State of Workforce Communications 2026 — Interactive Data Explorer
State of Workforce Communications in the AI Era · 2026

The same question.
Two very different answers.

2,000 IT leaders and workers across North America and Europe were asked what's working and what isn't in workforce communications. The gap between what leaders see and what employees experience tells the real story. Filter the data to find your own.

View from the Top
0%
IT leaders are nearly unanimous: better tools, better output.
The Lived Reality
0%
of workers feel pressured to "make it work" with systems that aren't designed for them.
The Reality Gap

IT leaders see complexity. Workers feel friction.

The challenges are shared. The experience is not.

IT leaders
Office & frontline workers
Where it hurts most

The communication frustrations workers live with daily.

How often each issue disrupts the workday — desk workers and frontline workers compared.

Issue
Desk workers
Frontline workers
What it costs to leave it unaddressed

When communication breaks, work breaks with it.

The cost shows up differently for office and frontline workers — but for both, the consequences extend well past inconvenience.

Office & knowledge workers
Frontline workers
The AI tension

AI Investment Is Accelerating — Employee Confidence Is Not.

AI surfaces significant divide in the data. Leaders see opportunity. Workers see uncertainty and lack of support.

IT view
0%
of IT leaders agree that AI features should be built directly into communication workflows, not bolted on.
Worker reality
0%
of workers say they use publicly available or free AI tools to get the job done — outside their approved stack.
On AI support, IT and workers do not see the same picture.
0%
of IT leaders say they support workers "very well" with AI use
but only
0%
of workers agree
Pace of change
0%
IT leaders say the pace of change in AI tools is too fast to manage effectively.
Worker confidence
0%
Only this many workers feel very comfortable using AI in their daily work.
The complete research

Get the full
State of Workforce Communications 2026 report.

  • Full analysis of the data Including verbatim worker and IT leader responses
  • Regional & sector deep-dives Healthcare, finance, public sector, retail, and more
  • Mitel's perspective What these gaps mean for hybrid comms strategy
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About this research. This study was conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Mitel, surveying 2,000 respondents across four key global markets: North America, Germany, UK and France. Three respondent types were surveyed: IT leaders, desk workers and frontline workers from organizations with 500 or more employees, working within a variety of key industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, financial services and the public sector. Filtered views show numbers from the matching survey segment; segments with fewer than 30 responses are not shown.