One of our main focuses here at Kademy is helping communication leaders think strategically about the big issues. We know the advent of a new year is a great opportunity to take stock, reset and reprioritise. To support you in this journey, we’ve compiled a list of the key trends we’re tracking going into 2025.
We hope this blog will help you understand what they mean for you and your team and what actions might help you navigate them effectively.
Doing more with less
“It’s a difficult time for internal comms” is a refrain we’ve heard repeatedly from leaders over the last 12 months. Tighter budgets, fewer resources and smaller headcounts have left many teams overloaded and overwhelmed. To adapt, leaders have told us they are increasingly relying on self-service resources, enabling business leaders and managers to communicate more independently.
We know you’ll always want – and need – to be on hand to deliver strategic comms support, but having ready-to-use tools and templates is a great way to deliver everyday comms tasks. Beyond this, some comms teams are shifting away from 1:1 executive support to broader corporate voice roles to better spread team resources.
If you are evaluating your team structure due to recent business changes, check out our step-by-step guide for building an agile team today. You can also get in touch to access our member-only library of comms team structure examples, providing you with a helpful starting point.
Change and crisis comms as business-as-usual
Change management is critical because you are in a permanent cycle of change.
For over a year, we’ve been talking about change comms as business-as-usual, to reflect the constant change we face. Today, the same applies to crisis comms. While your company will not experience a crisis every day, you need to be prepared to navigate one any day.
As one comms leader recently shared with us, “It’s a more volatile environment today, with misinformation and social media. It’s easier to be vilified.” This highlights the importance of transparent and authentic communication, as trust can be lost in a moment. As a comms leader, your deep understanding of your employees allows you to provide invaluable strategic guidance to business leaders when necessary. However, like change initiatives, you need to have the fundamentals in place to do this effectively.
Comms leaders are being increasingly regarded as reputation managers.
Looking for inspiration for your crisis comms strategy? We’re convening comms leaders on Thursday, 27th February, for a private roundtable to explore shared challenges, novel approaches and good practices. Get in touch to find out how you can be involved.
Putting GenAI to work
Is GenAI much-ado-about nothing if the use cases are so limited?
At a recent Kademy roundtable with communication leaders in London, strong feelings of disillusionment were evident. Leaders noted waning enthusiasm in their teams and pointed to limited use cases for comms. This is understandable. GenAI tools are still new to us. Now we’ve mastered the low-hanging fruit of AI for content creation, we’re asking, ‘What’s next?’
Our advice is to remain curious and experiment safely. As the technology continues to develop, so will the use cases available to you as communicators. If you are in a forward-thinking business, you might be able to get insights from your tech team or colleagues in other departments. If your business is struggling to make heads and tails of AI, you might want to seek opportunities to learn from peers. It’s also a good idea to talk to your current vendors so you know what new capabilities might be on the horizon.
To give you a head start, we’ve compiled a list of practical use cases shared by our community:
You can download this as a PDF here.
You can also download our GenAI Adoption Guide for Comms Leaders to help you navigate your team’s AI journey.
Reinforcing the value of comms
Remaining on our trends list from 2024 is demonstrating the value of comms. We don’t need to tell you why this is perpetually challenging, nor why it’s especially important when times are hard. At our November roundtable with comms leaders, our members shared some of the measurement strategies that are working for them, including:
- Identify and measure the single metric or metrics your business leaders care about now.
- Remember that quantitative data is your friend but you might need to help your team get more comfortable with it.
- Don’t forget the value of qualitative data. Listening is a fundamental part of measurement.
- Cultivate a measurement mindset within your team so everyone knows it’s a shared responsibility, not a capability held by a few people.
You can check out the full list of tips here.
