Internal Comms trends for 2024

If it isn’t too late in the month to be uttering these words… Happy new year to you all! We sincerely hope it’s a healthy, happy, and successful one for you.

?As it’s the start of a new year, we’re looking forward (in both senses of the phrase) to what’s to come, but we know?we’re not the first Internal Comms specialists to be speculating about the trends that will shape our working landscape and professional lives in ’24.

In actual fact, here at Guru HQ, we’re not expecting any earth-shattering swerves away from the direction of travel last year. And that isn’t a bad thing at all.

Here are five headline predictions from us, by way of introduction.?

1. AI will definitely play a greater part in the world of business comms. What remains to be seen is how well managed and carefully moderated that is. That will be up to individual organisations and their comms professionals.
2. The use of digital collaboration tools and platforms will continue to rise, as will the use of video within internal comms. However, the emphasis for digital platforms will shift further on the scale from desktop-based to mobile-friendly.
3. The emphasis on employee wellbeing will not (and should not) subside.
4. Inclusivity and personalised content within internal comms will also continue to grow in importance and significance this year.
5. Two-way comms will similarly continue to rise in prominence and dominance. Meaningful interactivity and the ability for all to have their voices heard will be seen as the most basic of requirements for our workers, regardless of role and location.

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IC tech specialists, Workshop, recently published their Internal Communication Trends Report, from which I pulled the following three headlines:

• Communicators’ primary goal is to engage employees and create better places to work. So, arguably, there is no change here from previous years. Here at Guru HQ, we would go as far as to say this is more “job description” than “emerging trend” for internal communicators.
• Next up on that list of goals is creating alignment across the organisation. Again, this is nothing particularly new, which suggests it might be something that we haven’t quite conquered right across the board yet. This is where a current (and that may well mean updated!) and robust internal comms strategy is fundamental.?
• Email is here to stay. For all of the fancy new digital tech platforms at our disposal, email is still the first port of call for the vast majority. That doesn’t mean that lengthy, dry, text-only corporate emails are still the way to go. They’re not. But more on that later.

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Perhaps more interestingly, their report also states that 74% of internal communicators believe that their internal comms strategy needs to adapt for 2024. That’s quite a telling (and potentially alarming) statistic to us. If you manage an internal comms professional and they are telling you this, we urge you to listen. Or you could be proactive and carry out a health check on your current offering as a new year’s resolution. Of those surveyed by workshop, 93% were also interested in incorporating new ideas into their strategy this year, so it definitely sounds like now is the time to revisit those strategies and update the offering.

From the same report, the top three challenges facing IC professionals are engagement, personalising content, and measuring results. In fact, half of internal communicators reported that they do not have the tools to measure the impact, and therefore the success, of their comms. Once again, newer tech (or, perhaps, fuller training on existing tech) would help with this - modern platforms offer a wealth of data on open rates, click through rates, impressions, shares etc. These can give a great insight into how far your comms are reaching, and what proportion of your workforce are receiving your comms as intended.

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Over at IC platform Haiilo, they are listing their “5 communication trends that will reshape the workplace in 2024 and beyond” as:

1. Instant access to information – in 2024, employees will expect information to find them immediately, rather than them have to seek it out! Haillo claim that employees spend, on average, 2.5 hours per day searching for the information they need, which is a shocking waste of time if you stop to think about it! That’s a third of the typical working day! If this is true of your workforce, then a full and careful updating of your intranet, OneDrive, or equivalent would be a worthy investment of time and talent.
2. Adequate content distribution – but this is not just about distributing content right across the board, as the headline suggests, but about distributing the right information to the right people.
3. Mobile-first comms – as Millennials already represent half of the workforce (which should increase to 75% by the end of 2025), delivering meaningful and engaging comms into the palms of our employees’ hands is the way to go. Comms apps which are accessible and fully functional on smartphones and tablets are the key.
4. Personalised comms – as stated above, this is already seen as one of the major challenges facing communicators. Most employees feel they are already dealing with too much information, so this is about targeting comms specifically and only to those who need it. There are many ways to tackle this, from carefully structured distribution lists to smart apps that facilitate tailored flows of information
5. Visual storytelling – newsletters and emails with huge blocks of text just won’t cut it anymore. To engage today’s workforce, videos, images, photos, and infographics are essential, not just preferable. The brutal truth is that most people are skimming comms content at work in the same way that they browse their social media. It is a challenge to create messages that grab attention, stick, and resonate. Keeping it brief, relevant, and having a compelling “What’s in it for me” will work wonders.

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Meanwhile, Staffbase include the following within their trends for the new year:

• Creating trust and security through reliable comms.
• Use Artificial Intelligence correctly and carefully within IC
• No More change management without communication managers

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Now, I purposely re-ordered those from Staffbase’s list so that use of AI followed creating trust. We have been banging on for years about the importance of good internal comms for building trust. But the “mainstream arrival” of AI into our workplaces poses as much of a threat or challenge as it does opportunities. There is no denying that AI will ease workloads and help with the generation of content right across the board, but it needs to be used with care and never allowed to run unchecked. With times uncertain and change the only constant, things like tone of voice and authenticity within internal comms really matter. Chat GPT might well write you a perfectly structured email or keynote speech on whatever you ask it to, but I bet its tone of voice would be a way off that of your business and your chief communicators. And your people will pick up on that. A successful, consistent tone of voice will go unnoticed but, almost subconsciously, nurture feelings of familiarity, reliability, dependability, and stability. An unexpected style of message can ruffle feathers or raise concerns around inconsistency and suspicion of confusion at the top!

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The third point I selected to include here ties in with today’s uncertainty and constant change, too. Not communicating effectively about change, with that comms starting before the changes are instigated and felt, will hugely scupper the chances of those changes landing successfully. Comms has always been of paramount importance within change management. That hasn’t changed.

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In conclusion, the trends for this year appear to be in the same direction of travel as last year. And that’s a good thing. No radical about-turns to deal with or unforeseen hurdles to leap. It also means that the tech many of us have been using for a couple of years (and that, for many, was brought in to assist with the new ways of working Covid forced upon us all) is still fit for purpose and has had the chance to grow with us, adding extra functionality to enhance its offering. The needs of our people haven’t changed dramatically either. All of this means that we can continue to improve on what we’re already doing and hone, perfect and personalise our comms offerings.

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However, as a word of caution, many of the reported stats from last year on engagement levels, trust, and employee intentions were not encouraging. And I’d hazard a guess that trend hasn’t improved too much either. (We’ll be looking at some recent survey results in our next blog.)

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Perhaps we should all commit now to making 2024 the year we give internal comms the attention, love, gravitas, time, talent, and budget it deserves. Our people will be the first to thank us for it. Increased productivity, loyalty and profit will follow shortly thereafter.