The futility of New Year’s resolutions was weighing on me the other day. I want to be better at some things in the new year: exercising more, eating healthier, spending more time with family, reading more. I am, however, acutely aware that, according to research, 23 percent of people quit their resolutions by the end of the first week, and 43 percent give up by the end of January. By February, as many as 80 percent have failed to keep their resolutions.

How can I set New Year’s resolutions I’ll keep? It occurred to me, then, that I might be more motivated to stick with my resolutions if they were focused on my work rather than my personal life.
So, at the dawn of 2025, I reflected on the lessons of 2024 in an effort to identify the choicest opportunities of the year ahead. The past year brought significant challenges in my job and in the internal communications profession in general. The last 12 months also opened doors to new ways of driving engagement, trust, and collaboration.
Let’s consider the key lessons learned, the opportunities on the horizon, and actionable resolutions I’m making to guide my work in the year ahead. Feel free to crib from my list.

Challenges of 2024

2024 was a year of complexity, marked by a confluence of challenges for internal communicators:

• Employee Engagement and Trust: Maintaining trust in an era of economic uncertainty, return-to-office debates, and layoffs proved challenging. Transparency and clear communication became vital yet harder to achieve.
  
• Artificial Intelligence (AI): The integration of AI tools was accompanied by equal measures of excitement, caution, and fear. While personalization and efficiency improved, concerns about ethics, privacy, job loss, and the potential erosion of human touch surfaced.
  
• Polarizing Social Issues: Global events, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, highlighted how political and social topics can ripple through workplaces, requiring thoughtful communication strategies.
  
• Data Security: Breaches, like the Disney hack, underscored the importance of protecting internal communications from external threats.
  
• Measuring Effectiveness: Many of us communicators struggled to define KPIs and prove the impact of our internal communication initiatives.
  
• Hybrid Work Challenges: Reaching both in-office and remote employees required new approaches, tools, and mindsets to ensure inclusivity and consistency.

Opportunities for 2025

The new year reveals a landscape rich with possibilities. Internal communicators can look to a series of prominent trends to amplify our impact:

• AI Innovation: Use generative AI to automate repetitive tasks, analyze feedback at scale, craft personalized messages, and perform a variety of other internal communication tasks—while ensuring ethical use and keeping the human in the loop. It is time to expand our experimentation to determine how generative AI can improve productivity and creativity while freeing us from mundane work to spend more time on creative and strategic efforts.
  We also need to work more closely with IT, HR, and Legal to inspire and motivate reluctant, leery, or frightened employees to undertake their own experimentation and embrace using generative AI in their jobs.
  
• Enhanced Employee Experience (EX): Collaboration across departments to design memorable employee touchpoints, like onboarding and milestone recognition, will foster a stronger sense of belonging. To be effective in a meaningful way, we need to look beyond the superficial trappings of EX (do companies still buy foosball tables for their break rooms?) to identify those organizational behaviors that not only make employees feel good about their jobs, but also align them with the company’s mission, vision, purpose, and values.
  
• Data-Driven Insights: Few communicators love math, but we live in an era where leveraging advanced analytics to measure communication effectiveness and refining strategies based on actionable insights is non-negotiable. The key to this opportunity can be summed up in one word: “Listen.” Employee voice is a cornerstone of EX and engagement. Internal communicators occupy the best position in the organization to develop the multiple channels – including the means by which leaders learn what employees are saying – that give employees that voice.
  
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I): The data could not be clearer: Strategic DEI– that is, efforts tailored to your organization and not off-the-shelf PowerPoint presentations – deliver outsized productivity, innovation, and profitability results. Yet political posturing has led to targeted attacks on companies with DEI goals and plans, leading a growing list of companies to abandon the work. Communicators should lead efforts to amplify underrepresented voices and create safe spaces for dialogue, embedding DE&I principles into every facet of communication. We can also counsel our leaders to dissuade them from jerking their knees in response to outside pressure.
  
• Multimedia Engagement: Our work focuses on employees, but employees are consumers who reflect the media consumption habits of the larger population. We need to understand shifts in the media world and adjust our communication to take advantage of the kinds of media that resonate with employees. (We know, for example, that a growing number of Gen Z and Millennial employees get their news from TikTok. Why aren’t we sharing company news in short TikTok-style videos, opting instead to continue writing long articles nobody reads? We need to experiment with short-form videos, interactive infographics, and immersive AR/VR experiences to make internal messages more engaging and memorable.
  
• Hybrid Work Evolution: While some executives seem bound and determined to force a return to the office on their workers, the results of these edicts are becoming clear: The best employees, who see drastically improved work-life balance in hybrid work arrangements, are leaving the companies forcing them back to the office every day, leaving their employers with a workforce characterized by mediocrity. We must optimize communication strategies and tools to bridge the gap between remote and in-office employees, ensuring equity and connection.
  
• Alignment with ESG Goals: Environmental, Social, and Governance is another category under assault by the political right-wing, yet increasingly, it is the requirements of customers and laws and regulations initiated by governments that are driving companies to adopt practices consistent with ESG. It is the internal communicator’s job to tie our communications to ESG initiatives, giving employees a clear sense of purpose and involvement. Ensuring employees grasp the company’s ESG goals and the reasons for them can also cool temperatures that rise when those polarizing social issues arise.
  

New Year Resolutions for Internal Communicators

To meet the challenges and embrace these opportunities for 2025, I have made these resolutions:

1. Deepen Employee Connections: I will focus on campaigns and initiatives that celebrate employee achievements, enhance EX, and make employees feel valued.
   
2. Commit to Measurement: I will update my strategic plan, ensuring it is grounded in clear KPIs, uses analytics, and enables me to tell compelling stories with data to demonstrate the value of my team’s work.
   
3. Expand My Multimedia Toolkit: I will incorporate new formats, like short-form news-focused videos, into my communication strategies to better engage a diverse workforce.
   
4. Champion Inclusivity: I will ensure all voices are heard by embedding DE&I principles into company messaging and creating space for open, honest discussions.
   
5. Secure Communications: I will strengthen my partnership with IT to bolster cybersecurity measures, keep employees informed of new threats and how to safeguard against them, and protect sensitive internal information.
   
6. Stay Purpose-Driven: I will better align my communications with company values, purpose, and ESG goals, showing employees how their work contributes to a larger mission. In 2025, I will establish a strategic narrative for the organization so every employee (and customer, supplier, and partner) can see where the company is going and why they should want to join us on the journey.

A Year to Lead with Purpose

2025 is a year of opportunity for internal communicators to lead with purpose, creativity, and a focus on what matters most: connecting people and facilitating the flow of information from those who have it to those who need it, when they need it. By resolving to embrace technology, prioritize EX, and stay ahead of emerging trends, we can make a profound impact on our organizations.
Let’s step into the new year with a renewed commitment to fostering trust, engagement, alignment, and connection. With the right mindset and strategies, the challenges of 2024 will become the foundation for our greatest successes in 2025.

Here’s to a year of growth, innovation, and impactful communication.