Less is more: taming channel sprawl and designing for clarity

In our upcoming Kogan Page book, People-First Internal Communication, we talk a lot about clarity as a core employee experience. Clarity reduces friction, boosts trust, and makes it easier for people to work together and get things done. But right now, many workplaces are failing on this front — not because they lack tools, but because they’ve got far too many.

Over the last decade, we’ve layered tools on tools — email, Teams/Slack, intranet, town halls, manager channels, mobile apps — until the signal got buried. Employees tell us they want the same kind of consumer-grade experience they get in their daily lives: simple, seamless, and centred on them. Instead, they often get a spaghetti-like tangle of overlapping channels that leaves them dazed and confused.

The best internal communicators are fixing that by taking a radical stance: less is more. They’re pruning the stack, setting hard rules for what goes where, and designing messages for use, not just views.

Channel change = add, not subtract.
In Gallagher’s State of the Sector 2025 report, just 7% of organisations removed a channel last year; 31% added one, and 51% changed nothing — despite widespread pain. The same report shows low satisfaction with core capabilities like segmentation and personalisation (only 30% favourable for personalising content by role/location).

The “infinite workday.”
Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index finds the average worker gets 117 emails a day and 153 Teams messages — plus an interruption every two minutes. In consumer life, smart apps hide irrelevant content and make navigation intuitive; at work, we too often just add to the pile.

Inbox proof that less really is more.
Research from PoliteMail shows consolidating routine updates into fewer, clearer sends outperforms constant drip-feeding. It’s another reminder that design beats volume.

Employees want clarity.
The 2025 IC Index reports employees are tired of impersonal, vague messaging and want real, human communication — another way of saying: cut noise, boost relevance.

1) Johnson & Johnson: from 650+ intranets to a single front door
J&J discovered it had amassed 650 intranets, 1,250 apps, and 50,000 SharePoint sources. The redesign created a one-stop intranet — integrating third party platforms like Workday, ServiceNow, and Salesforce — with strong governance and a consumer-grade search. Employees now have one place to go, just like they’d expect from their favourite retail or banking app.

Steal this: audit ruthlessly, bucket content as critical / need-to-know / always-on / nice-to-know, and carry forward only what passes the test.

2) Heathrow Airport: one operational channel for the frontline
Heathrow consolidated multiple frontline updates into a single operational tool. The channel was chosen based on reach, reliability, and fit with shift patterns — exactly the kind of experience design you’d see in a consumer-facing app.

Steal this: treat frontline reach as a non-negotiable design constraint — if a message can’t be delivered through the channel that actually works for shifts, it doesn’t go.

3) Walmart: one app as the “front door” for associates
The Me@Walmart app consolidates schedules, benefits, training, and feedback into a single mobile entry point. It’s a consumer-grade experience that feels familiar because it mirrors what associates use outside work.

Steal this: design the employee app to do jobs, not just broadcast news — and make feedback loops visible inside the same platform.

Here’s five things you can do, starting now, to reduce noise and create clarity:

1) Decide the jobs each channel does — and kill the rest.
Map your stack against key comms “jobs” (urgent alert, policy change, leadership narrative, how-to, recognition, two-way listening). If two channels do the same job, pick one. Publish your channel framework – capturing the role and purpose of each channel, who it’s for and what content does and doesn’t belong there - and hold the line.

2) Design for use, not views.
Adopt the “watch / listen / read” approach: a 60–90 second video, a 3–5 bullet skim, and a single source of truth. Consumer-grade comms are scannable, clear, and tailored to the user.

3) Consolidate the routine.
Switch to rhythms (e.g., a single monthly digest for general updates) instead of ad-hoc drops.

4) Make managers the moment of truth.
Provide managers with micro-scripts and “what this means for our team” briefs so they can localise messages without duplicating them.

5) Measure for clarity.
Measure the right things - track time-to-understand (how quickly people grasp a key message), read-to-do (how many act on the message without further prompting), and deflection rates (fewer duplicate questions).

Download our Channel Clarity Canvas (available to all members - free essentials and pro) to help you walk through these steps and more

In People-First Internal Communication, we argue that employee experience is communication — and that experience must be as effortless and relevant as the best consumer products. Channel sprawl is the enemy of that goal.

A people-first communicator doesn’t just ask, “If this were a customer, how would we design it?” — they co-create with employees to identify and remove friction points, simplify access, and make every channel a consumer-grade experience that’s effortless to understand and act on.

Because in the end, less is more isn’t about publishing less — it’s about making space for what really matters. When communication is clear and purposeful, the whole organisation works better.

We’re on a mission to help communicators break free from the outdated, broadcast-first mindset that reduces our work to a stream of announcements.

People-First Internal Communication is about:
Understanding people deeply.
Designing communication that moves them.
Measuring success by real-world change, not message volume.

Read the upcoming Kogan Page book (landing December 2025 – available for pre-orders now via Kogan Page. Use the tools. 🌍 Join the community. 👉 Be part of the PFIC Movement

Less is more.