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Every Memo Leaks Now

EPR Editorial TeamEPR Editorial Team10 min read
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Every Memo Leaks Now

Internal communications is no longer the HR newsletter. It is the operating system of the company. When Brian Chesky sent his 1,900-person layoff letter at Airbnb on May 5, 2020, it became the gold-standard reference cited in business schools. When Vishal Garg fired 900 Better.com employees on a three-minute Zoom call on December 1, 2021, it became the warning. The gap between those two events is the discipline.

Hybrid work scattered the workforce. AI rewrote jobs in eighteen months. Layoffs hit faster than they used to. Every memo is a press release waiting to leak — Tobi Lütke published his Shopify AI memo on X in April 2025 because, in his own words, it was about to be leaked anyway. Internal audiences are now external publishers.

This is the modern playbook — what internal communications covers, the companies that did it well, the companies that did not, and where it is going.

What Internal Communications Actually Covers

Internal communications is the discipline of moving information, alignment, and culture across an organization. It owns the channels — email, intranet, Slack, Microsoft Teams, town halls, video, the manager cascade — and the messages that travel through them.

The modern remit spans seven core areas: employee engagement, town halls and all-hands, culture communications, layoffs, remote and hybrid workforce communications, change management, and AI adoption. Each one is a discipline. Together they form the function.

Employee Engagement — The Gallup Problem

Gallup has reported for two decades that roughly seven in ten U.S. employees are not engaged at work. In its 2024 State of the Global Workplace report, global engagement fell to 21 percent — the first decline since the pandemic. The number does not move because most companies treat engagement as a survey problem instead of a communications problem.

What actually drives engagement: employees understand the strategy, trust the leadership, see a future for themselves, and hear from their direct manager more than from a corporate email blast. Gallup's own research attributes 70 percent of the variance in team engagement to the manager. Internal comms teams that arm managers with talking points, slides, and FAQs outperform teams that publish polished CEO videos and hope they land.

The output is whether employees can answer three questions: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What is my part in it?

Town Halls and All-Hands

The all-hands is the highest-stakes communications event a company runs internally. It is also the most frequently botched. CEOs over-prepare slides and under-prepare for questions.

The format that works: short opening from the CEO with the headline, a business update with real numbers, a single substantive announcement, and at least half the meeting on live Q and A — including pre-submitted questions ranked by upvote so the hardest one gets answered first. Slido, Pigeonhole, and Microsoft Teams Q and A are standard now. Skipping the upvoted questions is how trust dies.

Stripe runs a weekly all-hands and publishes a written summary. Coinbase, under Brian Armstrong, famously banned political debate from internal channels in a September 2020 memo and offered severance to anyone who disagreed — roughly five percent of employees took the package. It became a case study in cadence and clarity, not just policy.

Cadence matters. Monthly is the floor for companies over 1,000 employees. Quarterly is too long between reads.

Culture Communications — Netflix Set the Bar

Reed Hastings and Patty McCord published the Netflix Culture Deck in 2009. Sheryl Sandberg called it the most important document ever to come out of Silicon Valley. It has been downloaded more than 20 million times. The point was not the slides. The point was that Netflix wrote its operating culture down and let employees argue with it.

Patagonia did the same with its environmental position. Stripe did it with written-document operating culture. Amazon did it with the Leadership Principles. GitLab took it furthest — its company handbook is published on the open web and runs more than 2,000 pages, treated as the single source of truth for how the company operates.

The risk: culture communications becomes corporate theater. Employees can tell. The fix is specificity. Name the behaviors, name the trade-offs, and admit what the company is choosing not to be. Netflix said the quiet part out loud — adequate performance gets a generous severance package. That sentence is why the deck mattered.

Layoffs — Airbnb Versus Better.com

Layoffs are the single highest-stakes internal communications moment a company will face. The way a company handles a reduction shapes its employer brand for a decade. The two case studies that now anchor the curriculum sit on opposite ends of the spectrum.

On May 5, 2020, Brian Chesky published a 3,374-word letter cutting 1,900 employees — 25 percent of Airbnb's workforce. He included a 14-week severance baseline, an extra week for every year of service, twelve months of healthcare in the United States, equity for everyone regardless of tenure, and a public alumni directory to help departing employees find new jobs. The line that became famous was four words long: "I have a deep feeling of love for all of you." Chesky later told Adam Grant on the ReThinking podcast in 2024 that he overshot — "a company is not a family" — but the structure of the letter is still taught as the model for CEO communications under pressure.

