The Town Hall Is Not a Change Strategy

The lights dim. A confident executive walks onstage, or appears in a carefully framed video call. There are slides: a shifting market, a compelling ambition, a new operating model, perhaps a looming AI programme. The language is urgent but reassuring. Questions appear in a moderated chat. Someone says, “Exciting times ahead.”

Then the town hall ends.

The next morning, people open overflowing inboxes, restart unfinished work, press unbriefed managers for answers, and ask questions the slides never addressed:

This is where many change programmes quietly begin to fail.Not because leaders put on a poor town hall. Not because the CEO lacked conviction. Not even because the message was unclear at a corporate level. They fail because leaders mistake an announcement for a strategy.

A town hall is a moment. Change is a long, uneven process in which people make sense of an altered reality, decide whether they trust it, test it against the pressures of their working lives, and eventually – perhaps – change what they do.

Those are not the same thing.

The modern organisation has become very good at producing moments. It can assemble an all-hands meeting at speed, make a video from a leadership away-day, distribute a polished FAQ, and track whether employees opened the email. It can make the beginning of change look unusually complete.

What it struggles to do is the less theatrical work that follows: helping managers have honest conversations; making room for local questions; acknowledging uncertainty without creating panic; changing incentives and routines; showing people what the new reality looks like in practice; and listening closely enough to discover when the plan is failing on contact with everyday work.

That work does not make for a neat launch slide. It is also the work that determines whether anything changes.

• The Trap of the Event

The seduction of the big moment

Town halls are not useless. They can be valuable.

A well-run one can make a change visible. It can show that senior leaders are paying attention. It can give people a shared starting point and, at its best, provide a credible account of why the organisation cannot simply continue as it is. In a large or dispersed organisation, that shared signal matters.

But town halls do one thing especially well: they create the feeling that communication has happened.

That feeling is dangerous.

Employees do not experience organisational change as a strategic diagram. They experience it through meetings that disappear or multiply, systems that stop working, and altered approval routes.

The distance between “our transformation will improve customer experience” and “I now have to enter the same information into two systems while my manager waits for a dashboard nobody trusts” is where change communication either earns credibility or loses it.

This is not a minor execution problem. It is the central problem.

Gallup’s research makes the point with awkward clarity: only 13% of US employees strongly agreed that their organisation’s leadership communicated effectively with the rest of the organisation, while only 15% strongly agreed that leadership made them feel enthusiastic about the future. Gallup argues that a clear change narrative matters because it gives people a shared account of the past, present and intended future – but it also stresses the importance of employee voice in shaping that narrative.

The important word is not narrative. Organisations already have plenty of narratives. What matters is whether people share it.

A strategy only becomes shared when people can connect it to the work in front of them. Until then, it is simply information travelling downwards.

• Systems Over Slogans

Broadcasting is not sense-making

Most organisations design internal communication plans to push information out. What is the key message? Which channel will carry it? What does the intranet page say? Did people open the email? the town hall reach 83% of employees?

These questions are understandable. They are also insufficient.

They measure whether the organisation has sent a message, not whether people can act on it.

Employees do not need every detail of a change on day one. In complex transformations, many details genuinely are unknown. Pretending otherwise is one of the faster routes to distrust. But people do need enough clarity to understand three things:

The first is usually where leaders concentrate.Leaders often pass the second downwards without enough support. They promise the third, then give employees weak ways to take part.

This is how organisations create the familiar theatre of participation: they leave Q&A forms unanswered, file employee-survey findings into PowerPoint decks, and thank people for “valuable input” before moving ahead with a plan they have already set.

Employees notice. They are often more perceptive about organisational power than communications teams give them credit for.

If the only real route for information runs from the centre to everyone else, people will fill the gaps themselves. People infer priorities from what leaders do, not what leaders say. A colleague who has heard something from Finance may become a more trusted source. Employees then scrutinise which projects leaders quietly pause, which meetings leaders stop attending, and whether managers answer straightforward questions without reading from a script.

Rumour is not simply a failure of employees to understand. It is often a rational response to a vacuum.

That does not mean leaders must broadcast speculation or provide false certainty. It means they need to communicate the boundaries of uncertainty. Which decisions have leaders made? Which decisions remain open? What are teams still testing? Who owns the next decision? When will people hear more?

“We do not know yet” can be a credible answer. “We will tell you when we know” can be a credible commitment. Silence dressed up as confidence is not.

• The Critical Node

Your managers are the real channel

The town hall is usually built around the person furthest from the operational consequences of the change. That is not a criticism of senior leaders; their role is to set direction, explain the strategic case, make choices, and visibly take responsibility.

But employees do not take their most pressing questions to the CEO. They take them to their manager.

