By Tim Vaughan
— January 30th, 2026
Internal communications didn’t dramatically change course in 2025. What it did instead was reveal what has become established and where new pressures are starting to show.
Looking across the immense volume of Poppulo platform data from last year, familiar priorities remained firmly in place. Leadership, wellbeing, health & safety, and IT continued to dominate send volume, underscoring just how embedded internal comms now is in the daily running of organizations.
At the same time, the mix is shifting. AI moved decisively into focus, while other once-reliable themes began to lose momentum.
While this report doesn’t measure employee experience directly, the patterns we see in engagement—what resonates, and what doesn’t—are signals of how people are experiencing work.
In a world where employees increasingly define experience by relevance, clarity, and meaningful interaction with company comms, these engagement shifts point to experience pressure points organizations can’t ignore.
In total, 2.2 billion communications were sent through Poppulo in 2025. That scale alone says something about the role employee communications now plays, but the more interesting story sits beneath the headline number.
- Engagement patterns changed
- Some topics resonated less than they once did
- Others, including sustainability, regained ground
- And return-to-office messaging, once a fixture, faded from the top tier altogether
The infographic below breaks down the themes that shaped employee communications in 2025, how engagement varied across topics, and what current benchmarks reveal as organizations look ahead to 2026.
But this snapshot only scratches the surface. For a deeper, organization-specific view, get in touch with us here.
Taken together, the data suggests employee communications is entering a more demanding phase.
Core themes still account for much of the overall volume, but engagement is less forgiving than it once was. Some topics that previously performed consistently are beginning to lose traction, while others continue to earn attention when the message feels timely and tied to employees’ day-to-day concerns.
Health and safety remained steady. Sustainability regained ground. Return-to-office messaging, by contrast, continued to fall away.
AI stands apart from the broader mix. Its sharp rise in both volume and engagement reflects the practical questions organizations are now trying to answer—how work is changing, what’s expected of employees, and where uncertainty remains.
Unlike more established themes, AI communications appear to be driven less by routine updates and more by the need to explain change as it unfolds.
Benchmarking data reinforces the same tension. While average open rates increased, click and click-to-open rates declined, widening the gap between visibility and follow-through. Messages are still being seen. They’re just not always prompting action.
When interaction drops even as opens hold steady, employees are making quicker judgments about what deserves their attention. And when engagement concentrates around topics tied more closely to how work is actually done, it becomes harder to separate communications performance from experience itself.
Not everything that’s sent is landing in the same way—and that difference is becoming harder to overlook.
As organizations look to 2026, the role of communications in shaping employee experience becomes harder to ignore. What employees open, act on, or bypass increasingly reflects how relevant that information feels to their work.
And while this infographic highlights some of the most visible trends from 2025, it represents only part of a much deeper dataset. There’s more beneath the surface, and more context available for organizations that want to understand how these patterns play out in their own environment.
To find out more, get in touch with us here.