Less Chatter, More Matter: The Communications Podcast

#148 2025 in review … and what to expect in 2026

• Season 1 • Episode 148

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What a year! Filled with political upheaval and natural disasters all the way through to global protests, major elections and fast-moving technological change... you could say 2025 has been a whirlwind. 

With so much happening around us and within our organisations, it’s no wonder many people feel overwhelmed as we approach the end of the year.

In this episode of the Less Chatter, More Matter podcast, we take a look back at the trends that shaped the comms and change landscape in 2025 and what they signal for 2026. We unpack what communicators and change professionals need to be paying attention to as we enter a new year, and what trends are arising from the craziness of 2025 and beyond.

In fact, consider this your roadmap to what’s coming next. No crystal ball required, just clear trends, practical insights and a chance to step into 2026 with clarity, capability and confidence. Get listening!

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So much can happen in a year and 2025 has been no exception. Let's start at the beginning. In January, we saw Trump become president of the USA again, Elon Musk somehow became head of a short-lived government department. There were wildfires in California and a major earthquake in Tibet. February, the Germans went to the polls. After the collapse of the coalition government and the US government started implementing tariffs left, right and centre. And in March, mass protests by pro-democracy demonstrators was seen in Mali, while here in Brisbane, Australia, we had our first cyclone in years. That was exciting. In April, in happier news, Osaka in Japan hosted the Expo World Fair. In May, we in Australia, had our own federal election with the Labour government being reelected in a landslide. Speaking of elections, may also saw the papal conclave elect Pope Leo the 14th after the death of Pope Francis, and the Philippines held their general election. Europeans also voted, this time for the winner of Eurovision. Now come June and the 51st G7 Summit was hosted in Canada and a ban was meant to start on TikTok in the US although that only lasted a few days. July, there was that Coldplay concert video, and August brought a Tay Tay engagement, which the Swifties went gaga over. Also in August, student led protestors managed to kickstart a massive anti-government movement in Bangladesh, which saw the Prime Minister flee the country, and a new interim government put in place. Governments were also overthrown in Nepal in September, again after a youth-led protest. And in Madagascar, the president was ousted in a military coup d'etat in October. Now come November, and the COP 30 UN Climate Change summit was held in Brazil. And among all of this, war still raged in Ukraine and Palestine and Sudan. And those are just some of the top stories. There was plenty more happening. So when you get to this time of year, you can be forgiven for feeling a little overwhelmed, but it's also time to take all of the learnings from this year and start thinking about what's coming up next, which is why in this episode I'm going to share my top five comms and change trends I've noticed this year and what I think that means for you next year. What are those top five? Stay tuned to find out. Hello, friend, and welcome to another episode of Less Chatter, More Matter, the communications podcast. My name is Mel Loy and I'm recording this episode on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin, Brisbane. And today I'm going to share some of the top trends from this year in the change in comms world and how this might develop over the next 12 months. Now, none of us have a crystal ball I know, but there are some things that are more likely to happen than others, and being prepared is the best way to manage them when they do happen. Now, as always, this is the world according to Mel. So if there are other trends or ideas you think should be included on this list, please let me know. I'm all ears. All right, let's get stuck into it. Number one is the rise of AI as a daily tool. This trend will come as no surprise to anybody probably. But this year we've really seen AI go from a novelty to a daily tool, particularly in workplaces, and it's being used more and more as a search engine rather than say a traditional Google search. So let's start with AI now being used more for search. According to McKinsey, 50% of consumers now use an AI powered search. And also about 50% of Google searches now feature AI summaries, and that's projected to rise to above 75% in 2028. That said, people are still clicking through less on those AI generated searches than traditional search. Uh, research from higher visibility found that daily AI use overall has more than doubled. Get this just between February and August this year, so from 14% to 29.2% in just a matter of months. Then there's AI as a tool at work. Now, according to PwC, 54% of workers across all industries use AI in the last 12 months, and 14% of employees are using Gen AI tools every day at work. Now, despite the daily use of AI as a helpful tool, and I know I use it every day, a McKinsey report from November this year found that most organisations are still in that experimentation or piloting phase of AI. With almost two thirds of respondents saying their organisations have not yet begun scaling AI across their business. There's also differing perspectives on the employment impact of ai, so respondents do vary. 32% said they expect decreases in employment because of AI. 43%, So the vast majority said they don't think there's gonna be any change. And actually 