Prove your worth while supporting your people: Change comms that reflect culture

Between RTO processes and cuts to established teams, there’s been a lot of change across countless companies over the last few years. Those kinds of shifts can create major shockwaves to company culture — and communicators need to be ready to step in to right the cultural ship through their messaging.

At Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference next month in Seattle, Hannah Cho, senior vice president of communications at Coupa, will share her insights into how comms pros can use their messaging skills to reach employees effectively during times of change. Cho told Ragan that communicators need to understand the inextricable link between culture comms and change comms.

“Culture and change aren’t separate conversations,” Cho said. “The way leaders communicate — their tone, their transparency and the behaviors they reinforce—will define whether employees embrace or resist change.”

Cho shared a few best practices for communicators when trying to maintain a sense of culture amid times of change.

Line up change comms with the business strategy

Major organizational changes are all going to tie back to the needs of the business, and change comms messaging should do the same thing. Cho shared an anecdote about the value of communicators connecting with other departments to figure out where their messaging fits into the overall strategy and function of the company.

“One of the most important things I did when I joined Coupa was connect with our Enterprise Project Management Office,” she told Ragan. “They had eight company-wide projects going at the same time. You can pretty much bet one person in internal communications isn’t going to be able to support all of that. So instead of trying to show a dollar ROI, I’ve focused on embedding comms into those workstreams.”

Cho also recommended that aside from just talking about the value of comms with leadership, they can show it by guiding employees through change and showing off the state of the company’s culture on the other side of that change.

“We help establish communities, communicate the change, guide people through it and then communicate the outcomes,” she said. “That’s how you show that comms is essential to the success of company-wide initiatives.”

Keep transparency at the top of the priority list

The last thing employees want during a time of change is a lack of knowledge about what’s to come. Comms pros should guide employees through change with as much clarity as possible to help preserve trust.

“I’ve found that candor and transparency are paramount,” Cho said. “There’s a saying from our CEO that I love — directness is being considerate. That really shapes how I think about change communications. Whether it’s ethics training, customer issues or a potential restructuring, employees deserve clarity. Navigating change and risk isn’t about sugarcoating, it’s about communicating openly so people aren’t left in the dark.”

Cho shared a firsthand example of how her team communicated during a major change in a past role, and the success of the communication efforts was driven by transparency and employee-first messaging.

“In my last role, we went through a big cultural shift when we split from being one company into two,” Cho told Ragan. “We kept the same values, but the culture shifted because we were now independent, smaller and more nimble.”

She also said that a sense of transparency from leaders helped set the comms tone to guide employees through the company split.

“Tone and authenticity from leadership were everything,” Cho said. “We could have softened the message about margin pressure or avoided saying layoffs were possible. But I found transparency to be the better approach  — that yes, margins are under pressure and restructuring might happen. Employees may not love the message, but they’ll trust it, and that trust is what gets you through change. Uncertainty, in my experience, is the worst possible feeling for employees.”

Cho added that within these transparent messages, there needs to be ties back to company culture as a constant to carry everyone through the change. It can’t just be a line you tack onto everything you’re sending to your employees while their workplace shifts around them.

“Real culture shows up in how the message is delivered — who it comes from, the tone that’s used and how it connects back to the values and behaviors your company has chosen to live by,” she said. “Most employees can tell you the values on a poster. Far fewer can describe the behaviors that bring those values to life. Change communications is where that gap really matters, because if the behaviors don’t match the values, the culture won’t come through.”

To register for Ragan’s 2025 Internal Communications Conference, click here.

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