The Rumour Mill Is Winning

There is a moment in almost every organisation when employees know something is happening before the organisation is ready to talk about it.

A restructuring is coming. A senior executive may be leaving. A business unit is being reviewed. Jobs might be affected. A new operating model is being considered.

Official communication departments say nothing, but the employees are already talking. Someone heard something from a manager. Someone else saw a meeting invitation. Someone's colleague knows someone in HR. A message appears in a WhatsApp group. By lunchtime, a possibility has become a probability. By the end of the week, it has become “common knowledge”.

The organisation may still be preparing its official communication. The rumour mill has already published the first edition.

The Information Vacuum

Rumours thrive in uncertainty.

This is not simply a matter of employees being prone to gossip. Research into organisational change has repeatedly linked uncertainty, insufficient communication and the emergence of rumours. A study involving 1,994 employees found a reciprocal relationship between perceptions of inadequate change communication, job insecurity and rumours: insufficient communication could contribute to rumours, while rumours could subsequently influence perceptions of job insecurity.

That distinction matters because the rumour is often treated as the problem. The information vacuum that created the conditions for the rumour is rarely examined with the same urgency.

When employees do not have enough information to make sense of what is happening, they do what people naturally do: they seek information elsewhere, compare fragments, interpret signals and construct a narrative. And once that narrative starts circulating, correcting it becomes considerably harder.

Employees Don't Need Every Answer. They Need Something to Work With.

There is an important distinction between not having information and not having enough information to make sense of what is happening.

Organisations cannot always disclose everything immediately. Commercial negotiations, investigations, legal considerations, confidential appointments and strategic decisions can legitimately restrict what leadership is able to communicate. Be that as it may, confidentiality does not have to mean silence. Even when an organisation cannot disclose the full story, it can often communicate what is known, what is not yet known, what is being considered, what will happen next and when employees can expect another update.

That context matters because research on organisational change has found that employees often look to different communication sources for different kinds of information. Direct supervisors tend to be important sources for job-relevant and implementation information, while senior management provides broader strategic context. Trust also influences which sources employees seek and how they interpret the information they receive.

In other words, communication does not have to answer every question but it has to reduce unnecessary uncertainty.

The Grapevine Is Faster Than the Corporate Approval Process

This is where Internal Communications faces an uncomfortable reality because the formal communication process can be slow. Draft, review, legal, executive approval, HR approval, brand alignment, final changes and distribution. Meanwhile, employees communicate in real time.

The informal network does not require a communication plan, stakeholder matrix or an approval workflow. It moves through conversations, WhatsApp groups, team meetings, corridors and relationships.

That does not make informal communication inherently bad. In fact, research has shown that informal workplace communication can serve legitimate functions, including helping employees participate, question organisational decisions and hold management accountable. The problem begins when the informal narrative becomes the only narrative available. At that point, speculation can start carrying more weight than verified information.

A Rumour Is Not Always a Lie

This is another distinction organisations often miss.

A rumour can contain a mixture of fact, assumption, interpretation and speculation.

Someone may have genuinely seen a senior executive in a meeting. The assumption that follows, “they are announcing a restructuring” which may be completely unverified. But once the information travels through several people, the distinction between what was observed and what was assumed can disappear.

This is why simply telling employees to “ignore the rumours” is rarely an effective communication strategy. The organisation has to provide a more credible alternative.

Research has found that transparent internal communication can reduce uncertainty during organisational change and strengthen employee - organisation relationships.

The answer to a rumour is therefore not necessarily another rumour-busting email. It is credible information, delivered through trusted channels and reinforced consistently.

Managers Are Part of the Rumour Ecosystem

An organisation can produce an excellent leadership announcement and still lose control of the narrative five minutes later.

Why? Because employees will ask their managers:

“What does this actually mean for us?”

“Are our jobs safe?”

“Why is this happening?”

“When will it affect my team?”

“What aren't they telling us?”

If managers do not have the information, confidence or language to respond, employees will search elsewhere.

This is why manager communication should not be treated as an afterthought to major organisational announcements. Managers need the narrative, the facts, the boundaries of what they can disclose, the anticipated questions and the escalation route for questions they cannot answer.

The South African Context Makes This Even More Important

In South African workplaces, internal communication operates across highly diverse employee populations, cultures, languages, organisational structures and levels of access to information.

A 2025 systematic review of research on internal communication in culturally diverse South African workplaces found that internal communication plays an important role in employee relationships, conflict management, motivation and organisational goals. It also highlighted that managers can pay insufficient attention to the role of communication in strengthening employee relationships.

This makes the traditional assumption that “we sent the communication” particularly weak. A message reaching an employee does not necessarily mean that the employee understood it, trusted it or knew what it meant for them.

Communication has to travel beyond the channel. It has to reach interpretation.

The Real Communication Challenge

The rumour mill does not win because employees enjoy gossiping. It wins when it is faster, more accessible or more believable than the organisation's own communication.

That should concern every Internal Communications function because the question is not simply:

“What are employees saying?”

The more important question is:

“Why did they have to create their own explanation in the first place?”

When employees are left to connect the dots themselves, they will. The strategic role of Internal Communications is not to control every conversation but to ensure that employees have enough credible information, context and access to trusted voices to make sense of what is happening.

Because when the organisation leaves a blank space in the story, someone else will fill it.

And the rumour mill is always ready for the next edition.