The strong connection between internal comms and retention
Especially among deskless workers, employee communications plays a major role in who stays and who goes.
It’s a constant struggle for internal communications professionals to tie their worth to the bottom line. But a new survey from Staffbase provides some of the clearest proof yet that communications matters so much to employees, it can factor into their decision to change jobs.
Gallup research puts the cost of replacing a worker at 1.5 to 2 times their annual pay – and that’s a “conservative” estimate, the company says. So this is more than about touchy-feely metrics – this has a real impact on the bottom line.
According to the employee communications platform’s 2025 Employee Communication Impact Survey, conducted in partnership with YouGov, 58% of employees who are considering leaving their job cite poor internal communications as a factor in their decision – with 30% calling it a “major factor.”
These numbers become even stark when we zoom in on deskless workers, who feel deeply underserved by employee communications that don’t fit in with their on-the-move, away-from-the-computer work duties. Only 38% of employees consider the quality of internal communication “excellent” or “very good” compared to 29% who say it’s “only fair” or “poor.” And the numbers are worse for non-desk workers: Only 30% rate it as “excellent” or “very good,” while 40% say it’s “only fair” or “poor.””
In both of these cases, a lack of customization is often to blame, said David Maffei, Staffbase’s SVP and GM for the Americas.
“The more personalized, the more targeted, the more contextually relevant the communication is, the higher the culture is, the less turnover there is, and the more connected we see … that they feel to their enterprise,” Maffei told Ragan.
Read more: The power of personalizing your internal messaging to reach specific employee segments
Bad employee comms can drive turnover
This survey of more than 1,000 American workers found that poor internal communications is the fourth biggest factor contributing to employee turnover, behind only compensation, opportunities for advancement and the relationship with a worker’s supervisor.
Maffei said that one contributing factor to this discontentment over communications is due to messaging that doesn’t take into account an employee’s unique needs within the business. At first, getting an irrelevant communication or two isn’t a big deal. But over time, it starts to make workers feel unimportant.
“At first, you sort of look at it, you consume it. You say, ‘Okay, not totally for me, but cool that that’s happening, whatever.’ And you move on. But as that information continues to remain on that track, you end up getting disengaged, and you pull back from that communication, because there’s a lot of communication coming out. None of it has anything to do with me,” Maffei said.
Indeed, these figures are reinforced when looking at a crosstabulation of how satisfied employees are with communications: 82% of workers who rate their company’s comms as excellent are likely to stay in their jobs, compared to 22% who rate their comms as poor.
And if you need even more proof to show to your C-suite about the value of internal comms, let them know that 60% of workers also said that internal communications also has an impact on their productivity, motivation, and understanding of the company’s mission and vision.
But as important as communications clearly are, one vital group of workers is being left behind: deskless employees.
The massive divide between deskless and office workers
Deskless workers are a notoriously difficult group of people to reach. It’s hard to ask a manufacturing worker to check their email frequently or for a nurse to hop onto a Zoom call at a specific time, after all. And so often these workers are left out, either left to learn information via a manager cascade or a digital sign board.
According to this survey, it’s not working.
Two-thirds of deskless workers (66%) say the communications they receive are “poor” or “only fair.” That’s a shocking 46-point difference from office workers. Deskless workers are also more likely to say they don’t understand the rationale behind company changes (48% versus 41%).
“I still think, even in 2025, we’re living in this world where there’s a lot of stuff for employees that still just one size fits all,” Maffei said. “It’s rolled out and assumed that it’ll work for the CEO or it works for senior management, it’ll work for frontline workers or work for deskless workers, or work for what I call the ‘lowest common denominator employee.’”
Maffei says that failing to carefully tailor content to different audiences is to blame for this disparity. He emphasized that personalization goes beyond simply including someone’s name or home city in your communications with them – it needs to fully understand their job and how they fit into the great company ecosystem.
“Personalization is when the things that you’re interacting with, the content that’s being served to you, and the things that you need to touch actually affect the way you do your job,” he said.
Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.
