The purpose of this document is to align the team on how we approach internal comms both now and in the future. As we expand the team, maintaining effective internal communications flows will be critical to our success. As we scale the number of people on the team, we will experience several phase changes in system complexity and the processes we have in place for internal comms will need to be revisited regularly to ensure we’re communicating effectively.
Internal comms is communication that happens between stakeholders within a company—as opposed to external comms, which focuses on communication with customers and the public.
Disseminating information to relevant stakeholders within an organization is intrinsically hard, and it’s something that every company struggles with. From first principles, internal comms is hard because it’s a polynomial problem: the number of communication paths between people grows at a faster rate than the number of people you add to the company.
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Every company runs into this problem and there are many ways to go about solving it. One common approach is to hire someone who specializes in internal comms. This is a common specialized position in larger companies. Another common hire made to solve this problem is a Chief of Staff, which is a role that is largely an extension of an executive that increases their reach to other stakeholders.
Mandatory weekly all-hands meetings is another way to distribute information, but these make sense only during certain phases of complexity (e.g. they are pointless in a small team of 3 people, and intractable for a company as large as Amazon).
It’s important to understand the principles of what makes for effective communication, while keeping in mind that each of these principles will apply to a greater or lesser extent based on the size and complexity of the organization.
Fundamentally, internal comms is solving for information dissemination. So the principles around internal comms are considerations for how to manage information flows.
From first principles, some types of information scale, and others do not. Time does not scale (i.e. phone calls, meetings, etc); content does scale (e.g. written documents like this one, loom videos, etc).
When a company is small, coordination and communication is easy, and investing in scalable information (e.g. writing down long-form strategy documents) might not be a good use of time because everyone at the company is already on the same page. A 30 minute meeting with a small group of relevant stakeholders may very well be more efficient than spending 3 hours writing up documentation.
As a company gets larger, it becomes increasingly important to move information into a format that is scalable. It’s much more efficient to, for example, spend 3 hours writing a document and sending it to relevant stakeholders for review than it is to have a 30 minute meeting with 20 stakeholders.
Similarly, it’s more efficient to record a loom of a given process than it is to arrange for a 1 on 1 meeting with every person now and in the future who also needs to complete the task in order to train them on the process.
Given the importance of effective scaling, it is reasonable to expect that everyone should spend as much as one full day per week writing and recording content to distribute information with others at the company—especially for those in leadership.
As companies grow, information becomes siloed within groups/departments. This is bad, but it’s also inevitable given the sheer volume of information generated—for example, it’s not reasonable to expect every marketing hire to read through and understand all documentation within engineering and stay up to date on what every engineer is working on. So the question here is not how to prevent silos from forming, but rather how to manage those information silos.