In the mid-1980s, the toy company Mattel held a quarterly town hall for managers and above. Those employees below the manager level were excluded for purely logistical reasons: the largest room at the Mattel headquarters campus wasn’t large enough to accommodate all local employees, and there was no appetite to spend the money on a hotel ballroom.

As communications director, I knew that the distribution of information from those attending town halls to their teams was uneven at best. I also knew a lot of those lower-level employees felt disenfranchised. I recommended that we hold the town hall meeting twice. Leadership bought into the idea, scheduling the first session for managers and above, and the second for everyone else.

The first time those non-managers attended the town hall, they listened raptly as the CEO delivered his updates and analyses. After the meeting, a group of administrative assistants approached him. “What did you think?” he asked.

One of them said, “This was wonderful. We now understand a lot of things that are happening around here that we didn’t understand before. We just have one question,” she said. “Who are you?”

The CEO had not introduced himself, assuming everyone knew who he was. For those lower-level employees who had little contact with leadership, this was a flawed assumption.

Today, that CEO would be less nonplussed than he was 40 years ago. A new survey of 7,550 workers from Workvivo revealed that 46 percent of frontline workers don’t know who their CEO is. Worse, 87 percent said the company’s culture does not apply to them, indicating that the culture of the frontline differs from the culture the company projects in its messaging.

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It would be bad enough if that data point existed in isolation.

It does not. Most of the data points to massive systemic failures of internal communication across all industries.

The COVID-19 pandemic led many leaders to lean on their internal communicators. That led to a lot of those communicators taking a victory lap, congratulating themselves on their newfound respect from the C-suite. The pandemic has been in the rearview mirror for some time now. Internal communicators who believe leaders have maintained the same level of confidence may want to examine the data. While leaders still consider internal communications necessary, they no longer view it as a top priority. In their minds, it has become just another component of employee experience strategies.

A torrent of research shows that communication with employees isn’t working well at all.

The Trust Gap: Leaders Think They’re Connecting—But They’re Not

If you ask most executives, they’ll tell you their people are aligned, energized, and thriving. But step down a rung or two, and the view changes dramatically. Leaders think they’re broadcasting clarity; employees feel like they’re stuck in a fog. The discrepancy is laughable: 81 percent of leaders believe their employees are motivated and engaged, yet only 52 percent of employees agree. Almost all executives (95 percent) believe their workforce thinks leadership cares about employee well-being. Only half the workforce agrees. These aren’t minor misalignments. They are tectonic shifts in perception. And if internal communication is supposed to be the bridge, it’s failing under the weight of executive overconfidence and employee disillusionment.

Trust, already brittle in many organizations, is eroding fast. In just two years, employee trust in business leaders dropped from 80 percent to 69 percent, according to Mercer. Gallup rubs salt in the wound: Only 23 percent of employees strongly agree they trust their leadership at all. The view from the front lines is even bleaker, with the Edelman Trust Barometer showing that executives are 2.5 times more likely than frontline workers to believe their CEO is being truthful. This is a communication failure of the highest order.

Alignment Has Left the Building

For years, communicators have discussed alignment as if it were a corporate North Star, an essential ingredient for any functioning culture.

Zora Artis and Wayne Aspland define alignment as the deliberate process of connecting employees to strategy through a shared understanding of purpose, values, and goals, creating clarity, engagement, and coordinated action. Their research emphasizes that alignment isn’t just about cascading information, but also about enabling meaning and ownership at every level of the organization.

And yet, here we are: 77 percent of executives say their companies aren’t aligning employee goals with the organization’s purpose. Dwell on that for a moment: Most of the C-suite knows they’re not doing it, and either they don’t know how or they don’t prioritize it. But what, exactly, is internal communication supposed to be doing if not this?

This failure shows up in subtle ways. When employees feel disconnected from strategy, they retreat into silos, doing the work without understanding the “why.” That kind of culture is fertile ground for disengagement, cynicism, and eventually, resignation. It is no surprise, then, that more than half of American workers are watching for or actively seeking a new job, matching record highs. And if you think this isn’t connected to communication, think again: 61 percent of those employees considering a move cite poor internal communication as a contributing factor, and over a quarter blame poor communication outright.

The Efficiency Drain That No One Is Fixing

Too often, the cost of poor communication is couched in abstract terms focused on morale and engagement. New research helps us see it in terms of cold, hard cash. Axios HQ reports that the average employee loses more than 41 workdays a year to bad communication. That’s over eight weeks of productivity gone, vaporized by vague directives, information silos, and endless clarification loops. For a knowledge worker making $100,000 to $150,000 annually, that translates to nearly $20,000 in wasted salary per person. Now multiply that across a department, or an entire company.

