94% say internal comms is respected; only 30% can prove its working
Oak Engage surveyed 250 HR and internal comms professionals across the UK in February 2026. The headline finding is that 94% say internal communications is respected in their organization.
Only 30% can demonstrate business impact.
66% rely heavily on manager-led cascade to get messages out. 60% have no visibility into whether their communications are actually reaching or influencing anyone. Just 48% describe themselves as a strategic advisor.
Those numbers don't point to a measurement problem. They point to a positioning problem. And the profession keeps treating them like they're the same thing.
Respect and credibility aren't the same thing
On this week's episode of Frequency, Jenni Field drew a distinction worth sitting with. Respect and credibility produce different outcomes. You can respect someone and still not follow them. Credibility is what earns followership. It's what gets you in the room when the decisions are being made.
So if 94% of IC teams feel respected but 70% can't connect their work to anything measurable, the question becomes: what exactly is being respected?
The most likely answer is uncomfortable. People may respect the function of getting emails out, keeping the intranet current, running the all-hands logistics. That's a real contribution. It's just not the same as being respected as a strategic advisor to leadership. And the data suggests those two things are getting conflated.
The math that doesn't add up
The Oak Engage report says IC is valued. It also says IC is largely invisible when it comes to business outcomes. Those two things can technically coexist, but they shouldn't both be true in 2026.
If you're respected but can't prove impact, you're respected for the outputs. The channels. The content. Not for what changed because of it.
The shift from outputs to outcomes is not a new idea in this profession. The report even includes a table mapping comms activity to business metric to outcome to help people get started. The fact that it still needs to be included in a 2026 report tells you something.
What communicators should be thinking about
The gap isn't really about tools or measurement frameworks. It's about what IC teams are being asked to do and what they're positioned to influence.
If you spend most of your time producing content and managing channels, you'll be respected for that. You won't be credible as a strategic function because you haven't been operating as one. The two aren't interchangeable, and no measurement dashboard closes that gap on its own.
The more useful question is whether the organization even wants IC operating at that level. Because in a lot of cases, the honest answer is no. And that's a harder conversation than updating your reporting template.
Also in this episode: The Institute of Internal Communication's IC Index publishes on May 20th. Jenni and Chuck had a sneak peek at the full report, which surveyed around 5,000 UK employees in organizations with 500 or more employees. The picture is consistent with the Oak Engage data: trust in senior leadership is down at every level, half of employees don't trust their CEO, and leaders are significantly overestimating how clearly they've communicated strategy and change. The index identifies five drivers of employee confidence in the future of their organization. Jenni argues IC can genuinely influence two. Chuck says three. They disagree on AI communication, and neither is entirely wrong.
A meta-analysis of 113 studies covering 38,000 employees found a moderate correlation between job satisfaction and performance, but not the decisive link most organizations assume. The real point: satisfaction is a signal, not a driver. Performance improves when the system allows capability to show up, not when people are made happier. Most engagement programs are still solving for the signal instead of the system.
A Zoom and Deloitte study found that 94% of employees encounter friction somewhere in the meeting lifecycle, and the average employee loses 1.6 hours a week just preparing for meetings. The argument is that employee frustration with workplace technology is architectural data, not noise to be managed. The organizations sitting on that signal and not acting on it aren't failing to see it. They're just not prioritizing it.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.
The Frequency Podcast
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