Introduction
The workplace has changed, and so too has the role of the internal communicator.
Often, internal communications rise in importance in periods of business transition and disruption, where regular and transparent communications are critical for maintaining engagement. In the post-COVID era, where the only constant is change, the importance of internal communications to business performance has never been clearer.
In the new world of work, the power of internal communications to unite an increasingly disparate workforce is invaluable to business success. But old modes of communication won't suffice in the new hybrid landscape, so what will? As the digital workplace replaces the physical one, the role of technology in enabling effective enterprise communications will become critical to the success of any strategy.
It's time for internal communicators to build on current momentum, reflect on strategy, and adapt to the digital future of work. How? By focusing on what we learned over the last two years of disruption, and using these learnings to create a new blueprint for success.
About this guide
In this guide, we've drawn on industry research, conversations with enterprise internal communicators, and the institutes that advise them, as well as our own independent survey to paint a picture of the future of internal communications.
This guide focuses on:
- The key trends our survey showed as being the most important for internal communicators to watch and incorporate into their strategies.
- Why technology is vital when looking to supercharge your IC strategy.
- The rise of the intranet and why it should be the backbone of your strategy.
- How you can use an intranet to overcome the key challenges our survey highlighted and truly create a future-proof strategy that will keep you ahead of the curve.
This guide is designed for you, the next generation of internal communicators, to arm you with the information needed to supercharge your strategy for the next chapter of work.
A thank you to our contributors
Putting this guide together didn't happen in isolation. Unily is lucky enough to partner with some of the biggest, most innovative enterprises, as well as institutions and research bodies charged with defining strategies and solutions. We leaned on this expertise heavily to create a guide that pools knowledge from around the world on how internal communications need to adapt to support the redefined workforce. We are grateful to all our contributors for their insights.
Our contributors
- Jennifer Sproul - Chief Executive at the Institute of Internal Communications
- Ben Reynolds - Managing Director at Gallagher
- Margie Dolch - Senior Communications Specialist at Celanese
- Kerry Christopher - VP of Internal Communications at Cardinal Health
- Nancy Speidel - CEO and co-founder at iSAW
- Lynn O'Connor - Director DEI for UK&I at Sage Belong
- Abi Santmyer - Vice President of Internal Communications at Commonwealth Care Alliance
About Unily
Before we get into the guide itself, who is Unily and why did we write this guide?
Unily provides the largest enterprises with a single platform to unite employees and enhance their experience of work. We started life as a SharePoint consultancy back in 2005 and since then we have grown to develop our own product - Unily, the employee experience platform that connects, informs, and engages your enterprise. Unily is used by some of the largest organizations in the world to connect them with the people, tools, and knowledge to succeed at work. Unily brings together IC, IT, and HR teams to collate their skills and create a single hub that gives every employee everything they need to be inspired, engaged, and productive at work, no matter where that work happens.
We work with internal communicators to support them with the technology to enhance their strategy and overcome their challenges through digital transformation. We believe that every employee should feel engaged in their work and we know that engagement starts with communication. We believe in the power of internal communications combined with the right technology to change the way people see work, and we recognize that now more than ever this is crucial to future success. That's why we've produced this guide to share what we've learned about how technology is reshaping the future of work, and how internal communicators can embrace this change to support employees in the new world we face.
The future of IC survey
A survey by internal communicators, for internal communicators
To underpin the findings in this guide, we engaged our global community of internal communicators to understand how the industry is adapting to new ways of working in the aftermath of the greatest change our workplace has seen in recent history. Our survey identified core trends that are shaping the future of internal communications, and our conversations with industry insiders helped to bring these insights into context.
We surveyed over 100 internal communicators (119) on a global basis to understand how changes to the way we work have impacted the profession. Respondents came from companies ranging from less than 500 employees to more than 20,000, with HQs located in each continent. Industries operated in also varied, with respondents from healthcare/pharmaceutical, oil and gas, education, financial services, energy, food processing and agriculture, professional services, retail, technology, travel and transport, public sector and not-for-profit, insurance, and manufacturing. Additionally, 71% of respondents had at least a quarter of their staff based on the frontline.
