3 Predictions for the Future of Corporate Communication

From paper memos to an excess of e-mails, corporate content has undergone a series of changes over the past few decades. These changes haven’t just impacted the medium–be it a sheet of paper or words on a screen–but also the method. Digital advances have allowed for virtual meetings, remote employees, and interactive content, making today’s corporate communications more engaging, instantaneous, and flexible than ever before.

With new technology cropping up faster than ever, it’s important to adapt to today’s trends and to anticipate what will impact corporate communication in the future. To help you get ahead of the curve, we’ve compiled a list of the top three trends that we think will affect the way you communicate with your employees in the next five years.

1. Your workforce will be increasingly remote

Whether working from home or across the world, technology will continue to enable us to stay connected and informed without being physically present. In fact, thirty-four percent of global leaders said that by 2020, more than half of their full-time workforce would be working remotely. This doesn’t make for an office that is always half-empty, however; instead, companies will give employees flexibility to work remotely as needed.

To ensure that all of your employees–whether in office or at home–have the most up-to-date information, plan on making your content easy to access (think short download times and smart media streaming), while also totally secure (you don’t want sensitive data getting into the wrong hands). End-to-end content solutions allow for automatic updates across all devices, which means that you’ll never have an outdated PDF floating around between remote employees.

2. You will communicate through a variety of devices–some that haven’t been invented yet

Today, most workers bring their work home via their smartphone, but phones are just the tip of the Internet-of-Things iceberg. Already, smart vehicles are providing minute by minute information and instructions, while smart watches are ticking toward mainstream adoption. Who knows how we’ll connect to the Internet next?

Preparing your content for future devices has always been about making sure that it could reflow to fit any screen size, but soon, responsive layout may not be enough. To ensure that you can build on top of your existing software, you’ll need an extensible platform, as well as a file format that you can take anywhere. We recommend file formats that are open-source and can grow with your needs, such as HTML5.

3. You and your employees will receive more information than ever

From ads to articles to our ever-overflowing inbox, we digest a lot of information each day. In 2011, we took in about 174 newspapers’ worth of information each day–an astounding five-fold increase from 1986. Odds are, this number is only going to keep growing, but our ability to process this much information won’t.

Against the backdrop of all of this information, and with our shortening attention spans, your employees need to be able to navigate corporate content quickly. Your content should be structured logically and consistently, and needs to be easily searchable.

More importantly, your corporate content needs to stand out so that employees can apply what they’ve learned, and not just reference it. (Sure, it’s great if workers can look up information on their smart devices, but sometimes workers need information in their actual brains.) Your corporate content needs to take advantage of everything we know about how people learn, offering an engaging experience that invites focus–without the distractions of terrible UI, banner ads, and other unnecessary bling.

Preparing for the workforce of the future

The future of corporate content will always remain a mystery, but by making smart predictions about where trends are headed, we can be better prepared to communicate in the future. The best content solutions stay one step ahead, enabling users to build secure, well-structured, and extensible content.

To learn more about how Inkling’s cloud publishing platform prepares your content for the future of corporate communication, request a demo from our Sales team.