Debra Corey – Effective HR Communication: Book Review & Audio Summary

Book Info

• Book name: Effective HR Communication: A Framework for Communicating HR Programs with Impact
• Author: Debra Corey
• Genre: Business & Economics
• Published Year: 2013
• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Language: English

Audio Summary

Synopsis

In Effective HR Communication, Debra Corey challenges the conventional approach to employee communication by proposing a radical shift: treat your employees like valued customers. Most companies meticulously craft their external messaging but neglect internal communications, leaving employees confused about benefits, disengaged from company values, and disconnected from organizational goals. Corey presents a practical framework for transforming HR communication from dry policy documents into engaging campaigns that build trust, reinforce culture, and inspire action. Drawing on real-world examples like Merlin Entertainments’ innovative “For the Love of Fun” campaign, this book demonstrates how strategic, creative communication can turn passive employees into active participants in your company’s success story.

Key Takeaways

• Employee communication deserves the same strategic attention as customer communication—when done right, it drives engagement, trust, and loyalty
• Effective HR communication creates shared meaning by translating company values into tangible actions and memorable experiences, not just words on paper
• Building trust through honest, open communication directly correlates with business performance, with high-trust companies outperforming competitors by 2-3%
• Every HR campaign needs a clear call to action that employees understand, accept, commit to, and ultimately act upon
• Collecting facts about your employees before launching campaigns—understanding who they are and what resonates with them—is essential for communication success

My Summary

Why Your Employees Deserve Better Than Boring HR Memos

I’ll be honest—when I first picked up Debra Corey’s Effective HR Communication, I expected another dry textbook filled with corporate jargon and theoretical frameworks. What I got instead was a wake-up call about how badly most companies are failing their own people.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we obsess over every word in our customer-facing communications. We A/B test email subject lines, agonize over website copy, and invest millions in advertising campaigns. But when it comes to talking to our own employees? We slap together a dense PDF about the new benefits package and call it a day.

Corey’s central argument is refreshingly simple: if communication keeps customers engaged and loyal, why wouldn’t the same principles apply to employees? The answer, of course, is that they absolutely do. We’ve just been too stuck in traditional HR thinking to notice.

The Real Cost of Communication Failure

Think about the last time you received an HR communication at work. Was it exciting? Did it make you want to take action? Or did you skim it quickly and file it away in that mental folder labeled “deal with later” (which really means “never”)?

This isn’t just about hurt feelings or missed opportunities. Poor communication has real business consequences. Corey cites compelling research from the London Business School showing that companies with high levels of employee trust consistently outperform their competition by 2-3%. That’s not a marginal difference—that’s the kind of competitive advantage that can make or break a business.

The Institute of Leadership and Management reinforces this point, identifying honest and open communication as the cornerstone of workplace trust. When employees trust their employers, they push themselves harder, stay longer, and contribute more innovative ideas. When they don’t? Well, you end up with the kind of quiet quitting and disengagement that’s plaguing workplaces across America right now.

From Words on Paper to Lived Experience

One of my favorite examples from the book involves the entertainment company Merlin Entertainments. Like many organizations, they had a company value about having fun at work. But unlike most companies, they didn’t stop at printing this value in the employee handbook and calling it mission accomplished.

Instead, in 2013, their HR team launched a campaign called “For the Love of Fun.” They sent boxes to team leaders containing a film explaining the concept of maximizing fun at work. But here’s where it gets interesting—the boxes also included “fun goggles” (yes, actual goggles) that employees could wear to literally see the world differently and remind themselves to look for opportunities to inject fun into their workday.

They also included a “fun-o-meter” that measured fun on a scale from “chuckle” to “belly laugh.” Now, you might be thinking this sounds gimmicky or silly. And you’d be missing the point entirely.

What Merlin Entertainments understood—and what Corey brilliantly illustrates—is that values need to be experienced, not just read. Those fun goggles became conversation starters, reminders, and tangible proof that leadership was serious about creating a fun workplace. The fun-o-meter kept the concept top-of-mind and gave employees a playful way to engage with the value.