The results of the survey supported what many of us in the industry already know: that internal communications are rising in importance and the way we communicate has adapted to meet the demands of a changed workforce. Drilling down into the data we were able to define three core trend buckets: the biggest wins, the biggest challenges, and the biggest changes.
1. The biggest wins
Relationships with leaders and departments have been strengthened
How has your relationship changed with the following stakeholders?
Respondents reported improved strategic relationships across all departments including HR, IT, and leadership teams. Over the past year, without internal comms teams to help the business navigate through the pandemic, many companies would have struggled – IC has now been able to prove its influence and importance across their organizations, being the lifeline for many and the pivotal role in transitioning to this new world of working.
Budgets for internal comms have increased
Despite tough circumstances, respondents reported that budgets are set to increase or remain in 2022 and beyond. The influence of internal communicators has never been greater, and business leaders are now able to see the impact and invest in the right places. The question that enterprise leaders need to ask themselves now, is where to invest this increased budget for maximum impact?
Internal communicators are confident about the future
One of the most positive results that came from the survey is that overall, respondents cited that they felt confident about the future of internal communications. It's safe to say that IC has cemented itself as being a pivotal part of the overall business, and so teams should be confident and positive about the road ahead. Now, IC teams should be capitalizing on their newfound prominence and taking it one step further by future-proofing their strategies to revolutionize the business.
2. The biggest challenges
We asked respondents to rank which challenges they thought were going to be the most significant for them to face in the upcoming year. As a result, our survey cited the following core hurdles for internal communicators to watch.
What are the biggest challenges ICs will face in the future?
3. The biggest changes
We asked internal communicators to identify some of the most notable ways the practice has adapted in the aftermath of the pandemic. The results revealed four core areas for change that will predicate the next generation of internal communications.
Style and tone
Over the past year, the tone of communications changed significantly according to respondents. The turbulence caused by the remote work movement led to a shift in the way we communicate with employees. In the battle to tackle social isolation and engagement fatigue, internal communicators are placing greater focus on "humanized communications" that enhance culture and bring people together. Stuffy corporate communications are now a thing of the past as increased understanding of the impact of communications on culture comes to bear in more people-focused stories and empathetic language.
We saw increased use of video to bring more facetime to an increasingly digital workplace, and more direct communications from leadership to build trust through transparency. Being honest, direct, and empathetic are all key to establishing a culture that employees want to be a part of, and so this change in tone and style of communication will need to be encompassed into IC teams’ future strategies. Leadership must now look to their IC counterparts for advice on how to best accommodate their tone to build trust with employees. Trust is not only essential for boosting morale, but for increasing and inspiring employee engagement overall, and so needs to be incorporated within the overall IC strategy.
Relationships and trust
In terms of relationships, the respondents said that they felt more connected to both senior leadership and HR teams. This is likely down to the phenomenal impact IC has had on businesses over the past year, with senior leadership and HR coming together and turning to internal communicators to assist with communicating business plans and updates with employees. Now, IC teams can build on this positive change for the future, encompassing HR and leadership advice and direction into strategies.
Additionally, the way leadership communicates with the rest of the organization has altered significantly. Whereas before, leadership comms aimed to inform and update the company, now the focus has shifted to leaders needing to engage, build relationships, and make sure employees are aligned with the company focus. Internal comms now play a pivotal role in leadership comms, with leadership looking to the IC team to aid them in managing change and building a trusting relationship with all employees. They are now the ones that need to look at positioning change and news to the company, explaining it simply, and taking away some of the fear that comes with change and the unknown. Trust is not only essential for boosting morale, but for increasing and inspiring employee engagement overall, and so needs to be incorporated within the overall IC strategy.
