Strategic ads

Every failed intranet migration gets blamed on the wrong layer. Zoe Bennett (Fresh Intranet) and Shannon Ford (Microsoft) migrate organizations into SharePoint Online for a living. Their verdict, from Fresh Intranet's podcast: the technical lift is the easy part. What determines success happens around it. Three patterns worth remembering: * Content ownership is binary, not middling. Some teams know exactly what they have and where it lives. Others can't describe their own files when asked directly. There's rarely an in-between - and the migrations that go well are the ones where more content sits with the first group. * Copilot has changed the stakes on permissions. Badly managed access used to just be confusing. Now Copilot surfaces whatever it can reach, so old permission sloppiness gets handed a much bigger microphone. * The real failure point is adoption, not migration. One project hit every technical benchmark and still failed, because users went back to saving files locally rather than learning the new structure. The migration isn't finished when the technology goes live. It's finished when behavior has actually changed. None of this is a technology recommendation. It's a communication and change management one - delivered by people whose day job is the technology. Full piece: https://lnkd.in/gw5ejheg

When it comes to "digital employee experience," why do companies leave the employee out of the definition? Christiaan Lustig, co-author of the first book on digital employee experience, points to the industry-standard version: the sum total of all digital interactions in a work environment. Accurate. Also missing the clause that makes it usable - "where the needs and expectations of employees come first." That clause changes where DEX work starts. Not the software stack. The person on the other end of the screen. Lustig's diagnostic: if an organization needs a heavy adoption campaign to get a tool used, that's not a training gap - it's a signal the wrong tool got implemented, or the right tool got implemented wrong. His method on every project, before any technology decision, is fifteen-minute conversations with ten or twelve people actually doing the work. He also names the ownership gap directly: DEXOps, a function spanning IT, comms, HR, and facilities - because DEX only improves when departments stop treating it as someone else's problem. Based on a lively discussion between Lustig and Jarbas Horst and David Bowman from Fresh Intranet Article: https://lnkd.in/d8AtH-bj Full conversation: https://lnkd.in/d6R4q4iy

12 percent. That's the share of employees who read internal communications in full. The other 88 percent are skimming, ignoring, or handing it to an AI tool and reading the summary. Fresh Intranet's Employee Attention Recession report (May 2026) puts the number on something the profession has been reluctant to say out loud. Gallagher and the IC Index 2026 confirm it isn't a fluke. What makes the number genuinely uncomfortable: 91 percent of those same employees say internal comms feel relevant to them. This isn't a relevance problem. It's a volume problem. The sheer weight of incoming material has made full readership an unsustainable act. And nobody's fixed it. 83 percent of employees say they receive too much internal content. 83 percent of IC professionals say overload is a growing problem. Two surveys, two different respondent populations, the same number. Both sides have been saying the same thing for years. Mike Klein reviews all three reports - and adds what none of them quite say directly: measuring opens and clicks tells you whether the communication arrived. It doesn't tell you whether anything changed. The question for the profession: will it respond by refining its content, or by changing what it's measuring? https://lnkd.in/e8WQvsBq

Your message left your hands. What arrived on the other end wasn't what you sent. 20% of employees now default to an AI summary instead of reading your communication in full. Their manager filters what gets flagged. The grapevine runs its own version. None of it is visible to you. Fresh Intranet names this the Intent Gap. Gallagher and the 2026 IC Index confirm it's widening - trust in senior leaders down nine points, and a damning mismatch: leaders believe they've been clear on strategy and AI policy; their own employees mostly disagree. Stop measuring opens. They only tell you the email arrived. Mike Klein's fix: ask employees two questions. What are your organization's top three priorities? What are you actually focused on in your job? The gap between the answers is the Intent Gap - made visible, made measurable. Read it in Strategic: https://lnkd.in/gQ2qqbSM And for the full report, visit: 🔗 The Employee Attention Recession: https://lnkd.in/eQBgtZsB

The stat that should change how you think about IC measurement: Only 12% of employees read internal communications in full. That's not disengagement. 91% of employees say comms feel relevant to them. The problem is volume, 83% say they receive too much, and attention is being rationed. Fresh Intranet commissioned independent research with 1,000 professionals and employees across the UK and US, and what came back was a picture most IC teams will recognise, even if the numbers are starker than expected. The Intent Gap: the growing distance between what organisations believe is landing and what employees are actually understanding. A few things the data surfaces: → AI summarisation is now more common than reading in full (20% vs 12%) → 92% of IC professionals worry AI distorts their content's meaning, 95% of employees trust it anyway → Only 33% of organisations have formal monitoring for how content is interpreted once published → The #1 factor in whether someone reads your communication? How many others arrived before it This isn't a crisis. It's a design problem. And the report points to three practical levers, subtraction, building for mediation, and governing, that make a real difference. The full report is free and worth a read whether you're in IC, digital workplace, or just trying to make the intranet actually useful. 🔗 Download: The Employee Attention Recession: https://lnkd.in/eQBgtZsB

🇧🇪 Are you joining us in #Brussels from 16 to 18 April? We are bringing you together in-person to collaborate, celebrate and network. You have different options - choose one, some or all of the following: 🗓️ 16 April 💡 Building the Return on Talent Playbook: A Strategic executive roundtable on #HR + #Communication in the #AI era. 🌎 For: CHROs, CPOs, Chief Comms Officers, Heads of Internal Communication, and Chief People and Communication Officers 🥂 Strategic Global Awards 2026 Dinner 🗓️ 17 April 📢 Communication Leadership Summit 🗓️ 18 April 🚶♀️➡️ Ghent Day Trip For more, visit: https://lnkd.in/dner7C68 or email: [email protected] #Strategic #StrategicGlobalAwards2026 #CLSBrussels2026 #CommunicationLeadershipSummit