The Art of Making People Feel Seen: How A Communications Manager Works in 2026

Communications Manager: The Assets and Challenges in 2026

Over the last few years, communications technology has shifted from static, email‑centric channels to mobile‑first, real‑time and increasingly AI‑supported platforms. This change has not only expanded the reach and speed of internal communication, but it has also raised expectations: employees now anticipate personalised, interactive updates rather than one‑way broadcasts.

For communications managers, that means less time spent on manual distribution and more focus on orchestrating integrated campaigns, interpreting data, tailoring messages to different audiences and stewarding the organisation’s voice across apps, chat, video and social-style feeds. Times of rapid change in technology and economy can be challenging for communications manager. To succeed in this job, it requires not just adjusting to transformations, but also paying attention to detail and the bigger picture.

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity," noticed the French Philosopher Simone Weil. While she was not specifically writing about workplaces or corporate culture, her statement capturing the very human notion of being attentive continues to shape contemporary conversations about maintaining and improving human connections at work. Looking at modern companies today, attention fills part of the epigraph of every great communications manager's handbook.

Think about the last time someone at work truly listened to you. Not while glancing at a notification, not while composing a reply in their head, but with their full, unhurried presence. That moment likely changed the texture of your entire day. Weil contended what most of us can attest to ourselves: when we feel genuinely seen, we feel more appreciated and included. The result is a triangular interplay of trust, belonging, and motivation. This, in turn, reshapes our behaviour at scale. Recognition does not merely boost morale. It rewires the way teams collaborate, take risks, and commit to shared goals.

This is exactly the terrain a communications manager navigates every single day. Their role is not simply to draft press releases or schedule social media posts. It is to build the architecture of attention inside an organisation. They make sure that every employee, from the boardroom to the warehouse floor, feels conne cted to the company's purpose and to one another. In an era when 83% of frontline workers still lack corporate email access, that mission has never been more urgent or more complex.​ But what does it really mean to feel seen at work, and who makes that happen behind the scenes?

This article draws a portrait of what that mission looks like in practice. It explores a day in the life of a communications manager whose work touches strategy, storytelling, crisis response, stakeholder engagement, and the quiet, human act of making sure no one gets left out of the conversation.

The Many Facets of a Communications Manager Strategist, Storyteller, Connector

Before the first coffee has cooled, a communications manager has already scanned overnight media coverage, triaged a handful of internal messages from senior leaders, and begun sketching the day's strategic priorities. The role requires a rare blend of verbal communication skills and editorial precision. This includes the ability to translate complex information into compelling content that lands differently for diverse audiences, whether that audience is a factory-floor team, a board of investors, or a journalist on deadline.

At its core, the position is responsible for developing and executing communication strategies that support organisational goals. This means overseeing internal communication such as town halls, newsletters, policy updates, onboarding materials, as well as external communications like press releases, media campaigns, and thought-leadership content. A communications manager must ensure consistent messaging across every channel, from digital communications platforms and intranets to printed stewardship materials and signage.

A usual day begins with priorities, but it rarely follows a script. A regional leader needs help raising awareness about a safety update. A colleague in HR wants to align on campaign briefs for the upcoming employer-brand push. The CEO's office sends over talking points for an industry keynote. Each of these threads requires a different communication style, a different register, and a different sense of timing. Yet all of them must reflect the same brand guidelines and key messages.

This is why the best communications manager jobs attract people with strong project management skills, excellent written and verbal abilities, and an almost instinctive grasp of how to identify opportunities to connect people with the information they need.​

Communications Manager Jobs: Keeping the Kaleidoscopic View

Communications manager jobs attract people who enjoy holding a whole organisation in view at once, from the boardroom and the brand narrative right through to the everyday experiences of employees and customers. Rather than focusing on a single channel or niche, the role sits at the crossroads of creativity, strategy and operational delivery, asking one person to move fluently between campaign concepts, key messages, stakeholder conversations and the practicalities of getting content live on time.

For a communications manager, no two days look the same: a morning might begin with refining strategic priorities with senior leaders, continue with drafting supporter communications or internal updates, and end with reviewing media relations plans or digital communications.

For professionals who thrive on breadth rather than narrow specialism, this makes the communications manager role a uniquely rich career path. It calls for someone who can see patterns across multiple communication initiatives, ensure consistent messaging for diverse audiences, and still notice the details that make a story land, whether that is a line in an internal communication, a shift in brand guidelines, or a new opportunity to raise awareness with key stakeholders. Woven into a job description, this kaleidoscopic view is precisely what defines communications manager jobs: a key role at the heart of how an organisation speaks, listens and stays connected to the people it serves.

A typical communications manager job description will list responsibilities spanning content creation, media relations, crisis communication, event coordination, and internal communications platform management. It will ask for education in communications, journalism, marketing, or a related field, and it will expect candidates to demonstrate knowledge of digital communications tools, analytics platforms, and content management systems.

But the most revealing line in any job listing is usually this: "the ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment." That phrase is not filler. It is the lived reality of the role. On any given day, a communications manager might move from drafting a press release to briefing a senior leader on media talking points, then pivot to approving a social-media post, reviewing an internal policy document, and arranging interviews with trade journalists.

