Corporate execs who cut costs without a strong comms strategy are in for deeper long-term problems.
This year, GM cut 500 to 600 roles as one of a few rounds of layoffs so far. The people affected found out in 15-minute scripted HR meetings with no Q&A.
Shortly after, Microsoft eliminated roughly 3,200 roles in its Xbox division as part of larger company-wide layoffs, divesting four studios in the process.
Neither of those decisions is unusual: large companies restructure all the time, especially these days.
What’s worth paying attention to is the approach. Perhaps a scripted 15-minute meeting or video call (with no questions allowed) aimed to balance efficiency with a delivery that’s slightly more personal than a mass layoff email?
I can’t speak to their strategy, but the impact is surely felt by everyone who was still employed on Monday morning. That kind of experience deeply affects how they view leadership, and detracts from staff morale for the rest of their tenure.
Anyone who’s “survived” mass corporate layoffs doesn’t need to read the numerous studies to attest to the substantial drops in productivity, plunging trust, burnout, and other hidden costs that arise as a result.
These issues can be mitigated with more thoughtful comms strategies, but many organizations have been too slow to adopt new approaches.
The number that should worry your CEO
Businessolver has run its “State of Workplace Empathy” study every year since 2016. In the 2026 edition, 68% of HR professionals rated their CEO as empathetic – down 16 percentage points since 2022, and the lowest figure the study has ever recorded.
Read that again with the source in mind.
This is not a disgruntled-employee survey. It is HR professionals responding. The function that sits closest to the CEO, sees the reasoning behind the decisions, and understands the constraints. And they’re showing the sharpest drop in this study’s history.
Three more findings drive this home:
- 61% of CEOs now say they find it difficult to demonstrate empathy in their daily work — a 32-point jump year on year.
- 33% of CEOs describe their own culture as toxic, up 25 points. Among employees, 40% say the same, up 18.
- Trust in CEOs and senior leadership fell from 67% to 58% in a single year (per IOIC).
So this is not a case of leaders being misunderstood. A majority of them are telling researchers, directly, that the empathetic part of the job has become hard.
The gap between what CEOs know they should be doing vs. what they can actually do in the formats available to them is now measurable.
AI is the accelerant (not the root cause) of a deeper issue
CEOs have all kinds of incentives for AI investment, with cost and headcount reduction high on the list. Still, about 60% of the C-suite have found that AI adoption demands more empathy from leadership, not less (per Businessolver).
The reasons aren’t surprising:
- 39% of employees are worried about what AI means for their organization’s future
- 49% have had little or no employer-sponsored AI training
- 64% of AI-concerned employees reported a mental health issue in the past year, against 50% of AI-optimistic ones
Then a restructuring lands, framed as “AI-driven efficiency,” and delivered as internal memo.
The issue is, in short, a communication gap.
Your staff aren’t hearing from you in the correct format (or frequency)
Restructures and redundancies both surged 12% in a year. Over half of employees went through a restructure (IOIC, IC Index 2026).
Yet only 49% agree the reasons behind change are clearly communicated to them — down from 56% in 2023.
But people want to hear from leadership. Hearing directly from the CEO correlates with both higher trust and clearer understanding of why change is happening.
Read: Half your workforce doesn’t know why things are changing — our full analysis of the IC Index 2026 findings.
Doing this right requires a steady cadence of ongoing, digestible updates – think quick audio briefings throughout the weeks and months following a major internal change, rather than long gaps between larger messages.
This kind of proactive communication reduces staff anxiety during transition periods, and avoids letting the rumor mill feed on silence.
Why the memo fails at exactly this job
A written statement can be accurate, legally reviewed, carefully worded, and still land as evasive. Prose strips out all the nonverbal cues an employee uses to judge sincerity. Pauses, pace changes, tone, emotion.
Text alone doesn’t work in moments that matter.
An over-rehearsed video clip is often worse. It carries just enough performance signal for employees to notice the performance.
Audio is a harder format to fake. A leader either says the difficult thing honestly — with the pauses, the weight, the discomfort intact — or their voice gives away that they are reading someone else’s script. Humans are extraordinarily good at hearing that difference, because they have spent their whole lives calibrating on other human voices.
That is an uncomfortable property of the format if you were hoping to stay vague. But a human voice gives you a considerable advantage if you have real reasoning to share and no good way to get it across at scale.
