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PR has spent decades managing external perception, shaping what the world (journalists, customers, investors...yada yada) thinks about a company.

Meanwhile, one audience has quietly moved from the sidelines to center stage. The one that's become impossible to ignore.

*cue the spotlight*

The people already on payroll.

Get ready. Everyone's been promoted to most credible fact-checker.

Internal comms used to have a nice lil' formula:

Send the press release → brief the media → email employees.

That order has aged about as well as a company saying, "We're a family."

The next reputation crisis probably won't start on X, Reddit, or from a reporter.

It'll start with employees.

They've already compared the announcement against their meeting notes and connected the dots like they’re on CSI. 

The new lil' formula looks more like this:

Company → Employees → Slack (or Teams, if you must 🙄) → Glassdoor → Reddit → LinkedIn → everywhere else.

Basically, we know all the feels are not staying in the building.

Internal comms is finally having its moment. 💃

Not because companies suddenly care more about employee engagement or anything wild and crazy like that. It's because employees no longer experience company messaging privately.

✔️They question it.

✔️Compare it to what actually happened.

✔️Screenshot it.

✔️Discuss it.

✔️Archive it for future use.

Increasingly, they’re shaping how everyone else sees it too. So internal comms isn’t so… well, internal anymore. It’s become the external reputation, if you will.

Just look at Staples Baddie. One employee ended up doing more to shape public perception of working at Staples than any employer branding campaign ever could. No press release. No polished messaging. Just firsthand experience people trusted.

That's the shift. Employees aren't simply consuming company narratives anymore. 

💡 They're helping write them.

Which means PR's job isn't just asking, "Is this a compelling story?" It's also asking, "Would our employees recognize this as true?"

Employee skepticism isn't a "kids these days" thing companies can conveniently blame on Gen Z. There's data that backs it up.

According to People Matters, Glassdoor has seen a rise in mentions of "disconnect," "miscommunication," "distrust," and "misalignment."

A great example of the disconnect? Roughly 80% of leaders believe they're communicating clearly, while only about half of employees agree.

To take a page out of Miranda Priestly’s sarcasm book… groundbreaking.

One of the most interesting takes we've read recently came from the Is It Working? Substack, which argues employees don't distrust the actual communicators.

They distrust communication that feels like (typically accurate) it’s designed to protect leadership instead of being transparent.

Corporate speak keeps trying to make "everything's fine" happen.

It's not going to happen.

We all know the emails.

"After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to..." or  "We're excited to announce some organizational changes..."

Translation:

Something happened. We all know something happened. 

No one is allowed to say what happened, though. Sorry.

Smoothing over reality instead of acknowledging it makes employees lose trust.

And companies lose credibility.

And you kinda want your employees to back you. Just a suggestion. 🤷‍♀️

That's why communication isn't just supporting the business decision anymore.

Employees don't separate what happened from how it was communicated. 

The message becomes part of the experience itself, so when communication feels disconnected from reality, that is often what becomes the story.

There’s been plenty of examples in the last few years.

Exhibit A: Better.com. The infamous three-minute Zoom layoff instantly became the Fyre Festival of internal communications. 🥪

Afterward, the company's VP of Communications, Head of PR, and Head of Marketing all resigned.

When the communications team decides the communication strategy is something they no longer want to be associated with...we'd say that's more telling than any apology statement.

Amazon’s RTO announcement…wow. That went over about as well as the Game of Thrones finale. The CEO’s letter to employees started with “Hey team. I wanted to send a note on a couple changes we’re making to further strengthen our culture and teams.”

But then mandated employees return for a full 5-day workweek in-office.

Dude. Read the room. 😳

And did we forget to mention it was received by many via a broken link? So they found out the same time as the rest of the country when the press release dropped? 🤦‍♀️

Because nothing says "organized transition" quite like a 404 error.

GM employees who were laid off had to sit through a 15-minute "meeting" of HR reading a scripted statement. And they weren't allowed to ask questions.

On the flip side, Airbnb proved the communication itself can earn trust, even when the decision is painful.

During its 2020 layoffs, CEO Brian Chesky explained exactly why the company had to make the decision, acknowledged the human impact, and outlined in detail how the company would support departing employees. People still weren't happy to lose their jobs (obviously), but the response became one of the most widely praised examples of transparent corporate communication. 

(Psst, we wrote about Brian Chesky in a previous issue about what AI could never do. You can brush up on our feelings about him here.)

Employees don't expect every decision to be popular. But they do expect it to feel honest.

For years, PR has focused on helping companies tell compelling stories. But more and more, the job is making sure those stories hold up with the people who know the company best.

Before asking: "Will reporters believe this?"

Ask: "Will our employees recognize this as true?"

Not because employees have media training, or fancy executive titles, or whatever.

But because they were there. They know what was said in the meeting (and what wasn't). What changed between the all-hands and the announcement. Whether the message reflects reality or just the version leadership wants to be true.

That's a level of credibility no carefully crafted statement can manufacture.

So before your next announcement goes live, don't read it through a reporter's eyes first. Read it through an employee's. Because nobody wants to spend the next six months arguing over the corporate equivalent of "We were on a break." 

If your employees don't recognize your story as true...why should anyone else?

Ash & Lizzy

Who's going where and why it matters. Not just job shifts - power dynamics, layoffs, and who's headed out.

💔 Buzzfeed laid off 1/3 of its staff in an attempt by new owner Byron Allen to reduce financial losses.

💔 John C. Dvorak, an early and influential tech journalist for PC Magazine, died at the age of 80. Dvorak was part of the startup team at CNET Networks, and he also appeared on MarketWatch TV.

🎉 etn. has launched as Europe’s first daily live technology show, streaming five days a week.

🧳 Samantha Henig has joined The Wall Street Journal as head of multimedia. She founded the audio division at The New York Times.

🧳 Anthony Milton has joined The Margin, an outlet that operates in “the sweet spot between money and culture, where high finance meets real life.” He’s also looking for pitches.

👀 Semafor announced its expanded Global Advisory Board for Silicon Valley & The World, a major global initiative and 2-day live journalism event that connects technology builders with international policymakers to address how artificial intelligence reshapes society. The platform will bring together more than 350 founders, CEOs, investors, and policymakers this November.

🧳 Sri Muppidi is now reporting on business and tech for The New York Times and DealBook.

Get to know Ashley and Lizzy, learn more about The Colab, or pass The Brief along to a friend who should be reading this too.