13% of people think there's gonna be increases in jobs. Now we do know from come some key news stories this year that AI implementation has resulted in some job losses. So for example, Accenture, they announced a major restructure that resulted in 11,000 roles being lost in several months, driven by AI and the skills the company says they will need in the future. Although at the same time, they are retraining a lot of people in AI. Another example, Salesforce, they announced 4,000 job losses because of automation AI. Uh, AWS Amazon, more broadly, they've announced job cuts because of AI, although they didn't provide numbers. Uh, UPS, the parcel service. They announced plans to cut 20,000 workers. Now, many of these are in management or those kind of back office support roles and automation AI is being used instead to streamline a lot of the logistics planning and data processing they say. The other AI trend to note from this year is that many countries and jurisdictions have started implementing AI regulations and legislation. So for example, the EU's AI Act came into force from the 1st of April, and that established kind of the world's first comprehensive legal framework for AI. Interestingly, Japan kind of flipped the switch. So rather than trying to regulate ai, they've, their AI Promotion Act is more about promoting AI research and news. Uh, in the US over 38 states adopted or enacted around a hundred AI related measures in 2025. So what does all this mean for comms and change as we head into 2026? I think it means a few things. Number one, we need to make sure we're keeping up to speed with the change led by AI to help lead the adoption. We kind of have to become subject matter experts in the adoption of AI if we're not already, because a huge part of our roles is going to be that. But also we need to look at how we integrate this into our work. So rather than people thinking that, Hey, I can just use AI to write this email from the CEO, now we don't need the comms person to do it. It's more about, well, how do we actually use it to supplement the great work that we do and still add value? I also think that given most companies are still in that experimentation phase, we can expect scaling to come. So if you are going to be in that experimentation phase, they're gonna start implementation at scale. And we need to be prepared with comms and change strategies to support businesses in that process. And lastly, I think we just need to be aware of those regulations and legislation that will keep coming in. And they'll probably change over time as well, because again, we take a risk lens to our work, and a large part of that risk is making sure that we're meeting the requirements of any related legislation. So that's tip number one, the rise of AI as a daily tool. Trend Number two, get back to work. Or at least for a few days. This year, we've seen many more companies say to their employees that the good old days of hybrid working are over. Some big companies around the world have announced they were forcing their people back to work into the office five days a week. So some of these big companies included Amazon. So from January this year, 350,000 corporate employees had to return to the office five days a week. Uh, Dell, the computer company, they announced that workers living near an office must be in the office five days a week. JP Morgan Chase, they implemented a mandate for full-time, five days in the office for senior leaders. And most recently, the head of Instagram announced that a return to five days in the office from 2026, which is actually stricter interestingly, than its parent company Meta, which has a three day mandate. Now, that said, these five day week policies do seem to be the exception, not the rule. More commonly, we're seeing a mandate for three or four days in the office in agreement with your team manager. Research in 2025 though has repeatedly shown... That almost two thirds of hybrid workers would immediately look for a new job if their employer stopped allowing flexible work. So it is still a huge attraction piece for companies, no matter the size. So it'll be interesting to see how some of these big tech companies manage that when they're trying to attract talent. The other thing is that the comms around some of these things are often done extremely poorly. If you've read my second book, you'll know I use the Amazon one as a case study of what not to do. Uh, you know, they use terms like saying it's for greater collaboration. It's for getting people together. Rah, rah, rah. But. Honestly, a lot of the time it's just, we're paying rent on this space and we want to make sure we're using it. Uh, also, they don't trust their employees, but it's also in some, some reports from some companies. It's being used as a way to get people to resign or to performance manage people out without actually doing that. So. Implications for comms and change. Number one, from a channels perspective, we still need to expect hybrid working, so we need to make sure we're developing our channels mix in a way that makes sure we deliver communication equity, and that means that you get the same message at the same time. No matter where you are, whether you're in the office or at home, there's equitable access to communication and that is something we should have been building anyway, but it's something we're going to have to keep doing. The second thing is we are going to need to do much more coaching of leaders on how to communicate genuinely and transparently when bringing in these changes. They need to show they have listened, that they have consulted, gotten ideas, gotten feedback. And again, this is a big part of that leadership piece that I spoke about earlier. We're asking people to