Internal Comms doesn’t sell a product, it isn’t a cost; it’s an investment in coherence
- trinimaturana
- The Voices in English
Índice
From ROI to ROC: why coherence is the new metric of value in Internal Communication
The illusion of cost
If you still measure the value of Internal Comms in cost savings, you’re not measuring value, you’re measuring loss or disconnection.
Measuring Internal Comms in terms of cost is like measuring the value of blood in liters: you can quantify it, yes, but you lose sight of why it exists.
The cost isn’t in communicating. The cost is in not doing it on time. In every leader who improvises because they lack context.
In every team that repeats work because nobody translated the strategy.
In every employee who stops believing because the narrative turned into noise.
The question isn’t how much Internal Comms costs.
The question is how much you’re losing by still treating it as an expense.
Internal Comms doesn’t generate ROI. It generates coherence.
And coherence, in times of speed and saturation, is the rarest and most valuable currency inside any organization.
When a company sees Internal Comms as a cost, what it’s really saying is that it doesn’t understand the invisible capital that keeps it alive.
Because Internal Comms doesn’t sell products.
It keeps the emotional and narrative structure of the company from collapsing.
ROI measures return on money.
Internal Comms operates at another level, the level of shared meaning, where the return shows up as trust, alignment, and collective clarity.
From ROI to ROC: measuring what truly sustains culture
ROI measures investment, but Internal Comms doesn’t invest money; it invests coherence, context, and credibility.
That requires a new kind of return and this is my proposal:
“Return on Coherence (ROC) doesn’t measure how much you spend, it measures how much alignment you can sustain in the middle of change.”
In practice, ROC can be measured across three dimensions:
A simple equation to make visible what’s been invisible for decades: the degree of coherence that sustains the organization.
The root error: confusing communication with content
The more we measure outputs, posts, newsletters, town halls, the further we move from real impact.
The value of Internal Comms isn’t in what it produces.
It’s in what it prevents:
- Prevents crises.
- Prevents misalignment.
- Prevents reputational erosion.
Mature organizations measure Internal Comms not as a channel, but as a cultural risk mitigation system.
It’s the invisible architecture holding together strategy, leadership, and employee experience.
From efficiency to synchronicity
Communicating faster isn’t communicating better.
Speed without synchronicity is noise.
Efficiency without purpose is disconnection.
Strategic Internal Comms doesn’t seek to save time, it seeks to synchronize meaning.
That synchronization, that ability for everyone to understand, believe, and act in the same direction, is the real competitive advantage of a healthy culture.
The new power of IC: becoming the custodian of coherence
Internal Comms is not the CEO’s megaphone nor HR’s channel.
It’s the discipline that translates strategy into understanding and purpose into action.
Its power doesn’t lie in producing messages, but in ensuring those messages don’t contradict each other.
When the organizational voice, leaders, and teams sound like one living organism, that’s coherence. And coherence sustains performance.
Conclusion: measuring the invisible to sustain the essential
Defending Internal Comms budgets with cost-based metrics is a structural contradiction.
Internal Comms doesn’t need justification. It needs demonstration.
When organizations start measuring coherence with the same precision they measure revenue, they’ll realize their competitive advantage isn’t in what they sell, but in how clearly they communicate.
ROI is exhausted as a framework.
The future belongs to ROC: Return on Coherence. Because in an age of saturation, coherence is the new oxygen of culture.