The words “more to come” show up in almost every internal comms announcement. It’s a promise comms pros make to their audiences. But it’s also one that communicators unintentionally break.
It’s not because of carelessness. An internal communicator’s world moves fast and the next thing on the calendar appears quickly. But the commitment to follow up, whether through managers or directly with an employee audience, does not fade away when immediate attention shifts elsewhere. Weeks will go by after an internal announcement, and often the only person following up on employee questions and concerns are managers.
Communicators are great at equipping managers to deliver a message immediately after it drops. But there is far less time spent on the messages and follow up that come in the wake of internal comms announcements. That communication gap can lead to confusion and trust breakdown, which both can kill employee engagement.
Communicators don’t always prepare managers for follow ups
Comms pros do a lot of work to prepare managers when big internal messages need to be shared, including giving them resources like FAQ sheets, comms toolkits and specific wording to share during team meetings. But often, those resources are about one part of a message’s journey and don’t always help several steps down the line after an announcement happens.
Comms pros empower managers to deliver a message within a framing that’ll make sense for their teams. But while communicators prepare them as best they can to answer the inevitable questions that’ll come from employees and anticipate what those questions will be, there’s always room to improve. When major changes or announcements happen in an organization, especially as mergers and layoffs are increasingly common, communicators need to prepare managers for the questions that an employee comes to them with after chewing on it for a month and not just moment-to-moment updates.
Where the follow up lands
The fact of the matter is, employees are going to keep talking about the internal announcements communicators make even if comms pros stop pushing the message. It’ll just happen in informal situations between employees, and that opens the door to a loss of trust and hits to culture.
In too many instances, comms teams don’t hear how the conversations went between managers and employees. Read rates and other engagement metrics mostly focus on whether or not employees see a message, not if they need further information. They also don’t tell communicators if managers need more information.
That means the next update answers the message that was sent, not the version employees are hearing. Speculation will fill the gap and managers will stop advocating for a change they can’t explain. Once employees decide that their leaders aren’t being straight with them, no amount of follow up messaging fixes the issue. And the knock on issues of attrition that follow will harm the bottom line.
It isn’t that comms pros aren’t preparing managers well. There are plenty of tools and tactics that cover the announcement itself. The problem is where that preparation stops. A well-prepared manager is one who can still answer honestly weeks after the news lands, and too few of them are prepared by comms pros to do that. It takes a lot of intentional work up front on the part of communicators. And that work is a lot cheaper than winning back trust after the fact.
Sean Devlin is the senior internal communications editor at Ragan Communications. You can follow him on LinkedIn here.
