Companies spend enormous amounts of time, money and creative energy communicating with the outside world. They invest in brand strategies, advertising campaigns, beautifully crafted films and carefully considered messaging. Every detail is designed to shape how customers, partners and the wider public perceive their organisation.
But there’s another audience that doesn’t always receive the same level of attention. An audience that interacts with the brand every single day, understands its strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately plays a huge role shaping how the outside world experiences it.
The employees.
Think about it. You can have the most compelling brand positioning, an inspiring vision and an ambitious five-year strategy. But if the people inside your organisation don’t understand what you’re trying to achieve, or why it matters, how can you expect them to bring that vision to life?
And this goes beyond simply keeping employees informed. There’s a big difference between knowing that your company has launched a new strategy and genuinely understanding it. Between receiving an announcement about a new initiative and feeling excited about being part of it.
“That’s when employees can become some of your most powerful brand advocates.”
When people understand what their organisation stands for, where it’s heading and how their work contributes to the bigger picture, they’re much better equipped to represent it. Not because they’ve memorised a set of brand guidelines or corporate messages, but because they actually believe in what they’re doing. That’s when employees can become some of your most powerful brand advocates.
They’re the people talking to customers, meeting partners, sharing experiences with friends and family, and representing your organisation in thousands of small interactions every day. Their understanding, enthusiasm and confidence can reinforce everything your external communications are trying to achieve.
But the impact goes beyond brand perception. When employees don’t understand the organisation’s priorities, teams can end up working towards different objectives, new initiatives can struggle to gain traction, and valuable time and resources can be wasted. Good internal communication isn’t just about employee engagement. It can have a very real impact on how effectively a business operates.
Of course, this doesn’t happen automatically. You can’t simply announce a new vision, send everyone a presentation and expect them to feel inspired. People need context. They need to understand the reasoning behind decisions, the challenges the organisation is trying to solve and what those decisions mean for them. And perhaps most importantly, they need to feel included in the story.
Imagine a company has spent six months developing a new strategy. There have been countless meetings, workshops, presentations and discussions. Leadership teams have debated every detail, consultants have been involved, and eventually everything comes together in a beautifully designed 100-page document.
The strategy is ready. Everyone involved understands it, believes in it and is excited about what comes next.
But now comes another challenge. How do you communicate all of this to thousands of employees who haven’t been part of those six months of discussions? How do you explain not just what’s changing, but why it’s changing? And perhaps most importantly, how do you get people to understand what it means for them?
There’s a psychological phenomenon called the curse of knowledge. Once we understand something deeply, it becomes surprisingly difficult to imagine what it’s like not to know it. We assume that things which seem obvious to us must be equally obvious to everyone else.
And that’s exactly what can happen here. The leadership team has become so familiar with the strategy, its language and the reasoning behind every decision that it’s easy to forget how unfamiliar all of this will be to everyone else. For employees hearing about it for the first time, it’s an entirely new concept, often presented alongside dozens of other announcements, priorities and everyday responsibilities. And that’s where the communication gap begins.
The traditional approach is familiar. An email from the CEO, a presentation at a town hall, perhaps a beautifully designed PDF distributed across the organisation. Managers are then expected to communicate the key messages to their teams.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these methods. In fact, they’re all important parts of internal communication. But they rely heavily on employees having the time, attention and motivation to absorb the information, understand its implications and connect it to their own work. And we all know how difficult that can be.
"The problem isn’t necessarily the quality of the strategy or even the amount of information being shared. It’s the assumption that once something has been communicated, it has also been understood."
The challenge becomes even greater in large organisations, where employees work across different countries, departments, languages and levels of seniority. A message that makes perfect sense to someone in the boardroom might mean something entirely different to someone working on the factory floor, in a customer service centre or in a regional office thousands of miles away.
The problem isn’t necessarily the quality of the strategy or even the amount of information being shared. It’s the assumption that once something has been communicated, it has also been understood.
But communication isn’t simply the transfer of information. It’s the process of creating shared understanding. And achieving that requires just as much thought, planning and creativity as developing the strategy itself.
There’s a reason we remember a good story long after we’ve forgotten the details of a presentation. Stories give information structure, context and meaning. They help us connect individual facts into something bigger, something we can understand and relate to. And that’s exactly what’s often missing from corporate communication.
Organisations are full of complex ideas. Business strategies, transformation programmes, new technologies, operational changes, employee initiatives. These are rarely simple subjects, and explaining them to people with different backgrounds, responsibilities and levels of knowledge can be a considerable challenge.
This is where storytelling and visual communication can make a real difference. A film gives us the opportunity to take a complicated subject and build a story around it. And with animation, we can show things that would otherwise be difficult to explain, from invisible processes and complex systems to ideas that words alone sometimes struggle to convey.
There’s also a practical advantage, particularly for large organisations. A film can deliver the same core message to thousands of employees, regardless of their location or department. It can be shown at a company event, shared through internal platforms, incorporated into onboarding programmes or used by managers to introduce a new initiative. And unlike a presentation that might change slightly every time it’s delivered, the film provides a consistent starting point for everyone.
But perhaps the greatest value isn’t in the visuals themselves. It’s in the thinking required to create them.
"All of that information is important to someone, but not all of it is equally important to everyone."
At We Are Alive Studio, we’ve spent years helping organisations communicate complex ideas through animation and video. As the studio’s founder and creative director, I’ve worked on everything from organisational strategies and internal platforms to transformation programmes and new technologies. And one thing I’ve learned is that the most challenging part of the process often happens long before anyone starts animating.
It’s figuring out what we’re actually trying to say.
A typical brief might arrive with dozens of slides, hundreds of bullet points and a long list of messages that absolutely must be included. All of that information is important to someone, but not all of it is equally important to everyone.
I’ve been in plenty of meetings where we’ve spent more time discussing what to leave out than what to put in. And that’s often where the most valuable work happens. Because when everything is treated as equally important, it’s very difficult for an audience to understand what really matters.
Sometimes the solution is finding a simple metaphor. Sometimes it’s creating a character people can relate to. And sometimes it means taking a step back and questioning whether the message itself is clear enough. Being forced to explain something clearly and concisely often reveals gaps, assumptions or unnecessary complexity that weren’t obvious before.
Of course, a two-minute film isn’t going to replace a detailed strategy document, a leadership presentation or an ongoing conversation between managers and their teams. Nor should it. Good internal communication requires different formats, repeated messages and opportunities for people to ask questions and engage.
But a film can provide something incredibly useful: a shared starting point. A clear and consistent explanation that helps everyone understand the bigger picture, regardless of their role, location or familiarity with the subject.
And when that film is thoughtfully designed, visually engaging and emotionally relevant, it has a much better chance of being remembered.
I find it interesting that some of the most important communication projects are also the least visible. They don’t appear in advertising campaigns or on social media. They don’t necessarily win creative awards or generate millions of views. Some never leave the walls of the organisations they were created for. But their impact can be significant. They help employees understand change, connect with a shared vision, adopt new ways of working and feel part of something bigger.
After years of working on these projects, I’ve come to appreciate just how important this kind of communication can be.
We spend so much time thinking about how organisations present themselves to the outside world. How they attract customers, build trust, communicate their values and stand out from competitors. But the people inside those organisations are the ones who bring all of that to life. They deserve the same clarity, creativity and attention that we give to the audiences outside.
Because before you can convince the world of your vision, you need your own people standing behind it.
About the author
Aleksandar Sandorov is the founder and creative director of We Are Alive, the motion-obsessed creative studio that helps brands and organisations communicate complex ideas, initiatives and change through animation and video.
