5 Internal Comms Trends to Look Out For in 2022

Now that 2022 has finally started, it feels like the days when workplace communication was carried through phone calls, emails, and instant messages are long gone. Nowadays workplace communication trends are changing within the blink of an eye, while the impact of the pandemic is here to stay (at least) throughout this year.

 

To keep up in this unpredictable environment, it’s essential to focus on how organisations communicate internally, as nearly 74% of the workers miss out on important company news. Today, it is crucial to keep up with the current workplace trends and expectations, but only if they can be optimally embedded into the organisation.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been so strong that companies realised its effect in 2021. To eliminate it, many have made more effort into delivering their messages dynamically, taking real-time updates, and notifying policy changes to their employees using employee appropriate platforms. (We’re one of those platforms, by the way!).

 

But to better understand this dynamic here, we need to take a look at some data such as these one below:

 

• 44% of the employees want more involvement of Internal Communication tools

• Since the pandemic occurred, 75% of the employees feel more lonely, while 53% are

  emotionally exhausted

• Among all the communication trends in the workplace, employee satisfaction is ranked as the highest one

• The difficulties faced in measuring Internal Communications lowered in 2021 from 72% to 56%

• 83% of the respondents say that leadership is the potent source that defines leadership in a company

 

Looking at the above, it is clear that many companies are shifting their concern towards bringing more effectiveness in their Internal Communication. Also, all those valuable lessons we’ve learnt from last year need to better drive every professional this year. So, what trends should we be expecting to face exactly?

 

 

A Shift to Distributed Workforce

 

In 2022, we’ll go beyond the remote workforce and companies will be striving toward building a truly distributed workforce. Leaders will have to shift their thinking about remote workforces, moving from individual responsibility to organizational responsibility. That’s right: it’s going to be the company’s job to provide the same context of in-person work, remotely (i.e. work practices, behaviours, systems and processes).

Here, a key change will be the increasing intersection of IT and HR teams within companies to establish tools and policies that increase workers’ autonomy and alignment.

 

Continuous Increase in mobile-based communication

 

With the passage of distant and distributive working culture, the mode of communication is changing drastically. Due to such a flexible and new working mode, the need to establish a more simplified and intuitive interface for the workers to communicate is generated.

 

Mobile applications are the future of workplace communication that is indeed required to form continuous connectivity internally. Moreover, as today’s workplace is accomplished with millennials and Gen Z, the tech-savvy employees require speedy communication channels.

 

A new focus on employees expectation

 

Pandemic half-life may stretch throughout 2022 (and early 23), it may mean some organisations are forced into transformation, earlier than they had hoped. Chief among which is the fight for talent within the expectation shift from workforces. Employees now expect contact, recognition, mental and physical support and inclusion. Therefore employers must align all areas of their technology (and execution) domain to meet the new environment of employee expectation.

 

In such situations, the need to support employee well-being is crucial. Having stressed and burnt-out employees bring lots of undesired results, including disengagement, decrease in productivity, and high turnover. Due to the pandemic, mental health and safety concerns have also been generated – about 51% of employees said that their mental health got worse since the beginning of COVID-19.

 

As a result, HR managers needed to bring more innovative tactics to lower employee stress levels and improve connectivity with the company. To upscale employees’ well-being offerings, virtual tools, feedback surveys, portals on the intranet, or employee assistance programs that let employees feel supportive for approaching when required can work.

 

Next phase for employee experience

 

Employee experience is an inseparable part of the employee communication toolkit as it lets people be involved, connect and remain informed about the organization. It’s a an evolving topic that every HR department considers the height of important focus for the last few years.

 

In 2022 employee experience takes a front seat and companies will have to find ways to lift it from the jargon book and reify it. We’ll see this change surfaced in ‘human’ experience, built around experiential and purpose driven messaging which aligns with the organisation’s CSR and community identity. This next phase for EE will likely see brands supporting employees to find their own tribes within the organisation and being highly vocal and holistic in the deployment of company culture communication. We expect evolving enterprise EE to be increasingly similar to some EE’s found throughout the startup and unicorn space.. We’ll come back to this topic in full soon also 😉

 

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No one could have predicted all that 2021 would bring but, if we take stock of what we’ve learned to do this past year, we can make a real difference for our people in 2022!