Internal Announcement Template for Change

Write down the facts people will ask about: what was decided, why, how many roles or teams it touches and where, and when each part takes effect. Use numbers, not adjectives. Then mark what is still open. People can wait for a detail if you give them a date for it, but a vague answer invites guessing.

For job cuts, settle each person's terms before anyone is told: final pay, severance, benefits and last day. A termination checklist walks through each exit, down to what the rest of the team is told. Then list the outside dates that fix your schedule, such as a press release, an investor call or a notice period the law requires.

Those notice periods can set your dates for you. In the US, the WARN Act covers employers with 100 or more employees. A plant closing or mass layoff affecting 50 or more people at one site needs at least 60 calendar days' written notice¹. In the UK, making 20 or more people redundant at one site within 90 days² means at least 30 days of consultation with employee representatives before anyone is dismissed.

Plan the order before you write a word. The aim is that each group hears the news from you, not from the group before it, so keep the steps close together.

1. 1

   Brief the managers

   Managers who will deliver news or take questions get a confidential briefing, the talking points and the FAQ, ideally the day before.

2. 2

   Tell the people affected

   Each person whose job, pay or team changes hears it privately from their manager, in person or on video, never by email alone.

3. 3

   Announce it to everyone

   The all-staff message goes out as the private conversations finish, with a live meeting where people can ask questions.

4. 4

   Go public last

   The press release, customer emails, social posts and any op-ed your CEO has planned wait until every office has heard.

Securities rules leave room for this order. Under SEC staff guidance, a US public company cutting jobs as part of an exit plan need not file its Form 8-K until the affected employees have been informed³.

A send time is one moment everywhere, but it arrives at a different hour in each office. Convert every step of the plan into local time before you commit to it.

Suppose the press release follows half an hour later. Sydney then wakes up to news that has been public for about six hours. With offices in Austin, Berlin, Bangalore and Sydney, no hour falls inside everyone's working day, so moving the all-hands won't fix it.

Instead, give that office its own live session in its working day, even if that comes before headquarters' announcement, or hold the public release until it has heard. Use the time differences for your actual date, since the US, Europe and Australia change their clocks on different weekends.

Open with the decision and when it takes effect, then give the reason in a sentence or two. Prosci, which sells change management training, notes that the first time people hear about a change, they think about how it affects them⁴ and can't take in much else. So answer that next: who is affected, how they will hear, and what is not changing.

Keep the email short and general, since nobody can ask it a follow-up question. Leave the details to managers, a posted FAQ and one named person who takes private questions. Match the tone to the news: job cuts announced in the upbeat voice of a product launch read as careless.

People rarely reply to an all-staff email with the question on their mind. They ask their manager, in a one-to-one or a team meeting. In July 2025, Firstup, which sells employee communication software, surveyed 1,000 US non-managers whose employers had made layoffs in the past year. Of those, 52% named their direct manager as their most trusted source for company updates, and 10% named senior leadership⁵.

So give managers talking points before the announcement: each question they are likely to hear, with an approved answer. Include what unaffected teams will ask, such as "Are we next?" or "Does this reach our office?" Mark the lines that must be said word for word, like severance terms, and let managers put the rest in their own words.

Post an FAQ with the announcement, written to be read without a manager in the room, broadest questions first. Ask managers to log every question they get and the answer they gave. When two managers report the same question with no approved answer, write one and add it to the talking points and the FAQ that day.

The log also catches a second kind of miss: a manager who had an approved answer and didn't use it. That calls for a quiet word with that manager, not a new version of an answer that was already right.

If the news can't be scheduled, such as an outage or a data breach, start from a crisis communication plan instead. For a planned change, the template on this page holds the timing plan, announcement, talking points, FAQ and question log, all worked through for one company. River can adapt them to your own decision and offices.