Top Trends for Internal Communicators in 2025

Top Trends for Internal Communicators in 2025What are the latest trends in internal communications?

With the start of 2025, internal communicators have a lot on their minds. From disengaged employees to information overload, difficulties abound.

At the same time, advances in generative artificial intelligence and measurement tools to track an initiative’s progress — or lack thereof — can help create new means of not only surmounting these hurdles, but paving paths forward to give your company an advantage over the competition.

In conjunction with Ragan Communications, PoliteMail’s Internal Communications Trends for Success in 2025 survey, which contains responses from more than 200 professional communicators, reveals the industry’s top challenges and opportunities. It also highlights several wins and setbacks at this pivotal time when many are reflecting on the past to better prepare for the future.

Below are some initiatives and best practices for internal communicators based on key issues raised in PoliteMail’s annual trends survey.

Trend # 1: Streamlining Communication Channels

(paragraph)Among the prominent internal communication trends projected for 2025, optimizing each communication channel emerged as a top priority, with a staggering 47% of respondents identifying it as their primary area of concern. While having a variety of methods to reach employees is good, too many options can be time-consuming to manage for communicators and employees alike, leading to missed messages. As the saying goes, sometimes less is more.

When choosing the appropriate channel, there are three big factors to consider: accessibility and inclusivity, learning and retention, and timeliness.

Accessibility

(paragraph)Different employees have different needs. By considering both the known and unknown accessibility needs of your team, along with the information you need to communicate, you can more effectively choose the best channel.

Learning and retention

It’s important to consider how people learn, and how they retain information. Researchers find in general:

  • People learn more when they read text on paper than when they read on screen.
  • Storytelling narratives make it easier for folks to remember information.
  • Quality and relevant visuals shorten processing time and aid in better comprehension.

By considering the different formats of various channels, you can meet the diverse learning styles in the workplace.

Timeliness

With dispersed, hybrid, and fully remote teams, when you select a communication channel or tool, timeliness plays a big role. Will every employee receive the information in a timely manner, and at an appropriate time?

According to the survey report, respondents identified email, intranets, and meetings as the most effective communication channels. Email is a versatile communication tool, well-suited for sharing news, announcements, and event invitations, as well as conveying business strategy, results, operational updates, advice, and reminders. Intranets are great for long form documents, detailed news with back stories, process and policy updates and of course records of benefits, PTO and vacations. Meetings and chats, which have seen a dramatic rise in effectiveness over the past 2 years, are great for real-time collaborative work groups. They are also preferred for business strategy, results, and operational process communications which require some nuance and depth with a good record of the discussions.

Armed with more well-defined target audiences and channel preferences, internal communicators can begin working toward reducing the number of mediums and platforms at their disposal.

Trend #2: Experimenting With New Mediums

Survey results suggest internal communicators are likely to embrace new mediums for conveying information to employees next year. This includes everything from podcasts to messages on video monitors located throughout offices and warehouses.

When doing so, it’s crucial to keep tabs on whether the strategy is working or not with data analysis. Although no one should expect to see a positive outcome immediately, measuring the new medium’s effectiveness from the start will provide a solid foundation for determining whether it’s worth continuing six months after launch.

Performing a communications audit towards the beginning of 2025 can help identify weaker channels and demonstrate where new mediums could be beneficial. When auditing channels, ask these 3 questions:

  • How effective is this channel for this purpose?
  • Do employees feel like they receive sufficient communications?
  • Do employees engage with our messages?

In this situation, hard numbers are more valuable than someone’s subjective opinion, no matter how well-intended.

Trend #3: Solving Information Overload

An emphasis on transparency and keeping employees updated, along with a newfangled messaging platform or social network hitting the market every few months, has led to information overload.

The best way to prevent employees from feeling like they’re drowning in information is to focus on quality over quantity. Establish an easy-to-digest format for your message, whether it’s video or text. Be concise. Better yet, don’t send another email to the entire staff if it isn’t necessary.

Since employees’ often use the filters of “Who’s this from?” and “What’s this about” to decide whether or not a message is worth their time, consider sending messages from a recognized sender versus a generic mailbox. Write compelling subject lines. Take advantage of the preview pane in emails to give a glimpse of what the email is about.

Data can also do wonders in this department. Look up benchmarks for your company’s size and industry to see how you compare. Discover areas where you can improve and get to work on that. If a few long emails sent at seemingly random times throughout a quarter are receiving dismal open rates, for example, maybe try committing to sending a shorter one every other Thursday.

