Pew collects the numbers in one place. TikTok use among U.S. adults nearly doubled between 2021 and 2025, from 21% to 37%, and the age gradient is steep: 63% of adults under 30 are on it, against 12% of those 65 and older.

Among teenagers, 68% use it and roughly one in five say they are on it almost constantly. Black and Hispanic teens report that near-constant use more often than White teens do.

Worth handing to students about to write for a general business audience. The platform that feels universal to them reaches barely a third of the adult population.

Qin Su and colleagues at XJTLU’s International Business School Suzhou ran two experience-sampling studies, one in China and one in the UK, with a paper accepted at Information & Management. Their finding is that workplace instant messaging cuts both ways, and does both at once.

It moves work along, since people get answers, files and guidance without waiting on anyone. It also drains attention, since the notifications never stop and every one of them costs a switch. What decides which effect wins is the individual’s capacity to concentrate. Stronger focus means more of the benefit and less of the fatigue.

Good evidence for the channel-choice discussion. Students treat chat as free, and this puts a price on it.

Newberry’s rundown of Hootsuite’s annual report runs to eighteen trends, and the ones with teeth for a communication course sit in the middle of the list. Social content now has to survive search, because people query the platforms the way they query Google. Human-made work gets rewarded while AI tools have become table stakes, which is a harder line to walk than either extreme would be.

Two more worth arguing about in class: LinkedIn has entered a creative era, and employees carry more credibility than the executives above them.

It’s Hootsuite’s report and Hootsuite sells software, so read the framing with that in mind. The survey of marketers underneath it is still the broadest annual look at where the platforms are heading.

Jeff Rumage reports that the return-to-office argument has mostly burned itself out. Gallup has roughly 52% of remote-capable employees on hybrid schedules and about a quarter fully remote, while badge data from Kastle keeps weekday occupancy near half. Vistage’s research chief told Built In that leaders have drawn their lines and have no appetite for reopening the fight while AI is eating their attention.

The surprise is who is pushing to come in. Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Harvard and the University of Virginia found younger software engineers in the office more often than older ones, especially when their teammates were there.

Mentorship and visibility are communication problems, and this piece lays them out well for students weighing how much face time their own careers need.

Cost and affordability worries now sit among the top five contributors to rudeness at work, according to SHRM’s Civility Index. More than a quarter of U.S. workers, 27%, said those worries fed into incivility they experienced or witnessed on the job in the second quarter of 2026.

MetLife’s annual benefits study adds the backdrop. Financial confidence is at its lowest point since 2012, with 53% of workers saying they feel in control of their money, down from 62% in 2022.

A reminder worth giving students before they read a sharp email as a personal attack. Much of the friction they will meet at work starts somewhere outside it.

Jeff LeBlanc, who studies workplace culture, opens with a cafe worker in her twenties who texted her Gen X boss that she was running late. He wanted a phone call. She figured a text spared him the interruption and was the more considerate choice. Both of them thought they were being respectful.

He doesn’t read this as one generation communicating badly. He reads it as an expectation nobody said out loud, which leaves each side treating the channel itself as a measure of how seriously you take the problem.

Hard to beat for a media-choice discussion. Ask students which channel they would pick, then ask what that choice tells the boss about them.

Gallup’s third-quarter numbers put U.S. engagement at 29%, the lowest reading since 2011. The drop was steepest among remote and hybrid employees at companies rolling out AI.

Two of the items that slipped hardest are communication problems wearing a different hat: knowing what’s expected of you at work, and believing somebody there cares about you as a person. Neither one fixes itself as more work moves through software.

Good material for asking students who they think owns that clarity. Most of them assume a new hire is supposed to figure it out alone.

GMAC’s global survey of employers who hire business school graduates. Communication, problem-solving and adaptability lead what they weigh in hiring, and the employers most worried about communication gaps are putting more weight on presentation and verbal skills specifically. A direct answer for the student who asks why presentation work still matters when AI can build the deck.

The work that happens in the weeks before the talk, which is the part students never see when they watch someone polished. Step one is knowing your single point, the thing you want people to remember after everything else fades. Assignable as it stands before a presentation unit.

Five ways to gauge an audience’s reaction while you are still talking, and what to change when the room has gone cold. It opens with Kevin Hart at a Philadelphia comedy club, watching comic after comic get destroyed, then taking the mic and naming the problem out loud instead of pushing through his set. Adjusting mid-talk is the hardest part of presenting to teach, and most material skips it.

Researchers at Aalto and Toronto generated course slides with five AI tools, had educators assess them, then put the best ones into a real course alongside the instructor’s own. Students rated the AI slides about as highly as the human-made ones and could not reliably tell which were which. The finding worth arguing over in class: when students did label slides AI-generated, they were largely flagging slides they thought were poor.

Jeffrey Yip and Colin Fisher reviewed 117 studies of workplace listening and found five things that reliably get in the way: haste, defensiveness, invisibility, exhaustion, and inaction. The five-part structure turns easily into a class discussion or a self-assessment.

What shifts in interpersonal communication when four generations share a workplace, and what that means for the course.

An Associated Press report on where AI helps a job seeker and where it costs them the offer. The line students need: use it to prepare, not to perform. Pairs with an exercise where students run their own resume through a tool, then defend every change they decided to keep.

Northeastern’s career office on what gets a resume through automated screening now that keyword stuffing has stopped working. A university career center carries more weight with students than the resume-template sites that dominate this subject. Good assigned listening before a resume unit.