Speaker 1: In this video, I'm going to give you some insights into the top five trends in internal communication right now. My name is Joanna Parsons. I am an internal communications consultant, author, trainer and lecturer, and I'm here to help you demystify the world of internal comms and employee engagement in your organization. So trend number one in internal comms right now is artificial intelligence, also known as AI. Probably unsurprising that this is on the list. This has taken over the headlines all year. We've all heard about ChatGPT and Mint Journey and all these other tools. And for internal communicators, this is going to be a totally transformative technology for how we work, the outputs we create and the impact we can have on organizations. So lately, I'm hearing a lot of early adopters, people who are genuinely curious about artificial intelligence, how they can use it for their work, are using it for things like generating first drafts of content. So you know that feeling you've got like blank page syndrome. You have to write an article for your CEO or your senior leader, but sometimes it's really hard to start. So what some internal communicators are doing, they are using a tool like ChatGPT to generate a first draft. It can be a pretty rough first draft, which then they can use to start playing around and fixing it and improving it and getting it to the place they want. And for some people, this could save them half a day's work. So it's quite efficient. So there are lots of ways that you can use these tools to make your job more efficient and to just kind of take the heavy lifting off some of the work we just have to do in terms of content creation. Now, this isn't without controversy. Some people really hate the idea of content drafts being made by AI. That is totally up to you and what you're comfortable with. I think the key message when we're thinking about AI in internal communications is that we should really lean in and really get curious about this technology and how we can use it, almost as our assistant or our second brain, to do some of the busy work, some of the heavy lifting, some of the more tedious tasks that we can outsource to a robot so that we can free up our time for more value-added strategic communication. So my advice to you is don't resist the new technology. Just get curious about it. Experiment with it. Practice with it. Have a look around at the AI tools that are available to you and see how they can help you be more efficient in your job. So the second trend is actually quite an old one. It's around channels and content. So we live in a world now where there are a bajillion different employee communication apps, loads of different internal comms tools. We have access to more technology to do our jobs than we ever did before. But in some organizations, what's happening is they're introducing lots of new digital channels without retiring any others. So you end up with a situation where you might have 20 different internal communication channels and then you have 20 channels that your employees have to wade through just to find out what's going on at work. And that doesn't sound very audience-centric to me. Thinking about it from the point of view of an employee, that actually sounds terrible. So if you have a feeling like this is happening in your organization but you're not really sure what to do with it, a really good place to start is just to create a very simple communications channel matrix, which sounds complicated, it isn't. Write down all the channels that you have, how often you send content through them, what the purpose of that channel is. So your channels are things like email or your intranet or your town halls or your podcasts, whatever you have. And beware of adding extra channels if you're not retiring an old one. So think about the channels you have, think about the channels you need and see what the gap is between the two of those. And the second bit of this is around content. So again, in an age of endless digital noise, it's becoming increasingly difficult for employees just to know what's important and what's not. So you might be getting pings and dings from 20 different channels with lots of different information all at the same time, but the more messages that are flung at you, the less are going to stick. So I think the key message we really need to look at on the trend is actually that less is more. Let's turn down the noise so that people can hear what's important. And part of this as well is about creating content that is consumer grade, is probably the word I would use. So there seems to be a huge gap in so many organisations between the content we create for customers and the content we create for employees in terms of the quality and the standard. So I think we really need to close that gap and to raise the quality and the standard of the communications we're creating for our employees, knowing that they are our biggest stakeholder group. So here's some very simple practical tips on how you can up your game for your channels and your content. So tip one is to create a fairly comprehensive channels matrix in your organisation. Map out all your channels and the purpose of them and get very, very clear on why they exist. And if they're not needed, get rid of them. Second practical tip is to put in some word count limits for any written content that you have. So if you have a newsletter, intranet blogs, anything like that, put some guidance around how long they can be. So for example, a newsletter article, maybe 200 words. People are screaming for fewer words, so you can enforce that. And third practical tip is to use plain, clear, simple language. Just take the cognitive load off your reader. Let them understand something immediately at a glance without having to decipher it. And then the fourth practical tip around channels and content. If you're actually feeling like, God, we're drowning here and everything's a bit of a mess and I don't even know where to start, then an internal communications audit is probably a good thing for you to invest in right now. The third trend in internal communication is a move towards being more strategic. So a lot of internal