From Corporate Communications to Purpose Driven Work with Ivonne Furneaux

Success can look flawless on LinkedIn while still feeling wrong in your body. That tension is exactly where my conversation with Yvonne Furneaux begins and where it gets most useful for anyone thinking about identity reinvention, career change, or a second chapter beyond a corporate title. Yvonne spent more than 25 years in corporate communications, employee experience, HR, and DEI leadership, and she shares what she learned from working within large systems that don’t treat everyone the same. We get into the messy realities professionals rarely say out loud: how layoffs actually land, why corporate loyalty keeps eroding, and what “humane” change management looks like when leaders put the employee experience at the center. Yvonne also talks about leaving Weight Watchers after leading through major disruption, then stepping into solopreneurship, where you’re no longer the voice of a company, you’re the voice of yourself. We unpack how she found her first consulting clients through her network and what it takes to reintroduce your expertise to people who only knew an earlier version of you. Then we tackle the present moment: AI in the workplace, job insecurity, loneliness, and the DEI backlash. Yvonne offers a practical lens that cuts through politics while still improving workplace fairness, focusing on workplace identity: title, location, remote versus onsite, frontline versus corporate. She calls the invisible divides “ghost gaps” like the power gap, information gap, opportunity gap, and visibility gap, and explains how they quietly determine who thrives at work. If you want clearer language for what you’ve been feeling and concrete ways to navigate systems that don’t always play fair, you’ll get a lot from this one. Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review so more people can find the show.Send questions or commentsFor more information and insights from Beyond Expertise, visit https://podcast.ericdickmann.com/Be sure to check out Eric's other show, The Virtual CMO podcast.