Every year, we look forward to our return to Bishopsgate for Gallagher’s Communications Summit. It’s a wonderful event bringing together a broad church of communicators, HR specialists, and more to delve into the latest challenges, successes, and innovations in the world of internal communications.

Hosted by Marc Wright and Jennifer Reischel-Berg with panache and a touch of showbiz magic, it was an event chock-full of amazing insights and effective comms tactics. This year, the 106 team was lucky enough to attend in force, allowing us to cover the full agenda.

Across the days, we noticed four emerging themes: the importance of action after listening, the language we use matters, the role of emotional intelligence and finally, structure as strategic enabler.

1. Action over lip service

One major facet was the need for communicators to cut through the noise and tackle the immediate and real challenges organisations are dealing with. Modern workplaces need concise, clear, and aligned communications. As the world becomes more volatile, organisations can’t afford to mislead or obfuscate the realities on the horizon.

Directness

For some, this was in a much more literal tactic, like with Claire Williams, formerly of Williams Racing, who spoke about how she conducted one thousand 1:1 meetings with her colleagues because:

‘If you can’t communicate effectively across your team, you won’t have a high performing team.’ – Claire Williams

She did so by showing her belief that people are not assets and communicating follow through to show change. It was a means of demonstrating the leadership investment in people as she went out of her way to hear concerns and make people feel heard.

Reasoning and outcomes

This directness was further expressed in the ‘Is DEI Dead?’ panel featuring Advita Patel from Chartered Institute of Public Relations, Deepa Thomas-Sutcliffe of the Cabinet Office, John Clegg of Whirlybird Comms, and Sarah Black of Athru Communications. As the conversation went on, there was a clear sense that DEI could no longer afford to be performative and needed to demonstrate clear progress through visible change. It can’t be something that was overly spoken about without clear actions taken.

A similar tactic came up in Henrik de Wit’s Refresco case study on ‘launching an ESG in an age of dismissal’. Often organisations see climate commitments as a risk drive because it comes down to what is a more bankable investment of resources. But net zero ambitions affect the whole supply chain. A more realistic strategy is in embedding ESG policy within existing corporate strategy, marrying ethical imperatives with business acumen.

Practically, at Refresco, this meant their position on the climate crisis could be tailored to regional and specific frameworks as well as communications that:

• Educate
• Enable
• Energise

The sense of obligation for organisations to “do the right thing” can stimy the drive to complete tasks effectively and a crucial aspect was invigorating people to get excited about what the company is doing.

Responding to negative feedback

Carmen Coombs from Nationwide was even more active. In her conversation with Chris Andrew from Gallagher about how Nationwide evolved their EVP, she spoke about how folding in uncomfortable commentary helped to better meet the needs and expectations of their people. They spoke with colleagues at all levels to dissect and understand where they needed to go and answer the question of how we want the business to be seen by colleagues.

While not always positive, hearing the dissenting voices in the company made for the most proactive and effective comms to create the building blocks of their new EVP. This emerged from a thorough culture survey to build out their people narrative. Because there were so many conflicting demands for a company like theirs, they wanted to return to what they could fully offer their people.

A major motivation was the logic they held that this couldn’t be done without understanding the scale of the project and starting from the ground up to apply this new focus on their existing processes.

2. The language we use and why it matters

The second major theme was around the language we use in our internal communications. Time and time again, new articulation was a tool needed to better tackle the challenges of disengagement and wider market fears more tangibly.

Data comprehension  

Vinny Foreman had a clear understanding of utilising all types of data sets in maximising strategy reach and creating more intentional comms. As the way we incorporate these data findings evolves, our language around it must evolve with it. High open rates could no longer be relied upon as clear signs of adoption. Rather communicators needed to translate to detailed online persona creation to better observe ways colleagues use platforms.

Because of the endless options and lack of context in survey findings, many organisations settle for the easy thing, rather than intentionally finding the hard metrics that give a clearer sense of the puzzle.

Data was also top of mind for Sharn Kleiss when she took the participants through Gallagher’s 2025 Employee Communications Report. The most razor-focused storytelling comes from understanding data points. Crucially, this did not need deep technical knowledge but rather having a sense of how to read and articulate what you’re seeing.

The logic of language

Similarly, Stephen Welch of Archetypical felt we needed to view influence within an organisation as different kinds of languages. While he spoke Spanish, German, and English, he could recognise when someone was speaking Chinese, even if he didn’t understand what they were saying.