Or they do not ask at all, because they have learned that the manager has no more information than they do.

This is one of the enduring absurdities of corporate change: the people expected to translate the change are often briefed late, given generic talking points, and then judged for not being sufficiently enthusiastic. They are asked to carry the emotional and practical weight of a decision they may not have shaped, while continuing to deliver their existing workload.

They become, in effect, an underfunded help desk for organisational uncertainty.

Research from Prosci consistently identifies people-manager engagement as a leading contributor to change-management success. Its research also finds that employees generally prefer to hear personal messages about the impact of change from their immediate manager. Yet a 2025 update reported that 63% of respondents believed their organisations did not adequately prepare managers with the skills, training and tools needed to lead through change.

A manager cannot responsibly answer “What does this mean for us?” if she has only received a one-page briefing and a list of approved phrases. She needs context and real agency.

Above all, she needs permission to say more than “I understand your concerns.”

The manager’s job during change is not simply to repeat the corporate story in a smaller room. It is to interpret, listen, coach, identify resistance, surface obstacles and help the team work through what comes next. Communication is part of that job, but it is not the whole of it.

If managers are treated as a distribution channel, the organisation gets distribution. If they are equipped as sense-makers and problem-solvers, it has a chance of getting change.

• Operational Realities

The missing middle: where change becomes real

There is a persistent fantasy in transformation work that clarity travels intact through an organisation. Senior leaders agree a vision. It is translated into programme plans. Managers explain it to teams. Teams adjust. Results follow.

Reality is messier.

Each layer receives the change through a different set of pressures. A senior executive may see strategic necessity. A director may see a budget problem. A manager may see a staffing gap. A frontline employee may see another initiative arriving before the last one has been explained.

No amount of polished language removes these differences. A good communication strategy works with them.

That means designing for what might be called the middle: the point where a corporate ambition encounters the particular realities of a function, region, shift, profession or team. This is where people ask questions that sound resistant but are often operationally intelligent:

These are not distractions from the change strategy. They are the change strategy, becoming specific.

McKinsey’s survey research has repeatedly made a similar distinction. Senior sponsorship matters, but the stronger differentiator in successful transformations is the involvement of frontline employees and line managers, alongside consistent communication, clear roles and a practical link between transformation goals and daily work.

The exact percentages are less important than the underlying lesson: people cannot be treated as the final recipients of a change designed elsewhere. They have to be part of the machinery that makes it workable.

A useful test is painfully simple. After the town hall, can a team hold a 30-minute conversation and leave with a clearer view of what it will do differently next week?

If not, communication has not yet reached the level where behaviour changes.

• Framework System

What a real change communication system looks like

•  Success Criteria

Stop measuring the wrong thing

Internal communication is still too often assessed by the metrics easiest to collect: attendance, open rates, page views, video completions, town-hall questions submitted.

These are not worthless. They can tell you whether people had an opportunity to encounter a message. They cannot tell you whether the organisation has created understanding, confidence, ownership or changed behaviour.

A packed town hall can coexist with widespread confusion. An intranet article can have perfect readership among people least affected by the change. A silent Q&A can indicate trust, boredom, fear, disbelief or simply the fact that employees have already decided their local manager is a more useful source of information.

Measure closer to the work.

Ask managers what questions they cannot answer. Ask teams which routines are changing and which are not. Track the obstacles that recur across functions. Look for whether people can explain the purpose of the change in their own words, not whether they can reproduce a slogan. Examine whether new processes are being used, where workarounds are emerging, and whether the promised benefits are visible to the people doing the work.

The question is not, “Did we communicate?”

It is, “What became easier to understand, decide or do because we communicated?”

That is a harder standard. It is also a more honest one.

•  Strategic Re-alignment

The better use of a town hall

None of this requires abolishing town halls. It requires putting them in their proper place.

Use the town hall to begin a conversation, not finish one. Use it to state the case for change clearly, name what is known and unknown, make leaders accountable, and commit to a rhythm of further dialogue. Let it signal that the organisation is prepared to listen as well as speak.

Then do the work that follows.

Brief managers before the event. Give teams time to discuss the implications afterwards. Publish answers to the questions that emerge, including the difficult ones. Show what feedback has changed. Keep communicating when there is no new slogan to unveil. Make progress visible in ordinary work, not only in executive presentations.

Most importantly, resist the temptation to confuse applause, attendance or polished slides with adoption.

A town hall can announce a transformation. It cannot carry one.

Change is carried in the less glamorous places: in a manager’s honest answer to an uncomfortable question; in a redesigned process that removes friction rather than adding it; in the moment a frontline employee sees that a problem she raised has been fixed; in the repeated, mundane proof that the organisation means what it says.

That is not a communications afterthought.

It is the strategy.

---