Candace Nicolls leads people work at a company most HR leaders should be paying attention to. Snagajob is one of the largest hourly job marketplaces in the country, which means Candace's team has spent years thinking about communication for a workforce that is hourly, distributed, and often missing the office-friendly tools other HR programs assume. As Senior Vice President of People and Workplace, she oversees talent acquisition, HR, compliance, training and development, employee engagement, community, and facilities. Her career spans more than 20 years across talent management roles, and her conversation on Reimagining Company Culture centered on what real, transparent communication looks like when your workforce is not sitting in front of a Slack channel.
Her perspective sharpens a common HR mistake. Many companies assume their communication strategy works because the people who can hear it tell them so. The harder question is what happens for the rest of the workforce, the people on shift, on the road, or in roles that do not include a company laptop. Transparent communication has to reach them too.
Why Transparency Is the Hardest Part of Internal Communication
Transparency is easy to claim and difficult to deliver. The pattern Candace described looks familiar across industries. Leadership decides something. The leadership team gets a thoughtful briefing. Managers get a quick summary. Front-line employees get a one-line announcement and a poster. Within two weeks, leaders are confused about why morale dropped, while employees are confused about why a decision they had no context for is now their job to execute.
The fix is not more announcements. It is a different operating model where transparency is treated as a deliverable, not a tone. SHRM research on workplace communication notes that communication failures consistently rank as a top driver of disengagement, especially across distributed and shift-based teams where information naturally fragments.
Harvard Business Review research on turning employee feedback into action reinforces the point. The companies that build credibility with their workforces are not the ones that send the most updates. They are the ones that close the loop on what employees raise, in language and channels that fit the actual reality of the workforce.
What Real Communication Looks Like in Practice
How do you communicate clearly to a workforce that does not sit in front of email?
Candace's team uses a layered model. Mobile-first messaging. Manager talking points that are short, specific, and tested. In-person briefings at shift start where possible. Two-way feedback channels that do not require an account login. The point is that information has to meet employees where they are, not where HR wishes they were.
What do you do when leadership cannot share everything yet?
Be explicit about what is undecided and when employees will hear more. Vague reassurance is worse than acknowledged uncertainty. People can handle "we do not know yet, here is what we are working on, here is when we will tell you more." They cannot handle being treated like the answer might rattle them.
What Actually Works in Transparent Communication
Principle 1: Treat managers as the primary communication channel
No matter how good the company-level messaging is, employees take their cues from their direct manager. Managers who deliver leadership messages with their own context and conviction reach people. Managers who pass along corporate language verbatim do not. Investing in manager communication skill is not optional. It is the multiplier on every other channel.
Principle 2: Make feedback bidirectional and visible
Transparency means information flows both ways. AllVoices' Speak Up Hotline and anonymous reporting tools give employees a way to share concerns, suggestions, and observations through channels that do not depend on any one manager being approachable. Bidirectional flow is what turns transparency from a top-down posture into a real two-way operating practice.
Principle 3: Close the loop on what employees raise
Few things kill engagement faster than a feedback channel that disappears into a black hole. Employees calibrate their willingness to speak up based on what happened the last time someone did. Public, visible action on themes from employee feedback and stay interviews trains the system to keep speaking. Silence trains it to stop.
Where HR and Engagement Tooling Fit
Transparent communication is part of the broader work of human resources and employee engagement. The companies doing this well treat communication infrastructure with the same seriousness as IT infrastructure. AllVoices' pulse surveys let HR see whether messages are landing, where confusion clusters, and which teams are not getting the context they need.
How HR uses signals to improve communication over time
The mature pattern looks across communication outputs and engagement outcomes together. Leaders watch which messages produced sentiment shifts, which teams stayed quiet when others reacted, and where managers seemed to drift from the corporate line. Over time the data shapes how HR drafts messages, trains managers, and decides which channels to invest in. Communication becomes a measurable competence rather than a recurring complaint.
Frequently Asked Questions About Transparent Communication
How transparent should leaders be about hard news?
More than feels comfortable, less than puts the company at risk. The sweet spot is sharing decisions, the reasoning behind them, and the trade-offs leadership weighed, without disclosing details that would create legal or competitive exposure. People can handle hard news. They struggle with hidden news.
What is the biggest mistake leaders make in internal communication?
Underestimating how much context employees need to make sense of decisions. The leadership team has been thinking about a change for months. Employees hear about it for the first time on Tuesday. Treat that asymmetry as the design constraint, not as a complication.
How do you handle communication during periods of layoffs or restructuring?
With as much speed, dignity, and clarity as possible. Move quickly to limit the rumor window. Be specific about who is affected and who is not. Provide concrete next steps for both groups. Acknowledge the human weight of the moment. Avoid corporate boilerplate.
What about communicating with hourly or shift-based teams?
Mobile-first, shift-aligned, and short. Most office-centric communication models break down for hourly workforces. Companies with large hourly populations need dedicated channels, formats, and cadence designed for the way those teams actually work.
How often should leaders communicate?
Often enough that silence is unusual. Predictable cadence beats sporadic intensity. Employees should know when to expect leader-level updates, even if individual updates are short. The rhythm is the message.
What does good closing-the-loop look like in practice?
Specific, public, and timely. Specific means naming what employees raised and what changed. Public means sharing the change in the same channels where the original feedback was collected. Timely means within weeks, not quarters. The companies that close the loop well build a workforce that keeps talking. The companies that close it slowly or vaguely train their workforce to stop bothering.
How do you handle communication when employees do not believe what leadership is saying?
Slow down and address the credibility gap directly. Employees who have stopped believing leadership rarely respond to more emphatic versions of the same message. They respond to specific, observable changes that show the company is willing to do the work, not just say the words. The pattern is consistent: visible action first, broader trust later. Companies that try to talk their way back into credibility almost always make the gap wider. The hard part is patience. Trust loss happens fast. Trust recovery happens slowly, and only when leaders are willing to demonstrate the change rather than announce it. The companies willing to do that consistently are the ones whose workforces eventually believe them again.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Candace's experience leading people work at scale across an hourly workforce makes a useful corrective. Transparent communication is operational, not aspirational. It depends on infrastructure, manager capability, two-way channels, and visible follow-through, not on leaders who say transparency is one of their values. The companies that get this right build communication systems that survive bad news and tough seasons. The companies that do not end up with employees who learn to expect less and trust less.
The deeper point is that real communication is the substrate of every other people initiative. Engagement programs, DEI work, retention strategy, and change management all run on whether the underlying communication system functions. HR leaders who invest in that substrate get a multiplier on everything else. The ones who do not keep wondering why their best programs land softly.
Candace's framing also pushes back on a common mistake. Internal communication is not a marketing function dressed up in HR clothing. It is its own discipline with its own design principles, measurement standards, and skill set. Companies that staff and resource it accordingly outperform companies that treat it as something anyone can do in their spare time. The difference shows up in how quickly the workforce trusts the message, how reliably feedback comes back, and how durable the culture is during change.
The companies that consistently land their messages also tend to be the companies whose employees feel comfortable challenging them. That is not a coincidence. Two-way communication produces healthier organizations than one-way broadcasting, and the work of building it pays back in retention, engagement, and the quality of operating decisions made with employee input.
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