The development of strong project management skills is therefore not optional; it is essential. So is the capacity for continuous improvement, the willingness to review what worked, discard what did not, and refine the organisation's communications activity with each cycle.

For those seeking communications manager jobs, the reward is a career that is never repetitive, always consequential, and deeply connected to the heartbeat of an organisation.

Directing Multiple Performances

Marketing and Communications Manager: Where Brand Meets Message

By mid-morning, the work often shifts toward the intersection of brand and narrative which forms the familiar realm of the marketing and communications manager. In many organisations, particularly in the technology and services sectors, communications and marketing are no longer separate silos. They are interlocking disciplines that share a single objective: brand consistency across every touchpoint.

A marketing and communications manager is responsible for planning and overseeing marketing and communications activity that supports the company’s commercial ambitions and brand reputation. This typically includes coordinating media campaigns, developing campaign briefs, producing engaging content for social channels, and ensuring that every piece of creative work meets the organisation’s brand guidelines and delivers excellent written and visual quality. In practice, that might mean anything from a high-impact product‑launch video to an internal poster or leadership update shared via the employee app.

The role also demands a sophisticated understanding of target audiences and how to adapt communication style. Crafting a message for a B2B technology buyer is fundamentally different from writing a push notification for a shift worker checking their phone during a break, yet the marketing and communications manager must be fluent in both. They design communication initiatives that are strategic at the top of the funnel and deeply human at the point of delivery, ensuring consistent messaging while still resonating with diverse audiences.

This is where previous experience in a related field, such as journalism, public relations, digital marketing, or content strategy, proves invaluable. Drawing on that background, the marketing and communications manager combines analytical thinking (interpreting campaign data, adjusting spend, benchmarking media coverage) with creative execution (writing headlines, arranging interviews, crafting visual stories) to deliver impactful communications rather than merely adequate activity.

Communications and Engagement Manager: Building a Culture That Listens

If the morning belongs to strategy and content, the early afternoon often belongs to people. This is the part of the day that reveals why an increasing number of organisations are reframing the role as a communications and engagement manager. Today, the title acknowledges the inseparability of messaging and connection.

Employee engagement is not a by-product of good communication. It is the purpose of it. Research consistently shows that frontline workers who feel informed and included are more productive, safer, and significantly less likely to leave. Yet reaching those workers, many of whom have no desk, no laptop, and no company email address, remains one of the toughest challenges in modern internal communication.

A communications manager tackles this challenge by designing supporter communications and stakeholder engagement programmes that go far beyond the traditional top-down newsletter. They create feedback loops in surveys, polls or open forums, that give employees a voice. Additionally, they work closely with HR and operations to ensure that communication initiatives reflect the real concerns and aspirations of the workforce, not just the priorities of the leadership team.

This part of the role also involves maintaining relationships with internal stakeholders: department heads, regional managers, and team leads who act as communication multipliers on the ground. These relationships are the nervous system of any organisation. When they function well, key messages travel quickly and accurately. When they break down, misinformation fills the vacuum.

The ability to build strong relationships with people at every level of the hierarchy, from senior leaders to seasonal shop-floor staff, is perhaps the single most important skill a communications manager can possess. It is also, not coincidentally, the skill that most directly echoes Simone Weil's insight: attention is the foundation of trust.

Engagement Manager: Weaving Threads Across the Organisation

The late-afternoon hours often bring the most unpredictable work. A factory incident triggers the need for immediate crisis communication. A competitor's announcement reshapes the media landscape. A long-planned campaign goes live, and the first wave of data starts rolling in.

This is where the communications manager dimension of the role comes to the fore. They are at heart, a connector, someone whose expertise lies in understanding how information flows through an organisation and where it gets stuck. They not only cultivate verbal communications skills but also coordinate across departments, ensuring that sales, HR, operations, and leadership are all telling the same story at the same time.

What is more, effective stakeholder engagement requires more than good writing. It demands the ability to read a room, to sense when a message is landing and when it is not, to know when key stakeholders need a formal briefing and when they need a candid phone call. It requires the skill to ensure consistency without rigidity, and to adapt the company's tone for channels as different as a live-streamed town hall and a printed notice on a break-room wall.

The engagement manager also plays a key role in handling critical incidents. When something goes wrong, a product recall, a data breach, a workplace accident, the speed, accuracy, and empathy of the organisation's response can determine its reputation for years to come. This is high-stakes, high-pressure work that draws on every facet of the communications manager's skill set: media relations, internal communication, message discipline, and the ability to remain calm while orchestrating a response across multiple channels and time zones.

Public Relations: The External Face of the Story

No portrait of a communications manager's day would be complete without addressing public relations as this is the discipline that governs how an organisation presents itself to the outside world.

The field of public relations encompasses media relations, press releases, media campaigns, arranging interviews, event management, and reputation stewardship. For a communications manager this means that they have to cherish external communications. This practice includes nurturing relationships with journalists, analysts, and external stakeholders, ensuring that the organisation's story is told compellingly and consistently.​

The goal is not merely to generate media coverage but to raise awareness in a way that supports the organisation's strategic priorities. Every press release, every spokesperson briefing, every social-media response must align with the brand guidelines and reinforce the key messages that the communications team has carefully developed.

