An internal communication team of four in a 14,000-person industrial group was told to improve internal communication after a disappointing engagement survey. They did what most teams do. They launched a weekly digest, started a leadership podcast, moved the newsletter from fortnightly to weekly and added a Viva Engage community for the transformation programme. Twelve months later the survey score had not moved, the team was exhausted, and the newsletter open rate had fallen by nine points.
Nothing they did was unreasonable. Every individual decision had a business sponsor asking for it. The problem is that the whole programme was addition, and internal communication is one of the few functions where addition reliably makes things worse. The lever that works is subtraction, and the only thing that makes subtraction safe is knowing your reach by segment.
Why “produce more” is always the default
Output is visible and countable. Outcomes are neither. When a Head of Internal Communication is asked what the team did this quarter, “we published 48 items across six channels” is an answer that exists. “We removed two channels and reach in manufacturing went from 31 to 54 per cent” is a better answer, but it requires measurement infrastructure that most teams do not have, so the first answer wins by default.
There is also a sponsorship dynamic. Every function that wants something communicated asks for a dedicated vehicle. Finance wants a monthly update. The transformation office wants a community. HR wants a campaign. Saying yes to each is politically cheap and cumulatively expensive, because each new vehicle is a permanent claim on the same fixed pool of employee attention.
That fixed pool is the part that gets ignored. A supervisor on a production line has perhaps four minutes a day for corporate communication, and they had four minutes before you launched the podcast. Adding a channel does not create attention. It divides it, and it divides it in favour of whichever channel is easiest to consume, which is rarely the one carrying the message that matters.
The three subtractions that actually move the number
Cut channels down to the number you can measure
A useful and slightly brutal rule: if you cannot state the reach of a channel by segment, you are not running that channel, you are feeding it. Most organisations discover they have between eight and fifteen active internal channels once printed boards, screen displays, WhatsApp groups run informally by site managers and legacy SharePoint sites are counted. Three or four of them carry almost everything. The rest consume production time and dilute the ones that work.
Cut frequency to what the audience can absorb
Frequency increases are the most common optimisation and the least examined. When a newsletter moves from fortnightly to weekly, total minutes read rarely doubles. Usually it stays flat and open rate halves, which is the same content reaching the same people while the metric on your slide gets worse. Our note on internal newsletter metrics beyond the open rate covers how to tell the difference between real decline and denominator drift.
Cut the audience: stop sending everything to everyone
This is the subtraction with the largest effect and the most resistance. Sending every item to the full distribution list feels safe and inclusive. In practice it trains people to ignore the channel, because most of what arrives is not for them. A quality alert that matters intensely to 400 people in operations is noise to 9,000 people in commercial functions, and the cost of that noise is paid the next time something genuinely urgent goes out. Getting this right needs an attribute model, which is what our guide to audience segmentation for internal communications sets out.
You cannot subtract safely without segment-level reach
The honest reason teams do not cut channels is fear. Nobody wants to be the person who retired the printed site bulletin and then found out it was the only thing the night shift ever saw. That fear is rational, and aggregate numbers do nothing to relieve it, because an aggregate reach figure of 62 per cent tells you nothing about whether the night shift is in the 62 or the 38.
What removes the fear is a reach matrix: every channel down one axis, every population segment across the other. Once that exists, the decision stops being a judgement call and becomes arithmetic. Here is a simplified version from a multi-site manufacturer.
| Channel | Head office | Field sales | Manufacturing | Retail sites | Measurable? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SharePoint intranet news | High | Moderate | Low | Low | Yes |
| Weekly email newsletter | High | High | Low | Very low | Yes |
| Viva Engage communities | Moderate | Low | Very low | Very low | Yes |
| Teams channel posts | High | Moderate | Low | None | Partly |
| Manager cascade | Moderate | High | High | High | No |
| Printed site boards | None | None | High | Moderate | No |
Read that table for two minutes and the strategy writes itself. Four digital channels are all competing for the same head-office population and none of them reaches manufacturing or retail. The two channels that do reach those populations are the two you cannot measure. So the optimisation is not “add a fifth digital channel”. It is: retire two of the four overlapping ones, and invest the freed capacity in making the manager cascade measurable, which is the theme of our piece on measuring frontline worker communications.
A four-step sequence that fits in a quarter
One: inventory everything, including what you do not own. One row per channel with owner, frequency, intended audience and whether reach is measurable. Include the WhatsApp groups and the screens in the canteen. A channel you do not control still consumes attention you are competing for.
