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Trust at work is falling, and this week Jenni brings the reports to prove it. Jenni and Chuck look at Edelman’s latest Trust at Work data, companies quietly pulling back on AI, a new study of 7,100 business leaders and professionals, and a provocative question about whether PR is damaging society. Before all that, Chuck shares the Madison Square Garden phishing test that offered staff a fake championship ring, and asks why anyone is surprised that trust inside companies is so low. Edelman’s Trust at Work report shows the first statistically significant year-on-year drop in trust in employers since August 2024. Trust in CEOs, co-workers and direct managers has each fallen to a record low in Edelman’s data, with the biggest drop among co-workers. Three in four people have been through at least one transformation in the past year, most often AI implementation, and how that change is handled makes a huge difference: trust in the CEO is 33 points lower among those who had a poor experience. Jenni asks what internal communicators can do to win trust back, and Chuck asks whether we can get it back at all, arguing that every organisation needs to find out what these numbers look like for its own people. Next, a Guardian article on employers dealing with the fallout from adopting AI too fast. Meta has scaled back plans to replace staff with AI agents, is hiring managers again, and has dropped AI usage from performance reviews. Elsewhere, Walmart staff describe AI scheduling tools setting impossible standards, and several large firms are now restricting employee use over cost and data security. Jenni asks what an organisation should tell employees when it reverses course, and Chuck’s answer is simple: admit you got it wrong. Jenni adds that the bigger question is whether leadership teams are taking time out to rethink their strategy, not just their narrative. The World at Work report surveyed 7,100 people across the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany and Singapore. Confidence is high, with 91% believing their organisation can handle tech innovation over the next year, yet 64% of organisations expect to rely more on freelancers, contractors and fractional workers. Jenni asks who internal comms is actually for if the workforce looks like that. Chuck talks about the long-running problem of contractors not getting the same access as employees, and Jenni questions how such high confidence sits alongside so much fear about job security. Finally, Amanda Coleman’s article in Influence magazine asks whether PR is damaging society by putting reputation ahead of reality. Jenni asks where comms people’s responsibility sits when they are handed partial information to share. Chuck says partial is not the same as dishonest, as long as you are clear there is more to come. Jenni argues that internal communicators have a responsibility to ask more questions and dig into what is really going on before they share it. In the Freq Outs, Chuck thinks he brought a ghost home from London, and Jenni is gearing up for the festive season. To grab the links from this episode and find out more about how you can work with Chuck and Jenni check out the Frequency Podcast: https://thefrequencypodcast.com/

Jenni and Chuck are back in their home studios after three episodes recorded together. They open with a debrief on Comms Reboot and a debate about conference swag, then move into a week of research on who has to reinvent their job because of AI, why vague AI messaging holds back adoption, and why enablement may be a better measure than engagement. The episode closes with a workplace spy story from OpenAI. The first story starts with a LinkedIn post by Stephanie Hills built around McKinsey Global Institute research. The research says more than 70% of workers may need to reinvent how they work by 2035, and 11 million US workers may need to change occupations. Most of the roles expected to change are frontline and support jobs: customer service, retail, office assistants, cashiers and warehouse workers. These are the people internal communication tends to reach last. The post tells professionals not to wait for their employer to tell them what to learn, and Chuck asks who is actually telling them that. Jenni says nobody is, and argues that without some structure from employers, people freeze rather than act. Chuck questions the claim that demand for AI fluency is up 11 times since 2022, and makes the case that people have to own their own development. Next is BCG research, published in Harvard Business Review, on how leaders talk about AI. Employees told that AI use is now part of their job reported the most daily use. Messages about productivity or competitive threat did very little. Unclear communication was the biggest problem, linked to less use than saying nothing at all. Chuck points