The $7tn communication crisis:
Why every business needs to go visual
The business imperative for better visual communication spans generations, industries and departments
Workplace communications are in dire need of reform, according to the results of Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace, 2025.
The survey found that about 85 per cent of employees feel disengaged at work, costing global businesses an estimated $7tn in lost productivity every year.
Disengaged employees rarely bring their best. Struggling with monotonous meetings and uninspiring communications, many feel disconnected from their purpose, creativity and potential impact. This is more than a management issue – it’s a signal that the way we talk to each other inside organisations is fundamentally broken.
Source: Gallup
A world drowning in information
Just as consumers navigate a firehose of content, employees face an internal flood – Slack threads, longform emails, dense documents. Everything blurs together so much that the opportunity for a singular piece of content to grab – and keep – someone’s attention is more fleeting than ever. Every minute, 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube and 16,000 TikTok videos are posted. Content clutter makes it hard for the most important or relevant messages to stand out – particularly in the workplace.
Source: Gartner
More than one third of workers receive what they believe to be an excessive volume of communications, mostly text based, that wastes their time and overwhelms them. The result is disengagement.
“It’s hard for employees to stay engaged when meetings feel repetitive and communication feels flat,” says Duncan Clark, Head of EMEA at Canva, the visual communications company. “Without that spark of engagement, creativity naturally suffers. And creativity isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s the differentiator that separates great companies from the rest."
If traditional communication is overwhelming and uninspiring, a new approach is needed. Increasingly, the answer is visual.
The science and strategy behind visuals
Visuals aren’t just decorative, they’re neurologically dominant. The human brain processes images faster than any other input, an evolutionary trait designed to help us respond quickly to our environment. In a neuroscience experiment conducted by Neuro-Insight, Canva found that this neurological bias enables visuals to drive stronger emotional connections and trigger memory formation more quickly than dull alternatives.
In less than one second, creative visualisations can make us feel, remember and subsequently act”
Nina Miller, Client Solutions at Neuro-Insight
“We know that visuals – whether complex images, colourful charts or graphic slides – are processed in the brain in as little as 13 milliseconds,” says Nina Miller, Client Solutions at Neuro-Insight, a neuromarketing and neuroanalytics company. “In less than one second, creative visualisations can make us feel, remember and subsequently act.”
Source: MIT
This is why visuals have a place far beyond marketing or creative functions. In the workplace, visual storytelling accelerates decisions, improves alignment, and strengthens brand cohesion. Great presentations, dashboards, infographics, illustrations and other visual content formats – even emojis – aren’t just more engaging, they’re also more compelling.
The science paints a clear picture: visuals help messages land with more clarity and impact than pages of text. And savvy business leaders already know that visual tools are no longer just a creative luxury – they’re a business performance lever.
Gen Z: a catalyst for change
The shift towards more visual work isn’t a passing trend or generational quirk. But the evolution is being accelerated by younger, more visually-fluent colleagues. Already making up a quarter of the world’s workers, Gen Z employees are digital and AI-natives who instinctively communicate through imagery, video and interactive content. Around 90 per cent of them say they do their best work visually, according to Canva research.
Source: McCrindle
They know what works: compelling graphics with bold colours and clean design; concise and interactive messaging like their social feeds; platform-specific content, especially mobile-first; and authenticity – communications stripped of corporate flannel. In short, they expect workplace communication to look and feel like the media they consume.
The visual evolution isn’t about preferences – it’s about performance
This isn’t just what the Gen Z workforce wants, it's what the wider workforce needs: the visual evolution isn’t about preferences – it’s about performance. As attention spans shrink and content volumes swell, visual fluency becomes essential for effective engagement, cross-functional collaboration and speed to decision.
Unlocking the ROI of visual communication
The benefits of visual fluency are tangible. Design-led, visually fluent organisations significantly outperform their text-first counterparts in key business metrics, such as creativity, communication, brand cohesion, brand differentiation and go-to-market speed. This benefits the bottom line by fuelling both external brand strength and internal alignment.
Source: Canva
External brand strength is a key force in building consumer trust and underpins profitability. Research by Stanford University’s Behavior Design Lab on website credibility shows design is a critical factor for assessing credibility – with nearly half of participants relying upon visual cues in their assessments. This finding reinforces that a professional and consistent visual identity is a key component of a trustworthy brand, translating directly into market success. Extensive research, including by Quality Shareholders Group and the Trust Across America initiative, shows that trustworthy companies regularly outperform performance indices such as the S&P 500.
Professional and consistent visual identity is a key component of a trustworthy brand, translating directly into market success
A visually fluent organization also drives profitability by improving employee engagement. Highly engaged employees deliver a 23 per cent increase in profitability, according to Gallup results. "Visual communication is one of the fastest ways to align teams and drive clarity across an organisation. That clarity accelerates progress not only for internal teams, but for your customers as well," says Clark. “The impact is measurable – faster collaboration, smarter use of resources, and more effective content at scale."
However, visual fluency – the ability to create and interpret visuals effectively – should not be siloed in design teams but embedded across an organisation as a core competency.
Visual fluency as a core competency
Companies today expect employees to be data-literate, AI-forward and visually fluent. In fact, nine in 10 business leaders expect non-design employees to have visual skills. Yet the tools to support this shift are often fragmented. Most companies rely on overlapping, often incompatible visual tools that create friction hindering creativity and slow execution.
Nine in 10 business leaders expect non-design employees to have visual skills
In the U.S. alone, companies spend an estimated $65,000 per creative employee each year on content creation, but inefficiencies across tools, review cycles and outsourcing dilute that spend and constrain output. What workers need and leaders want is a single platform for creating visuals.
Visual communications platforms like Canva help businesses seize this opportunity by enabling non-designers to create impactful visual content ranging from documents and presentations to social media posts and video.
As part of an integrated technology stack spanning Salesforce to Slack, they empower cross-functional collaboration and inspire greater creativity – the key to engaging communications. Canva research found that 96 per cent of leaders recognise that creative ideas are essential to long-term success, making the ability to communicate visually a compelling competitive advantage.
From style to style and substance
Visuals aren’t a finishing touch anymore – they’re foundational to how modern organisations operate today. What was once confined to creative teams is now central to how businesses collaborate and compete.
While Gen Z may be accelerating this shift, the need for visual fluency cuts across all levels and functions. It’s a matter of business performance, not generational nuance. With $143bn invested annually in visual content creation in the US alone, the question isn’t whether to invest or not, but how to maximise that investment.
With $143 billion invested annually in visual content creation in the US alone, the question isn’t whether to invest or not, but how to maximise that investment
When organisations embrace visual communication fully, supported with the right platforms and a culture of fluency, they move faster, communicate more clearly and deliver more impact. In a world defined by complexity and speed, visual fluency isn’t optional. It’s a strategic advantage.
The new visual era of work is already here. The leaders will be those who design for it.