The India Employer Branding and Communications Summit 2025: Key Takeaways

Introduction 

If you were in the room at The India Employer Branding & Communications Summit 2025, you’d know that India’s employer communication and branding community has hit an inflection point. On 20 November 2025, more than 120 leaders across HR, communications, employee experience, culture, and branding gathered in Bengaluru. The day brought honest conversations, sharp debates, and pointed questions about where employer communication goes next. 

What stood out was the mood: curious, candid, and a little impatient. Everyone agreed that the old playbooks aren’t enough anymore. Employees are demanding relevance. Leaders want outcomes. And communicators are being asked to balance creativity, data, technology, and humanity, all at once. 

Across keynotes, panels, and fishbowl conversations, a few themes kept surfacing: 

• Stop doing what no longer works 

• Build employer brands that are genuinely inside-out 

• Measure impact in business terms, not just comms metrics 

• Treat employees with the same intentionality as customers 

• Rethink the intranet for a mobile-first, Gen Z–heavy workforce 

• Use AI to close the widening information and access gap 

This blog captures the biggest takeaways from the day, rooted in the conversations that unfolded on stage and off it. 

Top Insights from the IEBC Summit   

Each takeaway below reflects a combination of on-stage discussions, audience questions, and the real-world challenges leaders brought into the room.

• Rethinking Communication Habits for 2026

One of the sharpest provocations came early in the day: before planning what to start in 2026, decide what you need to stop. As Anshuman Kumar, Chief Strategy Officer at SeedlingLabs, pointed out, many communication problems aren’t due to a lack of effort. They stem from doing too much of the wrong thing. 

A few habits leaders agreed must end: 

• Blanket email blasts that add to noise without improving understanding 

• Rolling out external campaigns internally without first validating them with employees 

• Mistaking activity for impact, and overloading people with “more updates” instead of meaningful clarity 

• Clinging to channels employees don’t actually use, instead of addressing why employees are tuning out 

The takeaway landed strongly: strategic subtraction creates the space for relevance, creativity, and deeper alignment to take root. Many organizations are already replacing mass emails with targeted communication hubs, mobile alerts, or personalized channels as these are channels employees actually engage with.

• Building an Employer Brand that Speaks to Every Generation 

Leaders from companies like Delta Technology Hub, Titan, Deloitte, and Ather Energy brought a clear message: an employer brand cannot be manufactured externally if the internal experience doesn’t support it. As Shyamanta Baruah, who leads Communications and Employer Branding at Delta Technology Hub, put it, “assumptions are the biggest risk in employer branding, especially when it comes to generational expectations”. 

A few themes resonated through the conversation: 

• Stop guessing what different generations value. Validate, don’t stereotype 

• Employees feel the gap when the external brand promise doesn’t match the internal reality 

• One-size-fits-all messaging no longer works, especially across hybrid, frontline, and office-based teams 

• Culture signals come from daily experience, not from campaigns or EVP statements 

The panel also highlighted why assumptions fail: internal surveys often reveal needs that don’t match perceived generational differences. Practical approaches like focus groups, pulse surveys, and localized storytelling are helping teams build brand narratives that feel authentic to diverse employees.  

The message was clear. In 2026, the strongest employer brands will be built from the inside out, rooted in real behaviors, not branding language. 

• Proving Communication ROI with Metrics that Matter 

The measurement panel brought a refreshing level of honesty. Leaders from Apraava Energy, Swiggy, and Wipro spoke openly about how internal comms teams often track the wrong things, and why 2026 needs a shift from activity metrics to business impact. 

A few clear points stood out: 

• Opens and clicks don’t tell the full story. They only show distribution, not influence 

• Communication should ladder up to outcomes like employee retention, referrals, safety adherence, or productivity 

• One panelist shared how referral rates increased by 50% after improving internal messaging; a tangible signal that comms drives talent outcomes 

• Behavior change is the new metric, especially for compliance, safety, and culture-led initiatives 

The room aligned on one truth. If communication can’t show how it moves a business metric, it won’t secure leadership attention or investment. 2026 will be the year internal communications teams get sharper, more data-led, and more outcome-driven. 

• Using AI to Fix the Communication Breakdown 

In the AI keynote, Jean-Louis Bénard, Founder & CEO of Sociabble, highlighted a challenge everyone in the room recognized immediately. Employees spend close to nine hours a week searching for information, yet only 13% access the intranet daily. The disconnect is obvious: organizations are talking, employees are searching, but the two aren’t meeting. 

Key insights that stayed with the audience: 

• The issue isn’t a lack of content; it’s the inability to find what already exists 

• AI can bridge the gap by making knowledge discoverable, contextual, and personalized 

• Search needs to shift from navigation menus to conversational, role-aware discovery 

• AI assistants can reduce friction for frontline, hybrid, and overloaded teams 

• Personalization is becoming foundational. Language, role, site, and persona matter 

AI’s role is becoming clearer. It is no longer a gadget or a trend. It’s becoming the only reliable way to bridge the knowledge gap at scale, mapping content across tools, recommending what’s relevant, and helping employees find the right information in seconds. 

