How to Gain a Better Understanding of Employee Communication Preferences

Choosing the right channel: How to identify and optimize employee communication preferences

An important company update might need to engage an employee who works remotely from a co-working space in NYC, a field technician on-site in Chicago, and a senior executive at your Bay Area headquarters.

One person prefers these updates via email, another via text notification, and the other relies on face-to-face meetings. This range of preferences demonstrates a critical challenge for internal comms teams: there is no one-size-fits-all approach to employee communications.

How can you better understand these employee communication preferences? What communication channels and tools do you have available? How can you optimize your internal communications? Here’s how to tailor your messaging and tune your channels to increase employee readership and engagement.

What are communication preferences?

Communication preferences describe how individuals best receive, process, and respond to information. These preferences can include message timing, channel selection (email, meetings, chat, or internet posts), medium (text, video, voice), and sender. Employee roles, work environments, tools, generations, and workstyles shape their communication preferences. Ultimately, communication preferences describe how someone wants to receive information.

How different generations communicate at work

Let’s look at one factor that might influence how you craft and send messages: communication preferences by generation. Although this list is based on broad generalizations, these tendencies can help illustrate the range of employee preferences.

Baby Boomers (1946-1964): Tend to prefer formal, structured communication like emails and scheduled meetings. Videos can add a personal touch since face-to-face interaction isn’t always possible. For example, you could use video messages to communicate company announcements to help baby boomers feel more connected and informed.

Gen Xers (1965-1980): This generation tends to value a mix of email and direct messaging. They like efficient, no-nonsense communication. While they’re tech-savvy, they still appreciate professional etiquette. Therefore, Gen X employees might prefer a concise email that outlines key takeaways rather than a lengthy report.

Millennials (1981-1996): Millennials tend to favor digital-first communication, mobile-friendly platforms, and collaboration tools. If you want to communicate with millennials, make it a two-way street and solicit feedback. And one last note: millennials are a TLDR generation (i.e., too long; didn’t read it), so keep things short and skimmable.

Gen Z (1997-2012): Gen Z often prefers short-form videos, interactive content, and casual, authentic communication. Unlike older generations, they tend to reject traditional workplace jargon and are less willing to code-switch. For example, you could use memes or casual language in internal Slack channels to make internal comms more relatable for Gen Z.

Why communication preferences matter

Accounting for communication preferences goes beyond keeping employees informed–it impacts the employee experience. A study of 3,457 employees showed that internal communication satisfaction positively influenced employee engagement. Similarly, this study found that effective internal comms strategies can increase job satisfaction and organizational engagement.

How to identify employee communication preferences

Before you can optimize employee communications, you need to understand how your workforce prefers to receive and engage with information. While generational trends and industry benchmarks can provide helpful guidance, every organization has its own unique communication culture. The most effective approach is to combine employee feedback and behavioral data along with trends and benchmarks.

Conduct employee communication preference surveys

One of the simplest ways to identify communication preferences is to ask employees directly. Include questions about preferred communication channels, content formats, frequency, and timing. For example:

• Which channels do you use most often: email, Teams, Slack, intranet, text messages, or meetings?
• What types of communications do you consider most valuable?
• How frequently would you like to receive company updates?
• Do you prefer written content, videos, podcasts, or live presentations?

Regular pulse surveys can help communicators monitor changing preferences over time and identify differences across departments, locations, and job roles.

Segment employees by role and work environment

Communication preferences often depend more on an employee’s day-to-day work experience than demographic characteristics. A frontline worker without regular desk access may prefer mobile notifications or digital signage, while a corporate employee may rely on email and collaboration platforms.

Consider segmenting employees based on factors such as:

• Job function
• Department
• Location
• Remote, hybrid, or onsite work status
• Leadership level
• Technology access

These audience segments can help you deliver information through the channels employees are most likely to use and trust.

Analyze your communication engagement data

Employee behavior often reveals preferences more accurately than self-reported feedback. Analyze communication metrics to understand how your workforce interacts with various channels and content formats.

What are your open rates, page views, response times, and engagement levels? Have you performed A/B testing for different formats and channels to refine your strategies based on real-world results? As you learn more about employee communications preferences and tailor your content, do you see a positive trend in your communication metrics?

Benchmark against industry communication trends

While employee surveys and communication metrics provide organization-specific insights, industry research can help you identify broader workplace communication trends and emerging employee expectations. Consultancies like Gallup, Deloitte, and Gartner, and communications technology vendors like PoliteMail, routinely publish aggregate workplace data about employee behavior. These reports can give you a starting point and a benchmark to compare your own measures against and can help you understand how communication preferences vary across industries, work environments, and employee demographics. Understanding these trends can help communicators anticipate changing employee expectations and make more informed decisions about channel strategy.

Optimize your channel strategy around employee preferences

Next, you’ll want to optimize your communication channels to reach your people more effectively. Let’s examine some of the common corporate communication channel types.

Email: Most appropriate when a message requires undivided attention, asks for action, follows up on an emotionally challenging topic, or covers complex information. Email also wins for assignments, appointment or deadline reminders, announcements, and video content.

Meetings, both face-to-face and online: Research shows that in-person and online video conferencing meetings build trust, positively impact team empowerment and persuasion, help reduce misunderstandings, and improve conflict resolution.

Town halls are helpful for significant updates, leadership visibility, and interactive discussions.

One-on-one and small group conversations are ideal for managing groups and teams, training employees, providing feedback, and sharing emotionally complex or nuanced information.

Messaging apps (Teams, Slack, Viva Engage, etc.): These tools are good for building communities, informal collaboration, collecting feedback, answering quick questions, real-time group discussions, and connecting employees, especially remote workers.

Intranets: Great centralized hubs for company news, HR resources, and self-service tools. They can give employees easy access to benefits info and answer common questions like “How much PTO do I have?”

Each channel has an optimal message format, style, and length; sticking to these helps ensure clear, engaging, and effective communication. In other words, simply posting identical content in multiple channels is far from the ideal multichannel strategy.

How to streamline channels and tools

You likely have more channels than those listed above, whether digital signage, apps, screen scrollers, or more. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s better. Technology adoption is a real issue.

Channel consolidation is beneficial for content creators and the audience, as is streamlining content and targeting relevant audiences to ensure messages reach employees effectively without redundancy or overload. You can achieve this by creating a clear strategy that assigns specific purposes to each channel based on the above recommendations–and letting employees know where to expect what.

Routine measurement and regular comparative analysis of channels will inform you of what is effective and enable you to adjust your approach accordingly. Therefore, a well-structured communication and channel strategy keeps employees engaged without overwhelming them.

Making employee preferences a priority

Learning about your employees’ communication preferences and adapting your messaging to meet their needs is key to engaging them. Writing messages people want to read and delivering them via preferred channels will create a more informed and connected workforce. Start by asking which channels employees prefer for what content, then consider how your current communication strategies align with these employee preferences.