Technology
The pandemic acted as the catalyst that propelled many organizational digital transformation initiatives forward and set the tone for a more digital future. It goes without saying that technology was paramount for many organizations to survive the pandemic, and we can predict with confidence that it will be key to the future and how businesses will be run, with Gartner stating that “the pandemic rapidly elevated many digital workplace technologies from nice-to-have to must-have status.”
However, our survey revealed that despite this prediction, we still have a way to go. Respondents agreed that an intranet is a key tool for delivering on ESG strategies, supporting employee wellbeing, digital upskilling, and diversity and inclusion initiatives amongst other things. The need for mobile solutions is also rising in importance as a means to connect and communicate with frontline workers or those in the field, as well as employees working remotely.
Finally, to support the uptick in video as a primary medium for comms delivery, our respondents noted that they would require technology that could support this evolution of engaging communication and content.
Diversity and inclusion
The topic of diversity is a broad one, covering – but not limited to – gender, age, race, religion, accessibility, and sexual orientation, and the changing social climate in 2020 headlined some sensitive social issues. The Black Lives Matter movement highlighted racial social injustice, while the US presidential election contributed to political divisiveness. The year proved to be a wake-up call to many organizations as to the unconscious bias that may have been present within their companies, and ICs now need to make sure that this is tackled in their strategies and noted as an organizational priority.
Technology presents us with new opportunities to create more inclusive workplaces by supporting and promoting diversity across business. Investing in the right technologies can make creating an inclusive workplace a much easier task. Intranet technology gives everyone in the organization a platform to be able to get involved, make a change, and educate themselves on what it truly means to be inclusive.
Wellbeing
The changes to the way we work put a new spotlight on employee wellbeing, with many employees experiencing higher stress levels due to health, financial, and emotional worries. It's no surprise that our survey showed that almost half of internal communicators view employee wellbeing as their number one priority.
Wellbeing and mental health-focused initiatives that would have been encouraged and developed over the previous years should continue to be prominent in organizational strategies. Employers – guided by internal communicators – will be expected to provide increased support and information for employees and their ongoing mental and physical health, especially with hybrid working increasing in popularity.
The need for a future-proof strategy
The survey showed just how pivotal the pandemic was for internal communications, highlighting a number of key challenges and trends. This guide focuses on each of those challenges and trends specifically, offering valuable guidance as to how technology can be used to develop a future-proof strategy that will benefit both the business and employees. Building on the biggest wins, challenges, and changes, it takes the conclusions of the survey into account and uses industry insights and advice to expand on how ICs can use digital tools to better strengthen and truly level up their strategies.
By identifying the current and future challenges within the IC space, internal communicators can make the necessary adjustments to their current strategies in order to keep ahead of the curve. IC’s should be identifying exactly what needs to be improved on, invested in, or built up to truly strengthen their strategies, and more often than not, this includes looking at what the best technology is to help make this an easier task.
Embracing a digital future
To handle ever-evolving IC trends, it’s important to assess your messaging strategy and finetune your approach. According to Forrester, "accelerated digital transformation will characterize the next decade, predicting the success or failure of enterprises." Meanwhile, Gartner advocates that "the right technological investments can pave the way for discovering new and unexpected opportunities, while also building better business resilience down the line."
What is clear is that without the right technology any strategy will fall flat, and success will be hard to achieve. One of the biggest current barriers to a successful strategy is outdated and impractical digital tools.
With budgets set to grow, it is crucial that the right technology investments are made to underpin any future strategy. While IT teams will take the lead on optimizing the digital future of our enterprises, it remains the job of IC and HR teams to ensure a human balance is achieved. The most successful companies will strike the perfect balance between human and digital workplaces, where technology is being used to support the social characteristics of a thriving enterprise.
The increase of hybrid working models means that the office no longer represents the cultural hub of an organization. In lieu of this change, enterprises are turning to technology to create "digital HQs" where culture and connection can continue to thrive. A digital HQ is a universally accessible hub that brings together employees, the tools they need to work, and the communications they need to thrive, in one space.