Trend #4: Fostering Leadership Participation

Because leaders often set the tone for what’s acceptable behavior among employees while on the job, it’s important to get them onboard with your communication strategy. If they aren’t using a specific messaging app, for instance, their inaction suggests it’s okay for everyone else to ignore it, too.

This is why getting executives to see the relationship between internal communication and bottom-line business success is so vital. Explain it to them using metrics they understand. Use the jargon they use. They’re more likely to support your initiatives if they can connect your needs with the outcomes they care about.

Here are some best practices for improving leadership communications:

1. Cultivate a culture of communication

When everyone within an organization understands that communication is a key value—not just an afterthought—everyone will be more willing to listen and engage.

2. Don’t be afraid of training

Senior leadership should mandate comprehensive training programs to equip employees with the necessary skills and to fulfill their communication responsibilities effectively.  Those training mandates should apply to executives themselves.

3. Have a common goal in mind

Everyone within the organization should be working toward the same thing, and it’s up to executives to make that goal apparent.

4. Speak in your own voice

Employees want to hear from a person. They don’t want canned, committee-written edicts or AI-generated messages.

5. Engage in a dialogue

Communication doesn’t end when an email is sent or a survey question is posed. Results need to be published, recommendations followed through, and goals reevaluated. Pulse surveys can be beneficial in seeing how employees are responding to initiatives.

6. Measure your results

In the minds of executives, the right types of measurement and metrics transform communication from an expensive necessity into a valuable imperative. Measurement highlights what’s working and what isn’t, allows communicators to assess the success of campaigns, and helps decide which channels to use for what messages.

Trend #5: Measuring the Results

30% of survey respondents noted that consistently measuring and reporting on their multichannel communications effectiveness as a top goal for 2025. In a data-driven business world, it’s no longer acceptable to say a strategy is working simply because someone believes it is. Numbers are everywhere. Refuting an assumption can occur with just a few clicks.

Aware of this fact, many internal communicators seek to enhance their ability to track their efforts across multiple channels. Doing so requires researching measurement companies that provide the desired services, whether that means employee surveys, social listening, or email engagement.

Metrics such as reach and frequency across the various communications channels identify what messages are being delivered to which audience segments. By measuring interactions, repetitions of key phrases and storylines, sentiment analysis, feedback, and simple survey responses, communicators and executives can understand, objectively, how employees are responding to and engaging with your communications. Measurement enables learning what works best to spark employee interest and put an exchange of ideas in motion.

Trend #6: Leveraging Data Analytics

As noted, it’s good to get into the habit of collecting data. The next step, however, is essential: Knowing what to do with it.

Start by asking this question: “How do internal communication efforts contribute to the broader company strategies?” Then work backward.

While spreadsheets filled with statistics can be intimidating, the time to learn data analytics is now. Start with videos on YouTube or enroll in a program such as PoliteMail’s Employee Communication Academy, which offers a course dedicated to the topic. Registration is free.

As more companies make decisions based on hard figures — rather than rely on the CEO’s gut instinct — internal communicators will need a basic understanding of data to get a seat at the table.

Trend #7: Embracing GenAI

When it comes to learning about generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, there’s no better way than jumping in at the deep end.

Visit tools such as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, then start playing around. Ask the platform to tweak a headline. Ask it to write an entire draft of your upcoming newsletter.

Expertise will come with time. Soon enough, you may find yourself teaching your GenAI tool to emulate particular personas for more effective testing or building so-called prompt libraries meant to ensure consistent results no matter which member of the team submitting queries.

Those who refuse to try integrating the technology with their strategy will quickly fall behind those who’ve chosen to embrace it despite its current imperfections.

Here are a few ways GenAI can help internal communicators:

Summarizing

Rather than spending hours reading content, AI can provide a one-page summary with a bullet list of the most important points, and communicators can then dive into anything they want more detail on.

Writing and Editing

Beyond grammar and spell checks, an AI may help write better emails, intranet posts, stories, and other assignments. Ask an AI to reduce three pages to one, or to improve your Flesch reading ease score. Be wary of relying too much on AI, however, as employees are becoming savvy at instantly recognizing AI-generated content as insincere.

Maintain a Consistent Brand Voice

With its ability to learn patterns, AI can help edit content to align with an organization’s defined brand voice.

Research Compilation

Prompt AI to research topics, answer questions, or gather how-to videos.

The internal email trends of 2025 reveal a landscape filled with challenges and opportunities. From streamlining communication channels to experimenting with new mediums, solving information overload, fostering leadership participation, measuring the results, leveraging data analytics, and embracing GenAI, internal communicators have a myriad of initiatives to consider in the coming year. By addressing these key issues and embracing technological advancements, companies can pave the way for more effective and impactful internal communications in 2025.

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