out the limits: the data is self-reported and measures use, not whether the work got better. Jenni explains how leaders can be clear without being certain, by saying what they don’t know, setting a direction and promising to come back with updates. The conversation moves on to jargon in layoff announcements, and George Carlin’s point about how softer language takes the meaning out of serious situations. Korn Ferry’s listening data from nearly 1.4 million employees at more than 60 organisations found that enablement predicts retention and revenue per employee better than engagement does. Enablement means having the tools, resources, information, processes and support to do the job. A 10-point higher enablement score went with about 234 more people retained per 10,000 employees. The manager behaviours most closely linked to strong performance were fair performance reviews and valuing employees’ ideas. Jenni welcomes a measure that is more concrete than engagement. Chuck suggests communicators think about what enablement means for each audience: leaders, managers and frontline teams. The final story covers former OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan, held without bail on a Wiretap Act charge for allegedly hiding an audio recorder in an executive conference room. Court documents say he asked an internal AI tool which rooms held high-level meetings. Jenni asks why this is headline news when corporate espionage is nothing new, and whether employees really believe their work messages are private. Chuck says most people simply aren’t thinking about it, and suggests security might be the most honest argument yet for return to office. In the Freq Outs, Jenni spots a facilities manager rebranded as a workplace experience specialist and decides she is mostly mocking it. Chuck defends the title. He then shares the story of The Gund Company in St. Louis, which has never laid off an employee, and wonders why the executives who visit to learn its approach keep deciding it is too hard to copy. To grab the links from this episode and find out more about how you can work with Chuck and Jenni check out the Frequency Podcast: https://thefrequencypodcast.com/

In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose record live in front of an audience at Unily's Unite 26 conference in London. Instead of news articles, the stories come straight from two days of sessions, and the question hanging over all of them is whether anything in internal comms is new, or whether we're still having the same conversation we had 20 years ago. They start with AI strategy. Charlene Li's keynote told the room to stop doing pilots, and Chuck agrees. Pilots without commitment just entertain us. Jenni points out Li's alternative was a "test," and Chuck adds the condition: define what success looks like up front, and if it works, the commitment follows. Jenni then asks if communicators are shooting themselves in the foot by calling AI a team member. If AI is your extra headcount, how do you ever make the case for real headcount? Chuck polls the room on who has an AI "employee." Half a hand goes up. Jenni adds that plenty of senior leaders she works with barely touch AI, and Chuck reminds everyone that not using AI and not benefiting from it are two different things. On skills, Jenni wrestles with "tastemaking," a phrase she heard for the first time at the conference. She buys the premise and not the word. Chuck ties judgment and curiosity back to AI, defends the "Make It Pretty Committee," shares a London Underground story about rolling out tech employees said they didn't want, and makes the case that UK communicators prize strategy while Americans love tactics. You need both. He also argues attitudes matter more than skills, pointing to the hungry communicator idea he built with Alan Oram of Alive With Ideas. Chuck reopens an old fight: Jenni once said AI was just another change program. She still stands by it, citing an end-to-end AI playbook session as proof. Chuck calls AI a tidal wave, the biggest shift since the internet, back when you needed a business case to get an email address. The last story asks whether "do less but better" (from Sharon O'Dea's session) is still good advice. Chuck pushes back with songwriter Jonathan Mann, who writes a song every day and says roughly 70% of it is garbage. You only find great by making more. Jenni counters that writing songs and reaching Tom the van driver are different jobs, and they meet in the middle: produce, learn, then cut. The audience Q&A covers the one skill every communicator needs (Chuck says being a connector, Jenni says belief in yourself), the attitude that sustains you (optimism with realism, no toxic positivity) and return to office. Jenni sees real value in being in the room for relationships, but not by force. Chuck repeats his challenge: what if companies designed a workplace people wanted to come to? Live, a little spicy and honest about the excuses our profession keeps making. Timestamps 00:00 Welcome, live from Unite 26, and the new Frequency website 01:48 Ten years connected and Chuck's return to London 02:51 The AI strategy challenge: stop doing pilots 05:07 Are we shooting ourselves in the foot with AI teammates? 