When your organization is navigating change, every message matters. The real risk isn’t how it’s being said—it’s when the context doesn’t align.
When messages don’t match up, employees hear one thing from leadership, another from HR, and something completely different on the grapevine. That’s not a harmless mix-up; it’s a fast track to confusion, mistrust, and resistance.
Disjointed communication is more than a few missed emails or messy Teams threads. It’s what happens when communication is scattered, uncoordinated, and reactive instead of strategic and intentional. When no one owns the narrative, clarity falls through the cracks.
Clear communication isn’t a nicety—it’s a necessity.
It’s the difference between change that sticks or one that crashes. If you’re not being intentional about how you communicate during change, you’re sabotaging the plan and setting the efforts up to unravel.
The Harsh Realities of Disjointed Communication
1. Erosion of Trust & Credibility
In a world where skepticism is sky-high, every word you communicate during change either builds trust or breaks it. When employees hear mixed messages—or worse, feel like leadership is sugarcoating the truth—trust doesn’t just slip. It disappears.
According to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2025, employer trust has sunk to its lowest point in eight years. Belief in CEOs? Cut in half since last year. Even more alarming: 68% of people now believe business leaders intentionally mislead them with false information or overblown claims.
The statistics reveal that 2024 marks the steepest decline in employer trust since 2018
In a change environment, the moment transparency and alignment break down, ambiguity reigns. When people don’t know what’s happening or who to trust, morale plummets and resistance skyrockets. In the end, your change efforts stall before they even get going.
Tigerhall’s all-in-one change activation platform transforms fragmented messaging into actionable communication so you can cut through the noise and deliver change updates with clarity, consistency, and authenticity. No more cold, corporate email blasts, digging through cluttered SharePoint folders, or scrolling endless PDFs that no one reads. Instead, deliver actionable change communication the way modern employees want to consume it—bite-sized, engaging, and human. Think podcasts, videos, power reads, and more.
This way, your message doesn’t just land; it sticks.
2. Decreased Engagement & Buy-In
In any change initiative, you need people to listen and, more importantly, to care. That won’t happen if your communication is disjointed or top-down. When employees feel left out of the conversation, disengagement creeps in fast.
The numbers don’t lie. Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace shows that highly engaged teams outperform others in productivity, profitability, and sales. But globally, less than a quarter of employees are engaged. The rest?
62% are disengaged, and 15% are actively checked out.
When employees don’t understand why change matters or how it affects them, they’re not leaning in—they’re mentally logging off. When engagement drops, collaboration stalls, innovation flatlines, and even your leaders risk falling out of sync.
Tigerhall helps you turn communication into connection. Keep employees engaged and heard with two-way conversations—with comments, mentions, likes, and reaction buttons that spark collaboration. Go further by inviting real feedback through interactive forms such as polls, rating sliders, and more. When employees feel involved, they stay invested throughout the change.
3. Increase of Errors & Misunderstanding
Change is already overwhelming—don’t make it worse with long-winded emails and irrelevant updates. Your people are juggling enough without having to sift through 20-page documents packed with corporate jargon that gives minimal insights. When that happens, more often than not, something gets missed.
The result? Misunderstandings multiply, errors pile up, and in some cases, the impact goes beyond lost productivity.
Errors don’t just impact quality or customer satisfaction, they could compromise reputations. For example, poor communication around new safety protocols or compliance changes can lead to life-threatening accidents. The fallout? A PR nightmare that damages brand reputation, draining resources on damage control.
Avoid the chaos before it starts. Tigerhall helps you deliver the right message to the right people—no-nonsense style. Segment your message, tailored to different roles, functions, regions, etc., to ensure every update is clear, relevant, and actionable—so nothing critical gets missed.
4. Delayed Decision Making
Change isn’t static. Information evolves, and so do the decisions tied to it. Employees rely on timely, clear updates to know what’s expected of them in their day-to-day. When that information is delayed or missing, they stall—and that hesitation costs.
Delayed decision-making creates a domino effect, disrupting productivity across multiple levels of the organization. Left unchecked, this leads to missed opportunities, whether it’s losing customers, delaying innovation, or falling behind competitors. For the change team, getting those updates out can be time-consuming, especially while juggling other business-critical priorities.
Tigerhall helps you communicate smarter, not harder. Spend less time crafting comms and more time driving change with Tigerhall’s AI-powered Creator Studio. Instantly repurpose strategy decks or annual reports into podcasts and videos—all ready to share in minutes. Plus, reach global teams faster and speed up alignment with instant translations covering 30+ languages.
5. Unaddressed Concerns, Inconsistent Execution
Disjointed communication shuts down the feedback loop. When employees feel like their concerns aren’t being heard—or worse, ignored—they stop speaking up. This leaves issues unaddressed, slowly festering into inconsistent execution, inefficiencies, conflicting practices, and unpredictable outcomes.
With Tigerhall’s analytics dashboard, you’ll never have to guess if your message is getting through. Monitor engagement in real time and adjust your communication strategy as needed. Tap into sentiment analysis to see how different audience segments are reacting through comments, reactions, and live stream chats so you can address concerns before they escalate.
6. Financial and Operational Impact
The final and perhaps most tangible cost of disjointed communication is the hit to your bottom line—and, warning, it can be staggering.
Gallup’s past research estimated the cost of disengagement in the U.S. alone at $450 billion to $550 billion annually. And in a world of rising inflation and tighter budgets, everyone knows that the figure will keep on climbing.
When communications are fragmented, operational inefficiencies due to process issues, repeated tasks, and delays all add up. Not to mention the cost of turnover. When employees feel disconnected and unsupported, they leave. As attrition rises, so do the costs of recruitment and training. More importantly, the loss of headcount will also impact revenue due to reduced outputs or missed deadlines.
Are You Playing with A Broken Telephone?
Disjointed communication during change is like a game of broken telephone—where a simple message emerges at the end as something entirely different.
What started as a clear directive becomes a jumbled mess, lost in misinterpretation amid messy email updates, mixed messages, and the constant “I thought you knew?” conversations. It’s frustrating, costly, and all too common. And if you're nodding along, you already understand why it’s critical to quickly turn the tide before it’s too late.
With Tigerhall, communicate where your people already are.
Skip the hassle of new platforms and bring Tigerhall straight into Microsoft Teams. No extra onboarding, no new tools to learn—just seamless integration that keeps employees engaged and aligned on change-related updates within the existing flow of their daily work.
Book a demo to see Tigerhall in action today.
