Only 9% of employees completely trust leadership messaging
That number from ContactMonkey’s Global State of Internal Communications 2026 report is worth sitting with for a moment.
Not 9% trust it occasionally. Not 9% think leadership is dishonest. Nine percent of employees completely trust what leadership communicates to them. Meanwhile, a third trust it only somewhat, rarely, or not at all.
And yet 82% of leaders say they recognize internal communications as important. So it's not that organizations don't value the function. It's that the value isn't translating into anything that actually closes the gap.
The feedback loop problem
Here's the part of the ContactMonkey report that explains a lot of the trust problem.
95 percent of organizations collect employee feedback. That sounds like progress. But only 15% clearly communicate what they've done as a result of that feedback. 47%say it happens sometimes. 31% say it's inconsistent or delayed.
Employees are being asked to speak up. Most of them aren't hearing anything back. This is a credibility problem. And you can't fix a credibility problem by sending more messages, writing better subject lines, or upgrading your intranet.
What the report says about the culture gap
The ContactMonkey report frames its core finding around what it calls the culture gap — the distance between what organizations say they want internal communications to do and what they've given the function the resources to actually deliver.
The numbers on team size tell part of the story. Sixty-seven percent of IC teams have five or fewer people. Nearly one in five operates as a single-person function. And while 70% of organizations have a communications strategy in place, 54% say they don't have the resources to deliver it.
This is a setup for exactly the kind of trust erosion the data keeps showing.
This isn't a comms problem to solve alone
On this week’s episode of Frequency, Chuck Gose and Jenni Field spent time unpacking the ContactMonkey report alongside three other major IC reports published this quarter. Chuck's take on the 9% trust number was direct: when the people leading your organization aren't trusted in what they say, communications is not the solution. It's a symptom.
Better messaging won't fix a leadership credibility problem. What it can do is surface the problem clearly enough that the right people can't ignore it anymore. That's a legitimate and important role for IC to play — but it requires an honest conversation about where the function's responsibility ends and where leadership accountability begins.
The practical takeaway
The ContactMonkey report is more actionable than most. It points to clarity, consistency, and credible follow-through as the levers for closing the culture gap. None of those things require a bigger budget or a new tool.
What they require is discipline. Closing the feedback loop consistently. Saying what you're going to do, and then communicating that you did it. Making sure leadership understands that recognition without resourcing produces exactly the trust numbers the report is showing.
If you're building a case internally for why this matters, this report gives you the data to make it.
Listen to the full conversation
Chuck and Jenni break down the ContactMonkey report — along with the Gallagher Employee Communications Report, the IOIC Future of Communication whitepaper, and the nextICshift India Report — in Episode 47 of Frequency.
Read the ContactMonkey Global State of Internal Communications 2026 report here: https://www.contactmonkey.com/ebook/global-state-of-internal-communications-report-2026