What are the trends for internal communication in 2024?
Jenni working and taking notes at her laptop. Credit: Tynesight Photography

What are the trends for internal communication in 2024?

I’ve read various articles, research papers and LinkedIn posts from agencies, consultants and tech firms about the focus for internal communication in 2024. I wanted to find out what the different sources were saying as there are easily about 10 different posts to read!

A quick watch out here is that a lot of the blog posts about trends come from tech firms where there is a natural bias to the digital side of things. Looking at research papers and other sources is important to get a more rounded view of what is to come in 2024 - and it's not all about the tech!  

There is a lot to cover so I’m writing this article as the top level overview. Then I’m going to delve into some areas in more depth this month, probably each week. I want to explore the relationship between these trends and the priorities for those in HR, internal comms, employees as a whole and CEOs. So I’ll be writing a further four articles this month to cover those too.

In this overview, I'll share what was referenced to the most from those working in internal communication, the priorities for HR leaders and the priorities for CEOs.  

So based on all this reading I’ve tallied up the things that come up the most from different people and different sources:

  • Connecting employees with each other in the human sense, not the tech sense
  • AI
  • 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


This feels incredibly relevant when I consider the conversations I’ve been having with existing and new clients in recent months.

There were other things on the list of trends, they were mentioned just once, maybe twice, but not enough for it to be consistent across different sources.


What’s on the list for HR leaders?

Based on some Gartner research, these are the top priorities:

  •  Human centric leadership
  • Change management
  • Employee Experience
  • Recruiting and onboarding
  • Securing future skills and talent

There is some alignment here for the internal communication trends… the questions I start to ask are around the skills of the communication team to coach and advise leaders on the human centric leadership approach, as well as the reduced focus on change communication (this is why I need to write other articles on this topic!).

What’s on the list for CEOs?

Based on some insights from McKinsey, these are the priorities for leaders around the world:

  •  AI – generative AI and how it can benefit different parts of business
  • Digital transformation – we haven’t got this right yet and work still needs to be done
  • Energy – a focus on taking action after a few years of commitments
  • Being unique – having something that makes the company stand out for all stakeholders
  • Middle managers – they are starting to be seen as the integral part of the organisation that they are
  • Geopolitics – the impact of political change in recent years and an uncertainty about what is next
  • Finding the right growth strategy – choosing the right one and being ok with accountability around it
  • Macroeconomy – the uncertainty remains post COVID-19 and different ways to try and get certainty might be needed

There is some alignment here to the internal communication trends and there is something in this list that leans to innovation, creative thinking and action. I love that middle managers are on here. They have long been a priority for internal communicators, but this suggests there might be time and investment from the top which could be a real game changers. Digital transformation is also on here, something that I think is being covered under the hyper personalization theme for internal communicators. 

Next week I’ll be writing about the internal communication trends I have pulled out here, and how we can explore them in more detail mapped to the HR priorities.

If I’ve sparked any thoughts here feel free to comment or drop me a DM on here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guenther Schmidhuber

#StrategyGuru #IdeaOracle # ConceptCommander #NewsNinja #KeyboardWarrior

10mo

Thanks for the insightful overview Jenni - looking very much forward to your follow up articles, especially on internal comms...

Emanuela Tresoldi

Internal Communication Manager at STMicroelectronics | Passionate about employee engagement | Helping leaders in communicating their vision and strategy | Enabling employee advocacy

10mo

Thank you for sharing this! What resonates to me the most in what you wrote is “it’s not only about tech”. While tech is evolving and giving us great support and solutions, people are at the core of our job, even more than before.

Katie O'Halloran

Marketing and Press Officer at Ministry of Defence

11mo

Thanks Jenni - a great read. Going to look into hyper-personalisation more!

Natalie Coulson

APAC Communications Manager - creating connections and opening doors across Asia Pacific

11mo

Thanks for sharing Jenni Field - the balance between tech advancement and real human connectivity continues to be a fascinating discussion.

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