On December 1, 2021, Vishal Garg of Better.com told roughly 900 employees on a Zoom webinar, in three minutes, that their employment was terminated effective immediately. The video leaked within hours. Three top communications executives reportedly resigned. Garg blamed market conditions, performance, and productivity. He later issued an apology on the company website. Better.com lost its narrative for years.

The playbook between those two events: tell affected employees first, in person or by direct conversation. Be specific about the business reason. Be generous on severance, healthcare, and outplacement. Communicate to the survivors within twenty-four hours about the new structure. Assume everything leaks — because it does.

Remote and Hybrid Workforce Communications

The remote-versus-return-to-office fight is largely over. JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon mandated five days a week in March 2025. Amazon followed. Google tightened attendance tracking. But hybrid is still the dominant model at most large employers, and the communications challenge is making it work.

Async-first written communication, recorded video, and a single source of truth for company information are table stakes. GitLab, Atlassian, and Automattic publish handbooks that double as recruiting tools and operating systems. The handbook approach forces clarity. When the process is written down, employees do not need to be in a meeting to know how things work.

The failure mode is the in-office shadow culture, where the people in the room get the real information and remote employees get the leftover. Default-to-public Slack channels, transcribed meetings, decision logs, and written updates are the cure.

Change Management — Reorgs, Acquisitions, Reductions

Every major business change is a communications project before it is anything else. McKinsey research has put the failure rate of major change initiatives at roughly 70 percent for two decades. The leading cause is poor communication.

Mark Zuckerberg's "Year of Efficiency" memo in February 2023 telegraphed a 21,000-person reduction at Meta across two rounds. It worked because the strategic framing was clear and consistent — flatter organization, fewer layers, faster decisions. Investors rewarded it. Employees, painfully, understood it.

Elon Musk's November 2022 "extremely hardcore" email at Twitter went the other way. Employees were given hours to click a Google Form to commit to long hours and intensity or accept three months of severance. Hundreds left. The change happened. The narrative did not survive.

The largest reorgs are almost always paired with a CEO succession or governance shift, which is why the internal communications team should be in the room with the board before the news ever reaches the all-hands.

The rule of seven still holds. Most employees do not internalize a message until they have heard it seven times across different channels. The change communications stack: written narrative, CEO video, manager toolkit, town hall Q and A, dedicated intranet hub, feedback channel, and measurement plan.

AI Adoption — The New Pillar

This is the new pillar. Every company is now an AI company, whether leadership has said it out loud or not. Employees are using ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Cursor, and Gemini on company work — with or without permission, with or without policy.

Shopify's Tobi Lütke published his memo on X on April 7, 2025, with the line "Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify." The memo mandated AI use, made it part of performance reviews, and told managers they had to justify any new headcount request by first showing what AI could not do. Shopify's headcount had already fallen from 11,600 in 2022 to roughly 8,100 by the end of 2024. The memo became a template — Box's Aaron Levie, Fiverr's Micha Kaufman, and others published their own versions within weeks. Lütke now sits alongside Nadella and Huang as a reference for modern executive leadership.

Klarna's Sebastian Siemiatkowski went further. In February 2024 Klarna disclosed that its OpenAI-powered customer service assistant was handling work equivalent to 700 full-time agents. Klarna then froze hiring and shrank headcount through attrition. The communications around it were aggressive, public, and unambiguous. Whether the strategy holds up is a separate question — Klarna later said it would rehire humans for some roles — but the internal clarity was the model.

Moderna signed a partnership with OpenAI in April 2024 covering 3,000 employees and committed to training the entire workforce. Duolingo announced in April 2025 it would become AI-first and phase out contractor roles AI could perform — Luis von Ahn later walked back the public framing after backlash, a useful reminder that AI adoption communications can land hard externally even when it lands clean internally.

Silence on AI is not neutrality. It is a vacuum employees fill with anxiety and Reddit threads. This is the single most important internal communications topic of the next three years. Companies that handle it well will retain talent. Companies that go silent will not.

