Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

We put so much effort and money into finding and hiring new talent. We need to put as much effort into making them feel like they made the right decision — even before day one. A positive first impression during employee onboarding builds a foundation for long-term success.

When I first came to Silicon Valley in the dot-com frenzy of the ’90s, tech start-ups talked about the fast pace of change in “Web years.” In other words, what used to take years now takes quarters. Fast forward to today, and quarters as measurements of change seem sedentary. As we turn to 2026, what HR trends are on the horizon and demand our attention?

Internal communications teams face a familiar problem: They’re drowning in execution while starving for strategy. Hours disappear into drafting announcements, chasing approvals, and coordinating rollouts. Meanwhile, employees ignore most messages, engagement drops, and leadership wants to see proof of IC’s business impact.

Internal communicators used to be seen as the people who sent the emails. They formatted the memos, updated the intranet, and made sure everybody knew about the holiday party. Important work, sure, but hardly an image that necessitated a seat at the executive table. That era is over. Now IC is all about ROI.

A familiar pattern has emerged across enterprises: Employee technology that should simplify work has created layers of complexity nobody can untangle. Every new tool promised to solve a problem, and technically it did. The issue is that employees now spend more time navigating systems than actually working.

Your enterprise intranet hosts confidential strategic plans and stores thousands of employee records. It’s one of the most valuable systems in your IT infrastructure. Yet many organizations still rely on a generic security questionnaire, check a few boxes, and hope for the best.

The talent you can’t afford to lose is already looking at the door. They’re watching AI reshape their industry and wondering if your organization can keep up. If your retention strategy hasn’t evolved, you’re already behind.

Your employees regularly talk about your company, for better or worse. Every social media post, every coffee chat with a friend, every LinkedIn comment shapes how the world sees your brand. The question isn’t whether your people have influence — it’s whether you’re helping them use it intentionally.

Every day, knowledge workers lose valuable time hunting for information that should be at their fingertips. Emails pile up. Slack threads multiply. Documents scatter across SharePoint, Google Drive, and other systems. Even with the promise of AI assistants, more than a third of employees still can’t find what they need.

About 70% of major change efforts fail to achieve their intended goals, and the cause comes down to people-related challenges. Our lived experience intuitively reinforces this. It’s most often not what we’re trying to implement — the new system, new program, or merger — but how we’re going about it. So let’s remember this as we tackle AI-enabled transformations and prepare our workforces for AI adoption, reskilling, and disruption.