communication teams operate as quite passive order takers, almost like an arts and crafts department. They produce a lot of content, they churn out a lot of stuff, but they find it very hard to draw a line between the work that they do and the performance of the business. And actually what you really want to do is move into the space where you're operating more as strategic advisors and that all of the work that you are producing and delivering is directly supporting the delivery of the business strategy. So in order to do this, the first thing you need to understand is your business strategy. So if you have never read your organization's strategy, that is your first piece of homework. So you need to understand what is the organization trying to achieve? What are those three, four, five high level things that the business wants to achieve? So that could be retaining more customers, becoming more efficient, getting more share of the market, making more money. These are the things that are really important to your CEO and your leaders. And then you need to figure out, well, actually, how is internal communication going to help the organization to do that? Once you get into that space, you're becoming more strategic. You also need to get very clear the difference between outputs and outcomes, and you need to be able to measure both of these things. So a very simple way to understand it is think about outputs as the things that you make or produce or create. Your newsletter is an output. Any trainings that you deliver, they're outputs. Lovely posters you stick on the wall, they're outputs. They're the things that you make. The outcomes is the changes that happen as a result of those activities. So say you've printed 20 posters and you've made 17 newsletters and you've held four town hall meetings. So what? What is the difference as a result of all of those activities? Are people doing things differently? Are people feeling differently about the organization? Are people understanding things better? And how does that map upwards to what the business is trying to achieve? So the fourth trend in internal communication is getting better at communicating with people that do not sit at desks. Frontline workers, say, for example, they might be police officers, they might be nurses, they might be operating machinery on a factory floor. They do not sit at desks reading email all day. And these employees have traditionally always been quite difficult for internal communicators to reach. So now is the time where we start paying more attention and more care and deliberation into not only reaching them properly, but delivering content that matters to them and helps them feel engaged. So, for example, some recent research by Jenny Field and her team really focused on the importance of verbal updates for these employees rather than written content. And their main source of truth is their line manager. So it might seem quite old fashioned to focus on a line manager cascade for internal communication, but it's effective if you have a retail team, say, that work on a shop floor and once in the morning they get together with their team lead and they brief them on what's going on. That is the perfect channel to deliver the key information they need to do their jobs. Also, what's really critical about this group is the need for internal communicators to adopt more of a sociologist or an anthropologist approach and to undertake some participant observation. And basically what that means is you go and spend time with your frontline workers, observe them, watch how they do their job. How does their day look? Where are they spending their time? How are they getting their news? How can you help to understand their experience of work so that you can deliver more relevant content through more targeted channels? And lastly, for this group of employees, it's really important that we understand their content needs, because often what you can find is a very big gap between leadership who sit in the corporate office and the actual frontline workers on the shop floor. They might have very different understandings of what each group needs. So don't be driven just by what leadership are telling you the shop workers need. Go and ask the shop workers yourself and make sure that you really understand your audiences properly. And then the fifth trend in internal communication, quite a refreshing one. In an age of so much technology and really fast, accelerating pace of digital transformation, this trend is all about human connection, human conversation, and that need for people to connect and belong with each other. So there will always be a place for digital channels. We do need them. But at the same time, not everything can be relayed through a text message, through a Teams channel, through a podcast. There is a time and a place for good old fashioned conversations and to create opportunities for people to connect with each other, to speak with each other, to make friends with each other. So it's really important that we continue to emphasise the need for meaningful human connection at work so that the whole thing doesn't become totally transactional. Not everything can be solved through the introduction of a new digital channel. Not all messages are appropriate to be sent through a digital channel. So just be mindful of this again, thinking about your communication channel matrix. Map this out and where are you including the space for conversations, for people to hear directly from leaders and for people to be able to communicate directly with each other. And the nice thing about this trend is it costs nothing. Not every communication challenge needs a budget to be solved. So when you are doing your planning, trying to solve your problems, think about where does face-to-face communication come in and how can you use that to solve your problems. So these are the top five internal communication trends that I'm seeing in the industry right now. And I don't think these are going away anytime soon. If this is useful to you, please subscribe to this channel. I will be creating more videos to demystify the world of internal communication and employee engagement. Thanks for watching.