5 ways to fix your fractured change strategy

Moon Kim is an executive vice president at M Booth. Kaitlyn Kotlowski is a senior vice president at M Booth. 

A new Gallagher Employee Communications Report released in March should be a wakeup call for every communications leader: nearly six in 10 organizations have no formal approach to change communication. Yet, change management ranks as the most valued skill on internal comms and HR’s wish list. Something is broken.

The reactive fix is more – more emails, more all-hands invites, more Slack pings. Gallagher also found that more than eight in 10respondents already call information overload a growing problem, so increased volume is making it worse, not better.

The real issue is sequence. After years of helping companies navigate mergers, spinoffs, restructurings, leadership transitions, AI rollouts, and more, we’ve found one mistake underneath almost every failed change program: organizations flood employees with operational details before establishing the vision and the “why.” Employees end up able to describe what is changing but have no idea why it matters or what it means for them personally. 

Here are ways to enhance your organization’s change communications: 

1. Lead with the vision. Every single time.

Treating the vision statement as a one-time launch announcement is one of the biggest (and most expensive!) mistakes in change communications. A leader unveils a new strategy at an all-hands, and then for the next six months every communication is about the operational mechanics: the reorg, the budget shifts, the new tools. The original “why” gets buried.

Instead, think of it like a military commander’s intent: if you articulate the end goal clearly enough, your people can make smart decisions even when the operational details change around them. That north star has to show up in every town hall, every manager cascade, every email. Not as a tagline bolted onto the bottom, but as the actual frame for why this message is being communicated..

In practice: When a global financial services firm we work with hit a turbulent stretch of rapid growth and leadership transitions, the instinct was to communicate the operational fixes immediately. We pushed back. First, we helped the leadership team co-create a north star narrative: one crisp statement of where the company was headed and why it mattered to employees at every level. Every subsequent communication had to explicitly connect back to it.

2. Get buy-in before you announce the plan.

There is a sequencing error that plays out in organizations constantly: leadership finalizes the change plan, then rolls it out to employees and waits for engagement. It rarely comes. The most durable change programs build real feedback loops before the plan is locked, not as a box-checking exercise, but as genuine input that shapes the final product.

When employees feel heard at the vision stage, they have skin in the game. When they don’t, no amount of polished communication fixes the disengagement.

In practice: After a failed business restructuring left an organization with a fractured culture and growing distrust, the easy call was to rush a reset announcement. Instead, we designed a leadership workshop where executives across the enterprise built a narrative together. That co-ownership changed how the message was carried. Leaders cascading something they helped create sounds different than leaders reading from a script someone else wrote.

3. Double down on cross-functional alignment.

Even when communications nails the vision and the sequence, change programs regularly fall apart in execution. HR sends one message, legal sends another, the business unit leader sends a third. Each describes a piece of the picture. None of them connect. Employees experience whiplash and fill the gaps with rumors.

In practice: When a global healthcare leader was navigating a complex corporate divestiture, the communications stakes were enormous. With multiple new platforms and a brand-new corporate identity launching simultaneously, the communications team had to serve as the alignment layer. Every function’s messages had to ladder back to the company’s stated purpose and values. Every milestone moment connected to the same emotional thread, so employees experienced a coherent story instead of a pile of disconnected announcements.

4. Treat volume discipline as a strategy.

The omni-channel conversation is well-worn. What gets less attention is the harder discipline: deciding what not to send. Gallagher found that nearly seven in ten organizations run their entire communications function with six or fewer people, regardless of company size. Lean teams under pressure can tend to communicate more and end up in an escalation spiral: more sends, declining open rates, leadership demanding even more volume to compensate.

Before any change program launches, define your communication tiers: what warrants an all-hands, what warrants a newsletter, what gets a manager cascade and what gets held until it can be properly contextualized. 

In practice: When we partnered with the developer division of a major technology company going through layoffs and restructuring, the reflex was to flood employees with reassurance. We helped leadership build a tiered architecture instead: a weekly newsletter held the steady-state information flow, so all-hands meetings could be reserved for moments that genuinely required leadership presence and live dialogue. The all-hands format itself shifted from one-way presentation to real Q&A. Leaders were coached to answer honestly, including saying “we don’t know yet” when they didn’t. Post-event feedback was strong precisely due to that transparency.

5. Stop measuring what’s easy. Start measuring what changed.

Email open rates tell you a message was received but they don’t tell you if it was understood, believed or acted on. Real change communication metrics are behavioral: can employees articulate the vision? Are managers carrying the message consistently? Are fewer ‘confused’ questions surfacing in manager meetings?

Align with stakeholders on what ‘working’ looks like before launch. Pick three specific behaviors or outcomes you’d expect to see if the communication is landing, then track those.

In practice: One tool we like to use is message recall testing. Essentially, it’s a structured pulse survey sent 30 to 90 days after a major communication, asking employees to describe in their own words what the change is and why it’s happening. A global pharmaceutical company used this methodology to demonstrate that meaningful employee recall of their transformation plan had increased following a redesigned communications approach. That kind of evidence justifies the investment in communications far more convincingly than a spreadsheet of open rates.

The bottom line

Ineffective change communication usually isn’t a volume problem. Instead, it’s a structure and sequence problem. It’s essential to get the vision right first, build in real feedback before the plan is locked, align every function’s messages to a single narrative backbone, decide what not to send, and measure what actually changed.

It’s essential to treat internal communication as a strategic function, not a cascade one. And remember to bring some levity — change doesn’t have to be just serious; it can spark fun and high energy communication moments. In fact, we helped a healthcare company rally their employee base around March Madness to underscore how the company listens to employee suggestions and ideas, big and small. Your employees are consumers too.