Two: build the reach-by-segment matrix. This is the only step that needs data work, and it is where most programmes stall, because the activity data sits in SharePoint, Viva Engage, Teams and the newsletter tool while the segment attributes sit in the HR system. Joining those is the whole job.
Three: find the overlaps and the orphans. Overlaps are segments served by three or more channels. Orphans are segments served by none that you can measure. Both are on the same table and both are actionable.
Four: retire, merge, re-point, then re-measure at 90 days. Announce retirements with a named alternative for the audience that used the old channel. Re-measure after a full quarter, not a month. If reach in the underserved segment has not moved, the subtraction was not the constraint and you have learned something worth more than the channel you closed. Our guide to building an internal communications measurement strategy sets out the sequencing in more detail.
The honest position on Microsoft native analytics
SharePoint site analytics and Viva Engage community insights are free, already switched on, and adequate for a single site owner or community manager checking whether their own content is being read[1]. For that job you need nothing else.
They cannot produce the matrix above, for a structural reason rather than a quality one. Native reporting is scoped to a product and does not join to workforce attributes, so it can tell you a page had 4,200 views but not that 3,900 of them came from head office. Gallagher’s State of the Sector research keeps finding measurement to be the capability gap internal communicators name first, and this join is where the gap actually sits[2].
Teams often attempt the join with a custom Power BI build against the Microsoft Graph reporting API. That can work, and some organisations run it well. Be realistic about the cost: the reporting API is not consistently reliable and produces days with missing data, customers have observed KPI values in Power BI that do not reconcile with the native SharePoint reports for the same period, and a dependable build needs a robust ingestion process, scheduled reconciliation against the native figures and a named owner. Budget for the pipeline rather than the dashboard.
Tryane exists to do that join. It reads SharePoint, Viva Engage, Teams and your newsletter platform together, connects the activity to your organisational structure through Entra ID or an HR file, and keeps history across product transitions so a subtraction decision can be evaluated a year later. It is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and GDPR compliant by design, hosts in the EU by default with US data residency on request, and deploys in a couple of hours through Azure AD or Entra ID single sign-on with no agent to install.
What good looks like after subtraction
The team in the opening example eventually retired the podcast and the weekly digest, moved the newsletter back to fortnightly, and spent the recovered capacity building a fifteen-minute manager briefing pack with a read receipt. Reach in manufacturing rose from the low thirties to just under sixty per cent over three quarters. The newsletter open rate recovered. The team stopped working weekends. Gallup’s workplace research has consistently found frontline and deskless populations to be the least engaged, which is exactly the population that subtraction frees up capacity to serve[3].
None of that required a new platform. It required knowing who was being reached before deciding what to stop.
Frequently asked questions
How many internal channels should we run?
There is no universal number, but a workable test is whether you can state each channel’s reach by segment and name its owner. Most organisations that apply that test honestly end up with four to six, down from ten or more. The count matters less than whether every channel earns its place against a measured audience.
Will cutting channels reduce reach?
Usually not, because the channels most often cut are the ones overlapping on an already well-served population. Reach falls only when you retire the sole channel serving a segment, which is precisely what the reach matrix is designed to prevent you from doing by accident.
How do we measure the manager cascade?
Imperfectly, and that is fine. Options that work in practice include a briefing pack hosted on SharePoint so opens are recorded, a short manager confirmation in Teams or Viva Engage, and periodic pulse questions asked of the receiving population rather than the managers. None is exact. All are better than treating the cascade as unmeasurable and therefore invisible.
Our stakeholders keep asking for new channels. What do we say?
Show them the reach matrix and ask which existing channel their audience already uses. In most cases the answer is that the audience is already well served and the request is really about visibility for the sponsor rather than reach for the audience. That is a legitimate need with a cheaper solution than a new channel.
Does Tryane replace our native Microsoft 365 analytics?
No. SharePoint and Viva Engage keep recording what they record. Tryane sits on top, reading them alongside Teams and your newsletter tool and joining the result to your organisational structure, so you can answer the cross-channel and segmented questions no single native panel can. You keep the Microsoft 365 investment and add the measurement layer.
Sources
• Microsoft Learn, SharePoint portal health and site usage
• Gallagher, State of the Sector
• Gallup, State of the Global Workplace
Further reading
• Building an internal communications measurement strategy
• Audience segmentation for internal communications
• Measuring cross-channel internal communications
• Internal newsletter metrics beyond the open rate
• Internal communication KPIs for 2026
Tryane runs a 15-minute working session with Heads of Internal Communication, building the first version of your reach-by-segment matrix on your own tenant so you can see which channels overlap and which populations are orphaned. Book a slot with Jérémy to schedule yours.