We’re Still Communicating Like It’s 2019 — and That’s Failing Our Employees.
Your CEO just sent another reorganization announcement. You crafted it carefully, anticipated questions, kept it concise. Two hours later: There are crickets on the intranet, but Slack is exploding with anxiety and speculation.
Sound familiar?
You’re doing everything “right” according to the internal communications playbook. Clear messaging. Multiple channels. Transparent about the changes. And yet — employees are struggling. Important information doesn’t stick. Trust keeps eroding. Your HR team is exhausted from answering the same questions on repeat.
Here’s what I know from leading employee communications at scale: The problem isn’t you. The problem is that we’re still using communication strategies designed for a world that no longer exists.
What Actually Changed (It Wasn’t Just Operations)
The pandemic didn’t just disrupt how we work. It fundamentally rewired how we process information and stress.
Think about it: For going on two years, people lived with constant ambient threat. Refresh the news. Check the case counts. Calculate risk every time you left your house. Our nervous systems stayed activated — not occasionally, but constantly. That kind of sustained stress doesn’t just go away when we declare the emergency “over.”
Now layer on everything that’s happened since. Climate disasters making headlines monthly. Economic uncertainty and layoffs rippling through every industry. AI headlines alternating between miraculous and apocalyptic. Political division seeping into every corner of social media. This isn’t a series of isolated disruptions — it’s what researchers call “polycrisis.” Multiple, overlapping, ongoing crises that create a new baseline of stress.
Your employees aren’t showing up to work with a clean slate anymore. They’re showing up with their nervous systems already activated before they even open their laptops.
This is a reality based in neuroscience. It’s not an attention problem. When people operate under sustained stress, their brains literally process information differently. The prefrontal cortex — responsible for complex thinking, decision-making, and processing nuanced information — goes offline. The amygdala takes over, prioritizing threat detection over everything else.
What does this mean for employee communications? Everything you knew about how to reach people effectively just shifted.
This is why trauma-informed approaches focus on reducing threat signals and creating predictability — they help the prefrontal cortex come back online.
Why Your 2019 Playbook is Failing
Traditional employee communications strategies were built on assumptions that made perfect sense in 2019. They just don’t hold true anymore.
Assumption 1: People have cognitive bandwidth to process complex information
Pre-pandemic, you could send a detailed memo about organizational restructuring and reasonably expect people to read it, understand the nuances, and ask thoughtful follow-up questions.
Now? That same memo gets skimmed at best, ignored at worst. Not because employees don’t care, but because their cognitive load is already maxed out. When your nervous system is managing constant ambient stress, complex information processing becomes nearly impossible. People are in survival mode, not strategic thinking mode.
Assumption 2: Employees trust that leadership has answers
For decades, effective employee communications meant projecting confidence. Leaders were expected to have a plan, communicate it clearly, and execute it successfully. Uncertainty was something to minimize or mask.
But employees just lived through years of watching experts and leaders get things wrong repeatedly. They watched plans change weekly. They learned that nobody actually knows what’s coming next.
When you communicate with false certainty now, it doesn’t build confidence — it erodes trust. Employees can smell spin from a mile away, and they shut down when they sense it.
Assumption 3: One-size-fits-all messaging works
Traditional employee communications operated on the broadcast model: Craft the perfect message, send it through approved channels, measure open rates.
But sustained stress affects everyone differently. Some people need detailed information to feel secure. Others get overwhelmed by too much detail and need just the headlines. Some process best in writing; others need to hear it said out loud. Some want information immediately; others need time to prepare before receiving difficult news.
One-size-fits-all doesn’t account for how differently activated nervous systems need to receive information.
Assumption 4: More communication equals better engagement
When employees seemed confused or disengaged, the traditional response was: Communicate more. Send more updates. Use more channels. Repeat the message in different formats.
Now, employees are drowning in communications, thinking they have to keep on top of them all. Slack notifications. Email updates. Town hall replays. Intranet articles. The feedback isn’t “we need more information” — it’s “we’re overwhelmed and still don’t know what actually matters.”
More volume doesn’t equal more clarity. Often, it equals more noise.
What Trauma-Informed Communications Does Differently
I call my approach Internal Calms™ — because the goal isn’t just better internal communications, it’s reducing unnecessary anxiety amid organizational and global chaos.
Trauma-informed communications isn’t about being “nicer” or avoiding difficult topics. It’s a strategic framework for designing communications that work with how stressed nervous systems actually process information.
This approach works whether you’re managing ongoing change or crisis communications during unexpected disruption.
