Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Most IC and HR professionals aren’t starting from zero. They know what good looks like — clarity of purpose, a real understanding of their audience, leadership voice that employees actually trust, and some ability to show the function’s impact. The gap between knowing and doing is well understood. What’s less understood is where the teams that have closed much of that gap still get stuck.
New research from Gallagher’s State of the Sector 2025/26, drawing on over 1,300 communications and HR professionals across 40 countries, maps the internal communications landscape with unusual precision.
It identifies a segment of high-maturity, low-risk functions that have genuinely figured out most of what the field has been working toward. They’re not perfect. But studying what they do differently — and where they still fall short — is one of the most useful exercises available to any team trying to raise its game.
Key takeaways
- Only 26% of IC functions globally operate at high strategic maturity with low communication risk — what Gallagher’s research calls the “Stable” segment (Gallagher, State of the Sector 2025/26)
- Stable teams are 3.5× more likely to report increased employee engagement and track 90% of their stated mandate — compared to 43% for lower-maturity teams (Gallagher, State of the Sector 2025/26)
- The clearest differentiators aren’t budget or headcount — they’re how frequently these teams use audience insight, and whether their communications sound human rather than corporate
- 70% of all IC teams — including many high-performers — are still measuring delivery activity rather than listening behaviour or business outcomes (Gallagher, State of the Sector 2025/26)
- Audio is the format most structurally aligned with how high-maturity IC teams communicate: human in tone, measurable at the individual level, and asynchronous by design — meaning it reaches employees in the moments they actually have attention
What separates high-maturity IC functions from everyone else
Gallagher’s readiness model segments IC teams into four profiles based on strategic maturity and communication risk. Three of the four — Vulnerable (30%), Untapped (21%), and Resilient (23%) — all share a common limitation: either low capability, low risk awareness, or both. The fourth group, Stable, sits at just 26% of the field.
What does Stable actually look like? These teams track 90% of their stated mandate. They are 3.1× more likely to prioritise value metrics over activity metrics. They’re the segment most likely to operate as a genuine strategic consultancy to the business rather than a reactive content production function (Gallagher, State of the Sector 2025/26).
Two behaviours distinguish them most clearly from lower-maturity teams. First, they use audience insight — personas, segmentation, archetypes — five times more frequently than their counterparts (Gallagher, State of the Sector 2025/26). Second, they’re seven times more likely to communicate in a human tone rather than a corporate one (Gallagher, State of the Sector 2025/26).
This is worth pausing on. Neither of those differentiators is primarily about resources. You don’t need a larger team or a bigger budget to know your audience better or to write like a person. What they require is discipline — a decision to treat audience understanding as foundational infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have, and a willingness to let go of the polished corporate register that feels safe but doesn’t land.
Strategic maturity, in other words, is less about what you produce and more about how you think before you produce it.
The storytelling gap – and why following through is the harder part
If audience insight is the first differentiator, narrative discipline is the second — and it’s where even experienced teams tend to underinvest.
77% of IC professionals globally do not regularly use audience profiling or personas (Gallagher, State of the Sector 2025/26). That’s a planning failure, but the consequences show up in execution: when you don’t know who you’re talking to, you default to broadcasting. And broadcast volume, the research shows, actively increases the risk you’re trying to reduce. High communication volume correlates with a 30% increase in leadership trust risk — meaning more content, without more relevance, erodes the very thing it was meant to build (Gallagher, State of the Sector 2025/26).
What high-maturity teams do instead is build narrative continuity. When something was promised — a change explained, a commitment made, a question raised in an engagement survey — they return to it. Explicitly. The pattern isn’t complicated: say what you’re going to do, do it, then come back and acknowledge that you did. Call it a “promise kept” rhythm. It sounds simple, and it is. But most IC programmes don’t do it because they’re focused on the next piece of content rather than the thread that connects them all.
Read: How do you modernise internal comms in 2026?
This is one of the patterns most visible when supporting recurring internal content series. The programmes that build genuine audience trust over time aren’t the ones with the highest production values. They’re the ones where employees hear, across several episodes or updates, that leadership remembered what it said last time — and followed through. That continuity is what compounds. And it’s what distinguishes a comms function that happens to produce content from one that actively shapes how employees understand the organisation they work in.
The measurement problem that even high-maturity teams haven’t fully solved
Here is where the honest picture of even the best IC functions gets interesting. Because Stable teams have a problem too — they’ve just moved further along the spectrum to encounter it.
70% of all IC teams are still measuring output: sends, opens, clicks (Gallagher, State of the Sector 2025/26). These are delivery metrics. They confirm that a message went out. They say nothing about whether it was understood, whether it changed how someone approached their work that day, or whether it reached the people who actually needed it most.
High-maturity teams know this. The Gallagher research identifies resources as the primary remaining hurdle for Stable segments — which typically means they understand what to measure, but don’t yet have the infrastructure to do it consistently (Gallagher, State of the Sector 2025/26). The gap between intention and execution persists even at the top.
The stakes here aren’t just operational. Leaders increasingly ask IC for sentiment data and evidence of business impact — but only 27% of IC teams report at that level (Gallagher, State of the Sector 2025/26). The research makes the cost of that gap explicit: connecting comms data to business outcomes cuts the risk of IC being perceived as an administrative function in half. Put differently, measurement is how IC functions protect their mandate, not just how they improve their content.
