Communication software is any application employees use to exchange information at work, including messaging, email, video calls, and company-wide announcements. It covers everything from a two-person chat thread to a broadcast that reaches an entire workforce at once, and it is judged less on any single feature than on whether the right message reaches the right person through the right channel.
Why communication software matters
The tool an organization picks shapes how information actually moves, not just whether it moves. A chat app built for quick back-and-forth is a poor fit for a policy update that needs to reach every location, and a broadcast tool is a poor fit for a real-time question that needs an answer in the next five minutes.
Getting this mismatch wrong has a measurable cost. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index special report on the “infinite workday,” published in June 2025, surveyed 31,000 workers and found the average worker now receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages per weekday, with an interruption roughly every two minutes. Nearly half of employees, 48%, and 52% of leaders describe their workday as chaotic.
Types of communication software
Most organizations run several of these at once rather than picking just one:
Team messaging apps. Slack, Microsoft Teams, and similar tools for real-time, threaded conversation within a team or project.
Email. Still the default for anything formal, external, or that needs a paper trail.
Video conferencing. Zoom, Teams, or Meet for calls that need tone and body language, not just text.
Employee communication apps. Mobile-first tools built for reaching frontline and deskless staff who do not sit at a computer.
Intranet and announcement platforms. For company-wide news, policy updates, and content that needs to be findable later, not just seen once.
Digital signage. Screens in break rooms, warehouses, or retail floors for workers who may not check a phone or inbox during a shift.
SMS and text alerts. For time-sensitive, short messages like shift changes or safety notices.
Employee listening and pulse tools. Two-way channels that collect feedback and sentiment rather than only pushing information out.
AI-assisted messaging. Chatbots and AI writing tools layered onto existing channels to draft, summarize, or route messages.
Enterprise social networks. Facebook-style feeds for company updates, recognition posts, and informal culture-building.
Communication software vs collaboration software
The two categories overlap heavily and vendors often blur the line further, but the distinction is useful when evaluating a purchase. Communication software is built around exchanging messages: chat, calls, announcements. Collaboration software is built around working on the same thing together: shared documents, project boards, and co-editing. A tool like Microsoft Teams spans both categories, which is part of why organizations end up with overlapping tools that each do a bit of everything rather than one thing well.
Common challenges with communication software
Tool sprawl. Every new tool solves one problem and adds one more place to check, which is part of why Microsoft’s research found interruptions happening every two minutes. Each addition compounds the problem instead of solving it, since employees still have to monitor the older tools no one formally retired.
No clear ownership per channel. When email, chat, and the intranet all carry similar messages, employees stop trusting any single one to have the full picture, and important updates get missed simply because no one knew where to look.
Frontline and deskless exclusion. Software built around a corporate inbox misses the frontline workers who make up most of the global workforce, leaving a large share of employees dependent on word of mouth for information everyone else gets directly.
One-way defaults. Many communication tools are built to broadcast, not to collect a response, which limits their use for anything beyond announcements and does little to surface what employees actually think.
Notification fatigue. When every tool sends its own alerts, employees start ignoring notifications broadly, including the ones that actually matter.
How to choose communication software
Criteria
What to check
Reach
Does it work for frontline and deskless employees, not only desk-based staff?
Direction
Can employees respond, or is it broadcast-only?
Findability
Can someone search past messages weeks later?
Integration
Does it add a new silo, or connect to tools already in place?
Measurement
Can you see open rates, read receipts, or engagement, not just sends?
How Engagedly helps
Most communication software is built to push information out. Engagedly’s Engage & Listen suite is built for the other half of the exchange: pulse surveys, sentiment tracking, and recognition feeds that show whether a message actually landed, not just whether it was sent.
What is communication software? Communication software is any application employees use to exchange information at work, from one-to-one messaging apps to company-wide announcement tools, chosen based on who needs to reach whom and how quickly.
What’s the difference between communication software and an intranet? An intranet is one type of communication software focused on hosting company-wide content and resources. Communication software is the broader category that also includes messaging apps, email, video calls, and text alerts.
How many communication tools does the average company use? There is no single fixed number, since it depends on company size and structure, but most organizations run several tools in parallel, chat, email, video, and often a separate frontline app, which is part of why tool fragmentation is a common complaint.
Does more communication software mean better communication? Not necessarily. Adding tools without assigning each one a clear purpose tends to increase interruptions rather than improve clarity, which is why Microsoft’s 2025 research found the average worker facing an interruption roughly every two minutes.
Performance
Learning
Recognize &
Engage &
Talent
