TIL our all hands deck said 'record profits' while my own crew got a 0.5% raise letter

Jake Perry · 2026-09-16T17:25:05.125096+00:00

I do comms for a mid size logistics company out of Columbus and I want to warn anyone who writes internal stuff: the employees read the earnings slide before you finish the sentence. We dropped our Q3 all hands two weeks ago with a big graphic that said 'best quarter in company history,' and by 10am three people from the warehouse floor had screenshotted it next to their raise letters, which worked out to about 40 cents an hour. The comms team never saw the raise numbers because HR kept that in a separate doc, so we wrote a feel good deck on top of a pay freeze and had no clue. What killed me was a forklift guy named Darnell asking me flat out, 'so is the record in the room with us?' and I had nothing. Nobody gets mad at good news, they get mad at good news that skips them, and once that gap is public you cannot walk it back with a follow up email. I now ask HR for the raise and bonus figures a week before any town hall, no exceptions. Does anyone else have a fix for this, or do you just refuse to run profit language in internal decks at all?

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TIL our all hands deck said 'record profits' while my own crew got a 0.5% raise letter | Corporate Comms - Rigidtalk