Every big change starts the same way. A clear strategy. A confident leadership team. A deck that makes complete sense in the boardroom. Then it meets the people who have to live it.
That's where most of them come undone. Not on the strategy. On how it's communicated, and whether people feel connected enough to come with it.
The latest State of the Sector research from Gallagher, drawn from more than 1,300 communications and HR professionals, puts hard numbers to something we've watched play out for twenty years. Strategy is the easy bit. People are the work. The strategy gets the airtime. The internal communication that has to carry it, and the connection that makes people believe it, gets left to chance. And right now, most organisations are doing that work blind.
Change stopped being a project. It became the job.
Mergers, restructures, tech rollouts, culture shifts. The research is clear that change is no longer a phase you pass through. It's the permanent condition. Communicators ranked change as the single most important capability they need, across every level of maturity.
Then comes the number that should stop a leadership team in its tracks. 61% have no formal approach to communicating change at all.
Read that again. The most expensive, highest-stakes work in the business, the work your credibility is staked on, is being run on improvisation. No narrative. No plan for who hears what, when, and why. Just people doing their best in the gaps between everything else.
Doing it badly is worse than doing nothing.
Here is the part most leaders miss. When a change programme starts to wobble, the instinct is to communicate more. Send the all-staff email. Add another town hall. Turn up the volume.
The data says that instinct is making things worse. Organisations that push change at high volume see a 30% jump in the risk of losing trust in their leaders. Volume gets used as a substitute for clarity, and employees can feel the difference. More noise doesn't buy you more belief. It spends the trust you've got left.
So the lever leaders reach for first is often the one quietly working against them.
You can't fix what you can't see.
If that was the whole story it would be uncomfortable enough. The harder truth is that most organisations have no way of knowing it's happening.
73% of communications functions want to operate as strategic partners. Only 18% actually do. For the rest, strategy lives in someone's head, in a few slides, or in a leader's intuition. Nearly a third are not measuring whether their communication is working.
That means a transformation can be losing the people it depends on, week after week, and the first hard signal leaders get is the one that arrives too late. Attrition. A failed adoption number. An engagement score that drops and nobody can explain why. You can't be ready for what you can't see.
This is the reason to run a communications audit.
A communications audit is how you turn the blind spot into something you can act on. Before you spend another dollar on the next campaign, you find out what's actually true.
It looks at the things that decide whether change lands or stalls:
- Principles. Objectives of the internal communications strategy. Strategic principles to guide execution. Identified current and future state. Tone of voice. Clear outline of the purpose of this strategy and what it enables.
- Audiences. Clarity on who we're talking to, how and where to engage them. Tools to understand audience sentiment and make org wide messages relevant for each group.
- Content. Key messages. What needs to be communicated, how we'll say it with consistency and how we'll make it recognisable. Campaign phases. Ability of leaders to drive key messages with conviction.
- Channels & Tactics. Aligned communication channel and tactic ecosystem. Sequenced messages aligned to organisational events and rhythms.
- Governance. Internal resourcing, ways of working and measures of success. Capturing ongoing feedback and techniques for course-correction where necessary.
The output is not a report that sits on a shelf. It is a clear, honest picture of where you stand and what to fix first, so the next phase of change is built on evidence instead of assumption.
Most strategies don't fail on paper. They fail on people. An audit is the cheapest, fastest way to find the cracks before they cost you the thing you are trying to change.
If a transformation is coming, or one's already underway and you're not certain it's landing, start by looking. Our communications audit is quick to commission and built to be useful: a clear read on your strategy, channels, tactics and measurement, and a prioritised list of what to fix first. The landing page shows exactly how it works, and the organisations who've already put their communications through it. Australia Post, Coles, Kmart, Bunnings, Simplot and AGIG among them.
Click here to see how the communication audit works
If you're looking to bridge the gap between strategy and execution, we'd love to chat. Get in touch with the Bunch team.
Kane Lillywhite
Client Strategy Director at Bunch
Bunch is a specialist Employee Experience & Change Agency. We translate organisational strategy into human experience, closing the gap from ambition to action.