In their 2008 Q12 Survey of 1,000 employees in Australia, The Gallup Organisation found that 79% of workers were not engaged or were actively disengaged. Gallup estimated this represented a productivity loss to the nation of around $42 billion annually, which can be translated to lower potential profitability at the individual business level.

An engaged employee is passionate about what they do and will drive innovation to move the organisation forward. Actively disengaged employees are unhappy and don't really care who knows it - they will undermine what engaged people are trying to accomplish, says Susan Rochester.

Geoff Davies defines the structure of effective communications

In a working life spent writing business communications material, it has not been unusual for me to be asked to provide some copy for, say, a brochure that has already been designed and paginated. Each time something like this has happened, I have thought: why didn’t they ask me to write the copy first, before expending time and money on designing something whose contents they didn’t yet know?

'Sharing power, not ‘communicating at’ people, is the most effective way of engaging employees to improve business performance. This is one of the major findings of the largest-ever survey of employee engagement in the UK.  Engage Group commissioned YouGov to survey 23,585 people across Great Britain in October 2008, including 2,500 board-level executives – 2,000 of them from FTSE 500 companies.

A new phrase has entered the vocabulary of internal communicators over the past few years – Tone of Voice (ToV). It may be a buzz phrase, but ignore it at your peril. If your organisation doesn't have one, it soon will.

But what exactly is ToV? Steve Nichols takes a look at what it is and how you should use it.

Put simply, as far as internal communicators are concerned, a ToV document is a writing guide that helps you reflect the core values of your company or its brand.

Turbulence is life force. It is opportunity. Let's love turbulence and use it for change.
– Ramsay Clark

A recent YouGov poll from the UK’s Trade Union Congress says more than one in ten workers lack confidence in keeping their jobs for the next twelve months. There is a lot of uncertainty out there, but it’s not all ‘doom and gloom’ with some analysts stressing that redundancies are not the answer and that Companies in all sectors could benefit from thinking creatively about how they reward and deploy their employees as alternatives to redundancies. Julie Blunt takes a look.

Kate Wilson recently graduated with an MA in Corporate Communication from Sheffield Hallam University. Kate received a CiB prize for her dissertation entitled "Job satisfaction of self-employed communications professionals". The aim of the study was to ascertain whether UK self-employed communications professionals are more or less satisfied with their jobs than when organisationally-employed, and what factors affect their satisfaction.

Running a storytelling workshop recently, I got to thinking why it was that I, as someone whose primary role is in communications strategy, am so obsessed with and evangelical about story, says Thecla Schreuders.

If you are involved in employee communication then you already know that one of the most important aspects of employee communication today is measurement. But so much of that measurement is focused on whether employees access the tools organisations use to communicate with them.