you, nobody can call you out on mistakes.