🎺 Launching an Internal Communications Function from Scratch

Q&A with Jesse Comart — Senior Vice President, Head of Communications at GoodLeap

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In This Interview

• 📝 Start with the common channel
• Learn the importance of collaboration across teams
• 🤹 Balance reactive and proactive internal communications

About Jesse

Jesse Comart has worked in the US Senate, international PR agencies and built communications teams inside growth-stage tech companies. Jesse currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Communications for GoodLeap, a $12B fintech focused on clean technologies and sustainability, where he oversees all external and internal communications. His work has spanned industries including financial services, education, healthcare and energy.

How do you approach building an internal communications function from scratch?

Start with goals and ensure they are measurable. Such as: we want to increase employee retention by X% or we want to be more transparent about company financials.

Those goals should be grounded in the company’s values to ensure they are authentic. Employees will respond to internal communications if they align with their overall employee experience and culture.

Then, think about your channels — your communications are only as good as your channels. Those channels could include an intranet, a newsletter or way to compile news, a chat function like Slack, and live events. But, that’s a lot to launch and maintain. Start with the most common channel for your company and build from there.

How do you collaborate with internal and external communications?

At some companies, internal communications is part of HR or the C-suite, and external communications might be part of Marketing. It can feel like two different functions, but I’m a big believer that internal and external communications need to be connected. Every external comms tactic should have an internal comms component.

A lot of your internal comms components will become external. There’s a positive feedback loop when you have the two connected. From a best practices standpoint, you don’t want your employees to learn of news from the media, it should come from your leadership. And your employees can be your biggest brand advocates, particularly in areas like recruiting.

What has been the most surprising about building out an internal communications plan?

This is my third in-house job where I’ve built out a communications team and function. The challenges are really similar, even though I’ve been at different types of companies — ad tech, financial services and clean-tech.

It’s about bringing together different groups — you always need a collaboration between the Comms team, Human Resources,Technology Services and most importantly, an authentic leadership team. It’s surprising to me that these challenges are everywhere.

How do you prioritize what to focus on for communications?

In the first six months, you are going to spend a lot of time building your channels and setting norms for best practices to use those channels. You’ll get the C-suite on board and find your power-users — your advocates across the company.

You want to do this before you roll out a new channel or try to change behavior. You want to do 6 months of work before you press send. You can lose interest really fast if you have a failure to launch.

How does Internal Communications partner with the C-suite?

It really depends on your C-suite and how much they want to communicate. I’m a big believer in the philosophy of increasing the frequency to lower the pressure. You have to be careful about this because you don’t want to communicate too much so that employees are saturated and disengaged.

On the flip side, if you only communicate twice a year, then the pressure is really high for that specific email or meeting to be great. When there’s more exposure for the C-suite, it takes some of the pressure off of leadership and makes employees feel more engaged.

There’s a value in live events — they are engaging and there’s Q and A. But, that’s not how we engage in real life with the news. We don’t attend press conferences, we read news — so it’s about finding that balance for the C-suite between live events and digital communications.

What’s an impactful internal communications project that you’ve worked on over the years?

When I was at Mediamath, we had the issues of how we engage a company both globally and regionally. The company’s headquarters is in New York, but a lot of the employees were across Europe, Asia and Latin America. We revamped our All-Hands process and it took us two months to get it right.

What we came up with is that all the employees in each region would gather in the local office. The first five minutes, the CEO would talk about an important topic. Then for 10 minutes, the President would give a financial update. Then, we would turn cameras off and have a regional local update in-person. You really felt part of a global company, but really got a sense of your regional pride. Of course, now with Covid, it would be really hard.

How do you balance reactive versus proactive communications?

If you can put some goals and norms in place ahead of time with the C-suite and legal, you’ll save yourself the headache of reinventing the wheel with every reactive scenario. I think it’ll free up your time and headspace to be more proactive.

Over the last two years, a lot of companies were unsure how the outside world impacts their culture. You can’t predict the micro moments, but if you can have some standards set about what we communicate and why, you can try to follow those in the moment and not get consumed by that.

I’ve always had an internal comms calendar when our newsletters are going out and when our Town Halls are going to be. For every external communications moment, there should be an internal communications component to it 90% of the time. I think the two run in parallel where it’s easier to mark that note.

What advice do you have on launching an internal communications function?

Don’t try to do this all yourself! It’s important to get the C-suite and HR on board early because they’re the benefactors of your work. They are your internal business buy-ins. Make sure that HR understands the value of your work to you to build the company culture, increase employee retention or communicate through difficult change management.

The faster that you can identify a business purpose and get those business leaders to work with you on it by dedicating time and resources, the better off you’ll be. Don’t do this isolation or create the goals yourself, you won’t be as effective.

How do you keep learning about communications?

Collaborating with colleagues and learning from my peers is key. Even if you feel like you’re in a unique situation, someone else has probably struggled with something similar. Find networking groups and also read newsletters like this one!