6 hours of practice for 90 minutes of football.
That's the ratio when you coach youth football.
Three weeks of daily practice to start the season before a single game.
Three practices a week once the season starts.
Six hours of prep for a game that lasts an hour and a half.
And even after all that?
Kids still line up wrong.
Play calls get confused.
Someone forgets their assignment.
That's with dedicated, repetitive coordination. Every. Single. Week.
Now think about your company's internal communications.
Most companies treat comms like a game-day-only activity.
Write an announcement.
Hit send.
Hope everyone sees it.
No practice.
No repetition.
No system for making sure the information actually lands.
Then they're surprised when employees are confused.
On the field, you learn fast that one walkthrough doesn't cut it.
You rep the same plays until the reaction is automatic.
You adjust based on what you saw last game.
You don't just hand kids a playbook and say "figure it out."
Internal comms deserves the same dedicated focus.
The same repetition.
The same willingness to keep working at it even when you think everyone should already know the play.
If a team of 9-10-year-olds needs six hours of practice for one game, your workforce of thousands probably needs more than a monthly newsletter.
#internalcomms #employeeexperience #leadership #frontlineworkers #workforcecommunication
Short, human-written takes on frontline work, product, and AI β one email, once a week.
Andy Tolton is VP of Marketing at MangoApps, where he leads content, brand, and go-to-market strategy for the company's AI-powered unified workforce platform. His focus is on helping frontline organizations understand what's possible when communication, operations, and knowledge all live in one place, and making that case through storytelling that sounds like a person, not a press release. Andy's perspective is shaped by nearly two decades across communications, PR, and marketing in tech, sports, and enterprise software, and a belief that the best marketing starts with paying attention to how work actually happens on the ground.