Five key focus areas for employee communication

1. AI – AI is constantly evolving. In 2023 Microsoft introduced Copilot as an AI companion for personal and enterprise users of Microsoft 365. A year later and users can build their own Copilot agents to improve productivity. Identifying opportunities, defining how your organisation uses AI, and coaching leaders to support its use will not only play a key role in the employee experience but a competitive edge in delivering your strategy.

2. Personalisation – Our experiences outside of the workplace continue to be increasingly personalised, so it shouldn’t be surprising that we bring those expectations to work. ‘Noisy’ workplaces are a symptom of the lack of relevant, personalised communication. Having a clearly defined communication strategy driven by greater audience understanding, tailoring messages and a discipline of communicating with purpose, are critical to bringing relevance and focus.

3. Data-Driven Decisions – The saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. The need to measure internal communications isn’t new but it’s arguably needed now more than ever. As workplaces become busier and noisier places, setting clear objectives for communication outcomes, measuring impact and auditing and refining channels and tactics is critical to getting cut through

4. Employee experience – Four of HBR’s 5 Factors That Make for a Great Employee Experience directly relate back to internal Communications:

1. 1. Mutual trust – providing two-way communication and insights that helps employees feel heard and enables leaders to act on what they hear demonstrates and build trust between leaders and employees
   2. Alignment of employee values and vision – clearly defined values and vision, goals that provide a connection to purpose and leader led communications that help employees understand their role in achieving the vision.
   3. C-Suite accountability – strategic internal communications plays a key role in sharing employee insights and feedback with leaders so they can act on it and helping them become more effective communicators so they can share it.
   4. Recognising success – helping unpack strategy and direction through effective storytelling sits with internal communication and a key component is helping recognise and share the learnings, challenges and successes of the teams and the people involved.

5. Employee Engagement – everything above, plus your Internal Communications strategy (and your leadership team), need good quality insights to stay focused on the things that matter to employees. They help drive connection, engagement, understanding and if the insights are acted on – trust. Just be clear on what your measuring, and why, and that the insights are the right frequency to drive decision making and create change.