The practical shift is from “did they receive it” to “how far did they get.” Knowing that 71% of the logistics team completed a briefing on a new process, but only 28% of the night shift did, is operationally useful and strategically significant. It tells you where follow-up is needed, where message fatigue may be building, and where a different format might serve better. That level of data changes what IC can bring to a leadership conversation.
Where private audio fits in the high-maturity stack
The behaviours that define high-maturity IC – human tone, audience segmentation, narrative continuity, behavioural measurement – are exactly what audio is structurally built for. Not because it’s a newer or trendier format, but because of what it can and can’t do.
Email communicates. Audio conveys. The difference matters most in the moments IC and HR teams care about most: change communications, where tone is everything; leadership visibility, where text strips out the very signals that build trust; and culture activation, where the aspiration is for employees to feel something, not just to know something.
High-maturity teams don’t need another broadcast channel. They need a format that captures leadership voice authentically, can be directed at specific employee segments by role, region, or shift pattern, and returns data on actual listening behaviour – not delivery receipts.
To this end, Auddy’s end-to-end podcast solution Campfire provides full-service creative and editorial support for your internal podcast, built on a proprietary private distribution platform.
In practice for IC and HR teams, that means:
- Access-controlled audio that reaches employees on mobile, offline if needed, and without requiring anyone to be at a desk.
- Named-user completion data shows not just who listened, but where attention held and where it dropped — the kind of behavioural signal that supports real measurement rather than activity reporting.
- And the creative support means lean teams can sustain a consistent content cadence — the kind of regularity that makes narrative continuity possible — without absorbing the production overhead themselves.
The “promise kept” pattern described earlier is particularly well suited to audio. A leader can reference last month’s episode, close a loop, acknowledge a question that came back through listening data, and employees hear it in a way that a follow-up email simply cannot carry. The medium does part of the work.
Read more on the benefits of internal podcasts.
What even “Stable” teams are still getting wrong
These are the teams everyone else is aspiring to. And they’re still working on it.
The research’s recommended next steps for Stable functions are: invest in human-centric design and accessibility, build a listening ecosystem that integrates data across IT, HR, and employee feedback platforms, and make a clearer case for IC’s business value at the senior leadership level (Gallagher, State of the Sector 2025/26). They’re not small challenges. They require organisational influence as much as operational capability.
The broader lesson is that there’s no finished state in internal communications. High-maturity functions aren’t distinguished by having arrived — they’re distinguished by the quality of the problems they’re working on.
Vulnerable teams are asking how to get any traction. Stable teams are asking how to prove long-term business impact and embed their function more deeply into strategic planning.
If you’re reading this and most of the earlier sections feel like a gap between where you are and where you’d like to be, that’s a useful orientation.
The path from reactive to strategic is well documented. It starts with knowing your audience, communicating in a way that sounds like a person, measuring what people do rather than what lands in their inbox, and building the habit of following through on what was said. None of that requires a large team. All of it requires intention.
What to take away
- High-performing IC functions are a minority, but their behaviours are learnable: prioritise audience insight, communicate in a human tone, build narrative continuity across your content, and measure listening behaviour rather than delivery activity
- Volume without relevance increases the risks you’re trying to manage — more comms is not a substitute for better-targeted comms
- The “promise kept” pattern — returning to what was said and showing it was followed through — is one of the most underleveraged trust-building mechanisms available to any IC or HR team
- Behavioural measurement (completion, engagement curves, named-user data) is what transforms IC from a delivery function into a strategic one — and it’s what earns the function protection when budgets tighten
- Even the most mature IC teams are still closing gaps. The goal isn’t perfection — it’s making sure the gaps you’re working on are the right ones
Frequently asked questions
Our IC team is small. How do we move toward higher maturity without more headcount?
The Gallagher data suggests the primary differentiators of high-maturity teams aren’t resource-dependent — they’re behavioural. Using audience personas, writing in a human tone, and building in narrative continuity are decisions, not budget lines. The more resource-intensive work (sustained content cadence, analytics infrastructure) can be addressed by working with external production and creative partners rather than building internally.
What does “measuring behaviour” actually look like in practice for internal comms?
It means shifting from delivery metrics to engagement metrics. Instead of tracking sends and opens, you’re tracking how far into a piece of content employees got, whether they returned to it, and whether specific audience segments engaged differently. Audio formats make this more achievable because they generate natural listening data — completion rates, drop-off points, replay moments — that written content rarely produces at the same resolution.
How do we build narrative continuity without content feeling repetitive?
Continuity and repetition are different things. Continuity means your communications have a thread — they reference what came before, close loops, and build on an ongoing conversation rather than treating every update as a standalone broadcast. Repetition is saying the same thing twice. The simplest way to build continuity is to open each significant communication by briefly acknowledging the last relevant thing you said on this topic, and whether it was followed through.
What’s the most common mistake teams make when trying to move from broadcast to strategic IC?
Trying to do both simultaneously without a clear triage system. The shift from reactive to strategic requires being willing to do less — to have a list of things the IC function will not do — so that capacity can be directed toward the work that builds long-term influence. Teams that add strategic activities on top of an existing broadcast workload rarely sustain either well.
Source: Gallagher, State of the Sector 2025/26 — Employee Communications & Engagement Report. Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Based on 1,300+ respondents across 40 countries, September–November 2025.