• Should Employees Be Treated as Customers? The Debate 

The debate on whether employees should be treated like customers turned out to be far less polarizing than expected. Leaders from Sagility and Amdocs aligned quickly, emphasizing that employee experience now demands the same personalization, segmentation, and data-driven thinking that organizations use for customers. 

Several perspectives resonated: 

• Personalization isn’t “nice to have”. It mirrors how people expect information in their daily lives 

• Data-led targeting can dramatically improve relevance and reduce communication fatigue 

• Emotional equity and trust influence performance far more than policies alone 

• Purpose-driven communication helps employees see their future in the organization 

• Every touchpoint shapes the employer brand, including moments that aren’t visible externally 

• Teams must balance deeper personalization with clear communication governance 

The session reframed the question entirely. This isn’t about marketing or HR “winning” the debate. It’s about recognizing that the employee experience directly shapes the customer experience, and treating it with the same seriousness and design intent. 

• Connecting Frontline Workers and Gen Z in a Mobile-First Workplace 

When leaders from KPMG India, Amdocs, Tata Power, and L&T Technology Services took the stage to discuss frontline and Gen Z communication, the message was unanimous. Traditional intranets no longer match how younger or distributed workforces consume information. 

A few insights stood out across the discussion: 

• Mobile-first is non-negotiable. Frontline and Gen Z employees will not engage with tools that aren’t built for their reality 

• The intranet must feel like a real mobile app, not a desktop site squeezed into a mobile screen 

• Personalization is foundational. Content by language, location, interest, role, and shift-based feeds mirroring the logic of modern social platforms 

• Platforms should enable easy bottom-up communication, including simple creation tools and feedback loops 

• Instant, relevant updates are essential for distributed teams that don’t sit at desks 

• Design thinking is becoming essential for mapping frontline and multi-location employee journeys 

The panel highlighted something many leaders instinctively know but haven’t acted on. If the experience doesn’t mirror the ease and immediacy of the apps people use every day, adoption won’t follow, no matter how good the content is. 

• Aligning Global Employer Brand and Local Realities 

The fishbowl discussion, featuring leaders from Biocon, IKEA, and Thoughtworks, surfaced one of the most nuanced challenges in large organizations: balancing global brand narratives with local employee realities. The consensus was practical and refreshingly honest. Global consistency matters, but alignment doesn’t mean uniformity. 

A few points stood out across the conversation: 

• Local teams need the final say on communication, because they understand employee sentiment, language, and context far better than any central team 

• Global guidelines work best when they are when they define brand pillars, tone, and guardrails, rather than rigid playbooks 

• Misalignment often comes from ambiguity, not conflict between global intent and local execution 

• Local storytelling and ground-level listening shape trust far more than centrally created assets 

• Hybrid and distributed workplaces amplify the need for flexible frameworks and two-way clarity, not just top-down alignment 

The takeaway: global sets the direction, but local determines relevance. Organizations that get this balance right build credibility faster across regions, roles, and cultures. 

Conclusion: What 2026 Requires from Employer Brand and Communications Leaders   

If there was one thread running through every conversation at IEBC 2025, it was that the expectations from internal communication and employer branding teams have expanded. Employees want relevance and transparency; leaders want measurable outcomes, and organizations are recognizing that communication, culture, and technology are now inseparable. 

Looking ahead to 2026, a few priorities came through strongly: 

• Teams will need to stop outdated practices, and focus on clarity rather than volume 

• Employer brand strategies must grow from the real, everyday employee experience 

• Measurement will have to evolve, with IC efforts tied directly to outcomes that influence people and business 

• Employees should be engaged with the same care, segmentation, and data focus reserved for customers 

• Frontline and Gen Z talent expect tools that feel modern, mobile-first, and easy to use 

• AI’s role will be to close information gaps, increase relevance, and help people find what already exists 

• Global alignment will matter, but local ownership will determine whether communication lands effectively 

In many ways, the event served as a reset. The organizations that will move confidently into 2026 are the ones willing to simplify, listen closely, measure what matters, and build communication ecosystems designed around how employees actually work. Employer brand and internal communication are moving to the center of business performance, not sitting on the sidelines. 

Continuing the Conversation 

IEBC 2025 made one thing clear: organizations are ready to simplify, modernize, and communicate with far more intention. And many of the challenges raised during the summit, like fragmented channels, low intranet adoption, measurement gaps, frontline disconnect, are problems Sociabble is already helping companies solve. 

We’ve already partnered with global leaders such as Coca-Cola CCEP, Primark, AXA, Generali, and L’Oréal to strengthen internal communication, improve knowledge discovery, enable AI-powered search, and support frontline engagement in one unified experience. Sociabble enables teams to find information in seconds, leaders to measure communication against real outcomes, and organizations to deliver personalized, mobile-first communication at scale. 

If you’d like to continue the conversation or see how these ideas translate into practice, you can book a personalized Sociabble demo anytime. We’d love to show you what’s possible.