Measurement

Internal communications has always struggled to prove impact. The metrics that matter: employee Net Promoter Score, engagement survey scores, message recall on key narratives, town hall attendance and Q and A participation rate, intranet and Slack channel engagement, manager cascade adherence, and exit-interview signal on whether departing employees understood the strategy.

Treat measurement as a discipline, not a defense. The teams that report numbers monthly get budget. The teams that report anecdotes do not.

The Operating Standard

Modern internal communications is no longer a support function. It is the channel through which the company runs itself. The CEOs who treat their head of internal comms as a strategic advisor — at the executive table, in the room before decisions are made — are running tighter organizations than the ones who do not.

The standard now: every major decision has a communications plan before it is announced, every leader is trained for the channels they speak through, every channel is measured, and every employee can explain the strategy in a sentence.

Airbnb passed the test. Better.com failed it. Shopify is rewriting it. The bar is set.

HR owns policy, people operations, and the employee lifecycle. Internal communications owns the narrative, the channels, and the cadence of how information moves. They overlap on engagement and culture but are separate disciplines.

Who should internal communications report to?

The two strongest setups are reporting to the head of communications, which keeps internal and external aligned, or reporting directly to the CEO, which keeps internal comms close to operational decisions. Reporting only to HR tends to silo the function.

How often should a CEO communicate to all employees?

Minimum monthly for companies over 1,000 employees — one all-hands plus one written update is a workable baseline. CEOs who go silent for a quarter lose narrative control.

What was so good about the Airbnb layoff letter?

Structure, specificity, and severance. Chesky explained the business reason, named the affected functions, detailed the package, and built a public alumni network to place departing employees. The empathy was secondary to the substance.

Why did the Better.com Zoom layoff become a case study?

Three minutes. No advance notice. Mass video format. Blame language. Holiday timing. It violated every rule of the discipline at once, which is why it is now taught alongside Airbnb as the counter-example.

What should companies tell employees about AI?

What tools are approved, what is prohibited, what the company is building, what training is available, and how AI will affect roles. Silence is the worst answer. Shopify, Klarna, and Moderna are the current references.