do a lot of different things. This is part of your job as a leader, is to lead this change. So from a comms and change perspective, we are going to have to do a lot more support in that area. So that was trend number two. It is the end of hybrid working for some or a really clearly mandated hybrid working for others. Trend number three, change is permanent. This probably isn't new, but it really was reinforced this year. Anyone working in any business of any kind, not just in change or a change adjacent role, any role, you will know that the change that we're seeing is the new normal and what's been driving most of this change. The answer is technology, no surprise and climate. So in January, the World Economic Forum found that technology advances were going to be a big cause for change this year. They interviewed a bunch of people and 60% of those employers they interviewed said they expected technology to transform their business by 2030. And when we're talking transformation, not just change, that's everything. That's systems, processes, policies, people, technology, et cetera, et cetera. And that's a lot to happen in just a few years. So that, that a lot of that technology change is of course driven by AI information processing automation, robotics. I mean, the stuff coming outta China is pretty impressive in the robotics field. But the other piece is climate change mitigation and preparedness. So 47% of the employees that, uh, the World Economic Forum cited said they expected those climate related trends to transform their businesses as well in the next five years. Now look, they might be onto something there, because in January this year there were record warm temperatures across the globe. And so that was basically the warmest January in the global climate record despite La Nina pattern coming in. That's pretty scary. Right? And then we've also got workplace health and safety legislation, at least here in Australia, which is more of driving more of that compliance driven change management. So what are the implications for comms and change? Well, we are going to be busy. Anecdotally, I'm hearing leaders are more aware of the need to invest in proper change in comms for change initiatives. That's a good thing. They're finally realising, Hey, we can't do this alone. We need the right people to do this. Or we, you know, face massive risks to our business, but there's also a need for all of us to keep upskilling. So comms pros, change pros. If you haven't yet, you need to start upskilling in Change comms specifically - pronto. The other thing is too, remember that people are gonna be really over change. If they're not already. The fatigue has likely morphed into just apathy. They just don't care. They're just going through the motions. So getting people interested in change is going to take some really creative, very personalised approaches. We have to start thinking differently. We can't keep doing things the way we've done them. You can't just keep bringing out that old comms plan and you know, copy paste for the next project. We have to start cutting through the noise more. So that's number three. Change is permanent. Number four, we are seeing new and emerging skills starting to show through, and this is part of what comes with the AI and data revolution. So the 2026 Skills Horizon report from the University of Sydney was released recently, and they sort of have three levels of emerging skills. The first is the productive base skills. So that seems like AI fluency, cyber resilience, data fluency. Purpose, inclusion, belonging, self-leadership. The developmental skills layer includes things like digital ethics, leading complex projects, First Nations knowledge, persuasive story crafting, insight curation, leading across the generations, et cetera. And the third layer is the, what they call the emerging skills. So things like geoengineering, space business, I don't know what exactly space business is, but. Sounds fun. Uh, neuro innovation, quantum literacy, that sounds very scary. Now, obviously, a lot of those skills are very much aligned to things that we do. Things like leading complex projects, persuasive story crafting, et cetera. But again, the problem with this is that a lot of people can lose their jobs because they don't have these skills for the future. Or AI is taking over a lot of those repetitive processing types of roles. In fact, there's also a trend in small but more frequent layoffs. So this is from a Glassdoor report just recently. But they found that small layoffs, so they, uh, categorise that as less than 50 people and now the most common type of layoffs. So rising from 38% of layoffs in 2015 to 51% in 2025. And that trend, as you can imagine, just causes a lot of anxiety. Um, so employers are using these smaller but more regular layoffs instead of, you know, the once in a once a year big job cuts type of layoffs, and that means that job cuts come in these small, but always present waves rather than a big tsunami. This can help people or help companies to... You know, avoid bad headlines because they're not doing big cuts. They're doing death by a thousand cuts. But as I said, they create this culture where it's, you know, lots of anxiety, lots of insecurity, uncertainty, lots of anger, those sorts of things. So it's not great, but there's also hope there for some of the skills that we've been working towards anyway, I think as comms and change pros. So what does this mean for us? Well, number one, as I said, we need to keep upskilling ourselves in key areas though like data analytics and insights and AI; we need to be able to as comms and change pros... Look at this data and be able to take really useful insights out of it and apply it to the work that we do to make it