A couple of days ago, I had the great pleasure of engaging in conversation with someone who has been a huge influence over the past twenty years in shaping a great deal of my thinking about organizational communication and employee engagement.

That ‘someone’ is Roger D’Aprix, a man who IABC named as “one of the most influential thinkers in the communication profession in the last 25 years.” We have one coincidence in our professional lives in that we both worked for William M Mercer (as it was then called, today known simply as Mercer), the actuaries and human resources management consultants, at the same time in the early 1990s, on different sides of the Atlantic.

Among many things, Roger is the author of seven books, one of which – Communicating for Change: Connecting the Workplace with the Marketplace, published over a decade ago – is the business book I have referenced most in my professional life, even today.

So I was thrilled to be able to speak to Roger as co-host of Cafe2Go, the IABC podcast, for the August interview edition, which I’ve just published on the podcast blog.

If you’re involved in employee communication, I’m sure you’ll find the primary topic of our conversation pretty interesting.  Here’s the run-down of what we talked about in our 20-minute conversation:

[…] Among his many contributions to IABC is authorship of  The Face-to-Face Communication Toolkit: Creating an Engaged Workforce, the second edition of which has been published. The first edition, published in 2004, has been one of IABC’s best-selling publications.

In this interview, Roger talks with Cafe2Go co-host Neville Hobson, ABC, about the toolkit, what’s changed in the five years since the first edition, how the nature of face-to-face communication has changed in recent years especially with the advent of social media, tips on communication strategies to foster employee engagement and rebuild trust, plus some advice to those who say they have little or no time for face-to-face communication.

Worth a listen (click that link to retrieve the MP3, or you can listen right here with the Flash player at the top if you see it), even if you’re not involved in employee communication.

See what you can learn.