This is what Corey means by creating “shared meaning.” It’s not enough to tell employees “we value fun” or “we prioritize innovation” or “we care about work-life balance.” Those phrases mean different things to different people. Effective communication translates abstract values into concrete experiences that everyone can understand and embrace.

The Call to Action That Actually Gets Action

Here’s where most HR communications fall flat: they inform but don’t inspire action. Corey emphasizes that every effective campaign needs a clear call to action—something specific you want employees to do.

This could be registering for a new benefits program, adopting a new safety protocol, or embodying a company value in their daily work. But getting people to actually do something requires more than just telling them what to do. They need to understand the message, accept its importance, and commit to taking action.

The progression Corey outlines—understand, accept, commit, act—mirrors the customer journey that marketing professionals have been optimizing for years. Yet somehow, we’ve failed to apply these same principles internally. It’s like we’ve been trying to sell products without any understanding of sales psychology.

At Merlin Entertainments, leaders didn’t just send out the fun boxes and hope for the best. They promoted the concept through videos, held meetings to discuss it, and most importantly, modeled the behavior themselves. When employees see leaders having fun, being creative, and embracing the values they’re promoting, acceptance and commitment follow naturally.

Know Your Audience (Yes, Even If They Work For You)

Corey opens one of her key chapters with an Einstein quote about spending 55 minutes clarifying a problem before spending 5 minutes solving it. This resonated deeply with me because it highlights something most organizations get wrong: they start crafting messages before they understand their audience.

In the marketing world, we’d never launch a campaign without customer research, personas, and data analysis. But when communicating with employees, we often make assumptions based on our own perspectives or what we think people should care about.

Effective HR communication starts with collecting facts. Who are your employees? What motivates them? What are their concerns? How do they prefer to receive information? What language resonates with them? These aren’t nice-to-know details—they’re essential intelligence that determines whether your message lands or falls flat.

This means talking to employees at different levels, in different departments, and with different tenures. It means looking at data on how previous communications performed. It means testing messages before rolling them out company-wide. Yes, this takes time. But as Einstein understood, time spent clarifying the question makes solving the problem infinitely easier.

Making Complex Information Actually Accessible

One area where Corey’s advice feels particularly relevant today is in communicating complex benefits and policies. Healthcare plans, retirement options, parental leave policies—these are incredibly important to employees, but they’re also confusing and filled with jargon.

The typical approach is to hand employees a thick packet of information and hope they figure it out. The result? Most people give it a quick glance, feel overwhelmed, and make suboptimal choices (or no choice at all).

Corey suggests reimagining how we present this information. What if instead of a dense benefits booklet, you created a magazine-style guide with clear visuals, real employee stories, and practical examples? What if you broke information into digestible chunks and delivered it through multiple channels over time rather than all at once?

I’ve seen this approach work brilliantly at companies that treat benefits enrollment like a product launch. They create teaser campaigns, host interactive webinars, offer one-on-one consultations, and follow up with targeted reminders. The result? Higher enrollment rates, better-informed employees, and increased appreciation for the benefits being offered.

Applying These Principles in Today’s Workplace

While Corey’s book was published in 2013, its principles feel even more relevant in our current moment. The shift to remote and hybrid work has made intentional communication more critical than ever. When you can’t rely on hallway conversations and office culture to transmit messages organically, your formal communications need to work harder.

Here are some practical ways to apply Corey’s framework in modern workplaces:

Use multiple channels strategically. Don’t just send an email and consider the job done. Think about how different employees consume information. Some prefer video, others want written documentation they can reference later. Young employees might engage more with Slack messages or short videos, while others appreciate detailed written communications. Layer your messages across channels to maximize reach and retention.

Create experiences, not just announcements. When introducing a new initiative, think beyond the announcement. Can you create an event around it? A challenge? A visual element that makes it memorable? The fun goggles example might seem over-the-top, but that’s exactly why it worked. People remembered it.