work. You know, make add value, but also use AI in some of those processes as well. But also the flip side of that is we need to support upskilling people in the business. So as change happens. We need to be supporting building capability as well. These new skills are going to keep emerging. They'll keep changing. If you think about the skills we had even just 15, 20 years ago versus what we need now, completely different. This is just part of the cycle of work, but it does seem to be getting more frequent and bigger shifts as well. Our challenge is, as always, to keep up and trend number five. And I've spoken a little bit about this already, leadership has become so much more important. One of the consequences we've seen from, you know, the likes of the Trump government and others like it is we're living in an even more polarised world. There is a larger gap than ever between what people turn the left and the right, and the hardliners on either side are not willing to budge. Workplaces are not immune to this polarisation, and if you don't believe me, just think about what would happen if you had to get a group of people together today from around the business to decide whether or not you would implement quotas for gender or race in senior leadership. How would that go down? Or if your company should take a stance on the war in Palestine, or if your company's social media should share content for days like wear a purple day. Like it or not, you will have people divided on these issues and a large part of that divisiveness is driven by the political ideology on top of that polarisation, as I've said, there's stacks of change going on constantly, and a lot of it is tricky change where there's a lot of unknowns or unpleasantries involved. Then there's also people's expectations of a workplace, and that continues to change as older people leave the workforce and younger people come in. More and more people are expecting and they want empathy from their leaders. They want clarity, stability, a work environment that provides career opportunities, but also time to be able to spend time with your family and friends and do the things that you're passionate about. It is a lot for leaders to juggle. There is no doubt, and like we said, most new leaders are never given any form of formal training or mentoring. When they start a leadership role for the first time, they just have to wing it and many then simply revert to replicating the behaviour they've experienced from previous leaders and it's having an impact. So that Glassdoor report also found a trend of what they're calling the great employee leader disconnect. So when they looked at Glassdoor reviews, they found that words highlighting disconnection are up across the board 24% for disconnect, 25% for miscommunication, 26% for distrust, and are whopping 149% for misalignment. So workers are very skeptical of what their leaders say and the decisions they make. It's not a good place to be. And that disconnect is really shown in those words that people are using in those reviews. So what does this mean for comms and change? Well, we need to create more opportunities to coach and mentor leaders. They cannot do it alone and they often don't have the skills to do it, but we do, and we can help them with that. We need to put a lot more thought and time into the leadership comms component of change. We can't just, you know, here send this out and, you know, make it meaningful for your teams. That doesn't work. We're going to have to do a lot more and think about these contexts in which people live. But also we need to remember that most new leaders don't get formal training or mentoring, so we need to help bridge that gap. All right folks. It is time for your episode recap and today I shared my top five trends from 2025 and how I think they might impact us in 2026. And the first was the rise of AI as a daily tool. So for us, we need to make sure we're keeping up, but also look at how we can integrate this technology into our own work and be aware of the scaled implementation that's coming, and probably more regulations and legislation. Number two was the return to work policies that we've seen in some big companies five days a week, others three or four days a week, whatever it is. Our channels still need to be adaptable for that hybrid working arrangement, and we need to coach leaders on how to communicate well around these changes. Number three is permanent. We know this, but it does mean that we are going to continue to be busy. We need to keep upskilling. And we need to understand that people are entering this phase of change. Apathy, they're just really over it. We're gonna work, have to work hard to cut through. Number four was new and emerging skills starting to show. So things like data insights, cyber resilience, AI fluency, persuasive story crafting. All those things are starting to come through even more and more, and we need to do a lot more to upskill ourselves in some of those key areas as well as support upskilling others in the business. And number five, leadership has become so much more important than ever because of the polarised world we live in, but also the expectations of people in the workplace and all this change happening. So we need to coach and mentor leaders more and put more thought into the leadership comms component of change. All right, team. That's it for today, but I would love to know what topics you would like me to cover as we head towards the end of the year and enter our series that we call a topic in 10. So in 10 minutes I will answer any questions you have or a topic you'd like a big dive on. Make sure you click the link in the notes to send me your ideas, but in the meantime, keep doing amazing things and bye for now.