Your Chief of Work May Be in Comms

Putting Together the Puzzle

After years working across marketing, communications, and workplace functions — including a Senior Director, People & Placesrole — Michael took the Klaviyo job to narrow his focus, and go deeper into internal communications.

Before long, his previous roles found him again.

Michael said that employee experience had, over time, become synonymous internally with events, programming, and recognition moments, rather than the broader system of how work actually happens. Like music to my ears, he said the company was "making workplace decisions from a functional standpoint and not from an experience standpoint. It has to be both."

So instead of allowing a cross-functional dysfunction to fester, Klaviyo broke the silos. Since his communications team was involved across those touchpoints, the Chief People Officer (and Michael's manager) asked that he oversee employee experience, workplace, and real estate.

An Orphan With a Playbook

Michael has lived through several versions of organizational homelessness. As he described it, "[Internal Communications] can fall in so many places: marketing, people, or you actually just build out your own comms function that reports into the CEO. It depends on the company's disposition." Wherever it lands, comms takes on the priorities of its neighbor.

"You're solving the problem based on where your team is dropped."

It shows up at conferences. Real estate events run too technical for a comms leader. Comms events treat AI as something the comms team should adopt, whereas Michael's read is that the job now is helping the rest of the company adopt it well. There are no gatherings, at least at scale, for the people doing this combined work. And no vendor represents the whole picture.

An orphan function makes its own case. Michael makes his with the model he already knew: he runs the employee experience as a product. "I'm essentially approaching it the same way I would marketing. We have a product, and that is our overall employee experience." Talent acquisition and employer brand drive demand. Comms and engagement do the customer marketing. Real estate, events, and the spaces themselves are the experiential layer. One story across all of it, the way a campaign holds together.

"In my past life, I used to have to walk into raw, concrete spaces at convention centers and figure out how to turn them into something." For Michael, high-quality experiential show floors became highly functional office floors built to support the way teams work.

Next Up: Tackling Technology

To better shape the work experience at Klaviyo, Michael started asking questions about moments that are harder to see. This meant analyzing the data behind employees' digital collaborations, so he started asking his IT colleagues questions. A lot of questions.

So many that they added his team to the admin group for tools like Slack, Zoom, and Google Workspace.

With newfound access to meeting patterns, Slack channel norms, and room utilization, Michael could begin (re)designing offices based on real behaviors rather than inferences or self-assessments.

"I now have a deeper understanding of how to build a space based on how we work versus making assumptions."

I have been drawing this line for a while. Technology infrastructure (e.g., servers, switches) belongs in IT. The employee-facing layer, or at least the data it generates, should belong to, or be directly accessible to, whoever owns the experience. But the same logic influences how new features reach employees.

Michael shared the example of an IT Specialist who might see Slack coming out with a new feature and say, “Great, let's turn it on!” But he’d be next to them, saying, "No, please don't. Let's either test it with a small group or make sure we're building the right story for how this unlocks a new way of working for the team. We can't just hope for the best — we have to be intentional."

Over time, Klaviyo shifted the work to align with Michael's argument. The collaboration and AV technology teams most closely tied to the employee experience were realigned from IT to Michael's organization.

Make It Fun on Monday

I asked Michael how he sums up the job. "My role is literally to make it easier, and more fun, for people to get their work done." That is the whole point of putting these functions together, and the line every leader in HR, IT, real estate, and comms should be able to say without flinching.

Although many leaders may complain or struggle to secure buy-in to improve the employee experience, you don't have to wait for a reorg. Michael's advice, in particular to comms leaders reading this, was very direct: "Stop waiting and just do it. Start with the friction in someone's day, and find who else feels it."

Here are three things you can do to start moving the needle on Monday:

• Audit your collaboration-tech access. Find out who has access to what, and whether the list is limited to those with operational needs rather than experiential ones. The gaps are a clear opportunity for comms, real estate, or HR leaders to rethink how they collaborate with IT.
• Trace one ritual through space and tech. Pick a way of working you communicate often — focus time, in-office days, the all-hands — and follow it into the office layout and the digital tools. Mark where they support it or work against it. That misalignment supports integration and the management of work as a product.
• Stack hands with like-minded peers. Spend an hour comparing org charts and authority gaps between all internal leaders who obsess about the employee experience, or spend >50% of their time working on it. Record the conversation, and have an AI assistant play back all the gaps.

Someone has to be responsible for closing the gaps in employees' experiences, which often sit on the seams between silos.

It might as well be the leader already standing in them.