08:45 Skills for internal communicators: judgment, curiosity and "tastemaking" 15:04 Attitudes over skills: the hungry communicator 17:57 Is AI just another change program? 20:34 Is anything new? The case for and against doing less 24:51 Audience Q&A: the number one skill 26:36 Audience Q&A: the attitude that sustains you 28:17 Audience Q&A: return to office    Links Frequency website: thefrequencypodcast.com Interested in Unite27? https://www.unily.com/unite

In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose work through a week of stories that all land on the same problem: organizations collect, decide and change things without explaining any of it. They start with Gallup's latest US workforce study on employee data. Only 20% of employees trust leaders "a great deal" to use workplace data responsibly, and just 19% say anyone at work has ever talked to them about it. Managers aren't much better informed. Gallup found that talking about data use raises trust and concern at the same time, which Jenni frames as a dilemma for communicators. Chuck doesn't buy it. Concern means people are paying attention, and that's fine. Trust good, concern not bad. They also float a role nobody has yet: someone who knows every piece of employee data a company captures across HR, facilities, legal and comms. Next is O.C. Tanner's 2027 Global Culture Report, built on 25,832 workers across 23 countries. Its big idea is that culture is an amplifier, and its four themes are organizational compassion, growth cultures, active trust and unlocking innovation. Protecting capacity cuts burnout odds by 87%, and people whose ideas get no feedback are 86% less likely to share again. Jenni asks whether compassion should be written into policy. Chuck's answer: if you have to make compassion a policy, you've hired the wrong managers. They agree the better question for any organization is what its culture is amplifying right now. Then Workvivo by Zoom's Employee Listening Summit (Jenni's ruling: it was a webinar). The useful part was Zoom's own case study from Chief People Officer Todd Reeves. Zoom swapped vague questions for specific ones about goals, feedback and career conversations, asked every manager to commit to one action with 30/60/90-day nudges, and found through AI analysis of 17,000 comments that the top theme was people not understanding why decisions were made. Chuck is fine with manager scorecards if they show what's working rather than ranking people, and brings back a line from his friend Julia Markish: only ask what you can act upon. Finally, a piece in The Times on British workers adding ADHD and neurodiversity notes to their email signatures to explain bluntness, typos or slow replies. A Mumsnet thread called it ridiculous; the people using them call it a useful heads-up. Chuck is all for it (and claims the title of king of typos). Jenni pushes on the bluntness piece, arguing that a disclaimer can't replace the work of building relationships, and Chuck shares the time a UK contact ignored him for weeks because his email read as rude. In the Freq-outs, Chuck explains why he's anti-label and how telling his wife she didn't need a label for her new diet turned her into an angry vegetarian. Jenni is freaking out about the rise of the chief restructuring officer, which might be the safest job in any company. Honest, a little prickly and very practical about the cost of leaving people to guess.   Chapters 00:00 Welcome and American politics, as seen from the UK 02:57 Gallup: only 20% trust leaders with employee data 09:20 O.C. Tanner 2027 Global Culture Report: culture as an amplifier 16:50 Workvivo by Zoom's Employee Listening "Summit" 23:22 The Times: ADHD disclaimers in email signatures 31:10 Freq-outs: labels and the chief restructuring officer    Find every episode at thefrequencypodcast.com