Our survey revealed that enterprise intranets will be key to navigating these challenges and executing strategies in the new world of work. A modern intranet can become the cornerstone of a digital transformation strategy that can reinvent internal communication and underpin culture for the next chapter of work. Here's why:
The intranet as your secret weapon
Over the course of the pandemic, the company intranet became a lifeline as enterprises grappled to manage change and support remote working. Starting out as a critical tool for crisis communications, and later becoming a home for culture and wellbeing support, the humble intranet rose to prominence as an essential communications tool and enabler of business continuity.
Many IC’s may think of an intranet as being an archaic piece of technology, but the reality is the modern intranet or employee experience platform is a central part of the employee experience. Intranets of the past were hard to use and hard to maintain, with sub-par user experiences leading to poor engagement and as a consequence limited business value. But a decade of innovation has produced fruitful results. The intranets of today have evolved to become a living hub for culture, an enabler of work, and a critical part of any internal communications plan worth its salt.
The pandemic has given us an opportunity to rethink the way we work, accelerating digital transformations of organizations across the board. However, as technology increasingly becomes where we work not just how we work, it is more vital than ever that we find ways to support human connection and keep people at the heart of our businesses. A dedicated platform that focuses on engaging employees and supporting overall employee experience is now an invaluable business tool, set to solve a catalog of emerging challenges.
7 intranet features to supercharge your strategy
A modern, global intranet brings your company closer together by acting as a digital HQ – taking down barriers associated with remote and hybrid working, and enabling connection and sharing without borders. With the critical role of an intranet in having a successful IC strategy established, it's time to take a look at the most important features of a modern intranet, and how they can be used to level-up your IC strategy.
1. Maintain a positive culture with social features
According to our survey, maintaining a positive culture was named as one of the biggest challenges IC’s believed they will face in the coming years. This is largely due to the influx of remote and hybrid working. Connection will be the buzzword of the next decade – so how can we keep employees connected, collaborative, and feeling like they are part of a belonging and inclusive culture, when the future of the workplace looks more disparate and disconnected than ever?
The answer is we need to find ways of bringing employees together and creating shared spaces for dialogue and knowledge exchange. The value of enterprise social networking is coming to the fore.
The concept of a social intranet is nothing new, however, some businesses have been more reluctant than others to embrace social features in a workplace setting often citing nervousness around what this kind of open dialogue might entail. Will giving employees an open forum to discuss challenges breed negativity? In our experience, the answer is no. The benefits of creating social spaces for employees to interact far outweigh the potential dangers. When underpinned with the right guidance and the right culture, social networking primes collaborative innovation and boosts culture by fueling connectivity across borders.
Social channels can be used for all company discussions, as a place for sharing insights and discussing business news. Private and dedicated channels can be set up around specific subject matters - whether that's a work-related project or an extra-curricular interest. We've seen our customers use social features in novel inventive ways over the course of the last year that inspired us and furthered our belief that social networking spaces will be crucial to underpinning united culture in the next chapter of work.
Face-to-face collaboration between teams will no longer be the norm, so workforces will rely on the intranet to keep colleagues connected and aligned. Enterprise social tools will be heavily utilized to build community and facilitate knowledge sharing. Building this into your IC strategy is a sure-fire way of ensuring a positive culture of belonging is felt across your organization, despite factors such as location and distance being a challenge.
2. Put the focus back on employee wellbeing with sites
Unsurprisingly, employee wellbeing was highlighted as being a current and future concern for internal communicators. The pandemic placed employee mental health and wellbeing in the spotlight, and as work-from-home schemes gained momentum, leaders also turned their attention towards combatting sentiments of loneliness and change-related stress.
