One Memo, Multiple Realities: Why the Disney Layoff Email Felt Off
Updated: Aug 18
Layoffs test a company in every direction at once — operationally, culturally, and in the trust employees place in leadership. How that moment gets communicated can either mitigate the impact or exacerbate uncertainty and fear.
Walt Disney Company shared a memo with employees about upcoming layoffs. To the writer, it read exactly like what modern corporate communication has come to look like: calm, empathetic, measured, and carefully constructed. Yet, for the reader, it felt off.
That reaction isn't really about Disney. It's about a structural habit running through most corporate communication, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.
When a message feels off, teams almost always blame the words.
So they rewrite. And rewrite again. They swap long words for short ones. They run it through a readability checker. They take out the jargon. They add a human touch. They cut the third paragraph and restructured the fourth.
But that feeling doesn't go away.
What the real problem is.
The real problem is context switching — a term borrowed from cognitive science, where every shift in attention comes with a small tax: a pause to reorient, to rebuild the frame you were just in. Readers pay that same tax when a piece of writing changes who it's speaking to and how it feels, without ever signaling the change. In a message that works, the reader always knows who's talking, who's being spoken to, and what emotional register they're in — and they never have to think about it.
Corporate communication is rarely written for one audience. It's written for employees, leadership, legal, media, and investors — all at once, in the same document. Instead of designing for that reality, most teams try to fold everyone into a single message. What comes out the other side is a memo that keeps changing lanes: empathy, then authority, then reassurance, then strategic positioning, then compliance language. Each shift costs the reader a little. Across six or eight paragraphs, that adds up to what psychologists call cognitive load — the feeling of working harder than you should have to, just to understand something written for you.
That's the "something feels off" reaction. It's not confusion about what the words mean. It's confusion about who the message is for, and what it's asking you to feel.
Let's take a closer look at Disney's Layoff memo
You can watch this happen line by line in Disney's memo. It opens warm and direct, speaking to a human being. Then, inside the same second paragraph, it pivots twice — first into strategy language about a "unified enterprise," then into the kind of phrasing you'd expect in an investor update, an "agile and technologically-enabled workforce." Someone reading that memo wondering am I losing my job is suddenly standing in a boardroom with no idea how they got there.
The third paragraph, in my opinion, does the most damage. It opens honestly — I know this is hard — and then, in the same breath, pivots to "how to more effectively manage our resources and reinvest in our businesses." That's the emotional whiplash in its sharpest form: a single paragraph that opens with human acknowledgement and ends with efficiency framing. Without a transition, the human moment gets absorbed by the corporate one.
By the closing lines, the memo has shifted again, this time outward — toward leadership, toward anyone reading it as a signal of company health. "I remain optimistic about where we're headed" is a sentence written for that room. For someone who just found out their job is gone, it reads like the writer has already moved on to the next thing.
The instinct here is always to add more empathy — sound warmer, acknowledge the hard part, add a human line. That's not wrong, but it's not the fix. Most of these memos aren't short on empathy. The problem is that empathy in one paragraph followed by strategy in the next, with nothing between them, stops reading as empathy at all. It starts reading as a line the company said on its way to something else.
A simple fix:
What's really missing through all of it is a bridge. Not one "for those directly affected," not one "from a company perspective," not one moment that says I'm changing lanes now.
When you context switch with no transition, your reader is left to decode it alone — now imagine them being anxious, distracted, and reading on a phone in a car park before a meeting starts, not sitting quietly with full attention.
A steady message lets a distracted reader drop in and out and still know where they stand. A message that keeps changing who it's talking to gives them nothing. And every time they look back at it, they have to ask the same question again: wait, who is this for? Has anything changed since the last paragraph? Is this for someone else?
If your message feels confusing. Look at what separates each audience.
Stop blending audiences and start writing for them separately.
One message for impacted employees:
Impacted employees need something direct and practical — what's happening, when, what support exists, who to call, what comes next. No strategic framing, no optimism about the future, just clarity delivered with dignity.
One message for remaining employees:
The people staying need something different — an honest acknowledgment of the disruption and real answers about stability, not a rush past the moment toward a future vision.
One message for external stakeholders:
External stakeholders can have the strategic narrative — the positioning, the forward-looking language — in a message built for them, not smuggled into one meant for people who just watched their colleagues leave.
Same facts. Different containers. No context switching.
But most companies won't do this because it sounds like more work to write three messages instead of one. So they continue to cram everything into one and wonder why their audience ignores their messaging.
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Messaging designed to survive the rooms you’re not in
I'm Vivien, I help global B2B communication leaders and teams design corporate communications that make your CEO look good.
If you have an announcement you're wrestling with? I work with communications teams on exactly these high-risk multi-audience messaging moments.
