Internal comms doesn't drive revenue. (They're wrong.)
Someone said internal communications is a cost center, not a revenue driver. It came up in an ICology campfire -- our monthly member discussions where the community picks the topic.
This month's was dashboards. The revenue comment wasn't even on the agenda. But it stuck.
I've heard it before. A lot of us have. And every time I do, I think about how much that assumption is actually costing the organizations that believe it.
Here's what the data says.
Engaged employees don't just show up. They perform.
Gallup has been measuring the connection between employee engagement and business outcomes for decades. Their conclusion isn't subtle: business units in the top quartile of engagement outperform bottom-quartile units by 23% in profitability.
Not engagement scores. Profitability.
And in 2024, as global engagement dropped to 21% (its lowest since 2019), Gallup estimated the cost to the global economy at $438 billion in lost productivity.
Internal communications is one of the primary ways employees understand what the organization stands for, what's expected of them, and whether leadership is actually paying attention. When that communication breaks down, so does engagement. And when engagement drops, so does performance.
The line from comms to revenue isn't straight, but it's real.
Bad comms has a dollar amount.
The counterargument is usually framed around cost: internal comms requires headcount, tools, time. What does it produce?
Here's a better question: what does the absence of good comms produce?
Axios HQ research found that senior employees lose 63 work days per year to ineffective communication. For someone earning over $200,000 annually, that's roughly $54,860 wasted every year per person.
That's before you count the downstream impact: decisions delayed, projects stalled, frontline employees operating without the context they need to do their jobs well.
Cost center math only works if you're only looking at what internal comms spends. It falls apart when you account for what it prevents.
What employees know changes how customers feel.
This one gets ignored more than it should.
Research from LumApps found that companies with the best employee and customer experiences grow revenue at 1.8x the rate of their competitors. That's not a coincidence.
Customers interact with your employees. What those employees believe about the company, how confident they are in the product, how clearly they understand the value they're delivering -- all of that shapes the customer experience. It shows up in how they talk, what they recommend, how they handle problems.
Forrester found that 84% of companies that actively improved their customer experience saw increased revenue. You cannot build a consistently strong customer experience on a workforce that doesn't understand what the organization is trying to do.
Internal comms is what closes that gap.
Employees are also an audience for your brand.
This often gets overlooked entirely in the revenue conversation.
Research from Simpplr and others has documented that employees who understand their organization's strategy and share relevant content externally can generate significant earned media value, with some estimates putting that figure at over $8.5 million per organization.
That's not a comms fantasy. That's what happens when employees are informed, aligned, and actually proud of where they work.
Informed employees are a distribution channel. They talk to customers, prospects, and peers. What they say about your organization matters, and what they say is shaped directly by what internal communications tells them.
The budget argument is using the wrong math.
63% of organizations that increased their investment in internal communications reported an increase in new business revenue, according to Axios HQ data. Not "improved morale." Not "higher survey scores." Revenue.
That's the stat that should be in every internal comms team's budget conversation.
The cost center assumption treats communication like overhead, the same way you'd treat a utility bill. But information isn't a utility. It's what enables people to work, decide, and move. When it's good, the whole organization accelerates. When it's bad, everything slows down in ways that don't always show up in the communication team's budget -- they show up in missed targets, slow launches, and turnover.
Internal communications doesn't drive revenue the same way sales does. There's no direct line from an all-hands meeting to a closed deal.
But the idea that it has nothing to do with revenue is wrong. And holding onto that assumption makes organizations worse at the very things that actually generate revenue: engaged employees, aligned teams, customers who have good experiences, and workers who are confident enough in their company to talk about it.
One comment in a campfire discussion about dashboards assumed that comms is just a cost. The evidence says otherwise.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.
August 27, 2026 · Sioux Falls, SD
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