About the paper
The report is a focused internal communication channels-and-topics analysis from the IC Index 2025, examining what information UK employees in large organisations want, how much communication they receive, and which channels they rely on.
It is based on original survey research: an online representative quota sample of 4,939 UK workers aged 18–64 in organisations with 500+ employees, fielded in late March to early April 2025; the geographic scope is the UK only.
The methodology is clearly stated, though the report is limited to larger employers, so it does not represent smaller organisations or microbusinesses.
Length: 9 pages
More information / download:
https://www.ioic.org.uk/resource-report/ic-index-2025-guide-to-ic-channels-and-topics.html
Core Insights
1. What is the report’s central argument about the current state of internal communication?
The core argument is that internal communication in large UK organisations is broadly functioning reasonably well at a practical level, but clear gaps remain in relevance, targeting and topic coverage. The report says there have not been “massive shifts” since the IC Index began in 2023, yet some movements are important enough to affect communication strategy, especially when looked at through demographic and organisational differences such as generation, sector and employer size.
In essence, the report presents a fairly balanced picture. On the one hand, most employees say they receive the right amount of communication, most prefer written information, and email still dominates as the everyday channel for updates. On the other hand, substantial minorities still feel under-informed on key issues, especially pay and benefits, career development, job guidance, organisational challenges and hybrid working.
So the deeper message is not that internal communication is broken, but that it needs to become more audience-aware and more disciplined. The strongest practical implication is that communicators should stop treating employees as one uniform audience and instead think more carefully about what different groups need, when they need it, and through which formats and channels. That “know your audience” theme is visually reinforced in the audience-segmentation spread on page 8.
2. How well are organisations getting the volume of communication right?
The headline result is that 74% of employees say they receive “the right amount” of internal communication, while 14% say they get too much and 12% say they get too little. That is a strong result overall, suggesting that most large organisations are not wildly misjudging communication volume.
But the more important finding is what happens when organisations miss the mark. Employees who say they get the right amount are much more positive about communication overall: 75% rate organisational communication as excellent, their engagement score is 75%, and 72% would recommend their employer as a great place to work. By contrast, among those who say they get too little communication, only 17% rate communication as excellent and 42% rate it as poor. Those getting too much communication are also less positive, but not to the same extent: 42% still rate communication as excellent and 20% as poor.
That leads to one of the report’s clearest conclusions: too much communication is less damaging than too little. In other words, information overload is not ideal, but information starvation is worse. The report frames this as a meaningful challenge for leaders and managers, who need to filter noise while still ensuring people get the essentials.
There is also an organisational-size effect. Smaller large organisations, with 500–999 employees, are most likely to get the balance right: 83% of employees in that group say the amount is right. Among organisations with 10,000+ employees, that drops to 67%. This suggests scale makes communication calibration harder, likely because more business units and functions are competing for attention.
3. Which topics do employees most want more information about?
The clearest unmet need is pay and benefits. More than a third of employees, 36%, say they receive too little information on that topic. The next biggest gap is career and personal development opportunities at 31%, followed by guidance to help people do their job at 27%, organisational challenges at 26%, and ways of working or hybrid working, also at 26%.
That pattern matters because it shows employees are not just asking for more grand strategy messaging. They want information that directly affects their working lives, their future prospects and their ability to do their job well. Pay, progression and practical guidance all sit near the top of the list. The report explicitly notes that the top gaps are heavily focused on the individual employee experience.
At the same time, organisational meaning still matters. The report flags that too little information on strategy and direction, career development, job guidance, purpose and mission, and values and culture is associated with a particularly negative effect on engagement. So employees need both instrumental information and sense-making information: what affects me personally, and what tells me where the organisation is going and why.
There are also a few trend signals since 2023. Ways of working and hybrid working has moved up six places on the “too little” ranking, while strategy and direction has dropped five places, implying some improvement on strategy communication relative to other themes. Meanwhile, diversity and inclusion stands out as the topic with the highest “too much” score at 21%, followed by values and culture and people stories/news at 15% each. That does not necessarily mean those topics are unimportant; rather, it suggests some organisations may be over-indexing on them relative to employees’ felt needs.