Read: Don’t treat video and audio podcasts as the same channel
Three things worth doing before your next announcement
- Separate the news from the reasoning, and plan two different deliveries. News about a restructure travels through a company in hours regardless of what you do. The reasoning travels slowly, if at all. That gap is what does lasting damage. Give the reasoning its own channel and its own airtime rather than assuming it rode along with the announcement.
- Say the cost out loud. Vague language reads as concealment even when nothing is being concealed. If the decision was hard, employees need to hear that it was hard, in a format that can carry it. A leader who names the trade-off honestly is trusted more than one who presents a difficult call as obviously correct.
- Check whether you can tell if any of it landed. Most IC teams cannot answer this beyond delivery. If your only evidence after a major announcement is an open rate, you have no idea whether the reasoning reached the night shift, the depots, or the people furthest from head office — which is usually where trust erodes first.
When we run internal podcast programs for clients, the thing comms teams tell us matters most is not just the audio itself. It is being able to walk into a leadership conversation with named-user completion and drop-off data, and say with evidence whether the messaging is actually resonating.
In other words: are your employees tuning in, or silently burning out?
If you have critical comms for a global workforce, you need a channel that lets you scale leadership voices, and data to prove that your message is landing. That’s what Auddy Campfire was built for.
Learn more:
- Download the internal comms roadmap — a practical reference for building an audio-led IC channel.
- Read: How an investment firm turned leadership updates into must-listen content
Recap
- HR professionals rating their CEO as empathetic fell to 68% in 2026, down 16 percentage points since 2022 — the lowest figure in the ten-year history of Businessolver’s State of Workplace Empathy study.
- The problem is self-reported by leaders, not just observed by staff. 61% of CEOs say demonstrating empathy in daily work is difficult, a 32-point jump year on year, and 33% describe their own culture as toxic.
- AI accelerates the trust gap rather than causing it. Around 60% of the C-suite say AI adoption demands more empathy from leadership, while 49% of employees have had little or no employer-sponsored AI training.
- Explanations travel more slowly than the news itself. Only 49% of employees agree the reasons behind change are clearly communicated to them, down from 56% in 2023, even as restructures and redundancies rose 12% in a year.
- Format determines whether reasoning lands. Written memos strip out the nonverbal cues employees use to judge sincerity, and over-rehearsed video adds a performance signal. Audio carries tone, hesitation and weight, which makes insincerity harder to disguise.
- Cadence matters as much as format. Short, regular audio briefings through a transition period reduce anxiety and stop the rumor mill feeding on silence.
Frequently asked questions
Why do employees distrust leadership after layoffs even when the decision was justified?
Employees rarely dispute that a restructure was necessary. They react to how the reasoning was delivered. News of layoffs spreads through an organization within hours by word of mouth, while the explanation behind the decision travels slowly or never arrives at all. That gap — everyone knowing something happened, almost nobody understanding why — is what does lasting damage to trust in leadership.
What is the empathy gap between CEOs and employees?
The empathy gap is the difference between how empathetic leaders believe they are and how empathetic their workforce perceives them to be. Businessolver’s 2026 State of Workplace Empathy study found 68% of HR professionals rate their CEO as empathetic, down 16 percentage points since 2022 and the lowest figure recorded since the study began in 2016. Notably, 61% of CEOs themselves now say demonstrating empathy in daily work is difficult.
Is audio better than video for internal communications?
For leadership messages carrying difficult news, audio has a specific advantage: it preserves tone, pace and hesitation while removing the performance pressure that makes executive video feel rehearsed. Video requires a leader to look composed, which can read as detachment during a hard announcement. Audio also reaches deskless and shift-based employees who cannot sit and watch a screen, and it is faster and cheaper to produce on a regular cadence.
How should a CEO announce AI-related restructuring?
Deliver the news and the reasoning as two separate communications. Announce the decision through the formal channel, then use a leadership voice format to explain the reasoning, name the trade-off honestly, and address what it means for the people still in the business. Follow it with a regular cadence of short updates through the transition rather than a single announcement followed by silence.
How do internal comms teams measure whether a leadership message actually landed?
Email open rates confirm delivery, not comprehension. Formats that generate behavioral data as a by-product of consumption — completion rate, drop-off point, replay behavior, and segment-level differences — show whether the reasoning reached specific parts of the workforce. Knowing that a briefing was completed by most of one team but abandoned early by a night shift is operationally useful in a way an aggregate open rate is not.