Every year, Gallagher surveys more than a thousand communications and HR professionals across the globe to measure the state of internal communications. The 2026 report, drawn from more than 1,300 professionals across 40 countries, contains a finding that every leadership team navigating organizational change should understand.
Seventy-three percent of organizations aim for a strategic communications model. Eighteen percent believe they have achieved it.
That gap is the defining communications story of 2026. It is not a talent gap or a technology gap. It is a structural gap, and it has been widening for years.
What the gap actually measures
The Gallagher report calls this the Readiness Gap, the distance between where organizations need their communications function to be and where it actually is. The data shows that most organizations recognize the problem. They want strategic communications. They are not building for it.
The organizations in the 18% did not close the gap by hiring better communicators or investing in better technology. They closed it by making a structural decision about where communications work begins in the leadership process. For those organizations, communications is not a final step before an announcement. It is the discipline that determines what the announcement is capable of doing before anyone drafts a word.
For the 73% who aspire to that model without achieving it, the gap shows up in ways that are visible to the workforce even when they are invisible to leadership.
Where the gap shows up most visibly
The Gallagher data identifies the manager capability problem as one of the most significant and most consistently unaddressed risks in the industry. Eighty-seven percent of organizations say that managers lacking skills and capacity is a moderate or significant risk to their communications objectives. Twenty-one percent provide toolkits to support those managers.
That gap between recognition and action is not unique to manager preparation. It is the same structural problem as the 73/18 gap, expressed at the execution level. Organizations know that managers are the most direct line between leadership decisions and the workforce. They have not built the infrastructure to support that role before the moment it matters most.
The data also shows that volume is not the answer. Organizations that communicate at high volumes during periods of change experience a 30% increase in leadership trust risk. Sending more messages during a restructuring or a transition does not close the trust gap. Without the right sequencing and audience preparation, it widens it.
What the 61% finding actually means
Sixty-one percent of organizations have no formal change communications approach, and yet change management is ranked as the most valued skill those same organizations say they possess.
Knowing that something matters and building the infrastructure to support it are different decisions. The organizations in the 61% are not failing because they do not value communications. They are failing because they have not treated the change communications framework as a leadership investment that requires the same deliberate planning as any other strategic function.
The cost of that decision does not appear on the day a major change is announced. It surfaces in the attrition numbers that arrive months later, after the change is supposed to be behind the organization.
What closing the gap actually requires
The Gallagher report is clear that strategic maturity is the primary driver of readiness. The organizations that perform best are not the ones with the most resources. They are the ones that have made the structural decision to treat communications as a leadership function with a seat at the table where decisions are made, not a service that responds after they are final.
That decision cannot be made by the communications team alone. It requires leadership to understand that the communications framework is not something that gets built after the business decision is made. It has to be in place before the pressure to act makes deliberate thinking difficult. The organizations that have made that decision do not close the gap by chance. They close it because someone was in the room asking the right questions before the announcement existed.
That is the work I do with leadership teams. If the gap between where your communications function is and where it needs to be is visible in your organization, reach out at daphnescott.com.