How do you truly know if a change announcement has landed with your people?

Most communications teams still cannot prove a change message landed. The clearer evidence is what reaches managers in the days after the announcement.

Michael Reaney  ·  13 November 2026  ·  4 min read

It's been tough times of late for Canva, whose rise in the years prior to the current AI wave was an incredible success story. Chief executive Melanie Perkins told staff on 4th November that the company was restructuring in a way that would affect 1,271 people, about 22% of the workforce, calling it “without doubt the hardest moment” in its thirteen year history. The written note went out that day. The company wide meeting to answer questions about it was six days later, on 10th November. The length of time between the announcement and the feedback is where organisations can often lose track of their own message.

The standing practice of asking for feedback in such situations is failing. Gallagher’s Employee Communications Report 2026 finds 61% of organisations have no formal change communication strategy, even despite ranking change as their most pressing need. And 69% run the function with fewer than six people, regardless of company size. A separate Censuswide survey of 250 UK HR and internal communications professionals for Oak Engage, fielded in February 2026, found 94% believe the function is respected but only 30% can measure its business impact, and 60% have no visibility into whether their communications are reaching or changing anything at all. Both studies ask the communications team how confident it feels yet do not provide answers on whether the message actually landed.

David Grossman, founder of the consultancy The Grossman Group, argued this month that the first hours and days after any change announcement reveal exactly where employees are confused, sceptical or worried, and that managers see those reactions long before senior leaders do. His point is practical, not sentimental: a good change process treats those manager level questions as data, gathering them, finding the pattern, and updating the answer before the confusion compounds. Bahaa Khider, writing for Great Place To Work Middle East in August, names the same mechanism from the other end: a “leadership translation gap” opens the moment an announcement has to pass through a manager and become someone’s actual Monday. Khider argues the distance between what was announced and what people experience is the real measure of whether the communication worked.

Three actions for the weeks after major change announcements

1. Have a channel that goes up, not just down. The questions a manager fields in the first two days are the clearest evidence of where the message didn’t land: they should be collected as well as answered.
2. Note the half life of a decision. If the same question about scope, timing or who it affects is still arriving after two weeks, the announcement didn’t answer it the first time.
3. Listen for the words coming back. When a team describes the change in its own language rather than the leadership deck’s language, that’s usually the indicator of understanding.

Worth reading

• Gallagher, Employee Communications Report 2026 (State of the Sector survey, 1,300+ communications and HR professionals, 40 countries, fieldwork September-November 2025, published 10th March 2026). 61% of organisations have no formal change communication strategy, and 69% run the function with fewer than six people. The size of the resourcing gap behind the measurement gap. Gallagher, 10th March 2026
• Oak Engage, Credibility Gap in Internal Comms (Censuswide survey of 250 UK HR and internal-communications professionals, fielded 18th-25th February 2026). 94% say the function is respected; only 30% can measure its business impact, and 60% have no visibility into whether their communications reach or influence anyone. The clean statement of the gap this edition is about. Oak Engage newsroom
• David Grossman, Why managers are your most valuable change tool (The Grossman Group, via Allwork.Space, 6th November 2026). Managers see confusion, scepticism and doubt before senior leaders do, and a good change process gathers those questions deliberately rather than treating them as noise. Allwork.Space, 6th November 2026
• Bahaa Khider, Your strategy is not what leaders announce, it is what managers repeat (Great Place To Work Middle East, 13th August 2026). Names the gap between an announcement and what employees actually experience the “leadership translation gap,” and argues it opens at the manager layer every time. Great Place To Work Middle East, 13th August 2026
• TNW, Canva’s first job cuts affect 22% of staff in its ‘hardest moment’ (4th November 2026). The case this edition is pegged to: a restructuring affecting 1,271 people announced by written note, with the company-wide meeting to answer questions six days later. TNW, 4th November 2026

The moves

• OpenAI has named Jill Hazelbaker as chief corporate affairs officer, closing a vacancy at the top of its communications function that had run since January 2026. Hazelbaker joins from Uber, where she spent over a decade in senior communications and corporate-affairs roles, rising to president and chief corporate affairs officer after a promotion in May 2026; before Uber she held senior communications posts at Snapchat and Google. Reported by O’Dwyer’s PR News, 3rd November 2026. O’Dwyer’s, 3rd November 2026