An intranet is a great tool for tackling employee health and wellbeing, with features such as sites helping to deliver the support and information employees need in one easily accessible place. Sites help you to put information in context, so users know where to go when they need information on a specific topic. Well-being and mental health hubs are becoming popular as an efficient way of delivering and aggregating information and activities to support wellness.
Sites can also be used in different ways. Over the course of the pandemic, we saw sites leveraged to create COVID-19 hubs that provided a single place for all information surrounding the pandemic and the company's response. Prior to this, sites were being used for more traditional uses like displaying department information, hosting project-specific information, or as a home for internal clubs and networks.
In the future, we expect to see sites being leveraged to host training and development resources that will support increased agility through upskilling, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion, and wellbeing resources.
3. Cut through the noise and engage remote employees with targeting and personalization
Internal communicators have singled out engaging remote employees as being the biggest challenge. The best way to disengage an audience is to overwhelm them with irrelevant communications. The best way to engage them is to tightly target content based on role, location, and interests so you know the information you’re giving will be valuable to the recipient. In short, the days of mass messaging are over, at a time when the need for corporate messaging is at an all-time high.
The modern intranet is the ideal medium for managing the communications challenges that come with a complex workforce and high volumes of communication. Targeting lets you push content out to select users, while personalization gives users the ability to tailor their own experience. At the same time, tracking lets you keep an eye on who's seen what and who needs to be prompted.
Personalization and targeting allow you to deliver a more relevant intranet experience to your employees that will ultimately help to cut through the noise, delivering the most relevant tools and information to improve engagement and productivity levels. It also helps to eliminate silos that can form when information is not easily accessible. This is especially important with the new influx of hybrid and remote working.
To keep ahead of the game, your IC strategy needs to incorporate the tools to be able to communicate to your global workforce without it getting lost in a sea of messages and notifications.
4. Use video to overcome engagement fatigue and manage business change
Engagement fatigue was noted as being a new challenge by internal communicators, largely due to IC’s having to continually try and keep employees engaged through the turbulent year and new ways of working. It’s important to strike a balance when it comes to employee engagement, and this is where digital tools can come in to help. Instead of having constant noise and articles thrown at them, an intranet can act as the hub for employees to come to and choose the way they want to engage with content.
In line with this, our survey revealed that video communications are on the rise. With digital tools now at the center of the working day, internal communicators have more choice about how they deliver their messages. Video is a compelling medium for enterprise communication because it can be produced quickly and consumed more easily than a long-form blog or worse, email. Video adds variety to any communications strategy, and an increasingly digital world satisfies our craving for more facetime.
To effectively incorporate video into your internal communications strategy, you need a digital platform to host your video comms. Over the course of the pandemic use of video skyrocketed and we saw our customers employing video more and more to deliver key messages, particularly from leadership. Between Jan 2021 - April 2021, nearly 1m minutes of video were watched by employees using a Unily intranet.
An intranet can take the pain out of video-based communications by automating things like transcripts that ensure universal accessibility. An intranet also allows you to put videos in the context of additional information, create easily accessible libraries, and allows your employees to search using keywords to find videos on appropriate topics. Strong use cases for video include:
- Leadership addresses
- Welcome videos for new employees
- Training videos
Creating regular targeted video updates means that you reach and engage your target audience every time. With native video, you can reuse content anywhere across your intranet platform, and for improved discoverability, you can even tag people featured in your video.
5. Keep employee productivity high with a ‘Google-like’ search and integrations
Many internal communicators may have digital tools already incorporated in their strategies, but if they are archaic and unfit for practice, they may become detrimental to the success of your strategy. This can then have an impact on the productivity of your employees. It’s well known that engaged employees are productive employees, so a top goal should be to make employee engagement a priority.
One of the biggest impacts to employee productivity is the time spent looking for the information and knowledge they need to do their daily jobs and tasks. According to a report by McKinsey, employees spend 1.8 hours every day searching and gathering information. On average, that’s 9.3 hours per week of time lost.
