Seven things we learned about the state of internal comms at the IOIC Festival

Last week, Perago’s Managing Director and newly announced IOIC Fellow Victoria Ford and I spent two days at the IOIC Festival 2026 at Warbrook House in Hampshire. Ten sessions, a full notebook, and a long drive home to process it all.

One thing worth flagging upfront: the IOIC Festival draws predominantly from the private sector, often faster-moving, more commercially driven, with different pressures around change, competition and risk. Working across both sectors, we find that understanding the commonalities and the differences is where some of the most useful thinking happens. The festival delivers both in good measure.

Here are seven things that stayed with us.

Trust is falling. And the evidence for IC has never been stronger.

The IC Index, presented by Ipsos, set the tone for the whole event. Only 57% of employees feel confident in the future of their organisation. Fewer than half think the reasons for change are clearly explained to them, a figure that has fallen a further 7% in a single year. Trust in the leadership team and in the CEO both sit at 50%. Trust in line managers is higher at 73%, which raises its own questions about where messages are actually landing, and why.

The counterpoint is striking. Organisations with a dedicated internal communications function consistently outperform those without, on strategy clarity, on employee advocacy, and on how represented people feel. The gap is significant. 70% of employees in organisations with a dedicated IC team say communication is timely. That drops to 46% without one. The case for investing properly in IC has never been better evidenced.

Change is permanent. IC hasn’t caught up yet.

Research from H/Advisors Maitland, drawing on conversations with 622 leaders across seven international markets, landed one of the conference’s most striking findings: 0% of leaders expect change to slow down. Not one. The old rhythm of plan, launch, land, recover, repeat is gone. Recovery periods are a thing of the past.

The implication for communicators is significant. Designing a campaign for a moment no longer works when there is no moment, only a continuous stream. A useful test from the session: if someone joined your organisation six months after a change was launched, would they understand what’s changing and why? If not, the communication work isn’t done, however good the launch looked.

When culture and comms don’t match, the message is dead on arrival.

One of the most direct sessions of the two days came from Misty Oosthuizen. Her opening provocation, that some internal comms is just corporate gaslighting with nicer punctuation, was designed to land hard, and did. The point beneath it was more constructive: communication doesn’t exist in isolation. People do not hear messages in a vacuum. Tone changes what people hear. Culture does the rest.

The practical challenge she put to the room was clear. If the communication says one thing and the behaviour of the organisation says another, employees notice. A leader who writes with warmth but behaves with opacity doesn’t earn trust. The message dies before it’s read. Getting communication right is necessary. It isn’t sufficient.

AI is the conversation nobody has fully figured out yet.

AI ran through almost every session, and the nuance was more interesting than the hype. Only 35% of employees believe AI is being used to solve the right problems in their organisation. More tellingly, AI-generated communications can quietly erode trust. People sense when a message has lost its human voice, and leadership communications are particularly vulnerable.

The practical session on prompt engineering was one of the more useful of the two days. The framing that resonated most: AI is a talented junior. You are the creative director. The risk isn’t using it. The risk is abdicating editorial judgement to it.

The front line is at risk of being left behind.

This theme surfaced repeatedly. Employees without computer access have dramatically lower trust in leadership and significantly lower psychological safety than those with it. In one survey, 21% of these employees spend no time at all engaging with internal comms sent to them.

The majority of employees have less than ten minutes a day to engage with internal communications. More than one in four aren’t sure if what they receive is relevant to them. Those numbers should give any communicator pause, and they apply regardless of sector.

Designing for how communication actually reaches people, rather than how we assume it does, requires genuine audience insight, honest channel evaluation, and the willingness to go where people are rather than where it’s convenient to be.

Sustainability comms carries real legal risk.

The session on sustainability communication was a timely reminder that this is no longer a values conversation. Misleading sustainability claims can attract fines of up to 10% of global turnover. Directors can be held personally liable. The rule is simple: unless you have the evidence, don’t say it.

For communicators supporting organisations on sustainability narratives, the discipline required is significant. Claims must be specific, caveats must be clear, and everything must be consistent with what has been said before. In a regulatory environment that is tightening, what felt like a communications challenge is becoming a legal one.

Creativity and storytelling still cut through.

One session provided a useful counterweight to the data and the caution. A fictional animated crime drama, rolled out to 25,000 employees across 46 countries, saw 41% engage directly with it. Story-led, human-centred, role-specific creative works, at any scale, and perhaps especially when the subject matter is difficult.

What holds across all seven

Regardless of sector, the fundamentals don’t change: trust, clarity, humanity, evidence. The pressures come from different places. The answers look roughly the same.

And as is often the case at events like this, the greatest value came from the conversations themselves. Thank you to everyone who chatted, challenged, and kept the thinking moving. And thank you to Jen, Dom, Joe and the wider IOIC team for bringing the two days, and the people, together.

A few things worth sitting with: the trust data is real and the gap between organisations that invest in IC and those that don’t is measurable. The legal exposure on sustainability communications is growing. And the question of how to reach people who have ten minutes, if that, to engage. That one doesn’t have an easy answer.

We’ll keep thinking about all of it.

On a personal note. Since the festival, Victoria has been announced as a Fellow of the IOIC. It’s thoroughly deserved, and a reflection of a long-standing commitment to the internal communications community: to the practice, the people, and the conversations that make both better. The two days at Warbrook House were a good reminder of why that commitment matters. There’s important work to do.