TL;DR
Too many companies treat employees as people who are on a “need to know basis,” which translates into them being the last people who know. If your team can’t clearly explain what’s going on, no media hit, press release, ad campaign, or social campaign is going to save your reputations. Employees are, by far, the most important public in Public Relations and it’s time to start treating them that way.
We recently walked away from an RFP. That doesn’t happen often, and it wasn’t a decision I made lightly. The company had a genuinely interesting story to tell and real potential for good media coverage. But when we asked how the internal communications piece would be handled — how employees would be briefed before anything went external — the answer was essentially: “They’ll figure it out once it’s out there.”
We withdrew because we’ve seen how that movie ends, and the potential client wasn’t willing to change the script.
It ends with employees getting questions from clients, partners, and their own networks — and having no idea what to say. It ends with a hundred different answers floating around for every question, none of them quite right, none of them on message. It ends with a company spending serious money and/or resources on external communications while the people inside the building quietly undermine it just by not knowing what’s going on.
And none of that is the employees’ fault.
Who Is the Public in Public Relations?
When most people hear “public relations,” they think media. Press releases. Earned coverage. Trade publications and podcast placements and LinkedIn visibility. And yes — all of that is part of it. But the word “public” in public relations is doing a lot more work than most people give it credit for.
The public isn’t just the industry. It’s not just customers or stakeholders or journalists. It’s everyone who touches your business and matters to its success. And when you map that out honestly, employees aren’t at the end of the list. They’re at the top.
Your employees are your first public. Then come your stakeholders and partners. Then your customers. Then the industry at large. Then the wider world.
The story has to blossom from the inside out — not launch externally and then trickle back in. When you get that order backwards, you’re not just being inefficient. You’re actively wasting money and eroding credibility at the same time.
What Actually Happens When Employees Are Last to Know
Here’s the scenario that plays out over and over. A company does everything right on the external side. The press release is polished. The media list is targeted. The social assets look great. The story lands in a few key outlets. Momentum builds.
And then someone asks an employee about it.
Maybe it’s a client who saw the announcement and wants to know what it means for their account. Maybe it’s a partner checking in or perhaps it’s someone’s mother calling because she saw something in the news. And the employee — who works at this company, who wears the logo, who represents this brand in the world every single day — has to say: “I actually just heard about that too.”
That moment is not a communications failure. It’s a leadership failure. And it does real, lasting damage.
When employees don’t have the story, they improvise and don’t stay silent. They give their best interpretation, with whatever confidence level they happen to feel that day. Multiply that across a company of a hundred people, or a thousand, and you have a hundred or a thousand slightly different versions of your message out in the world simultaneously. All of them carry your brand. None of them are quite right.
If your team can’t deliver the message, you haven’t won the message.
You’ve lost control of the story the minute someone asks an employee what’s going on and they don’t have an answer.
Why This Keeps Happening
This isn’t a new problem, and it’s not unique to any one industry. So why does it persist? A few reasons come up again and again.
The fear of leaks
Companies — especially publicly traded ones, or those in competitive markets — worry that telling employees means telling everyone. What if it gets out before we’re ready? Here’s the reality: it’s probably going to get out anyway. The question isn’t whether information leaks. The question is whether it leaks clearly or messily. A well-briefed employee who accidentally mentions something is a very different situation from an uninformed employee who fills in the blanks with guesswork.
The assumption that employees will figure it out
“They know us. They’re part of this. They’ll connect the dots.” No, they won’t. Not reliably. Not consistently. You have people who’ve been with the company for fifteen years and people who started last month. You have people in finance and people in operations and people in sales. They all have different contexts, different levels of background, different relationships to the news you’re sharing. And out in the world, they’re all going to get asked the same questions regardless — because they’re all wearing your badge.
The belief that PR is only external
This is the big one. When PR gets scoped as a media strategy and nothing else, internal communications falls through the gap. But reputation isn’t built only by journalists and industry analysts. It’s built by every interaction, every relationship, every conversation someone has with anyone connected to your business. The internal relationships are the foundation. Everything else is built on top of them.
How to Actually Do This Right
The fix isn’t complicated. It just requires intention and the discipline to do it before the external launch, not after.
Before anything goes public, ask yourself: have we explained this internally in a way that people can repeat with confidence? Not just shared, explained – and thoroughly. Not a 55-page deck dropped into a shared folder. Not a press release forwarded with a “FYI” in the subject line. Actually explained, in plain language, with the tools people need to carry it.
What does that look like in practice?
A simple one-pager that answers the basics: here’s what we’re doing, here’s why it matters, here’s what you should say if someone asks, here’s where to go for more information. A short FAQ covering the five questions most likely to come up. Clear examples people can use to explain the product, the change, or the direction to someone who knows nothing about it.
Then test it. Ask five people the next day what they heard. If you get five different answers, you’re not done. Go back and simplify. One and done is never done, and repetition isn’t redundant: it’s reinforcement. Keep going until the message is landing consistently.
Your employees want to represent the company well. Most people don’t take a job hoping to be a bad ambassador for their employer. They want to carry the water. They want to be part of the story. Give them the tools to do it, and they will.
Let them be amplifiers. Let them be the first wave of your story reaching the world — clearly, confidently, and consistently. Because when that happens, your message spreads faster, stays truer, and lands with more credibility than any press release ever could.
Earned media doesn’t start when the story hits. It starts when your team can say it clearly, confidently, and consistently.
So before the next launch, the next announcement, the next big pivot — stop. Ask who inside the building knows. Ask whether they can explain it. Ask whether they have what they need to answer a question at dinner tonight if someone brings it up.
If the answer is no, that’s where to start. Not with the press release. Not with the media list. With your people.
They’re not the last public, they’re the first – so treat them that way.
Want more on communication strategy that starts from the inside out? Listen to the Everything Speaks podcast with Lee Caraher.