4. How do employees prefer to receive information about organisational priorities and plans?
The dominant preference is written communication. Overall, 53% say they would prefer to read information about their employer’s priorities and plans, compared with 31% who would rather talk about it in team or group discussions, 10% who prefer visual formats such as film or infographics, and just 6% who prefer audio.
This is important because it pushes back against the idea that internal communication should automatically become more multimedia-heavy. The report shows that written communication remains the default preference for a majority. It also suggests that the appetite for audio has weakened: the share preferring audio has fallen by 6 percentage points since 2023. By contrast, preference for talking about priorities and plans has risen by 11 points, which may indicate a growing desire for interaction and discussion around important organisational issues.
The pattern is not uniform across all organisations. In employers with 500–999 staff, only 44% prefer to read information and 39% prefer to talk about it. In organisations with 1,000 or more employees, the pattern stabilises at roughly 55% preferring to read and 28% preferring discussion. So smaller large organisations appear more conversational in how employees want to engage with priorities and plans.
One especially interesting finding is that digital connectedness makes very little difference here. Employees who spend most of their time at a computer and those in less digitally connected roles have near-identical preferences for reading communication, and only small differences on the other formats. That weakens the common assumption that frontline or offline workers necessarily want less written communication.
5. Which channels do employees actually rely on, and how do audience differences shape channel use?
In practice, email is still the dominant channel by a wide margin. Sixty-five per cent say they rely on email for general news and updates. After that come one-to-ones with line managers at 35%, company newsletters at 34%, and team meetings at 34%. Then there is a second tier: colleagues by word of mouth at 25%, Microsoft Teams at 21%, and the intranet at 17%.
This matters because it shows a clear distinction between preference and reality. Employees may say they like written information, and the channel data confirms that written, scalable formats still dominate everyday organisational communication. Email remains the backbone. Manager communication and team-based discussion are important, but secondary.
The report also adds a useful caution about advocacy. Some low-usage channels, including LinkedIn, Instagram, Slack and TikTok, are associated with very high levels of employer advocacy among the people who use them. But the report sensibly argues that this probably reflects the fact that advocates are more likely to engage with their employer through those channels, rather than those channels causing advocacy. In other words, correlation here should not be mistaken for channel effectiveness.
Audience differences are one of the most valuable parts of the report. On page 8, several patterns stand out:
Public sector employees are more likely than private sector employees to rely on the intranet, 20% versus 15%, while private sector employees are more likely to rely on virtual and in-person town halls. Smaller organisations make heavier use of team meetings, WhatsApp and LinkedIn. For example, among employees in organisations with 500–999 people, 40% rely on team meetings, 22% on SMS or WhatsApp, and 15% on LinkedIn, compared with just 31%, 6% and 4% respectively in the largest organisations.
Generational differences are especially sharp. Gen Z employees are much more likely than Baby Boomers to rely on SMS or WhatsApp, 19% versus 5%, and more likely to use LinkedIn and Instagram. Baby Boomers, by contrast, are more likely to use the intranet, 20% versus 10% for Gen Z. Millennials also show relatively high use of digital screens, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Finally, part-time employees are more likely than full-time employees to rely on word of mouth, 30% versus 24%, and employees in global organisations are more likely to use company newsletters than those in UK-only organisations, 38% versus 30%. Together, these patterns reinforce the report’s strongest strategic point: channel strategy should be audience-led rather than based on one standard corporate mix.
Overall, this is a useful, applied piece of original research. Its main value is not in dramatic headline shifts, but in showing where the practical frictions are: under-communication is more harmful than over-communication, employees still want written clarity, pay and career information remain underserved, and channel reliance varies enough by audience that a single-channel logic is unlikely to work well.