Employee Communications During Workforce Restructuring

Are you engaging the people who need to hear from you?

When an organization announces a major workforce change, sending the announcement is only the beginning of an effective communications strategy.

Microsoft provided a timely example with the introduction of a new Voluntary Exit Offer (VEO) for 60,000 eligible employees, representing roughly a quarter of the company’s workforce.

But the more important part of the story is what is happening behind the announcement: the internal communications strategy required to address the various information needs, uncertainty, and high volume of questions that accompany a significant workforce change, which won’t be the same for everyone.

As Gartner observed in its First Take article on Microsoft’s announcement:

“Restructuring communications must address multiple audiences, each interpreting the announcement through a different lens.”

That observation presents the challenging question every internal communications leader must address:

Is our workforce-change communication strategy reaching and engaging the people it needs to?

Tailor workforce-change communications to each audience

Most everyone will need to know why the change is necessary and what it means for their future. Consider the different perspectives inside an organization experiencing such change:

Eligible or affected employees need to understand what’s happening, why them, their available options, what happens next, and where they can get authorative answers.

Remaining employees may have an entirely different set of concerns. What is this major organization chang intended to accomplish? Why I am not eligible? How does this impact my role and my team and my role? Will responsibilities change? What does the organization look like after the restructuring? For this audience, communications need to move beyond explaining what’s happening and provide the strategic context for where the organization is going next.

Managers occupy an especially challenging position. Employees naturally look to them for answers, often before managers themselves feel adequately informed. Managers need consistent information, talking points and guidance that enable them to explain both where the organization is today and where leadership is intending to take it, while addressing questions they can answer and knowing where to direct those they can’t.

Leadership needs to articulate the strategy behind the change. Employees shouldn’t have to piece together the organization’s direction from announcements, organizational charts and rumors. Leaders need to create a clear narrative, and address potential counter-narratives, connecting here’s where we are, here’s why we’re changing, and here’s where we’re going.

Are you reaching those audiences and addressing their specific information needs?

Answering that requires looking beyond the performance of the individual announcement, it requires analysis of the entire campaign, with the ability to address and measure each segment independently within one construct.

Communicators who measure the results of the change-communications program by audience segment, will see whether important information is actually reaching the employee populations for whom it was intended.

The follow-up FAQs on SharePoint, the Teams channel and chats, leadership announcements, manager communications and employee updates are all parts of the same communications campaign. By measuring engagement over time by audience segment across channels, communicators and leadership can identify where their narrative is strong or falling behind and use those insights to adjust the communications that follow.

How PoliteMail helps execute change management campaigns

PoliteMail gives internal communications teams the ability to manage and measure employee communications directly from Microsoft 365 Outlook.

For workforce restructuring and other significant organizational change, this means moving beyond simply measuring who opened the email, to understanding whether the communications strategy is working.

Communicators can use PoliteMail list management tools to target communications to the appropriate employee audiences, helping ensure employees receive information relevant to their circumstances.

Then they can measure reach, readership and engagement, by segment, providing communications teams with visibility into how employees are engaging with important organizational information.

And they can evaluate communications results as campaigns, rather than looking at every message as an independent event, giving communications leaders a broader view of how effectively a change-communications strategy is performing over time.

Most importantly, those insights give communicators an opportunity to respond, reinforce the messages the are working, refine others, provide additional context and equip managers to address any information gaps.

That creates a practical communications cycle:

Communicate → Measure → Analyze → Adjust → Communicate again

And it can continue as the organization moves from announcing change to helping employees understand what comes next.

Because during consequential organizational change, successful internal communication isn’t measured by whether the organization sent the message.

It’s measured by whether the right audiences are reading, engaging, understanding and making the necessary changes to move forward confidently.