| The ultimate workplace experience conference
The ultimate workplace
experience conference
| The ultimate workplace experience conference
The ultimate workplace
experience conference
Picture this scenario: One of your most talented employees just handed in their resignation. The reason? “I never know what’s happening here and I feel disconnected from everything.” If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Our latest workplace experience trends & insights report revealed a startling truth: 82% of employees struggle to connect and collaborate with colleagues. The cost of poor workplace communication isn’t just missed messages – it’s missed opportunities and lost talent.
“The world of work is changing every day in ways we couldn’t imagine ten, five, or even a year ago,” says Lauren Patton, Director of Internal Communications & Engagement at Appspace. “Organizations that insist on sticking to outdated methods, strategies, and technology that don’t put their people’s experience first are at high risk for missing opportunities for innovation, mediocre productivity, and–worst of all–losing their top talent.”
Key challenge from the report: 69% of employees say their organization delivers inconsistent messaging across different communication channels.
Here’s a scenario: You spend weeks crafting the perfect change management announcement, only to watch it drown in a sea of reply-all emails about something unrelated. Your CEO’s video update somehow has fewer views than last week’s cafe menu. Your most important messages are competing with routine notifications, making every announcement feel like just another ping in a neverending stream of workplace noise.
Integrate your existing tools instead of adding new ones
Rather than adding to your tech stack, use a platform that connects with your existing environment – like Microsoft 365 – bringing all your communication tools into one seamless workflow. If your teams already live in Teams and SharePoint, you should meet them there.
Here’s what this looks like in practice, according to Lauren: Lean into Push vs Pull comms. By giving employees control over their communication preferences, you allow them to filter out the noise that doesn’t apply to them.
“Information overload is often just filter failure, but we can’t always know 100% of what’s relevant for an individual. Giving them the ability to opt in and out of some channels empowers employees to play an active role in improving their experience.”
–Lauren Patton, Director of Internal Communications & Engagement at Appspace
Key challenge from the report: 92% of employees say having a sense of community and personal connection with colleagues is crucial to their workplace experience, yet only 18% say their current tools help foster real connections
Every internal communications leader knows the frustration: Your carefully crafted strategy becomes a series of one-way broadcasts. Town halls generate minimal participation. Critical updates get buried in cluttered inboxes. While we measure metrics, test channels, and refine messaging, our workforce continues to disconnect from company dialogue.
Create spaces that spark connection
The most effective organizations are creating digital spaces that mirror the natural interactions that would happen at a physical workplace. They’re building channels for project teams, communities based on interests, and department hubs. These spaces combine clear structure with built-in social features, making it easy for employees to find and join relevant conversations.
Lauren recommends things like setting up virtual communities that can be public or private, created around projects, teams, special interests, and affinity groups.
She adds: “Encouraging social engagement around company announcements–likes, comments and shares–can also motivate your teams to interact more. Building a praise feature or peer recognition program gives people another way to engage.”
Key challenge from the report: 66% of employees would rather work remotely than come to the office, while 57% say they’re required to work in person more than they’d like.
Remember when the office was more than just a place to sit with headphones on? The best internal comms teams are trying to revive that energy by turning physical spaces into living, breathing channels for connection. It’s about creating those “water cooler moment” opportunities that sparked our best ideas pre-pandemic.
Make mobile the great equalizer
Remember when remote employees always felt two steps behind? A solid mobile strategy changes everything. Give your people a pocket-sized window into workplace happenings—from desk booking to company news—and watch their engagement improve.
Lauren adds that the most successful workplace communicators know that technology alone isn’t the answer – it’s how you orchestrate it. Start with clear guidelines about which channels serve what purpose. Build a framework that makes it easy for teams to know where to share and where to find information. Most importantly, give your teams the structure, policies, and oversight they need to participate more.
“Provide governance and guidelines around what goes where. It empowers users, leaders, and comms teams to create consistency and easy access across the organization.”
—Lauren Patton, Director of Internal Communications & Engagement at Appspace
Key challenge from the report: When only 21% of employees say their workplace tools support real-time communication effectively, it’s time to rethink your tech stack. Adding more disconnected tools won’t solve the problem–but an integrated approach will.
These days, your employees are switching between email, chat, intranets, and digital displays just to stay informed. Each new platform promised to fix everything, but instead created another information silo. This results in updates getting lost in translation, messages becoming inconsistent, and your carefully crafted communication strategy fragmenting across a dozen different tools. The solution isn’t adding tool number thirteen. It’s about making your existing tools work smarter together.
Keep it simple for everyone
When it’s time to choose a unified solution that integrates all these elements in one platform, Lauren recommends that companies prioritize tools with great UX: “Great user design and interfaces make it easy for comms teams, leaders, and employees alike to actually use the tool to contribute, collaborate, and build community.”
She goes on to illustrate with an internal example. Appspace uses Appspace, and when the team launched it for team members, Lauren didn’t provide informal training as part of the roll-out.“Instead, we organized a month-long event with weekly missions to encourage people to learn the platform through structured real-time, real-environment play. At the end, we surveyed to ask what people still felt they needed help learning, and pretty much everyone felt comfortable that they had a handle on it just from experimenting over those four weeks.”
“Effective workplace communication isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s business critical,” Lauren highlights. “Employees are more invested, innovative, and engaged when they have the right information from the right people at the right time, in the way they want it. When leaders are proactive about identifying and solving friction and barriers to the flow of messaging, everyone wins.”
Companies that prioritize seamless, intuitive communication don’t just improve engagement – they create workplaces where people actually want to be. Whether it’s delivering critical updates without inbox overload, making it easier for employees to find what they need, or turning the office into a space that fosters connection, the best workplace communication strategies aren’t just about what’s said — they’re about how information flows.
Want more insights on workplace communications? Get your copy of the report.
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