The core shift: Instead of pushing information at people and hoping it lands, you design systems that help people access and process information when they’re actually able to receive it.
So, what does this look like in practice? I focus on three core principles here — safety, trustworthiness, and choice. (There are six total in the Internal Calms framework; you can explore the full approach.)
Safety: Reducing cognitive load through predictable patterns
When people don’t know when to expect communication, their nervous systems stay on high alert. Unpredictability itself creates stress.
Trauma-informed communications establish consistent rhythms. Employees know when to expect important updates — maybe it’s every Tuesday, maybe it’s the first Monday of each month. Even when there’s no major news, you show up. The predictability frees up cognitive resources that were being used to manage “when the other shoe going to drop” anxiety.
Example: Instead of ad-hoc announcements whenever leadership makes decisions, establish “Strategy Update Fridays” where people know to expect information about organizational changes. When there’s nothing to update, you still send something brief acknowledging that. The consistency matters more than the volume.
Trustworthiness: Acknowledging uncertainty instead of pretending to have all the answers
This might feel counterintuitive, but here’s what I’ve learned: “I’ll update you when I have more information” builds more trust than carefully crafted spin.
Employees can handle uncertainty. What they can’t handle is being patronized or lied to.
Trauma-informed communications practice radical honesty about what you know and what you don’t know yet. You give realistic timelines for when you’ll have answers — and you actually follow through. You name when things are hard or unclear. You don’t oversimplify complex situations.
Example: “We’re evaluating three options for the reorganization. We don’t have a final decision yet, and I can’t tell you exactly when we will. What I can tell you is that we’ll share the decision by end of Q2, and here’s the criteria we’re using to evaluate.”
Choice: Giving people choice in how they engage
When people feel they have no control, their stress response activates even further. Offering choice — even small choices — helps people regulate their nervous systems and engage more effectively.
This means providing the same information in multiple formats: A 5-minute video, a detailed FAQ, a one-page summary. Letting people opt out of non-essential updates. Giving advance notice before difficult announcements so people can choose whether to engage live or review materials on their own time.
Choice creates agency. Agency reduces stress and increases capacity to actually process what you’re communicating.
Example: AI Implementation
Let me give you a concrete example: rolling out AI tools that may impact jobs.
Traditional approach:
Exciting announcement about “AI transformation” and innovation
Focus on efficiency gains and competitive advantage
Training schedule distributed
Reassurance that “this is about augmentation, not replacement”
No acknowledgment of the job security fears everyone is feeling
Trauma-informed approach:
Name the anxiety directly: “AI headlines are everywhere and many of you are wondering what this means for your job”
Be honest about what you know and don't know: “Here’s what the company is implementing. Here’s what roles the leadership team believes will evolve. Here’s what we genuinely don’t know yet about long-term impact”
Provide agency: “Training is available now, but you can start when you’re ready, so long as it is by [date]. Some teams are piloting first — you can volunteer or wait”
Create space for concerns: “We’re holding regular office hours where you can ask tough questions about AI, get real answers, and learn alongside one another”
Show commitment to workforce: “Here’s our reskilling investment. Here’s our commitment to internal mobility before external hiring. And here’s the criteria for how we’ll be making decisions”
Establish predictable updates: “We’ll share what we’re learning monthly, even if the answer is ‘still figuring it out’”
The outcomes:
When organizations implement trauma-informed communications during difficult changes, they support:
Higher retention of key information (people actually remember what was said)
Increased trust in leadership even when the news is hard
Fewer rumor mills, higher employee engagement, less speculation
Employees who stay engaged through the transition instead of presenteeism
Managers who feel equipped to support their teams
Faster organizational recovery and return to productivity
This isn’t magic. It’s designing communications for the reality of how humans process information under stress instead of how we wish they would.
The Path Forward
Here’s the truth: Today is the least complex day of the rest of our lives. The polycrisis isn’t ending — it’s evolving. AI disruption, climate events, economic volatility, political instability — these are permanent features of the landscape, not temporary bugs to be fixed.
Organizations that will thrive aren’t the ones trying to return to 2019. They’re the ones redesigning their employee communications for the reality of perpetual uncertainty.
This doesn’t mean you need to have all the answers. It means being honest about uncertainty and helping people stay steady within it. It means prioritizing psychological safety as the foundation for everything else. And it means building communication strategies that work with nervous systems, not against them — stop relying on false urgency to drive action.
Ready to rethink your approach? Let’s talk. Want more insights on trauma-informed communications? Subscribe to Ellen’s newsletter.