Good internal communication can leave your employees feeling cozy under a fleece blanket, sipping hot chocolate next to a fire. Bad internal communication can feel like, well, anything going on at Twitter right about now.

Stephanie Oribhabor, director of employee experience at Great Place To Work, spends a lot of her day making sure her colleagues have the information and resources they need to succeed. She’s always strategizing when it comes to internal communications, making sure employees are able to access information and that it’s helpful when they do.

Kayla Glanville is co-founder, CEO, and in charge of all things internal comms at Upaway,  a travel support and organization company. She has years of experience in internal communications at companies like Twitter (pre-Musk), and considers herself a “comms-focused founder.”

These two pros say a solid internal comms strategy is indispensable, and, yes, they told us why.

Remember the why. Your internal communications needs a why component that connects back to your employees’ so they know why they should care.

“Sometimes I think that the why gets missed in messaging,” Oribhabor said. “Everybody wants to know the why and how [the message] impacts them personally.”

She pointed to a recent company-wide presentation where top brass broke down budgeting “to a very granular level” for everyone at the company. Employees could see how their work affected the bottom line, the company's future growth, and, ultimately, their bonuses.

“Everyone cares about [their bonus] at the end of the year, and in order to hit this, you have to understand everything else that either we’re on target for or we’re not, and it takes all of us rowing in the right direction,” she said. “We talked about the numbers and the business and talked about budgets and broke everything down. I think people were like, ‘I get it’...I visibly saw light bulbs going off in the room.”

Keep reading.—AD

To follow tech industry news in 2022 was to be bombarded with headlines about layoffs. Heavyweights such as Amazon and Meta trimmed staff by the thousands, while employees at once-ascendant unicorns like Stripe also met the same fate. You would be forgiven for getting the general impression that certain factors—like pandemic-era over-hiring, perchance?—led to a cataclysmic string of layoffs last year.

The reality, laid bare by government data aggregated by ZipRecruiter, indicates a different picture: Layoffs hit an over 20-year low last year across the entire US economy. This isn’t to say that massive layoffs didn’t occur, but rather that the headlines focused on rupture in one industry, rather than the broader labor market.

Beneath the headlines. VC investment in Big Tech boomed during the pandemic, which is perhaps why the rash of layoffs drew so much attention. Speaking of tech layoffs last year, ZipRecruiter’s Chief Economist Julia Pollak told CNBC: “These are very salient layoffs, even if they don’t affect that many people and are actually quite contained to tech and closely related industries…They are loud. They are very public. They’re talked about all over social media.”

Various industry leaders and experts have been warning of a looming recession, so much so that throughout 2022, various CEOs were “falling over themselves to say we’re falling into a recession,” Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi told CNBC late last year.

The layoffs weren’t reflective of a broader downturn, and instead were sparked by very specific circumstances, Daniel Altman, chief economist at Instawork, explained to HR Brew over email: “Some tech companies faced a whipsaw of constrained funding and lower-than-anticipated demand,” as the economy veered away from pandemic conditions.

Keep reading.—SB

In 2019, having a New York City-based job at advertising agency R/GA meant working daily from a 173,000 square-foot office space in Hudson Yards—an office so immense that some agency execs have referred to it as “a football field.”

By 2023, that football field was long gone. At the beginning of the year, R/GA relocated to a newly designed office space in NYC’s Chelsea neighborhood that’s one-tenth the size of the old one. Only around 10% of R/GA’s New York-based staff are in the office at any given time.

“No matter how fancy the space, there’s no point in paying for an acre of desks for 40 members of staff a day to come in,” Tom Morton, R/GA’s global chief strategy officer, said. “We didn’t need a desk farm anymore.”

Three years of remote work and hybrid arrangements have altered white-collar jobs, and R/GA’s office downsizing reflects some of those workplace changes. As executive teams around the country grapple with hybrid work setups, agency leaders are still reenvisioning what it looks like to build company cultures and workplace camaraderie in a hybrid work world.

“We’re never going back to pre-Covid,” said Elizabeth Eidshaug, executive director of brand and business growth and head of the New York studio at Pearlfisher, a brand design agency. “So, what are we now creating in its place? I think that’s the real opportunity for all of us.”

Read the full story on Marketing Brew.—KS

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: 53% of CEOs say their companies are doing “an excellent job” advancing pay equity. On the other hand, 60% of HR leaders say their company is not doing an excellent job. (OpenComp)

Quote: “They were just kind of, like, hoarding us like Pokémon cards.”—Britney Levy, a laid-off Meta worker on the social media company hiring so many employees that there wasn’t enough work for them (Insider)

Read: Employers are struggling to assess the skills of job applicants who use ChatGPT to produce application materials. (the Wall Street Journal)

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