Who Owns the Employee Experience? Why It's Time to Get Clear

Is your organization clear on how HR and Internal Communication align on ownership?

In our recent HR and Internal Communication survey, the majority of Hr leaders said employee experience is a shared responsibility across functions.

Sound great. But in practice?

It can create a clarity gap.

When responsibilities overlap without clarity, two things can easily happen:

 1. Priorities get misaligned

 2. Assumptions go unspoken

And that's where tension can creep in between HR and Internal comms. 

This isn't a turf war.

It's a strategic execution issue.

One HR leader's response highlighted the challenge of resourcing internal comms work:

"While delivering the best communication to our employees or end users is necessary, it has to make sense. The use of HR personnel to deliver training and communication must be realistic. While it's important, we can't use all our resources for internal comms efforts. I know comms metrics are important, but the juice has to be worth the squeeze."

And here's where strategy misalignment shows up:

➡️ Culture building

➡️ Change management

➡️ Performance enablement

➡️ Employee experience

All critical to the business

All full of shared responsibility checkboxes.

It's no wonder the HR/IC relationship feels complicated.

Clarifying responsibilities sharpens strategy. And that's when internal comms can translate the strategy into stories people can understand, believe, and act on.