How to avoid misfires in internal messaging during sensitive moments

Misconstrued messaging can lead to many unintended consequences that can lead to consternation that chips away at employee morale and company culture. The best communicators know how to navigate even the trickiest situations like leadership changes and returns to the office with clarity and precision to avoid the churning of the internal rumor mill.

Employees are intuitive, and there’s a good chance they’ll know if you’re not being forthright with them. Obfuscation is a great way to sow the seeds for misconstrued messaging.

“Employees aren’t stupid. If they’re reading between the lines, it’s usually because no one’s saying what needs to be said,” said Amanda Ponzar, senior advisor for public and corporate relations at Kaptivate.

Here are a few strategies internal comms pros can employ to increase the likelihood that their messages are received as intended and rumors don’t surface.

1. Guide leadership through the message to ensure that it’s clear — and that you can anticipate the reaction. Ponzar recommended that when there’s a draft message in danger of being misinterpreted or eliciting negative reactions, comms pros should collaborate with leaders to ensure that the message is clear and speaking directly to the employee audience. That means grounding it in the company’s mission and values and language that’s familiar to employees. “If you talk through the issue ahead of time in the messaging, you can flag some of those problems before it gets rolled out,” she said.

 2. Choose your channels carefully and allow space for feedback

 Major organizational changes like layoffs or leadership transitions are potential pitfalls for misconstrued internal comms messaging. Amanda Ponzar, senior advisor for public and corporate relations at Kaptivate, shared an anecdote about a CEO transition she helped lead at a previous job. She told Ragan that her team took care to ensure that news and updates about the transition process reached employees on every possible channel, as focusing on just one or two outlets could leave some employees feeling left in the dark and underinformed.

“We did everything,” Ponzar said. “From news releases and articles to events to newsletters and emails and thought leadership pieces and videos — so that when we got to the transition, people weren’t surprised by the departure of a long-term CEO.”

She added that in change processes, Ponzar’s internal comms team also set up the infrastructure for employees to ask questions. Through confidential forms and email inboxes, Ponzar’s team was able to craft messaging that addressed gaps in knowledge or misinformation before the rumor mills started among employees.

“There are confidential ways to submit a question so you don’t have your name on it,” she said. “That helps so that people feel comfortable asking versus feeling like they’re going to get penalized if they ask a question.”

3. Doing the prep work makes a huge difference

Communicators need to put themselves in the shoes of various employees so they can better anticipate how messages will be received.

At a previous job, Ponzar’s  company instituted a return to office policy in which leadership didn’t anticipate how the employee base would react. This led to some backlash and jumping to conclusions based off the original RTO message. Ponzar gave a few pointers on how comms pros can remedy these sorts of situations.

4. Work with managers — they’re close to employees. Managers are the closest touchpoint employees have to the rest of the organization — especially the company’s decision makers. Communicators should consult with team leaders and managers to ensure that a given message is worded or packaged in a way that’ll resonate with certain teams and not cause confusion. That way managers know how to steer the conversation for the unique teams within the intent of a given message. “Managers can be caught off guard because they may have the talking points, but they haven’t had the opportunity to really understand the broader context,” she said. “Or prepare for what’s coming next.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.