Forty1, the employee engagement division of The Creative Engagement Group (TCEG), is bringing together its UK and North American businesses under one name, with a new logo; a bold, new identity; and a new combined Forty1 website.

Imagine you’ve been invited to a party. No one talks to you, you don’t get asked to dance and you find out you were only invited to fill out numbers. This is a far too common experience for diverse talent.

My colleagues at Forty1 have asked me to reflect on our one-year anniversary with The Creative Engagement Group. How could I refuse? What a great opportunity to consider a year of tremendous growth for our team!

COVID-19 has made the corporate approach to wellbeing even more crucial. With more people working from home or in a hybrid way, it can be more difficult to find a unified approach, according to a new study on wellbeing conducted by Forty1, the employee experience division of The Creative Engagement Group (TCEG).

Fuelled by a series of events over the last two years , employees have taken a stand. They have pushed away from the comfort of their desk chairs, sighed a long breath of relief, exclaimed ‘FINALLY’, and spoken up against discriminating organisational cultures.

For communicators inside organisations, the pandemic represented a many-faceted challenge. There was a huge increase in operational communications. A shift to digital channels. And an uptick in leadership communications. All put huge pressure on communicators.

The funny thing is, when we sent everyone home in March 2020, we knew that our environmental channels were dead to us. But we all assumed digital would be an easy answer to all our employer-comms prayers. Box checked.

Tight deadlines, heavy workloads, structural changes, financial security, health and safety concerns – these are just a few of the many challenges employees face today. In the new norm where we are bombarded with a constant stream of business and personal demands, effective communication is key to ensuring a workforce that is ready and able to sustain themselves, their families, and the business for the long haul. But how do we do that? We need to think of our employees as we do our external customers, because in reality, employees are our internal customers – the foundational talent who will help us meet our critical business goals.

‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ is an adage that resonates with me on a personal level. As a visual learner, and someone who is dyslexic and dyspraxic, I navigate many things through imagery and visuals. Photography plays an important role in how we perceive the world around us. The media has used photography to influence and portray what is considered ‘normal’, defining what representation should be. On the whole, we see visually appealing, white, (binary) gendered people, but is this really representing the world we live and work in? For me, this is where many campaigns and brand identities fall short – the ‘thousand words’ their photography screams are that of tokenism and misrepresentation. Their choice of photography often feels like a tick-box exercise.