It doesn’t stop at lost time. Communication breakdowns have become part of the daily experience for employees. According to research from Grammarly and The Harris Poll, 100 percent—yes, every single one—of knowledge workers report miscommunications at least weekly. A quarter say it happens multiple times a day. This isn’t just annoying; it’s corrosive. It wears down satisfaction, erodes morale, and adds fuel to the burnout fire. Poor communication isn’t just a glitch in the system. It IS the system. Too many internal communicators wouldn’t even consider that part of their remit. Leaders reviewing these results in comparison to their spending on internal communication may have different perspectives.

Feedback Loops That Go Nowhere

If your company asks for feedback but doesn’t follow up, you’re not listening—you’re collecting noise. Employees notice. A Visier survey found that the top thing employees want after completing a survey isn’t more perks or pizza parties. It’s communication: an update on what’s being done in response to their feedback. When that loop isn’t closed, the message is deafening: “We heard you, but we don’t care enough to act, or to tell you what actions we’re taking.”

The situation becomes especially grim when communications teams aren’t even positioned to help. A study from Weber Shandwick found that only 17 percent of CEOs believe their communication and public affairs teams are well-equipped to handle today’s rapid-fire challenges, whether economic, geopolitical, or cultural. If comms can’t rise to the moment, who will? And if the function doesn’t get the resources or influence to meet the moment, what message does that send to employees about how much they’re valued, or how seriously leadership takes trust, transparency, and connection?

The Shifting CEO Message

Executive priorities have shifted, and the shift occurred without much input from communicators. Axios reports that, as of March, leaders have shifted from an empathetic, reassuring tone during the pandemic to one focused on productivity and accountability. As Axios put it, “CEOs communicating with employees has evolved from ‘bring your best self to work’ to ‘step it up.’”

Other executive trends have included:

Return-to-office mandates — Surveys reveal a stark divide in perception. Full-time mandates among Fortune 500 firms nearly doubled from 13 percent to 24 percent since the fourth quarter of 2024. But 77 percent of employees feel these mandates reflect a lack of trust, while only 39 percent agree that they boost productivity. Since leaders seem to believe that presence equals performance, that friction intensifies. In fact, 35 percent of employees say they’d consider quitting if forced to return to full-time office work. That number grows to 40 percent for Millennials and Gen Z, the demographics that dominate the workforce.

Abandonment of DEI goals — The rollback of DEI initiatives and goals to accommodate the Trump Administration’s executive orders doesn’t sit well with most employees. Seventy-eight percent say it’s very important that their organization remains inclusive. Reports of employees unhappy with companies scaling back their DEI programs are common. Disney employees, for example, have expressed displeasure, and at major firms (such as Accenture, Skadden, and Kirkland & Ellis, among others), employees have resigned in protest, framing the moves as an “authoritarian” infringement on inclusive values.

Layoffs — The shift from a seller’s to a buyer’s market has led to a surge in corporate layoffs. As a result, roughly one-third of American workers report experiencing “layoff anxiety” this year. Sixty-five percent of those who survived recent layoffs say they’re now worried about their own job security, compared to just 24 percent at more stable companies.

Employee confidence has plunged to a record low, with Glassdoor reporting that mid-level employee confidence has dropped to 47 percent, the lowest level since the company began tracking in 2016.

This has led the vast majority of employees (69 percent) to prioritize job security over career growth.

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These and other widespread symptoms of disengagement, as well as the specific areas of misalignment, all point to a single epicenter: a systemic breakdown in internal communication. This is not merely a contributing factor; it is the core mechanism through which the disconnect is created and sustained. The failure is not a lack of messages, but a lack of connection, clarity, and trust.

Does all this sound like internal communicators should be patting each other on the back for a job well done?

The current state of things should be a clarion call for internal communicators. Corporate journalism remains important. For various reasons, employees need to be informed about what’s happening. As Mitchell Stephens pointed out in A History of News, “Organizations depend for their unity and coherence on a sense of group identity. To think a society’s thoughts is to belong to that society. News provides the requisite set of shared thoughts.”

However, ensuring news and information travel between leaders and employees is just table stakes. If it is all an internal communication team does, we end up in the circumstances we face today.

Many internal communicators will argue that many of these issues are HR’s problem, or that their remit does not extend beyond coordinating messaging. But if internal communicators are not addressing the various ways the company communicates internally—employee-to-employee, department-to-department, and the messages sent by its processes, among others—who will? Who else has the expertise to identify communication bottlenecks and challenges and strategize solutions?

The current state of things is unsustainable. The concept of internal communication needs to expand or risk irrelevance.