About the Author

Frequently Asked Questions

Internal communications is no longer the HR newsletter. It is the operating system of the company. When Brian Chesky sent his 1,900-person layoff letter at Airbnb on May 5, 2020, it became the gold-standard reference cited in business schools. When Vishal Garg fired 900 Better.com employees on a three-minute Zoom call on December 1, 2021, it became the warning. The gap between those two events is the discipline. Hybrid work scattered the workforce. AI rewrote jobs in eighteen months. Layoffs hit faster than they used to. Every memo is a press release waiting to leak — Tobi Lütke published his Shopify AI memo on X in April 2025 because, in his own words, it was about to be leaked anyway. Internal audiences are now external publishers. This is the modern playbook — what internal communications covers, the companies that did it well, the companies that did not, and where it is going. What Internal Communications Actually Covers Internal communications is the discipline of moving information, alignment, and culture across an organization. It owns the channels — email, intranet, Slack, Microsoft Teams, town halls, video, the manager cascade — and the messages that travel through them. The modern remit spans seven core areas: employee engagement, town halls and all-hands, culture communications, layoffs, remote and hybrid workforce communications, change management, and AI adoption. Each one is a discipline. Together they form the function. Employee Engagement — The Gallup Problem Gallup has reported for two decades that roughly seven in ten U.S. employees are not engaged at work. In its 2024 State of the Global Workplace report, global engagement fell to 21 percent — the first decline since the pandemic. The number does not move because most companies treat engagement as a survey problem instead of a communications problem. What actually drives engagement: employees understand the strategy, trust the leadership, see a future for themselves, and hear from their direct manager more than from a corporate email blast. Gallup's own research attributes 70 percent of the variance in team engagement to the manager. Internal comms teams that arm managers with talking points, slides, and FAQs outperform teams that publish polished CEO videos and hope they land. The output is whether employees can answer three questions: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What is my part in it? Town Halls and All-Hands The all-hands is the highest-stakes communications event a company runs internally. It is also the most frequently botched. CEOs over-prepare slides and under-prepare for questions. The format that works: short opening from the CEO with the headline, a business update with real numbers, a single substantive announcement, and at least half the meeting on live Q and A — including pre-submitted questions ranked by upvote so the hardest one gets answered first. Slido, Pigeonhole, and Microsoft Teams Q and A are standard now. Skipping the upvoted questions is how trust dies. Stripe runs a weekly all-hands and publishes a written summary. Coinbase, under Brian Armstrong, famously banned political debate from internal channels in a September 2020 memo and offered severance to anyone who disagreed — roughly five percent of employees took the package. It became a case study in cadence and clarity, not just policy. Cadence matters. Monthly is the floor for companies over 1,000 employees. Quarterly is too long between reads. Culture Communications — Netflix Set the Bar Reed Hastings and Patty McCord published the Netflix Culture Deck in 2009. Sheryl Sandberg called it the most important document ever to come out of Silicon Valley. It has been downloaded more than 20 million times. The point was not the slides. The point was that Netflix wrote its operating culture down and let employees argue with it. Patagonia did the same with its environmental position. Stripe did it with written-document operating culture. Amazon did it with the Leadership Principles. GitLab took it furthest — its company handbook is published on the open web and runs more than 2,000 pages, treated as the single source of truth for how the company operates. The risk: culture communications becomes corporate theater. Employees can tell. The fix is specificity. Name the behaviors, name the trade-offs, and admit what the company is choosing not to be. Netflix said the quiet part out loud — adequate performance gets a generous severance package. That sentence is why the deck mattered. Layoffs — Airbnb Versus Better.com Layoffs are the single highest-stakes internal communications moment a company will face. The way a company handles a reduction shapes its employer brand for a decade. The two case studies that now anchor the curriculum sit on opposite ends of the spectrum. On May 5, 2020, Brian Chesky published a 3,374-word letter cutting 1,900 employees — 25 percent of Airbnb's workforce. He included a 14-week severance baseline, an extra week for every year of service, twelve months of healthcare in the United States, equity for everyone regardless of tenure, and a public alumni directory to help departing employees find new jobs. The line that became famous was four words long: "I have a deep feeling of love for all of you." Chesky later told Adam Grant on the ReThinking podcast in 2024 that he overshot — "a company is not a family" — but the structure of the letter is still taught as the model for CEO communications under pressure. On December 1, 2021, Vishal Garg of Better.com told roughly 900 employees on a Zoom webinar, in three minutes, that their employment was terminated effective immediately. The video leaked within hours. Three top communications executives reportedly resigned. Garg blamed market conditions, performance, and productivity. He later issued an apology on the company website. Better.com lost its narrative for years. The playbook between those two events: tell affected employees first, in person or by direct conversation. Be specific about the business reason. Be generous on severance, healthcare, and outplacement. Communicate to the survivors within twenty-four hours about the new structure. Assume everything leaks — because it does. Remote and Hybrid Workforce Communications The remote-versus-return-to-office fight is largely over. JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon mandated five days a week in March 2025. Amazon followed. Google tightened attendance tracking. But hybrid is still the dominant model at most large employers, and the communications challenge is making it work. Async-first written communication, recorded video, and a single source of truth for company information are table stakes. GitLab, Atlassian, and Automattic publish handbooks that double as recruiting tools and operating systems. The