What should internal communicators be leading and influencing in 2024?

In January I wrote about the trends in internal communication and their relationship to the needs of HR, CEOs and employees. At the end of those four articles I felt that one more was need to capture the next steps needed in 2024 (all articles are here on LinkedIn).

Since I wrote these, a few other reports have been published and in reading those, they have highlighted some worrying trends for internal communications and some huge gaps in the knowledge of the internal communication profession.

So in this article I’m going to share three things; why we need to be consistent, what should internal communicators be leading and influencing on and what are the areas of development for internal communication teams/functions.

Why we need to be consistent

In all the reading and research that has been carried out in the last decade, the last year and the last few months one thing is ringing true. The big stuff doesn’t change. One of the reports that has been published since January is the Gallagher State of the Sector report. This is a survey only report and 50% of the responses are from North America (the report doesn’t break down the data by region sadly as that would be hugely helpful to the profession.). There are some insights in here that show a strange shift for internal communication into employee engagement but we don't know if that is a global trend or more localised.

I've already shared the top seven trends for internal communicators and a lot of these are familiar to previous years:

• Connecting employees with each other in the human sense, not the tech sense
• AI (Artificial Intelligence)
• Hyper-personalisation – tailoring content to employees
• Creating content that is actually engaging to the audience
• Focussing on the employee experience and making it as good as the customer one
• Building trust in the leaders and the organisation as a whole
• Using data, analytics and insights to drive decisions and activities

Given what is highlighted for CEOs, employees and HR it’s clear that if we are consistent and focus on fewer things, we will get some traction with success. What is important for any internal communication team/function is to define what success looks like.

Not a lot changes year on year. In fact, in the Gallagher report, they summarised the focus for the year with the exact same copy in 2022 and 2023. We don’t need to reinvent things each year and most internal communication strategies should be at least 18 months in length, and more commonly around three years.

What are the main things we should be looking at in 2024?

Trends are helpful as they can help us see where things might be heading, but as I have written about already, there needs to be a split between what is activity and what is development. We also need to align our activity to the organisations we serve so while the horizon scanning is useful, we can’t do it all.

So if I was still in my role as Communications Director or Global Head of Communications, these are the things I would be looking at in terms of leading and influence:

Leading

Line manager skills

I’d want to be leading the conversation with HR around what the communications skills are for managers. How it is delivered is another matter but the content of it should be led by us as experts in communication.

Understanding employee groups

Through persona development and research it’s time to really understand our audience. If things like hyper-personalisation are coming in and the challenges of communicating with deskless workers remains – let’s make sure we really know who we are communicating with.

Leadership communication

Building trust in leaders, improving senior leader communication – this is all coming up a lot. This needs a conversation around content, channels, time, behaviours and priorities for the senior team and then a specific strategy can be created to help here. This is uncomfortable but we can't keep avoiding this one.

Two-way communication

Making sure that the channels in place are also used for listening. And that the information and data we get from channels is used to inform decisions around content and if the channels are working.

Strategic narrative

Write it, create key messages and content around it and make sure the anchor to the story is in place. It’s the key to unlocking a lot. It's not the how you're doing it, it's the why.

Influencing

Employee Experience

Where internal communication can support the employee experience. Using my model to help frame how it all fits together I’d want to be in a workshop with the relevant stakeholders to discuss what internal communication should be doing at each stage of the employee lifecycle.

Change programmes

If you’re plugged into the strategy of the organisation you should be involved in the change programmes early enough. There should be strong influence here with templates and knowledge in the team to advise and support the organisation on all change projects.

Digital workplace

This is influencing because this is often owned by IT and there are many stakeholders to consider here. This is important for hybrid work, efficiency and remote leadership engagement. What is the role of the communication function here? Is it to help people create great content, governance, information sharing?

What are we doing for our own skills?

What has struck me about some of the reports this year is the lack of looking at the skills in the function or the team. We are quick to blame other functions for making requests that don’t align with the purpose of internal communication or quick to say we aren’t included early enough in conversations. But what are we, as individuals and teams, doing about it? How are we making sure we have the skills, the credibility and the influence?

This is what would be on my list to consider:

• Be clear about the skills gaps in the team and then intentionally address them, continuously
• Getting a mentor to help individuals or the team as a whole (I work with individuals and teams regularly in this capacity)
• Learn about AI as a whole and what the organisation is doing with it
• Make sure there is complete understanding of the organisational strategy for the whole team/function
• Storytelling, creative writing, impactful content
• Understanding the external factors that impact the organisation - politics etc.
• Reading – I have a huge list of recommendations!
• Attending conferences and events to learn from peers and network
• Academic qualifications like the internal communications diploma with CIPR or the masters with IoIC
• Attending industry expert masterclasses and workshops like those offered by AllThingsIC

If the same trends keep coming up, and the same solutions are being shared but the impact isn’t changing – we need to really look into why that is. Hosting a team day to review data and insight from internal research and looking at industry insights will help to shape the internal communication strategy for the year.

I hope this helps bring things together and of course, if you need any help, just drop me a DM or email us at info@redefiningcomms.com