Case study
Rebuilding trust after a leadership change
When an organisation goes through a difficult leadership transition, communication can quickly become one of its biggest challenges.
For one mid-sized organisation, trust was low, people were disengaged and employee retention was suffering. Colleagues had stopped believing the updates they were receiving and, perhaps most concerningly, nobody quite knew how to talk about what was happening.
CommsRebel was brought in to help the organisation rebuild trust and create an internal communications approach that felt more honest, consistent and connected to what colleagues actually needed.
The challenge: rebuilding trust after leadership change
The organisation had experienced a difficult leadership transition which had left its mark on the workforce.
Trust was low. People were disengaged. Retention was suffering.
But the problem wasn’t simply a lack of information.
Leaders were communicating updates. The issue was that colleagues didn’t believe them.
What people needed was to feel heard, safe and connected to a sense of purpose. That meant the organisation needed to move beyond simply sending more communications and start thinking about how it communicated.
Understanding what colleagues really needed
Before recommending any changes, we listened.
We carried out:
- Focus groups and listening sessions
- One-to-one conversations
- An internal communications audit
- Leadership interviews
This gave us a much clearer picture of the employee experience and, importantly, allowed us to understand the difference between what leaders thought colleagues needed and what colleagues were actually telling us.
We then developed an internal communications strategy based on those insights.
Rather than trying to solve a trust problem with another campaign or series of announcements, the strategy focused on rebuilding the relationship between leaders and colleagues.
Moving from reactive updates to trust-building communication
The biggest shift was moving the organisation away from reactive communication and towards more intentional, trust-building communication.
That meant encouraging leaders to show up more consistently, helping colleagues become part of the communication rather than simply recipients of it, and making sure communications felt considered rather than last-minute.
These might sound like relatively simple changes.
But when communication has become associated with uncertainty or mistrust, consistency matters.
Over time, those small changes helped create a different relationship between colleagues, leaders and internal communications.
The impact
The work created a stronger foundation for longer-term employee engagement and retention.
The organisation achieved:
- Executive buy-in for sustained investment in internal communications
- Leaders who were more visible and communicated more consistently
- A stronger colleague voice within organisational decision-making
- Greater consistency across internal communications
- A stronger foundation for employee retention and engagement
Crucially, internal communication was no longer being viewed simply as a way to distribute information.
It was recognised as part of how the organisation could rebuild relationships and trust.
What this case study taught us about internal communication and trust
You can’t rebuild culture without rebuilding trust.
And you can’t rebuild trust without thinking carefully about what communication really means to the people receiving it.
When trust has been damaged, simply increasing the volume of communication rarely solves the problem. Employees need to see consistency between what leaders say, what they do and what people experience inside the organisation.
Listening has to come before communicating.
That’s where meaningful change begins.
Does your organisation need to rebuild trust?
If your organisation is navigating leadership change, employee disengagement or a breakdown in trust, CommsRebel can help you understand what’s really happening and build an internal communications strategy that helps people feel heard, informed and connected. Email us today to book a chat.
