Nuveen Comms Chiefs: Outdated Channels Undermine Culture Claims

Employees judge a company's culture by the channels it gives them, not just the words those channels carry — and Nuveen's communications leaders say the gap between polished messaging and clunky tools is getting harder to hide as AI raises expectations for workplace technology.

"The channels a company uses are a really good reflection of how it views culture," Chris Dickey, head of corporate communications at Nuveen, told Ragan. "A heavy reliance on email points to very conservative thinking about who can say what to whom."

Dickey framed the issue as access and voice: whether employees can reach a leader, even via a handle on Viva Engage, and whether the company puts real people behind its messages or sends "anonymized emails that are just updates."

What should a channel audit measure?

Comms teams tend to evaluate channels on reach and open rates. Dickey argues that misses the point. Employees pick up on far more than whether a message reached them, so an audit should ask what each channel lets employees do, not just what information it lets them consume.

Dan Mulcahey, vice president of internal communications at Nuveen, added a generational lens to channel selection.

"People don't walk into work and trade their texts, WhatsApp and social media for an old intranet and some emails," Mulcahey said. "Gen Z didn't grow up using email as their main way to communicate."

He noted that many organizations moved faster on LinkedIn than they did on their internal platforms. "Harmonizing the two is how you show the say-do. We're going to get your feedback, but are we actually going to do anything about it?"

Where does the brand-experience gap show up?

The disconnect surfaces in employee surveys across many companies, Dickey said, and it often starts with the story comms helps tell. A polished narrative from comms, marketing, branding and strategy collides with everyday reality: "Then you open your laptop, it takes 20 minutes to warm up, and you're working on a legacy system."

Comms won't fix a slow laptop. But Mulcahey said many comms teams aren't even empowered to shape the channels carrying their own messages — a gap Nuveen has made a priority. The team moved from one-way legacy email to two-way conversation on Viva Engage and is building an employee app inside the Microsoft tools employees already use.

"Comms owns the messaging and where the message lives," Mulcahey said. "To the extent we can improve that experience for employees, it helps make what we're saying real."

How is Nuveen using AI internally?

Nuveen's comms team experiments with AI alongside a dedicated developer in the IT department. One result: a tool that feeds Viva Engage posts through a Copilot-powered summarizer, set to parameters like word count and title length, so the corporate team builds its internal newsletter without comms involvement.

"I remember coordinating newsletter meetings and nitpicking little things," Mulcahey said. "All that is out the window now."

Speed matters most with feedback, where a slow turnaround can look like no one is listening. Dickey recalled that getting town hall survey data to leaders "used to take a week of reading responses and forming a point of view on sentiment." Now Copilot summarizes the Excel sheet and returns the top five themes and who said what.

"The first time I did that, our CEO walked past my desk, and I showed him the results the same day as the town hall," Dickey said.

Does AI threaten authentic comms?

Not according to Mulcahey — provided humans keep listening. During one town hall, an employee asked a leader a sensitive question and drew an answer Mulcahey had never heard from that leader before. That answer now sits in the collection of remarks he uses to draft posts and scripts. No AI tool could have captured it.

"AI is a facilitator," Mulcahey said. "It's helping us extend the humanity, not replace it. At its worst, AI creates generic content that isn't in anybody's voice, and employees can see that."

His benchmark: the worst comms before AI was corporate speak and jargon, and the problem is the same now. "You still need authenticity."

For comms leaders, the playbook is concrete: audit channels by what they let employees do, control the ones you can, and use AI to cut feedback loops from a week to a day — while leaving the listening to humans.