How Ho-Chunk, Inc. found structure and scale with Workshop

Scaling internal comms is rarely simple — and at a company like Ho-Chunk, Inc., it gets complex fast.

Ho-Chunk, Inc. operates across government contracting companies and the WarHorse casinos, with a mission to drive the socio-economic development for the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. It’s a uniquely complex environment, with employees working everywhere from office settings to fast-paced casino floors, often without the same access to tools or time to read long updates.

That reality shapes how communication needs to work. The challenge isn’t just sending updates, but making sure they reach people clearly and feel relevant to how they work day to day.

For a while, the communications model held up. It was highly centralized: leaders aligned on messaging and brought requests to the comms team, who handled everything from drafting emails, to coordinating reviews (often across long Outlook threads), and managing distribution. That approach created consistency and gave teams confidence that communication was being handled thoughtfully.

But as the organization expanded, the volume of requests grew right alongside it. The work began to shift — becoming less about improving communication and more about keeping up. Nothing was technically broken, but the system wasn’t getting better either. And over time, that gap starts to matter.

That’s what led Ho-Chunk, Inc. to start looking for a better way — something that could bring more structure to the process without adding more friction. That search is what led them to Workshop.

Rethinking the role of comms (and letting go of “do it all”)

The communications team took a step back and reconsidered their role.

Instead of managing every message, the focus shifted to enabling teams across Ho-Chunk, Inc. to communicate effectively and confidently on their own.

As Ryan Martinez, Corporate Communications Manager, put it, “We scaled back the time we put into production and equipped other departments with the tools and support needed to achieve their desired outcomes.”

With Workshop, that shift became something the team could easily operationalize — using shared templates and a centralized sending experience that made it easy for teams to create and distribute their own communications while staying aligned.

Rather than acting as a central production hub, the communications team began building a system that balanced structure with flexibility. Teams were given the tools to draft, review, and send their own updates, while still working within clear standards that kept communication consistent across the organization.

That required more than just access. The team focused on creating shared expectations, building repeatable processes, and staying close enough to guide teams without becoming a bottleneck again.

Over time, their role evolved into something more durable: defining what good communication looked like and making it easier for others to replicate.

And as ownership spread, something important happened — the volume of communication increased, but the quality didn’t drop.

As Ryan shared, “The ability to send communications has gone up, but the level of quality communications has also spread across the company.”

Starting small, proving it works, and building trust

At a company like Ho-Chunk, Inc., a full-scale rollout was never going to be the right starting point.

With such a wide range of roles, environments, and communication needs, forcing a single approach all at once would have created more friction than progress.

Instead, the team started with pilots.

They identified teams that were a strong fit, brought them in early, and worked closely with them to test and refine the approach in real conditions.

Ryan explained, “We do a lot of pilots. We’ll take a specific group and say this might be the best team to pilot a new feature.”

These pilots weren’t just about testing a tool. They were about understanding how this model of communication could work across different teams — what needed to stay consistent, and where flexibility mattered.

One of the first teams to adopt this model was Learning and Development.

After getting up to speed, they didn’t just use it— they leaned into it.

They built new skills, took ownership of their communications, and became one of the strongest examples of what this model could look like in practice.

Their willingness to learn and adapt made them a critical partner in proving that this approach could work across the organization.

That approach was put to the test when a member of the communications team stepped away on leave.

During that time, the Learning and Development team fully owned their communications — planning, building, and sending messages independently. 

Communication didn’t stall. Messages continued to go out, and everything held steady.

More importantly, it highlighted something bigger: this wasn’t a process dependent on one person. It was something teams across Ho-Chunk, Inc. could confidently run themselves.

From there, adoption spread naturally. Teams could see how it worked, how it fit into their workflows, and what it made possible.

As Ryan put it, “We don’t just do it for them. We gave them the tools, and now they’re building something cool.”

What actually improved as they scaled

As more teams took ownership, the impact showed up clearly in the results. Newsletters became more structured and more relevant to their audiences, instead of trying to cover everything at once. That focus translated directly into stronger engagement, with Workshop’s analytics making it easier to see what was resonating across different teams and audiences.

• One newsletter consistently sees 90%+ open rates
• Another drives a 25% click-through rate

As Ryan put it, “out of every four people it gets sent to, one of them clicks something in the email.” For a distributed workforce across very different roles and environments, that kind of engagement is a strong signal that the content is truly useful.

The team also rethought how executive communication showed up. Instead of frequent updates, they introduced a more intentional approach, reserving leadership messages for moments that truly mattered — a shift that led to a 16% higher open rate on all-company emails sent by executives. When leadership communicates more selectively, people tend to pay closer attention.

At the same time, ownership of communication continued to grow across the organization. What once ran almost entirely through the communications team is now distributed across departments, with teams confidently creating and sending their own messages. As Ryan shared, “Other teams send more emails than us at this point.” Because the structure behind that shift is clear and consistent, the increase in volume hasn’t created confusion — it’s made communication more scalable.

As the communications team spent less time on production, they gained something that had been in short supply: capacity. They were able to focus on work that had previously been difficult to prioritize, like tracking PR incidents, analyzing trends across social and job review platforms, and turning those signals into insights leadership could use. Instead of reacting after issues surfaced, they began identifying patterns earlier and responding more proactively. As Ryan noted, “We wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work on things beyond that if we weren’t saving time in other places.” In this way, internal communications became more than a delivery function — it became a way to understand what’s happening across the organization and help guide what happens next.

What Ho-Chunk, Inc. built — and why it works

What Ho-Chunk, Inc. built isn’t just a more efficient workflow.

It’s an approach designed to grow with the organization, where teams are equipped and trusted to communicate on their own, supported by clear standards and tools that don’t get in the way.

And importantly, it doesn’t depend on a single team to keep everything moving.

Today, communication at Ho-Chunk, Inc. is more distributed than it once was, but it’s also more consistent, more relevant, and more resilient because of it.

Because scaling internal comms isn’t really about sending more messages.

It’s about building something that can grow with you — without breaking what made it work in the first place.

See what this could look like for your team

What Ho-Chunk, Inc. built started with a shift in how the communications team approached their role, then grew into something that makes strong communication easier to repeat across the organization. If you’re feeling that same pressure — more requests, more channels, more complexity — it may be time to rethink how your system works. Workshop gives your team the templates and structure to communicate confidently and scale without losing quality! Book a demo to see how it could work for you.