What does your choice of channel say about how much you trust your employees?
In the space of a few years, the question of how to communicate major change to a workforce has produced answers as different as the organisations giving them. Looking at five global leaders side by side, the channel choice alone tells a story about organisational culture, leader confidence, and the relationship between internal and external communication that most IC frameworks rarely discuss.
The video that broke with tradition
When Accenture CEO Julie Sweet needed to communicate the biggest organisational restructure in the company’s history to 770,000 employees spread across more than 120 countries, she chose not to send a memo. According to Fortune’s September 2025 report, Sweet opted for a direct video message, explaining that reading the announcement on paper would not have conveyed the same sense of purpose as hearing her voice. She described the transformation as both analytically grounded and deeply human, worked through multiple iterations with her leadership team, and enlisted speech coaching to sharpen the message before it went out. The restructuring was driven by client needs and AI integration, not cost-cutting as a primary goal, and Sweet wanted employees to hear that distinction clearly. The video format made the difference between a directive and a conversation.
The email that landed on a Sunday night
Tesla’s Elon Musk took a different approach entirely. His April 2024 communication announcing global layoffs of more than 10 percent of the workforce was a late-night email, brief and blunt, telling employees there was nothing he hated more but that it had to be done. No video. No cascade. No manager briefing beforehand. The channel choice reinforced what many already sensed about the organisation’s communication culture: decisions come from the top, fast, with little scaffolding. The message reached employees and the press simultaneously, because it was forwarded almost immediately. The channel was the message.
The memo that became a newsroom post
Amazon’s Andy Jassy published his June 2025 memo directly to the Amazon newsroom, making it a simultaneous internal and external communication from the moment it went out. There was no leak because there was nothing to leak. Jassy’s decision to publish openly was itself a statement: the company had nothing to hide about its position on AI and workforce change, and employees would read the same version as investors and journalists. This approach has the advantage of consistency but carries a cost: the language of the memo now has to serve multiple audiences at once, which makes it harder to speak directly to the people who actually need to hear it.
The post that got ahead of the leak
Shopify’s Tobi Lutke went further still, posting his internal AI expectations memo directly on X after hearing it was about to be leaked. The move was pragmatic, but it raised a question the IC profession has not fully reckoned with: if a leader publishes an internal memo on a public social platform before employees have had a chance to read it internally, what does that say about the relationship between the organisation and its people? In Lutke’s case, the proactive publication was framed as transparency. Whether employees experienced it that way is a different question.
The memo seen by Reuters
HSBC’s Georges Elhedery communicated his October 2024 East-West restructuring to 214,000 employees through a memo that Reuters obtained and reported on the following day. Elhedery told staff that redundancies among senior roles were inevitable as the bank streamlined duplicative positions, and promised that the leadership team would spend more time explaining the changes in the days ahead. The memo confirmed the direction and named the scale of change, but the fact that journalists were reading it at the same time as employees created a specific kind of trust problem: employees found out about their own organisation’s direction from a wire service, not from their manager.
| What this tells IC practitioners Channel choice is not a tactical decision made after the message is written. It is part of the message. The same content communicated by video, email, public post, or a memo seen first by Reuters lands in fundamentally different ways. Before the next major communication goes out, the question worth asking is: which channel serves the employees who need this information most, and which serves every other audience instead? |
What channel decisions in your organisation have shaped how employees actually received the message, regardless of what the message said?
