The Architects of Trust: How to Build the CHRO and CCO Partnership

For some organizations, the HR and communications departments might function like neighbors who occasionally borrow a cup of sugar: HR shapes the employee experience, communications tells the company's story, and the two cross paths mainly during a benefits rollout. That arrangement no longer holds.  

Layoffs, artificial intelligence, and a workforce spanning five generations have collapsed the wall between the two functions. Amidst this disruption, CHROs are prioritizing effective change management, with over half of CHROs (53%) making it their primary concern for 2026, according to SHRM’s 2026 CHRO Priorities and Perspectives report. Meanwhile, the communications function is navigating how to respond to decreasing employee trust in their organizations, according to Gartner’s Future of Communications report. 

With so much to navigate, chief human resources officers (CHROs) and chief communications officers (CCOs) who treat each other as service providers rather than as strategic partners are operating at a disadvantage. Here's what CHROs need to know about building that partnership — and what it costs them when they don't. 

Two Roles, Many Shared Responsibilities 

Rochelle Ford, CEO of the Page Society, an association for chief communications and corporate affairs officers, argues the CHRO and CCO have always been more interdependent than most executives realize — regardless of where their tasks sit on the org chart. Employee relations and internal communications report up through the CHRO at some companies and the CCO at others, she noted.  

"Regardless of where they’re sitting, they're interchangeable, and they're interdisciplinary," she said. For CHROs weighing where to place these functions, her point is less about picking the right box on the chart and more about building a partnership between HR and the communications team that’s sturdy enough so that the choice doesn't matter. 

Sheryl Battles, who spent more than three decades in corporate communications before becoming vice president of global diversity, inclusion, and engagement at Pitney Bowes, an ecommerce shipping solutions company, has sat on both sides of that divide — reporting at various points to a CHRO and a CCO. She describes the ideal division of labor less as a boundary and more as a set of complementary lenses. In her experience, HR often owned the substance of a decision — say, a senior leadership change — while communications weighed in on how it would land. 

"The CCO might come in and ask, ‘Is that what you really want to say? ... You do understand that your Q&A ought to include this, because from the outside, when I read that, this is what comes to my mind?’" she said. 

The goal, she explained, isn't for communications to overrule HR's decisions, but to pressure-test them. 

"When everybody puts their picture of success together, what you can end up with is something that none of you could have gotten to alone,” she said. 

Collaboration is important to making any kind of transformation a success, noted Linda Rutherford, executive advisor at Southwest Airlines, and former chief administration and communications officer. 

“No executive should think that they can navigate the kind of transformation that we're having to navigate right now without a very strong partnership between those two roles,” Rutherford said. She pointed to her own experience grappling with Southwest's 2025 workforce reduction, the airline's first mass layoff in its history. Supporting employees and communicating change to them fell to both communications and HR. 

"Communications were the promise makers, and HR were the promise keepers," she said. "So those had to be in alignment." 

No matter the challenge, CHRO-CCO alignment ultimately matters because of its direct impact on employees, explained Ford. As CEO of the Page Society’s global community of senior communications leaders, she’s advised many professionals on the importance of a strong employee experience.  

"You will lose your license to operate without an investment in and building up and maintaining a strong employee base," she said. 

When the Partnership Breaks Down

Rutherford and Ford agreed that when the relationship isn’t as strong as it could be, the damage rarely stays contained to the two offices. 

"If you have disconnect at those two executive levels, then the teams will spin," Rutherford said. "They will often do redundant work, and then they'll bump into each other and realize they've been wasting time."

Ford argued that misalignment creates conflict and crisis, describing scenarios where employees learn news about their own company from the media before hearing it internally. 

Battles traced the root of that kind of breakdown to a misunderstanding or misinformation about the value and the intention of the partnership.

Without a unified partnership and strategy, situations like these can break trust not just on the inside of an organization, but on the outside as well, ultimately harming both business reputation and employee sentiment. 

Building the Partnership: Four Practical Strategies

1. Start with the basics — literally. Ford's advice for CHROs who want to strengthen the relationship is straightforward: "Walk over and say, ‘Hello, what's on your mind?’" she said. "Pick up the phone, have lunch, find out from each other what are the top five issues that you're working on, and ask, ‘How we collaborate and help each other?’”

2. Find your counterpart's ‘love language.’ Rutherford recommends CHROs and CCOs get deliberate about where their communication styles diverge before a crisis forces the issue. "Sometimes one person talks one way, one person talks another way, and they're literally passing each other," she said. When that happens, an unbiased third party — a chief of staff, a head of strategy — can help surface the misalignment before it reaches their teams.

3. Put people in each other's rooms. Battles credits much of her success to a structural fix rather than a relational one: Designating a liaison who sits in on the other function's senior team meetings. "It's common practice to have a comms lead sitting in on the HR senior team," she said. In Battles’ experience, having a liaison creates a flow of intelligence, facilitated trust, and a greater appreciation for each other’s teams.

4. Get ahead of AI governance together. Rutherford, Battles, and Ford each named AI as the issue most likely to define the CHRO-CCO partnership going forward. This reflects a similar sentiment found in SHRM’s 2026 CHRO Priorities and Perspectives report: 92% of CHROs anticipate more AI integration into the workforce this year.

Ford identified AI as a challenge that has touched every aspect of a corporation.

“It’s making a difference in headcount, budget resources, and governance,” she said. “It’s a brand issue, and it’s a compliance issue. Communications and HR have to be a part of that conversation.”

Rutherford agreed, noting that Southwest’s approach to its AI strategy has been with a people-centric, "human in the loop” lens, which has brought the strategic alignment between the CHRO and CCO even closer.

“Speed, technology disruption, and the complexity of change are really making the CHRO and CCO partnership a necessity because it's about the people and how we're going to carry the organization forward when there are disruptive changes,” she said.

Battles went further, calling AI not just a working partner but an influencer and a game changer that will reshape workforce structure, office policy, and public trust all at once — precisely the kind of cross-functional problem no single C-suite seat can own alone. 

A Strong CHRO-CCO Partnership: Good for People and Business 

This alignment extends beyond executive harmony. A CHRO and CCO who trust each other, Ford argued, send a signal beyond their own offices — to employees weighing whether to stay, and to investors weighing whether the company is one worth watching and investing in. 

She connected that harmony to measurable outcomes beyond reputation, too, noting that organizations with a strong CHRO-CCO partnership tend to see a reduction in strikes, absenteeism, and work stoppages.

"Your employees become your advocate," Ford said. "Which one do you want? Do you want an advocate, or do you want someone to go home disgruntled?"

That's the return on the partnership. Get it right, and, as Rutherford put it, the two functions stop being separate promise makers and promise keepers and start operating the way the moment demands: as one team.