The communications discipline has been evolving at quite a dizzying pace in recent years. So what next? Rebecca Richmond, research & content director at training agency Melcrum, asks: what does the future hold for internal comms?

As I write, we’ve just completed our latest project for Melcrum’s Strategic Communication Research Forum, on the future for internal comms. We felt that if we could understand the broader business landscape over the next three to five years, we would be able to anticipate the likely implications for internal comms and provide guidance for the function.

We identified four key trends shaping the global business landscape over the next few years:

The Post-Recessional Environment

For post-recessional recovery, companies often focus on the financial implications for the business. They are, of course, extremely important. But the long-term implications for the work environment are not always highlighted with the same intensity, yet will likely re-chart the relationships between corporations, leaders/managers, employees, and other stakeholders. Within this notion of the Post- Recessional Environment, we’re talking about two key themes – rebuilding trust in the organisation, and the Employee Value Proposition (EVP).

The Drive for Productivity

Doing more with less, it seems, will continue to fortify its position as the mantra of the corporation. Unquestionably the concepts of lean and six-sigma cast their shadow here. Though they have long been present in corporate thinking (and have often delivered significant value and ROI), the concept of streamlining process will come to the fore again. In the event of continued streamlining, many companies will have less resource and therefore people themselves – with their ability to do more with less, innovate, question to find new ways of working – will become more crucial. We will need to identify ways of tapping into our collective intelligence across the organisation through collaborative platforms and flexible working.

The Diversifying Workforce

This is the issue that communicators are already all too aware of – both in terms of opportunities and challenges. And yet, according to every study that we reviewed and virtually every conversation or interview that we conducted, these opportunities and challenges will develop with great speed over the next few years. Here, the two biggest issues we highlight are global/local balance, and the crossgenerational workforce. As we explore these, the need for a segmented approach to the diversifying workforce becomes clearer (though its importance depends on the size of your organisation).

Corporate Structure, Management & Sustainability

In some regards, the overall impact of the three issues already highlighted have a ‘knock on’ effect for the overall corporate architecture and management of any business. So what are the key ‘weather conditions’ that the corporate ‘ship’ needs to consider when it comes to structure and management? The way we do business; how we convey those business strategies and processes in an open way; the way our people work (and need to work); and expectations from employees, stakeholders, customers, markets, governments, etc.

Key elements here are transparency and sustainability, and leadership and management - the drivers we’ve focused on from the perspective of the implications for overall business, before turning to the implications for communicators.

Our study, then, is structured around these four ‘drivers’, with each section containing an overview of the trends, the driving factors behind them and validation from a broad array of resources. Then come the implications for internal comms along with our recommendations for how communicators should respond. If you’d like to learn more about the project, don’t hesitate to contact me. We’d welcome your input, perspectives and feedback.