An internal communications audit checklist is a structured self-assessment tool that HR, People, and Internal Communications leaders use to grade the health of their employee communication program. It consists of 20–30 yes/no questions organized into categories — most commonly channels, leadership, cadence, feedback, and measurement — that produce a numerical score plus a list of gaps to address in the next 90 days.
The 25-point checklist below is built for IC maturity assessments that need to move fast. It scores itself live as you check items off, lays out the business reasoning beneath each question, and surfaces the action steps that close the gaps once you have a score. Use it solo, run it as a leadership workshop, or hand it to a consultant running an IC health check on your behalf.
Who is the 25-point IC audit checklist for?
The checklist is built for four overlapping audiences. The primary user is an Internal Communications manager or HR Business Partner who owns or co-owns an employee comms program at a 50–5,000-person company and needs a single diagnostic tool they can run quarterly. The second is the Chief People Officer or VP of People who runs a 60-minute leadership workshop on the state of IC at the quarterly off-site. The third is the founder or COO of a 50–500-person company running comms without a dedicated IC team, who needs a structured way to gut-check what they have built. The fourth is the external consultant or fractional Head of People delivering an IC maturity assessment to a client and looking for a defensible 25-question framework rather than a bespoke-from-scratch build.
What this checklist is not: it is not a survey for individual employees; it is a leadership self-assessment. It is also not a replacement for the full communications audit methodology, which includes channel-level analytics review. Use this checklist as the leadership-level screening tool — if the score is below 15, the deeper audit is the next step.
What does "internal communications" cover in this audit?
Definition: Internal Communications (IC)
Internal communications is the set of channels, content, and cadence an organization uses to keep employees informed, aligned, and emotionally connected to its strategy, leadership, and culture. It spans the documented channels — email, intranet, Slack or Teams, mobile push, town halls — and the undocumented ones — manager cascades, frontline team huddles, peer Slack threads. A healthy IC program reaches all of these with consistent messages, measures how each one performs, and uses the measurement to refine what the next message looks like.
That broad scope is exactly why a checklist is the right format. A 25-question rubric forces prioritization: you cannot fix every dimension at once, so the gap list tells you which dimensions to attack in which order. Most IC programs that fail an audit fail because the leadership team tried to scale content production before fixing the channel inventory or the feedback loop — this checklist exists to surface that order-of-operations problem early.
The categories below are organized in the order most IC programs should attack when they are starting from a low score: channels first, leadership and messaging second, cadence and personalization third, feedback and inclusion fourth, measurement and programs fifth. If you score above 20, the work is optimization and consistency — start anywhere.