Your job got harder. Here are four reasons why.
1. Engagement is low
You can’t communicate by yourself. That would be speaking to an empty room. As someone sending a message, you need someone on the receiving end for communication to take place. And that’s where the trouble starts, because most people are checked out of work. Only one in five employees are engaged, costing the world economy $10 trillion (Gallup, 2026).
Go on. Ask a follow-up question: why are so many disengaged?
Employees disengage as a defence mechanism (Afrahi et al., 2022). It kicks in when the burdens of work start endangering their sense of safety and meaning (Kahn, 2017). And the threats are everywhere. We have the daunting task of living through interesting times.
We’re hitting historic highs…
- July 22 2024 was the hottest day on record (NASA, 2024)
- The number of inter-state conflicts in 2025 was the highest since WWII (Rustad, 2026)
- Gen AI became the most rapidly adopted general-purpose technology (CCIA, 2025)
- The level of billionaire wealth is higher than at any time in history (Oxfam, 2026)
And historic lows…
- Democracy in the US is deteriorating faster than ever (V-Dem, 2026)
- Social mobility declined sharply after 1980 (Aaronson and Bhashkar, 2008)
Historian Adam Tooze calls it a ‘polycrisis’. It touches every workplace.
2. Change is everywhere
96% of organisations have recently experienced disruption (PwC, 2022), which is when transformation is forced from the outside. Transformation comes from within, too, of course. But most attempts at large-scale change fail (McKinsey, 2017).
So progress has been bumpy. Change is the leading cause of burnout and fatigue at work (Capterra, 2022). Only a third of leaders manage change in a healthy way (Gartner, 2025). And on top of that, the approach to communication is all wrong.
One way to fail is not giving enough information about company change. Only a fifth of employees feel well-informed (Staffbase, 2025).
Another failure is giving too much information while change is underway. The more you talk about strategy, the more likely employees are to say the organisation lacks direction.
When communication steps up from a moderate amount of chat to a high level, employees flag these risks:
- 16% higher risk of information overload
- 24% higher risk of burnout
- 30% higher risk of losing trust in leadership (Gallagher, 2026)
Volume is no substitute for the kind of clarity that comes from strategy. Yet few communicators have personas to represent their audience, a framework for choosing channels, or a formal approach for change comms (Gallagher, 2026).
3. People are overloaded
You can only pour so much information into an organisation. The flow is choked by the capacity of the people inside, which is limited by biology (Stróżak and Francuz, 2017).
It doesn’t take much to bump against the constraints of human attention. Try to follow overlapping voices. Two talkative people can transmit around 80 bits of information per second (Coupé et al., 2019). Your ears can keep up. But your conscious mind can only process 10 bits per second (Meister and Zheng, 2024). So you lose details and get muddled (Middlebrooks, 2017).
Now imagine what happens as the average knowledge worker gets 100 emails and 150 messages a day (Live Group, 2026). That’s right. They get overwhelmed (Microsoft, 2026).
So while you might see your job as keeping colleagues informed, a more important role could be shielding your colleagues from the 370 billion emails sent every day (Radicati Group, 2025).
‘Information overload’ is a top concern for folk in internal communications: eight out of ten say the problem’s getting worse (Gallagher, 2026).
We’ve known about information overload since the 1970s. Back then, experiments involved putting housewives in front of a one-way mirror with a range of TV dinners. Given a moderate amount of information, they could pick the best meal for their needs. But getting too much information was as bad as having too little: the housewives started choosing impulsively, making worse decisions while growing in confidence with every additional fact (Jacoby et al., 1974).
Today, we’re all in that scrambled state. When workers accept corporate buzzwords and jargon which is ‘semantically empty and often confusing’, they are motivated, but perform badly in tests for analytical thinking, reflection and fluid intelligence (Litteral, 2026). Your audience is addled.
4. You’re competing with phones and apps
One in four young people could reasonably be called smartphone addicts (Sohn et al., 2019). They get panicky when their device isn’t at hand.
Phones even cause hallucinations. You’ve experienced this if you’ve picked up your phone because it buzzed, only to find zero notifications. Your brain misinterpreted some small vibration, like the rub of your jeans against your hip, as a message coming in.
Back when people used the ‘vibrate’ setting, these ‘phantom phone signals’ freaked out typical phone users once a fortnight (Drouin et al., 2012). Now we can get notifications on our wristwatch, ‘vibrate’ gets turned off.
Still, these ‘phantom phone signals’ reveal what your brain is up to. It’s constantly monitoring your phone, which diverts effort from other tasks. If you keep your phone on your desk, you’ll experience a ‘brain drain’ that reduces working memory and fluid intelligence (Ward, 2017). That’s what communications are up against. A constant drain.
Why do we find phones and apps so compelling?
The unexpected answer is: they’re addictive because they often disappoint. A notification can be a technical update. A message can be automated spam. That makes unlocking your phone an act of gambling. You pull the lever, try your luck and lose… or hit the jackpot!
In the words of Google’s first design ethicist, Tristan Harris, ‘Several billion people have a slot machine in their pocket’. The thrill is in the anticipation (Schüll, 2012).
At work, notifications distract from important tasks (Grammarly, 2024). The average knowledge worker:
- checks messages every six minutes (RescueTime, 2024)
- relies on seven disconnected tools (Mitel, 2026)
- and is expected to monitor more channels every year (Grammarly, 2024)
They might spend 88% of the workweek communicating (Grammarly, 2024), but their attention is fragmented. Twenty years ago, the average person could focus on a task for two and a half minutes. Today, they might reach 40 seconds before opening a new tab (Mark, 2024).
Work just isn’t designed to preserve attention.
Look here for more reasons to despair (and for a flash of hope)
So those are the challenges. And we didn’t even get into the ‘emotional recession’ or what AI has done to trust! I say more in my book The Slow Communications Manifesto – which also offers some practical fixes for broken business comms. Email me at aidan@pinstripepoet.com for a proper back-and-forth.