Six Tips to Create an Executive Communications Plan

Does this scenario sound familiar? You recently shared the results of your employee engagement survey, and it's clear your employees don't feel connected to the leadership team. They want more transparency on the state of the business. And they don't see leaders walking the talk when it comes to the vision and values of the organization.

The response from the executive team is, "We need more and better internal communication!" And then they look to you.

If you find that leaders are looking to the communications team more today than ever before, you're not alone. A 2026 Ragan/PoliteMail survey found that only 22% of communicators aren't using AI in their work now, and the role itself has expanded well beyond drafting emails and newsletters. You're expected to be a strategist, a coach, and increasingly, a trust-builder.

Why executive communication matters right now

Here's the uncomfortable reality of 2026: employees have lost faith in leadership, and the data backs it up. Glassdoor mentions of "misaligned" are up 149%, "distrust" up 26%, and "disconnect" up 24%. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, which surveyed nearly 34,000 people across 28 countries, found that 78% of employees trust their employer as an institution, but only 44% believe their CEO is doing a good job of bridging internal trust divides. That's a 29-point credibility gap between the organization and the person supposedly leading it.

Meanwhile, poor communication is costing companies between $9,284 and $30,000 per employee per year, according to Pumble's 2026 workplace communication research. And Grammarly's latest data suggests professionals waste roughly 13 hours per week on ineffective communication.

The stakes are real. 79% of employees say the quality of communication from leadership directly affects how well they understand organizational goals, which in turn impacts their productivity, motivation, and job satisfaction.

So yes, executive communication isn't a nice-to-have anymore. It's the difference between a workforce that trusts you and one that's quietly updating their LinkedIn.

What is an executive communications plan?

Let's be specific. Executive communication is all communication coming from a member of the senior leadership team. Town halls, coffee chats, emails, employee app posts, intranet messages, video updates, Slack announcements. If it has a leader's name on it, it counts.

An executive communications plan is the strategic approach to all of that. It answers questions like: Who says what? Through which channels? How often? And what are we trying to accomplish? (Retention? Engagement? Alignment with a major company shift?)

Without a plan, you get sporadic CEO emails that nobody reads, town halls that feel like lectures, and a growing sense among employees that leadership exists in a separate universe.

What's changed in 2026

A few things have shifted since you last revisited your executive comms strategy. Some are obvious, some are sneaky.

The middle-management communication layer is breaking down. This one's big and often overlooked. Internal comms has always relied on a quiet subsidy: managers willing to take leadership messaging and translate it for their teams. They'd add context, adjust for their function, and use their own credibility to sell decisions they didn't make. In 2026, that subsidy is running out. Managers are absorbing eliminated roles, dealing with increased workloads, and being asked to sell RTO mandates and AI implementations they didn't create. According to Poppulo's 2026 internal communication analysis, many have stopped translating messages altogether. They're just trying to survive.

AI is everywhere in comms, but employees can tell. 78% of communicators now use AI for drafting or editing content, per the Ragan/PoliteMail survey. Another 47% use it for meeting transcription, and 25% for sentiment analysis. But here's the catch: employees are getting savvy about AI-generated messages. Content that reads like it was assembled by a language model, generic, overly polished, full of "delve" and "foster" and "leverage," gets ignored. The organizations seeing real engagement in 2026 are the ones producing humanized, personal content, even if AI helped draft it.

Video has won. Short video updates, visual summaries, and live Q&A sessions are replacing long emails as the preferred format. Employees are far more likely to remember a 90-second video from the CEO than a 700-word email. LinkedIn video content alone generates 5x more engagement than text posts. If your leaders aren't comfortable on camera, that's a coaching problem worth solving.

The trust gap between leaders and employees is widening. 80% of leaders believe their communications are clear and engaging. Only 50% of employees agree, according to HR Executive research. That's not a small discrepancy. It means half your workforce thinks leadership communication isn't landing, and leadership has no idea.

Personalization is no longer a marketing-only concept. Employees now expect communications that are relevant to their role, location, and work context. Blasting the same message to engineers in Bangalore and retail staff in Birmingham isn't going to cut it. AI tools can help with segmentation and personalization at scale, but the strategy has to come first.

Real examples of executive communication that works

Town halls + micro-towns. The company-wide town hall still has a place, but the smart move is pairing it with smaller follow-up sessions. A 500-person all-hands gives the CEO stage time. A 15-person "micro-town" the next day lets a VP contextualize the message for a specific team and take real questions. The combination of broad reach and specific follow-up is what builds trust.

Executive video summaries. HR and leadership teams are combining short memos with 60-to-90 second video clips. These work especially well for global, distributed teams where time zone differences make live events impossible. Mobile-friendly, low production value, and personal beats polished and impersonal every time.

Coffee chats and informal check-ins. Casual, scheduled drop-ins, whether virtual or in-person, do more for leadership credibility than any polished email. When a CTO shows up to a team standup or a CHRO grabs coffee with a new hire cohort, it breaks down the idea that leadership exists in a separate reality.

Reverse town halls. Instead of executives presenting and then fielding a few polite questions, flip it. Collect anonymous questions beforehand. Have executives respond to the real concerns, not the softball questions someone planted. This format works especially well in organizations where trust is already low.

6 tips for building your executive communications plan

1. Listen to your employees first, then tell leaders what they want

Communications professionals have a direct line to employees. Use that access. Talk to them about what they actually want to hear from leadership, not what leadership assumes they want.

You can do this formally with surveys and focus groups, or informally in pre-shift meetings or conversations with frontline managers. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 82% of employees want their employer to promote a shared identity and culture, and 74% want to be brought together with people different from them. Employees aren't asking for corporate platitudes. They want leaders to be specific about what's happening, why it matters, and how it affects them personally.