Build feedback loops. Communication shouldn’t be one-way. Create mechanisms for employees to ask questions, share concerns, and provide input. This not only improves your messaging over time but also builds the trust that Corey identifies as crucial for engagement. Town halls, anonymous surveys, and open office hours all serve this purpose.

Measure what matters. Just as marketers track open rates, click-throughs, and conversions, HR communications should be measured. Are people taking the actions you want? Do they understand the message? How do engagement levels compare to previous campaigns? Use data to continuously improve your approach.

Invest in storytelling. Numbers and policies are important, but stories stick with people. When communicating about benefits, share stories of employees who’ve used them. When promoting values, highlight real examples of people living those values. Stories create emotional connections that dry facts never will.

Where the Book Could Go Deeper

While I found Corey’s framework incredibly valuable, I did notice some areas where the book could have offered more depth. The examples, while compelling, are somewhat limited in scope. Most come from larger organizations with dedicated HR teams and substantial budgets. I would have loved to see more guidance for small to mid-sized companies that might not have the resources for elaborate campaigns like Merlin’s fun boxes.

Additionally, the book focuses heavily on the planning and creation of communication campaigns but spends less time on measurement and iteration. In today’s data-driven environment, I think readers would benefit from more specific guidance on metrics, testing approaches, and how to use feedback to refine communications over time.

The book also predates many of the communication challenges that have emerged in recent years—managing distributed teams, addressing social and political issues in the workplace, communicating through crisis and uncertainty. While the principles still apply, specific guidance on these modern challenges would strengthen the framework.

How This Compares to Other HR Books

If you’re familiar with books like Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” or Kim Scott’s “Radical Candor,” you’ll find that Corey’s work complements these perspectives nicely. Where Lencioni focuses on team dynamics and Scott on management communication, Corey zooms in specifically on the often-overlooked area of formal HR communications.

Her approach is more tactical and campaign-focused than Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why,” but the underlying philosophy aligns—people need to understand and connect with the “why” behind messages before they’ll engage with the “what” and “how.”

What sets Corey apart is her marketing-minded approach to internal communications. She’s essentially arguing for applying consumer marketing principles to employee engagement, which feels obvious in retrospect but remains surprisingly uncommon in practice.

Questions Worth Pondering

As I finished this book, a few questions stuck with me that I think are worth considering in your own organization:

What would change if you allocated the same budget and attention to employee communications that you do to customer communications? Not just in terms of money, but in terms of creative energy, strategic thinking, and leadership attention?

How much of your current HR communication is actually designed for employees versus designed to protect the company legally or satisfy compliance requirements? And could you accomplish both goals—meeting legal requirements while still creating engaging, accessible communications?

Why This Book Still Matters

Despite being over a decade old, Effective HR Communication addresses a problem that hasn’t gone away—in fact, it’s gotten worse. Employee engagement scores have been declining for years. The “great resignation” and “quiet quitting” trends suggest that employees feel increasingly disconnected from their employers.

While communication alone won’t fix toxic cultures or inadequate compensation, it’s a crucial piece of the puzzle. You can have the best benefits, the most progressive policies, and the strongest values, but if employees don’t understand them, don’t trust them, or don’t know how to engage with them, they might as well not exist.

What I appreciate most about Corey’s approach is that it’s fundamentally respectful of employees. It assumes they’re intelligent, capable people who deserve clear, honest, engaging communication. It rejects the paternalistic “we know best” attitude that pervades too much of traditional HR in favor of a partnership model where employees are active participants in the workplace, not passive recipients of policies.

If you’re in HR, internal communications, or leadership, this book offers a practical roadmap for rethinking how you connect with your people. And if you’re an employee who’s ever felt frustrated by confusing, inconsistent, or uninspiring communications from your employer, this book will help you understand what’s missing and how it could be better.

I’d love to hear your experiences with HR communication—both the good and the cringe-worthy. What’s the most effective employee communication campaign you’ve seen? And what’s the worst? Drop your thoughts in the comments below and let’s keep this conversation going.