There is a particular sentence that appears in meetings when a company is about to do something painful. A merger. A relocation. A restructuring. Someone asks when the employees should be told. Then someone else says, “Let’s wait until we know more.” The sentence sounds prudent. It is often fear wearing a sensible tie.
ROI Communication has built a 25-year business around the opposite idea: tell people early, say what is known, admit what is not and give managers enough help to carry the conversation. This is not public relations pointed outward. It is the less glamorous machinery pointed in - the emails, town halls, manager toolkits, intranets, surveys, scripts and question boxes that determine whether a decision made in a boardroom becomes work anyone can actually do.
Barbara Fagan founded ROI in 2001 with a four-person team. Its first assignment involved communication around the HP-Compaq merger, an apt baptism for a consultancy interested in moments when the org chart moves faster than human emotion. Today, the company says more than 90 employee-owners work across North America and Europe. They serve communication and HR leaders at more than 300 organizations, from startups to Fortune 10 companies.
The company became its own case study
In 2008, the financial crisis arrived and ROI used candid staff conversations to reorganize its own way of working. The episode matters because consultants are excellent at prescribing medicine they would prefer not to swallow. ROI swallowed. Thirteen years later, on its twentieth anniversary, the company went further and created an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. Every eligible colleague became part-owner; ROI became both majority women-owned and 100% employee-owned.
Employee ownership does not automatically make a meeting shorter or a strategy wiser. It does, however, put an economic fact beneath the culture language. The writers, designers, analysts and consultants doing the work share in the value they create. For a firm whose product is employee engagement, that is a useful form of accountability. The pitch and the payroll point in the same direction.
“Humanity is infused into every decision we make and every recommendation we give.”From the ROI credo
Thirty-two thousand people and one new address
The clearest picture of what ROI sells is Toyota’s “One Toyota” consolidation. In 2013, Toyota Motor North America set out to unite three headquarters in California, Kentucky and New York at a new campus in Plano, Texas. The business logic could fit on a slide. The human consequences could not. Thirty-two thousand U.S. employees needed to understand the move; many had to decide whether their families would move with it.
ROI helped write CEO and leader emails, coordinated timelines, designed mailers sent to employees’ homes, left flyers on desks, built web materials, trained leaders and helped answer more than 1,600 messages in the employee question box. Notice the range. The work moved from abstract narrative to domestic reality. A strategy became an envelope on a kitchen table.
Immediately after the announcement, 83% of employees said they understood the reason for unifying the headquarters. More than 96% of managers found the communication useful. The move finished in 2017, and the program earned an IABC Gold Quill Award of Excellence. ROI’s distinguishing move was not a clever slogan. It was building an answer system around a decision - then checking whether understanding survived contact with real life.
When the benefits fair became television
Adobe posed a different puzzle in 2020. The company was changing benefits platforms and expanding several forms of support. It wanted more employees to participate in open enrollment. Then offices closed and the familiar in-person benefits fairs vanished. The first plan failed for the most literal possible reason: no one could enter the room.
ROI and Adobe replaced the fair with an online chat show in which benefits staff told personal stories and explained the changes. ROI created the theme, “It’s your life … live it well,” as well as home mailers, emails, articles, surveys and even the show’s set. The channel changed, but the useful principle was older: benefits become interesting when people can recognize their lives inside them.
Nearly 90% of survey respondents said the amount of information was right, four points better than the year before. Benefits page views rose 30%, while actual enrollment increased nearly 10%. These are client-reported campaign results, not proof that one format will work everywhere. They are proof of a more modest and useful claim: a necessary corporate ritual can be redesigned around the situation people are actually in.
The open rate is only the lobby
ROI sits in a peculiar market. It competes with specialist agencies such as Intactic, Vignette, Brilliant Ink, ROC Group and Tribe, with the change practices of larger consultancies, with software companies and with the internal team’s own ability to do the job. Its advantage is breadth without pretending to be a platform. ROI can devise the strategy, write and design the campaign, coach the leaders, temporarily embed staff and measure what happened.
Its digital workplace practice works across SharePoint, Simpplr, Staffbase, Unily and Workvivo. The advice begins before vendor selection: organize an intranet around what employees need to accomplish, not the departments that happen to own the pages. “HR, Finance, Operations” is an org chart. “My benefits, my pay, my tools” is a day at work.
A click says the door opened. The higher rungs ask whether anybody walked through it.
The same logic appears in ROI’s measurement work. Email opens and attendance are the first rung, not the conclusion. Its model climbs through knowledge transfer, behavior change, business impact and financial impact. Surveys, focus groups, audience segments, channel dashboards and sentiment analysis help distinguish “we sent it” from “they understood it.”
The workshop that worked - except at work
ROI has lately applied its change practice to AI. Melanie Barna, a senior vice president, has described an early Copilot workshop that felt successful: animated discussion, strong questions, clear next steps. Months later, the team’s habits were almost unchanged. Information had moved. Work had not.
That miss changed the offer. ROI now frames AI adoption as a capability and workflow problem, not a single training event. Its programs include readiness assessments, governance, literacy, strategic guidance, adoption communication and accelerators built specifically for communication teams. The lesson is deliciously inconvenient for anyone selling workshops: enthusiasm at 4 p.m. is not behavior on Monday morning.
A sequence worth stealing
The most portable part of ROI’s method does not require an agency. A communication team can borrow the sequence before it borrows a consultant.
ROI’s business is therefore neither messaging nor morale, exactly. It works in the awkward interval between a decision and the people expected to live with it. Competitors can write the email. Software can distribute it. The harder craft is constructing the chain from announcement to understanding to action - and remaining present when 1,600 replies arrive.