His RECIPE model was a way of understanding different influence preferences to better capitalise on motivating and activating different departments. These included:

• REWARD
  • Showing you understand that internal actions of the organisation affect the individual and rewarding them justly.
  • Showing you respect your coworkers time and that the energy they put into the company isn’t for nothing.
• EXCHANGE
  • Capitalising on transactional sensibility
  • Suggesting to your people that they can gain a lot from working with you.
• CONNECT
  • Connecting emotionally with colleague motivations.
• INFORM
  • Finding facts and communicating as plainly as possible the intelligence you have
• PICTURE
  • Setting goals for the next 3-5 years
  • Big picture distillation to connect with the wider organisational ambitions.
• EXIT
  • Communicating that if an aspect of the strategy does not bear fruit that we have another route to take.

Bethany Joy picked up a similar sentiment on her talk about rediscovering your secret brand voice. In her communications, she noted that instinctive reactions to particular words could give clues to the language you should be using. In her experience, there was too much focus on language for clients/customers and not enough for the workers, even though clear internal brand voice could help teams work closer together.

3. Emotional intelligence

To facilitate more cohesive comms strategy, greater emotional intelligence works as a guiding light to better build culture, vision, and greater employee experience.

What makes us emotional at work?

Richard Clarke from Evolved Ideas was specific in the emotion he wanted to talk about, namely happiness and how to diagnose it at the workplace. For him, happiness was a science, and within the workplace that is made up of five factors:

• Protection from harm
• Opportunity for growth
• Connection & community
• Mattering at work
• Work-life harmony

You can diagnose people’s unhappiness through these factors and recognise how best to treat it. This was vital because increased happiness is increased retention, higher productivity, and better behaviour modelling.

Compounding this point, Joss Mathieson wanted us to start using the f-word more at work – feelings. He explained that all organisations have an emotional culture, even if it’s one that’s unaddressed, and that we need to address this particularly during change transformation programmes.

The human response to change is to perceive it as a threat so communicators need to recognise how to position the change as rewarding, even when this isn’t rationally the case. Identifying these key emotions was as simple as understanding the positive emotions you wanted to feel and the negative emotions you don’t want to feel.

Strategic benefits of emotionality

As much as emotionality was positioned as a work benefit wholesale, many speakers also made the case for more strategic use of emotions. Advita Patel (CIPR) took us through her methodology of building up leadership confidence.

This began in small habitual changes to encourage in leaders so they could talk themselves into the confident headspace they needed to be in to enact and lead people with drive, determination, and skill. This ‘ripple effect’ worked like a Couch to 5k strategy, using repetitive practice to instil positive patterns that you took forward into the organisation.

Deepa Thomas-Sutcliffe utilised a similar framework in her talk ‘Why does organisational purpose matter?’ This was about using language to align personal purpose with wider organisational purpose, and Deepa cited Ikigai, the Japanese concept meaning ‘A reason to jump out of bed in the morning.’

This alignment more practically speaking came through audience insights and an honesty with yourself about when the organisational purpose felt inauthentic. Even when working across multiple countries, there was a means of doing this through:

• The induction process
• Volunteering opportunities for employees
• Good employee engagement

Internal representation, making the people who embody the values most clearly more visible, was integral to spread this sense of culture around and gives literal examples to colleagues about how to live their purpose.

4. Structure for strategic leverage

Communicators have always been told how vital it is to make the business case for their programmes and are encouraged to invest in effective measurement tools to better show the value of what they do. This conference was no different as many speakers made a pointed effort to show what publicising policy and internal frameworks could do for clearer and more empowering comms.

Lack of governance

In Sonya Poonian’s talk on AI, she showed that most organisations, despite having a keen desire to utilise AI at every turn, have woefully small amounts of governance or guidelines in place for their employees:

• 2 in 5 communicators reported having no governance in AI.
• Only 36% had a dedicated group or individual with responsibility for AI in the business.

Communicators need to push for greater guidelines and understanding of the organisational position on AI in the business, as the usage is going to continue at a high pace. In a wider point, communicators need the language and knowhow of involving them in these more concrete policy and cultural issues.

Having a plan

The value of knowing these frameworks was readily apparent in Carolyn Bowick’s session on crisis comms. Mapping out all potential options and having clear processes in the wake of every eventuality made for the most streamlined and effective crisis comms. This emerged from knowing the organisation’s duty of care and responsibilities, again highlighting the need for specific contractual operations and communicating those to your people meaningfully.

In the same vein, in the ‘Is DEI dead?’ panel, communicators could more effectively show colleagues where the organisation stands if there is a clear guideline in place. Having the backing of top brass regulation means employees have clear guidelines so they can manage socio-cultural differences well, with their good intentions supported by a framework.