With so much information for employees to absorb and an increasing need for employees to be able to self-serve, the need for a searchable hub becomes apparent. With the rapidly increasing scope of today’s enterprise digital landscape, and content stored across a broad range of applications, providing instant access to business-critical information is crucial to enabling your people to do their jobs effectively.
Another productivity driver for employees is to have all apps, tools, and external data sources accessible and searchable from one location. Having an intranet that can integrate everything your employees uses on a daily basis is a huge benefit, especially when combined with the ‘Google-like’ search capability. Workers are able to search for content and data from multiple repositories, but moreover, it reduces digital complexity and improves the overall digital experience.
Having a unified search center delivers enterprise-grade search experiences that can super-charge your search strategy and help you achieve a sophisticated search experience, helping your employees cut through the noise to get to the information they need in seconds. This in turn boosts engagement and productivity, as employees will not be spending their valuable time trawling through multiple different platforms and engines.
6. Utilize feedback and analytics to give every employee a voice
A hugely important aspect of a good internal comms strategy is having the ability to continually improve and evolve it. Traditionally, many internal comms teams may have shied away from measurement. However, if you’re looking to future-proof your approach to intranet management, numbers should be non-negotiable.
An intranet with good feedback and analytics built into it will enable enterprises to know exactly how employees are interacting with the intranet, as well as giving them a voice to offer suggestions and feedback as to how the intranet could be improved. It’s always important to qualify any numeric assessments with qualitative feedback, so enabling a variety of feedback features such as forms, polls and surveys are essential.
Margie Dolch, Senior Communications Specialist at Celanese Corp recommends getting familiar with the basics first by exploring your intranet’s analytics dashboard. Take the time to learn what measures like page views mean so that you can put these numbers into context. Once you feel more comfortable, start sharing analytics with your leadership team and using their feedback to establish KPIs and organizational priorities.
Leveraging your intranet’s analytics is one of the most impactful ways to demonstrate your ROI and secure future buy-in. “It makes me really proud that those metrics are something we can bring forward to show our leadership team the kind of success we’ve had, just like other groups have always been able to do,” Margie concludes.
7. Bridge the gap in frontline engagement with a mobile application
According to the internal communicators we surveyed, engaging frontline employees remains a major challenge for the years ahead. This is largely due to the fact that, despite the crucial role they play, there is a lack of direct communication channels to frontline employees making them difficult to reach. But a modern intranet can solve this.
Incorporating an intranet into your strategy will enable omnichannel communications approaches devised to engage your entire workforce. With enterprise social features, an intuitive mobile-friendly user interface, bespoke user experiences, and a centralized hub for training, company news, and collaboration; modern digital workplaces can connect your frontline employees to the rest of your organization and engage with them on a level previously impossible.
With mobile responsive functionality and personalization options, these solutions facilitate inclusive messaging strategies that can be tailored to optimize end-user experience. Additionally, having a mobile intranet solution means that every employee can access corporate updates from their personal device simply by downloading their company intranet app.
There’s no doubt that the future of work will continue to evolve and change shape over the coming years, so it’s difficult to predict what the ‘norm’ will look like. But taking onboard the insights and advice that this guide shares gives internal communicators everything they need to adapt and take their strategies to the next level.
The biggest wins, challenges, and changes as highlighted by our survey go to show exactly how the landscape has changed so far and showcases the specific areas IC’s should begin to focus on. The advice and insights from industry experts further expand on this and gives a rounded view as to why digital tools – specifically an intranet – may be the vital next step for many internal communicators.
The use-case for having an intranet to enhance and futureproof your internal comms strategy is a strong one. Without a central piece of technology to bring employees together, delivering inclusive and engaging communications will be an uphill battle. With a current issue for IC’s being unfit digital tools, it's now best to invest in the best possible technology to really supercharge your strategy for the coming years.
Ultimately, the future of internal comms is positive and bright. The time has come to seize the momentum and demonstrate to business leaders just how vital internal comms is.