Last week I laid out a lightweight internal comms infrastructure for early-stage startups. Once you hit growth stage, however, all of your systems for internal comms will start failing. Out of nowhere, implicit understandings — about business priorities, about culture — evaporate. No one seems to be on the same page anymore. You start to get questions in your All Hands Q&A that feel totally beside the point. What the hell is everyone even up to that they have time to ask about my stance on gun violence or complain about the performance review process?!
At this stage, you still feel like the CEO of a startup that might go out of existence tomorrow. But your newer employees no longer see you as a risky, early-stage company; they see you as an established entity. You’re now The Man and “leadership” is suddenly bifurcated from everyone else.
This moment often hits around 100-150 people, though some companies cling to their old internal comms systems until 1,000-plus. At this scale, there are simply too many people and too many competing priorities to share every little update at the companywide level.
I like to call this stage the tween-age years, because it’s awkward and uncomfortable and some parts of your business will mature faster than others and everything will feel too much all the time. I’ve made my career out of working for companies in this stage because it’s hard and messy — and also immensely rewarding when you get it right.
Here are a few modifications you’ll need to make to your internal comms infrastructure as you hit this stage:
All Hands
As companies grow, companywide All Hands typically become less frequent and more scripted. This is a good thing: Bigger companies need to help their employees sift through the noise by being more judicious in what they communicate to everyone. Often this means that the Q&A portion of the All Hands gets refocused on just questions relevant to the content — or gets cut entirely.
Specifically, the cadence of All Hands can fall to monthly as you approach 200 employees and quarterly when you hit 1,000. At this scale, the coordination tax of getting everyone across the company aligned on content will increase exponentially, and regular team-level communications will become more important than companywide ones.
As you grow, you will also want to implement a more organized Q&A system. Common ways of doing this are taking questions in advance, using a moderation platform like Sli.do, and/or limiting questions to those related to the topics presented. I also like to have a live moderator (often a comms person, though this can also be a trusted lieutenant in the business) reframe questions into more productive phrasing and combine related questions in a single ask.
But be careful with reframing: If you take all the sting out of a pointed question, you’ll lose credibility. Keep the questions on-topic and fair, but don’t strain out all the salt.
AMAs
Even as All Hands lose their AMA component, it can still be valuable for employees to get an unfiltered look at what their executives are thinking about. I find it productive to keep these true AMAs smaller, building in time for senior leaders to have unscripted conversations with different parts of the business.
There’s lots of ways to slice-and-dice participants for small-group AMAs. You might approach certain teams or only directors-and-above or only high performers. Or you might randomly assign people. I like to keep small-group AMAs between 20 and 30 people so they remain intimate but also high-scale enough to be worth a senior exec’s time. You might try to hit everyone in the company every six months, or only meet with a few groups. Do what feels authentic for your company — and what’s possible given your company’s size and the demands on senior leaders’ time.
To avoid the cold start problem where no one wants to ask the first question, I find it helpful to have the leader prepare a five-minute overview of who they are (where did they work previously? what brought them to this company?), what their role is, and their top three or four priorities right now.
Global Status@ Emails
Once you have more than 10 or so teams sending regular status@ updates, that channel will get clogged with updates, and people will stop reading all or most of them. That’s when you might want to consider a single global email that consolidates the major, business-critical updates from other emails. But be careful not to put the burden of compiling this entirely on one person, because pulling together these emails are a slog. For growth-stage startups the ROI just isn’t there to put significant people-hours against this weekly.
Instead, ask the people sending their teams’ status@ emails to put the really major stuff in a separate doc throughout the week (or two weeks, or whatever). Align with them on whatever “really major” means for your company. (Generally it means that it will impact all or most employees, like a benefits update, or that it will meaningfully move the needle for the business, like a product launch or winning a major contract.) Then have your comms person do a gut check to make sure everything rises to the level of “actually important for everyone to see” before sending the note out.
At this stage, it may also make sense to implement a subscription-based option for team-level status@ updates. This allows people to sign up for the updates they want (e.g. status-product@ or status-sales@ or whatever) rather than automatically getting every single email.
Onboarding
When you’re in growth-stage, your employee population will multiply every few months. This means your onboarding is one of the most effective means you have of communicating with employees. You may or may not have a fully fleshed-out onboarding program at this stage. Regardless, make sure you use the opportunity to be really clear about what the business is focused on, how people can find information, and how information is shared internally.
A Warning
Every time you implement a change to your internal comms — whether to the cadence of your All Hands, the way you do Q&A, or how top-down your Slack policies are — people will chafe. “This isn’t the scrappy startup I joined,” people will lament. “It’s becoming so much more corporate.”
This is healthy and normal. It’s also your job as CEO to push back on this rhetoric. I often hear executives complaining that this kind of added bureaucracy is inevitable. But it’s only inevitable in a scaling company — and it’s a privilege to scale! Just as you have to rethink your product and business strategy at each new phase of your growth, so too do you need to rethink your internal comms strategy. This change is hard, but it’s also a sign that you’re succeeding.
As CEO, you need to land the message that the only constant is change, and that employees should expect constant experimentation with the way information is shared. Be honest that sharing too much information can distract people from the relentless focus required to execute on your goals; be transparent that your goal is not to hide the ball but to separate the signal from the noise. People are much more willing to give you the benefit of the doubt when you’re upfront with them that you know there are tradeoffs and share the principles you’re using to balance these decisions.