The highly polarized 2024 election climate challenges business leaders and communicators facing the enormous task of communicating to a divided group of employees, customers, and other stakeholders wanting to feel respected and heard. Given just how intense the political environment has become, leaders surely have their hands full. That was abundantly clear at a recent meeting of the Communication Leaders of Chicago, a group of senior communications and public relations professionals focused on addressing strategic approaches to emerging challenges in our field. Many of the veteran leaders at ..read more

Amid all the constant changes in business today, signs of burnout are everywhere in the workforce. As the economy continues to rebound and employee mobility grows, burnout is a double-edged sword wreaking havoc for organizations, with many employees feeling checked out or looking to leave their jobs. Those who remain are left with picking up the pieces, and that aftermath can cause stress and strain on them as well. In partnership with The Harris Poll, we recently conducted research designed to gauge the extent to which American workers are thriving, burned out, or ambivalent and what drives ..read more

There’s a reason the phrase “change fatigue” has become so common among employees and leaders today. The complexities of the business environment mean change is one thing most employees can expect, whether they like it not. Changes in strategy, restructuring, layoffs, the prevalence of mergers and acquisitions, people, and workplace culture issues – the list goes on and on. Naturally, all that change can feel overwhelming for employees and their supervisors. Our recent research conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll underscores this, as many employees and managers we surveyed identifie ..read more

In a highly competitive job market where every applicant is qualified and somehow has at least five years of experience, more companies turn to Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to expedite the hiring process. Every applicant’s resume gets “scanned” into this software, and based on the keywords it finds and other technical jargon, the ATS selects the best candidates for the role to then be seen by a real person ..read more

One of the most challenging parts of the communicator’s job today is how to help leaders wisely respond when issues arise. Often, leaders are cautious about communicating in difficult moments and may not understand why their employees need to hear from them. The list of potential topics is endless – ethics scandals, layoffs, world conflicts, a pandemic, climate concerns, and more. Pivotal research – including some of our recent studies with The Harris Poll – shows that silence often backfires, leading to employee disengagement, a lack of trust in leadership, and worse, distraction and busines ..read more

In a world where business priorities are rapidly shifting, internal communications teams are forced to consider whether their structure still meets today's strategic communication needs. The role of the internal communicator has also changed. Beyond partnering across the business, there's a growing need to collaborate with counterparts across all aspects of corporate affairs and the corporate communications team, including media relations, external communications, employer branding, government relations, and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG). Navigating a change in structu ..read more

I’m sure it came as little surprise to many that Merriam-Webster recently announced “authentic” as its annual “word of the year,” meaning it was a high-volume dictionary look-up and a concept that people were clearly thinking and writing about. According to Merriam-Webster, authentic has a number of meanings, including “not false or imitation,” a synonym of real and actual; and also “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.” Building Trust in the Age of AI Clearly, the rise of artificial intelligence drove interest in the word, and some of that was buttressed by celebrities such a ..read more

In today’s dynamic business world, all leaders will inevitably face a crisis – or a series of them – at some point in their tenure. Whether it’s big issues or small disruptions, how leaders respond to the situation makes all the difference in securing the company’s reputation and maintaining the confidence and trust of employees.  What Is Crisis Communication? Crisis communication is the strategy an organization deploys to respond to any difficult issue or business disruption that challenges the company’s reputation or threatens to break down employee trust and confidence in an organizat ..read more

Mergers and acquisitions, or M&A as the process is more commonly known in the business world, reached an all-time high in 2021 as companies struggled to find their footing following shutdowns and a “new normal” brought about by the pandemic. While M&As made headlines at that time with mega-deals in the $20- to $30-billion range, in 2023, M&A is taking a new form – but no less impactful for companies and their employees. Today, mid-market transactions are dominating as CEOs use a program of both strategic acquisitions and select divestitures to transform their portfolios ..read more

Ask leaders what’s most important for a successful business and many of them will point to a single critical factor: employee engagement. Once a team is “all in,” any business is far more likely to thrive. Yet even as leaders recognize its importance, actual engagement remains disarmingly low. According to the latest data from Gallup, just 32% of full- and part-time U.S. employees are engaged at work, while 18% are actively disengaged. All those disengaged employees cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, according to Gallup's 2022 report on the state of the global w ..read more