11/05/2026
Major organizational change highlights the value of internal communicators teams.
Consider what’s happening at Microsoft right now.
With 60,000 employees being offered a voluntary exit, one announcement quickly escalates into hundreds of thousands of individual conversions and questions: Why is this happening? Am I affected? What about my team? What does the organization look like after this?
The questions will be different depending on who’s doing the asking. All employees want to understand why, from their own point of view. Affected employees want clear answers about what comes next if they do or don’t take the offer. Non-eligible employees will want to understand what the organization will look like after the change. Managers and people leaders are often caught in the middle, expected to provide clarity to staff before they themselves have all the answers--many being affected by the exit offer at the same time.
Internal communications play a critical role in helping employees navigate uncertainty.
Strategic communications teams map out the information needs and likely questions of each different audience ahead of time and take responsibility for translating leadership business objectives into stories employees can relate to from their own perspectives. Narrative control becomes paramount as rumors may run rampant, so communicators leveraging messaging analytics and employee listening systems are able to evaluate response in real time and help leaders calibrate messaging moving forward as the situation evolves.
We explore the value of internal communications during workforce restructuring, and methods of measuring and managing change management campaigns in our blog post.
Employee Communications During Workforce Restructuring