Use what you learn to coach leadership on message tailoring. A CEO update about company strategy lands differently with the engineering team than with the customer support team. Same information, different framing.

2. Create employee personas

This is standard practice in marketing and PR but still rare in internal comms. Build out personas for your key employee segments. What do they value? How do they consume information? What channels do they actually use?

Go beyond demographics. Build a stakeholder matrix that maps job roles, communication preferences, and expectations. For example:

StakeholderPreferred channelsKey concernsCommunication frequencyFrontline staffMobile app, team huddlesSchedules, safety, recognitionDaily/weeklyMid-level managersEmail, Slack, 1:1sTeam performance, career growthWeeklyRemote knowledge workersVideo, email, intranetStrategy, flexibility, developmentWeekly/biweeklyExecutivesExecutive briefings, dashboardsBusiness outcomes, riskAs needed

When you know who your employees are, you stop guessing about what channels and messages will land.

3. Evaluate your communication channels

Now that you know who your employees are and what they want, evaluate whether your existing channels can actually deliver. This is where a lot of plans fall apart. You might know that video works best, but if your frontline employees don't have access to a platform that supports video, you've got a gap.

52% of employees still prefer in-person meetings for critical updates, according to HR Executive research. At the same time, mobile-first communication has become non-negotiable for reaching deskless and frontline workers. If your people can't access leadership messages on their phones, you're missing a huge chunk of your workforce.

The goal isn't to add more channels. (76% of professionals already communicate across more channels than the previous year, and 28% of communicators say reducing information overload is a top 2026 priority.) The goal is to ensure the right messages reach the right people through channels they actually use.

4. Be intentional about who says what

The CEO shouldn't be the only one talking. Your plan should specify what types of messages come from which leaders. Strategic vision? That's the CEO. Benefits changes? That's the CHRO. Product direction? That's the CTO.

Set a consistent cadence. Monthly executive updates, weekly team-level check-ins, and informal touch points in between. The 2026 Edelman data is clear: 73% of people say CEOs are obligated to lead trust-building efforts. But the data is equally clear that direct supervisors and co-workers are often more trusted than the CEO. So use the full leadership team, not just the corner office.

5. Measure what matters

If your communication channels allow you to track engagement, analyze the data. Open rates, read rates, video completion rates, click-throughs. These are table stakes.

But don't stop at quantitative metrics. Run pulse surveys to understand whether employees noticed the change in executive communication and whether it's making a difference. Only 37% of communicators expressed high confidence in their ability to use analytics to improve communications, per the 2026 PoliteMail survey. Of those confident communicators, 80% use pulse surveys to produce an eNPS score. Of those with low confidence, 60% relied only on annual engagement surveys.

Here's a practical measurement framework:

• Open/read/view rates on emails and videos
• Click or action rates on embedded links
• Pulse survey feedback on clarity, relevance, and trust
• Manager and frontline feedback (are employees acting on messages faster?)
• Trends over time, month to month
• Correlation with business outcomes where possible: voluntary attrition, productivity, engagement scores

Build a simple communications dashboard and share it with leadership regularly. When you can show that a CEO video had a 72% completion rate and a follow-up pulse survey showed a 15-point trust increase, you stop being an order-taker and start being a strategic advisor.

6. Show employees that leaders are listening

This is where most plans fail. You can nail the messaging, the channels, and the cadence, but if employees don't see evidence that their feedback changed anything, trust erodes.

The 2026 Edelman data is striking: 42% of employees would put in less effort at work if their leader had different political beliefs from them, and 34% would rather switch departments than report to a manager with different views. Trust is fragile right now. The only way to strengthen it is to make listening visible.

Have leaders respond directly to employee feedback. Share what changed because employees spoke up. If nothing changed, explain why. Silence after a survey is worse than a bad result.

Where to go from here

If your employees are asking for more transparency and visibility from leadership, that's not a failure. It's useful information.

The workforce in 2026 expects authenticity, specificity, and consistency from leadership. Whether it's a video message from the CEO or a quick mobile app update, both the content and the delivery matter. Global engagement remains stubbornly low, with only 23% of employees globally classified as engaged according to Gallup's latest data. But organizations with strong internal communication practices see 47% higher engagement numbers.

The gap between what leaders think they're communicating and what employees actually receive is the single biggest opportunity in internal comms right now. Close it, and you don't just improve engagement scores. You build a workforce that actually trusts the people running the company.

FAQ

What's the difference between executive communication and internal communications?

‍Executive communication refers specifically to messages from leaders (CEO, C-suite) to employees or stakeholders. Internal communications is the broader umbrella covering all organizational communication, including team updates, HR messages, and system notifications. Both need to be aligned, but executive comms carries the weight of leadership credibility.

How often should leaders communicate with employees?

‍A regular rhythm matters more than a specific frequency. Monthly executive updates combined with weekly check-ins or quick messages from direct leaders is a common pattern. The worst thing a leader can do is go silent for weeks. Gaps create uncertainty, and uncertainty breeds distrust.

How do I avoid communication fatigue?

‍Limit broadcast volume. Consolidate messages. Make sure every communication adds clear value. Use segmentation so people only receive what's relevant to them. And vary the format. A mix of video, text, and visual summaries breaks monotony and improves retention.

How do I scale executive communications for large or global teams?

‍Use scalable formats like pre-recorded video and intranet posts. Localize messaging for different regions and teams. Empower managers to cascade messages with their own context added. Use your engagement data to identify which regions or teams are engaging less, and adjust.

How do you coach executives to communicate effectively?

‍Provide message templates and scripting support. Give feedback on tone and clarity after each communication. Share post-delivery metrics so they can see what landed and what didn't. Encourage personal stories, candor about uncertainty, and plain language. Most executives don't need to be polished speakers. They need to be real ones.

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