Public relations also demands a proactive mindset. Rather than waiting for journalists to call, the best communications managers identify opportunities to shape the narrative by pitching stories, placing opinion pieces, and building the organisation's reputation as a trusted voice in its sector. They seek to build strong relationships with media contacts over time, understanding that credibility is earned through reliability and transparency.

In a media environment that moves faster than ever, this external-facing work is inseparable from internal communication. An organisation's employees are its most credible ambassadors. When internal communications are strong, when people understand and believe in the company's mission, that conviction radiates outward, making every piece of external public relations more authentic and more effective.

Communications Flow, Not Flood: The AI-Assistance That Responds To Your Needs

The responsibilities outlined above are not new. Communications managers have always juggled strategy, content, crisis response, and stakeholder engagement. What has changed, however, is the toolkit available to do it.

A decade ago, internal communication meant email blasts and pinboard notices. Today, communications managers operate across a constellation of digital channels. They operate between employee apps, intranets, chat platforms, video-conferencing tools, content-management systems, and social networks. The challenge within the job is no longer a lack of channels but a variety of them and the resulting need to ensure consistent messaging across every single one.

This is precisely where a digital communications platform like Flip becomes indispensable. Flip is an AI-native employee app designed for frontline work, and it has become a popular tool of choice for communications managers who need to create, collaborate, and connect with employees across the entire organisation, regardless of whether those employees sit at a desk or stand on a production line.​

Content Studio: The Command Centre for All Communications

At the heart of the communications manager's Flip app is the Content Studio, which functions as a communications manager's command centre. From a single interface, they can draft posts, manage approval workflows, schedule content across multiple channels, and target messages by role, team, or location. The platform's built-in AskAI writing assistant helps craft engaging content faster, suggesting simplified language for frontline readability, generating headline options, and recommending relevant channels for distribution.

For a marketing and communications manager navigating dozens of campaign briefs and content deadlines, this kind of intelligent assistance has transformative effects. It means less time wrestling with blank pages and more time refining communication strategies that genuinely move the needle.

Approval Workflows and "Post As" Features

One of the quiet frustrations of communications manager jobs is the bottleneck of approvals. A regional leader wants to share a team update but cannot access the publishing tools. A colleague is travelling and needs a post approved before boarding a flight. Flip solves this with streamlined approval workflows and a "Post As" feature that allows communications managers to draft and schedule content on behalf of colleagues, who can then review and approve with a single tap from their phone.

This ability to turn what used to be a days-long email chain into a seamless mobile-first process that keeps communications activity on schedule, even when key people are on the move, is not a minor convenience. It is a fundamental shift in how organisations handle the flow of information.

Flip Flows: Empowering Everyone to Contribute

Great internal communication is never a one-way broadcast. It is a conversation. Flip's Flows feature enables anyone in the organisation, may it be a warehouse supervisor to a retail store manager, to submit news, updates, and stories through a guided chatbot interface. Submissions are automatically routed to the right approvers, ensuring that compelling content surfaces from every corner of the business without creating chaos in the editorial calendar.

For a communications and engagement manager, this is the difference between a top-down newsletter and a living, breathing community. It means that the voices of frontline workers, that is the people closest to customers and operations, are heard, amplified, and woven into the organisation's narrative.

Integrations That Streamline the Entire Workflow

The Flip app connects to the systems organisations already use, such as SharePoint, Workday, and other enterprise platforms, so that policy updates, knowledge-base articles, and HR self-service tools are accessible within a single app. For communications managers responsible for ensuring that the right information reaches the right people at the right time, this integration eliminates the friction of switching between platforms and reduces the risk of outdated or inconsistent information circulating across the organisation.​

The platform also supports instant messaging, video calls, live translation, surveys, digital signage, and live streaming making it to a comprehensive suite that covers every channel a modern communications team needs to maintain relationships with internal and external stakeholders alike.​

Human Attention in the AI-Powered Tomorrow

Technology can accelerate workflows, automate approvals, and surface insights that would take a human hours to compile. But it cannot replace the fundamental act at the centre of every communications manager's role: paying attention.

Paying attention to the senior leader who needs reassurance before a media appearance. Paying attention to the frontline worker whose suggestion could improve a process. Paying attention to the subtle shift in tone that signals a looming crisis. Paying attention to the language that makes one community feel included and another feel overlooked.

Simone Weil understood that attention is not passive. It is an act of will and a practice. At its best, it is a form of appreciation. The communications manager who brings that quality of attention to their work does not merely disseminate information. Each day, they foster the connective tissue of an organisation. Ultimately, they ensure that every employee, in every location, at every level, feels that they are part of something larger than their own task list.​

That is the job. A craft on its own. And with the right tools, a clear strategy, a supportive leadership team, and a platform like Flip that handles the operational complexity, it is a craft that can be practised with more skill and more longlasting impact than ever before.

Explore our Future of Work series that zooms in on how the operations managers, communications managers and human resources managers work today.

Sources: Echo Research, Playbook 2025: Top 10 challenges to master.