The employee comms work behind Western Digital’s split from SanDisk

When Western Digital and SanDisk split into two companies early in 2025, internal communicators needed to navigate the human impacts of the division, including teams being rearranged and the building of new internal cultures.

Kalpana Ettenson, senior director of strategic communications at Western Digital, (a member of Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council) stepped into her role just a few months before the big move, in the fall of 2024.

“As I came in, it was obvious the separation was very disruptive for everybody emotionally within the business,” Ettenson said. “There was just a ton of work that had to be done by the support functions within HR, finance, legal and IT to take the systems and split them apart.”

Ettenson also had to build a comms function from the ground up, guide a new CEO through the process of communicating with employees, and help the workforce understand what the move meant for them. Part of her job involved reframing the importance of Western Digital’s hard drive-focused business model in a market that increasingly values flash storage technology.

“Our employees had really felt a sense of being in the backseat, not being considered valued,” Ettenson said. “I had to come in and build this new comms organization with a focus on executive communication. At that point, I had to focus on what the strategic narrative was that we were going to launch both internally and externally. How were we going to be talking about ourselves to our employees and would we be sharing that message with them?”

Rebuilding Western Digital’s employee narrative

One of Ettenson’s primary challenges was dispelling the perception that Western Digital was just what was left after SanDisk went independent. Instead, she needed to affirm to employees that hard drives were key to the computing market, especially with AI tech’s huge demand for storage space.

“We had to build out this narrative from the notion of HDD (hard disk drive) as an outdated, old piece of technology, as being irrelevant, and flip that,” Ettenson said. “We went on talking about HDDs as truly foundational in the AI-driven data economy because there is no technology like the hard disk drive that can actually store the vast amount of data being driven by AI. If you look at the major hyperscalers, they were really focused on building out their data centers with hard disk drives because that’s what they needed. So we had a tagline that our CEO liked to say — ‘No HDDs, no AI’ — and we really latched onto that.”

To make that narrative stick, Ettenson’s team needed to give people a hub where they could get more details on the strategy,.

“We revamped our internal homepage and focused a lot more on putting information there,” Ettenson said. “There hadn’t been as much of a focus there to really provide people with a deeper understanding of the strategy.”

New leadership comms for a new company identity

As the new CEO and leadership team stepped into their roles, Ettenson encouraged them to lean into live communication and allow employees to ask questions directly.

“When I joined, I said to the CEO, ‘We have to do live meetings,’” Ettenson said. “Transparency for (employees) is super important because they want to be able to ask questions of you. If you have to say, ‘I don’t know the answer, we’re working on that,’ that’s OK. But they need to know that you’re here, you’ve got a strong vision for what we’re going to do.”

Ettenson also helped familiarize the leadership team by sharing short Q&A videos internally, allowing employees to learn more about their leaders at their own pace.

“We introduced our executive leadership team individually in two-minute segments and rolled those out at a pace of about two a month so the employees could get to know them,” she told Ragan. “We played them live in meetings and we posted them to our intranet platform.”

Ettenson’s work is evidence that when a company has a major shift in identity, internal comms needs to exist in much more than just announcements. Employees need a connection with the reasoning behind the split and the leaders shepherding it so they can see themselves in the new organization.

“Comms is so critical in times like this, when you’re going through these massive shifts, because we’re the means by which that information is shared,” Ettenson said. “A close engagement with the business and having that sense of trust with leaders is super important. It’s about making sure we’re aligned to what they’re looking for and what they believe we need to be doing.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.