Staff are not a leak risk to be managed
Internal communication is often treated as the last stage of an external announcement, on the theory that the fewer people who know, the less chance of an early disclosure. The theory is usually wrong, and it is expensive: people who learn about their own organisation from outside it stop treating internal messages as informative, which removes the channel exactly when it is needed.
Announcement is not explanation
Most internal messages state a decision and stop. What people actually need is the reasoning, the alternatives that were considered, and what specifically changes for them on Monday. A message that answers the first question and not the third generates more work than it saves, because every manager is then asked the third question separately and answers it differently.
The cascade
A cascade delivers the same account through the management line so that people hear it from someone they can ask questions of. It works only under two conditions: managers get the material far enough in advance to read it properly, and the gap between the first tier hearing it and the last tier hearing it is measured in hours rather than days. A slow cascade is indistinguishable from a rumour with a head start.
The return path
The part most often missing is the route back. Questions collected from the cascade, answered visibly, and republished to everyone are the only reliable evidence that the message was understood rather than merely sent. Where no return path exists, the organisation learns what people thought about an announcement from resignations and from external coverage.
Frequency and trust
A channel used only for bad news becomes a signal in itself. Regular, genuinely informative use in ordinary weeks is what makes it readable in difficult ones — the same principle that governs media relations, applied inward.