When a company goes through a big change — a merger, a new owner, a new strategy — there is a moment where someone says: we need to communicate this properly.
What they usually mean is a press release, a new page on the website, maybe a post on LinkedIn. The outside version.
And then somebody in the room goes quiet, because they are thinking about their own people. The ones who heard the rumour in the canteen two weeks ago. The ones wondering if they still have a job. The ones a customer will call on Monday, asking what is going on — and who will answer however they feel that day, because nobody told them anything else.
That is two jobs, not one. And they are the same job held up to two different audiences.
The outside is marketing. The inside is culture. The line between them is thinner than you think.
I work with an HR partner on exactly this. We keep ending up in the same conversations, from opposite doors. She comes in when a company is changing and the people side starts to creak: uncertainty, quiet resistance, good people updating their CVs "just in case." I come in when the outside story stops matching reality: the company has changed, but the market still hears the old one.
What we keep finding is that these are not two problems. They are one problem with two symptoms.
Your employees are a communication channel whether you like it or not. A big one. In a technical B2B company, your customers do not talk to "the company." They talk to your service technician, your sales engineer, your project manager. If those people are confused about what the company is becoming, that confusion is your marketing — delivered face to face, at full credibility, for free.
You can buy the nicest launch film in Denmark. It loses to one awkward silence from your own project manager when a customer asks "so what does this mean for us?"
And it works the other way too. When the outside story is sharp and people inside the company actually believe it, something shifts. People repeat it. They say it at dinner, at the trade fair, to the candidate they are trying to recruit. Culture is partly just the story people tell themselves about where they work. If you want a strong one, the story has to be worth repeating — and it has to be true.
What to actually do, in plain terms
Here is the advice Tina and I would give you if you were sitting across the table, change on the horizon.
1. Decide the story before you announce anything. Not the press release — the story. One paragraph, in words a normal person would use: what is changing, why, and what does not change. If you cannot say it in one paragraph without jargon, you are not ready to say it to anyone, inside or out.
2. Inside first, outside second. Always. Your own people should never learn about a change from LinkedIn. Not once. The moment they do, you have told them where they rank, and they will remember it longer than the change itself. Even a short "we don't know everything yet, here is what we do know" beats silence.
3. Say what you don't know yet. This is the one leaders resist, and it is the one that builds the most trust. "We don't know yet how this affects each team. We will tell you by this date." Uncertainty admitted is survivable. Uncertainty discovered is not.
4. Give your people the sentence. Your customers will call your employees and ask what is going on. Decide in advance what you want that answer to sound like, and hand it to them. Not a script — a sentence or two they can say in their own words and mean. If you don't, each of them will improvise their own version, and the market will receive fifty different companies.
5. Check the two stories against each other. Sit down — ideally with whoever owns the people side and whoever owns the market side in the same room — and ask: does what we tell customers match what we tell employees? Does what we tell employees match what we actually decided? Any gap between those three will find its way out. It always does.
6. Keep it up after day one. The launch-day announcement is the easy part. The three months after are where it is won or lost: the questions people were afraid to ask in the big meeting, the customer who reads the news late, the new normal nobody has named yet. Plan the follow-up before you make the announcement, or there won't be one.
Why this overlap matters more than it sounds
HR and marketing are usually two separate conversations in a company, often in separate budget lines, occasionally in separate buildings. During a change, that separation is expensive. The internal story and the external story are written by different people, at different times, with different assumptions — and the gaps between them become the story everyone actually believes.
When they are done together, you get something better than consistency. You get an identity that holds: employees who can explain the company, customers who hear the same thing from every direction, and a culture that survived the change instead of being a casualty of it.
A change is the moment your company tells the truth about itself — to the market and to its own people, at the same time, whether you planned it or not. The only choice you have is whether the two versions match.
If a change is ahead of you — or already underway — and you want the inside and the outside to tell the same story, write to me. Between Tina and me, both sides of that table are covered.