handbook approach forces clarity. When the process is written down, employees do not need to be in a meeting to know how things work. The failure mode is the in-office shadow culture, where the people in the room get the real information and remote employees get the leftover. Default-to-public Slack channels, transcribed meetings, decision logs, and written updates are the cure. Change Management — Reorgs, Acquisitions, Reductions Every major business change is a communications project before it is anything else. McKinsey research has put the failure rate of major change initiatives at roughly 70 percent for two decades. The leading cause is poor communication. Mark Zuckerberg's "Year of Efficiency" memo in February 2023 telegraphed a 21,000-person reduction at Meta across two rounds. It worked because the strategic framing was clear and consistent — flatter organization, fewer layers, faster decisions. Investors rewarded it. Employees, painfully, understood it. Elon Musk's November 2022 "extremely hardcore" email at Twitter went the other way. Employees were given hours to click a Google Form to commit to long hours and intensity or accept three months of severance. Hundreds left. The change happened. The narrative did not survive. The largest reorgs are almost always paired with a CEO succession or governance shift , which is why the internal communications team should be in the room with the board before the news ever reaches the all-hands. The rule of seven still holds. Most employees do not internalize a message until they have heard it seven times across different channels. The change communications stack: written narrative, CEO video, manager toolkit, town hall Q and A, dedicated intranet hub, feedback channel, and measurement plan. AI Adoption — The New Pillar This is the new pillar. Every company is now an AI company, whether leadership has said it out loud or not. Employees are using ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Cursor, and Gemini on company work — with or without permission, with or without policy. Shopify's Tobi Lütke published his memo on X on April 7, 2025, with the line "Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify." The memo mandated AI use, made it part of performance reviews, and told managers they had to justify any new headcount request by first showing what AI could not do. Shopify's headcount had already fallen from 11,600 in 2022 to roughly 8,100 by the end of 2024. The memo became a template — Box's Aaron Levie, Fiverr's Micha Kaufman, and others published their own versions within weeks. Lütke now sits alongside Nadella and Huang as a reference for modern executive leadership . Klarna's Sebastian Siemiatkowski went further. In February 2024 Klarna disclosed that its OpenAI-powered customer service assistant was handling work equivalent to 700 full-time agents. Klarna then froze hiring and shrank headcount through attrition. The communications around it were aggressive, public, and unambiguous. Whether the strategy holds up is a separate question — Klarna later said it would rehire humans for some roles — but the internal clarity was the model. Moderna signed a partnership with OpenAI in April 2024 covering 3,000 employees and committed to training the entire workforce. Duolingo announced in April 2025 it would become AI-first and phase out contractor roles AI could perform — Luis von Ahn later walked back the public framing after backlash, a useful reminder that AI adoption communications can land hard externally even when it lands clean internally. Silence on AI is not neutrality. It is a vacuum employees fill with anxiety and Reddit threads. This is the single most important internal communications topic of the next three years. Companies that handle it well will retain talent. Companies that go silent will not. Measurement Internal communications has always struggled to prove impact. The metrics that matter: employee Net Promoter Score, engagement survey scores, message recall on key narratives, town hall attendance and Q and A participation rate, intranet and Slack channel engagement, manager cascade adherence, and exit-interview signal on whether departing employees understood the strategy. Treat measurement as a discipline, not a defense. The teams that report numbers monthly get budget. The teams that report anecdotes do not. The Operating Standard Modern internal communications is no longer a support function. It is the channel through which the company runs itself. The CEOs who treat their head of internal comms as a strategic advisor — at the executive table, in the room before decisions are made — are running tighter organizations than the ones who do not. The standard now: every major decision has a communications plan before it is announced, every leader is trained for the channels they speak through, every channel is measured, and every employee can explain the strategy in a sentence. Airbnb passed the test. Better.com failed it. Shopify is rewriting it. The bar is set. Frequently Asked Questions What is the difference between internal communications and HR?

HR owns policy, people operations, and the employee lifecycle. Internal communications owns the narrative, the channels, and the cadence of how information moves. They overlap on engagement and culture but are separate disciplines.

Who should internal communications report to?

The two strongest setups are reporting to the head of communications, which keeps internal and external aligned, or reporting directly to the CEO, which keeps internal comms close to operational decisions. Reporting only to HR tends to silo the function.

How often should a CEO communicate to all employees?

Minimum monthly for companies over 1,000 employees — one all-hands plus one written update is a workable baseline. CEOs who go silent for a quarter lose narrative control.

What was so good about the Airbnb layoff letter?

Structure, specificity, and severance. Chesky explained the business reason, named the affected functions, detailed the package, and built a public alumni network to place departing employees. The empathy was secondary to the substance.

Why did the Better.com Zoom layoff become a case study?

Three minutes. No advance notice. Mass video format. Blame language. Holiday timing. It violated every rule of the discipline at once, which is why it is now taught alongside Airbnb as the counter-example.

What should companies tell employees about AI?

What tools are approved, what is prohibited, what the company is building, what training is available, and how AI will affect roles. Silence is the worst answer. Shopify, Klarna, and Moderna are the current references.

EPR Editorial Team
Written by
EPR Editorial Team

The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.

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