Trends in Employee Communication Strategies

Are your employees truly connected or are they working in silos? Network health is a critical factor that impacts engagement, productivity, and retention. With work becoming increasingly distributed and asynchronous, understanding how collaboration trends shape network health is crucial for People leaders. Here are the key data insights every People leader should know: ▶ Network health is under strain: Employees with fewer than ~60 in-company connections per week report higher feelings of isolation. Teams that foster cross-department collaboration are more likely to maintain strong network health and engagement. ▶ Collaboration spans matter: On average, employees interact with 72 collaborators in a typical week. Low collaborator volume is linked to decreased visibility and poor integration within teams, impacting work performance. ▶ Workday overlap impacts response times: Employees with less daily overlap with close collaborators see an average increase in slack response time by over 60 minutes. This drop in responsiveness is a proxy for overall collaboration health and can disrupt workflows. ▶ Asynchronous work is on the rise: Teams that work asynchronously have more time for focused, project-driven tasks. These teams use tools like JIRA, Asana, and Slack, showing higher efficiency in distributed environments. ▶ Siloed teams lack visibility: Nearly 30% of cross-team collaborations suffer from lack of structured touchpoints. Leaders who formalize cross-team communication see stronger collaboration outcomes and higher productivity. ▶ Isolation leads to disengagement: Employees with fewer than 40 weekly collaborators report lower engagement levels and feelings of detachment from their work and peers. ▶ High async work necessitates strong norms: Tracking async behaviors and educating employees to minimize unnecessary synchronous communication helps reclaim lost focus hours. This translates to more effective remote work practices. ▶ Meeting overload hinders productivity: Teams that cluster meetings to preserve focus time report fewer interruptions and a 15% improvement in task completion. ▶ Slack usage trends away from public channels: 75% of Slack messages are direct, against best practices. Public channel usage drives team awareness and better knowledge sharing, improving collaboration and onboarding experiences. ▶ Cross-team collaboration is essential: Data Science, Engineering, and Product teams that establish structured, cross-team collaboration points perform significantly better on key projects than teams working in silos. For more insights and solutions from Worklytics on network health and collaboration, check out the full report in the comments below. What challenges are you seeing with team collaboration in your organization? #PeopleAnalytics #TalentAnalytics #FutureOfWork #TalentManagement #HRAnalytics

This chart is a wake-up call for executive communicators. According to Ragan’s 2025 Communications Benchmark Report, the most effective way to connect senior leadership’s messaging to employees is no longer town halls. It’s email, by a wide and growing margin. In 2023, town halls were the clear leader (68%). By 2025? Email is No. 1 at 66%, while town halls have dropped to 62%. And small group meetings? Down from 44% to just 20% in two years. What does this shift tell us? It’s not about the format. It's about how employees consume information. Employees are busy. Many are hybrid or remote. And attention is limited. They want leadership updates in a format they can skim, revisit, and reference on their own time. This doesn’t mean we abandon live communication. Far from it. But it does mean executive comms pros need to: ✅ Master the art of writing clear, concise, human-centered emails from leaders No more corporate jargon or vague updates. Executives need help sounding like people, not press releases. ✅ Use town halls for what they do best: connection, not information dumps If email delivers the “what,” live meetings need to deliver the why and the feel. Energy, alignment, vision. Make them moments that matter. ✅ Build layered strategies A single message from the CEO won’t resonate equally through a workforce of 10,000+. Repetition, context, and channel variety still matter. But email is now table stakes. As how people use different channels evolves, so must we.

The pandemic changed our industry. Over the past few years, I’ve observed a dramatic shift in #communications job openings in the tech industry. Tech communications jobs used to be very #PR-focused. But now, the comms jobs I see most often are #AnalystRelations and #InternalCommunications gigs. These are positions that used to be considered pretty niche, or even a “tuck-in” function to another role (like a PR person). Why are they suddenly dominating the (crappy) #commsjobs market? My guess: 💡Companies are finally realizing the immense ROI of a strategic #AR program—this can’t be phoned in or tucked into someone else’s role for a few hours a week. It needs a dedicated leader. 💡Distributed workforces require strategic #EmployeeCommunications—not just ad hoc emails and Town Halls. This role defines culture, creates belonging, and translates vision in a way employees can get behind. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Communications teams *are not just PR teams*, and PR skillsets aren’t necessarily the same as those needed for AR or employee comms (or social media or executive comms, etc.). Communications professionals are focused on multiple stakeholders—journalists, analysts, employees, investors, board members, customers, etc.—and each one of them requires it’s own bespoke communications strategy that’s constantly evolving. Bravo to the companies that are embracing and expanding strategic communications functions like internal communications and analyst relations—the investment in your stakeholders is so worth the results. 👏 👏