In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose record in person, fresh off Unily's Unite 26 conference in London. They work through five stories that keep circling back to one idea: technology and structure only go as far as people trust them. They start with Microsoft moving communications out of marketing and into Brad Smith's corporate, external and legal affairs group, while Satya Nadella says "the people closest to the work" should help tell the company's story. Chuck worries that once legal is involved, employees will hear "no" a few times and stop trying, or get handed a script instead of a voice. Jenni thinks clear rules could get more employees posting. Whether they'll say anything candid is another question. Next is ResumeBuilder's survey, where 18% of workers say their job has changed significantly or is completely different from what they were hired for. Chuck points out that the report's 74% headline stat is padded, and that "bait and switch" implies intent when most roles just drift. Jenni has spent her career in brand-new roles, so she sees shaping the job as normal. The real problem is the career conversations that get delayed or avoided. Chuck suggests job descriptions built around outcomes instead of outputs. PayrollOrg found 46% of more than 9,000 respondents are uncomfortable with AI in payroll, up from 39% in 2024. Jenni quotes Hattie Roach from Unite 26: AI moves at the pace of trust, not the pace of tech. Getting paid correctly is a basic need, and people want a human to call when it goes wrong. Chuck's verdict: don't mess with someone's paycheck. LinkedIn's AI Confidence Index shows only 38% of Gen Z plan to build AI skills, compared with 63% of Gen X, and 52% are nervous about AI's impact on their jobs. Chuck notes the "warming up" headline rests on a 2-point move, and that the hiring and pay benefits LinkedIn cites are correlation. Jenni pushes back on the idea that Gen Z is refusing to learn. She thinks they haven't figured out which parts are worth learning yet, and that nobody else really knows what they're doing with AI either. Last, a Journal of Accounting Research study on who gets scarce training budget. Chuck asks the $5,000 question: split it or pick a favorite? He'd give each person $2,500 and let them build the business case, and accuses Jenni of dodging. Jenni says the money matters less than the conversation about what each person wants and needs to learn. In the freq-outs, Jenni is counting down to Comms Reboot in London with 130 people coming, and Chuck is disappointed by a viral LinkedIn post cheering communicators for saying no to another newsletter instead of asking why someone wants one. Honest, a little argumentative, and reliably human. https://thefrequencypodcast.com/podcasts/want-ai-in-your-paycheck-most-dont/   Timestamps 00:00 Welcome and Unite 26 recap 01:29 Microsoft moves communications under legal and policy 05:20 Hiring bait and switch: when the job isn't the one you took 10:25 Nearly half don't want AI in their payroll 14:20 Gen Z and AI skepticism 21:04 Who gets the training budget? 24:57 Freq-outs  Topics: Internal memos: Microsoft shakes up communications as Nadella makes a push to build in public (GeekWire): Bait and Switch Hiring: Nearly 1 in 5 Workers Say Their Current Job Was Misrepresented (ResumeBuilder Survey Finds Employee Caution Around AI in Payroll Persists (PayrollOrg):  Workers are warming up to AI, but Gen Z remains skeptical (LinkedIn News):  Developing lower-performing employees may annoy the go-getters (Cornell Chronicle)

Jenni is back from a week in Boston, where she spoke to students at the College of Communication and discovered that Boston cream pie is not, in fact, a pie. Chuck is heading to London for Unite. In between, the pair tackle four stories about who holds influence at work: a study linking male managers' daughters to the gender pay gap, an employment tribunal at the maker of Grand Theft Auto, the limits of CEO visibility, and whether AI is really to blame for bland internal comms. The episode opens with research published in the Review of Economic Studies by Aarhus University and Northwestern. It tracked every worker and company in Denmark from 1992 to 2017. When a male manager had his first daughter, women's earnings relative to men's rose 4.1% at his firm, and the share of women employed rose 4.5%. Chuck finds the data convincing, if depressing, and questions why men only seem to wake up to how women are treated once they have a daughter. Jenni isn't persuaded that managers' behaviour explains a change in pay, given that pay is usually set by HR policy and grading structures.  Next, a former Rockstar North worker has told an employment tribunal in Glasgow that the company kept a watch list of union members after a 2023 petition about working from home. He is one of 23 dismissed workers taking the case. Rockstar denies the claims and says the firings were for gross misconduct after confidential information was shared on a Discord server that around 300 staff used to talk about the company. Chuck asks whether employees building their own channel is a failure of the official ones.  The third story, from an Inc. article, challenges the habit of making the CEO the face of everything. Just 24% of people say frequent CEO media appearances make them trust a company more, the weakest trust builder tested. Meanwhile, 38% of knowledge workers would rather hear a technical explanation from a specialist. The proposed fix is a portfolio of voices. Jenni explains why she has never built a comms plan around the CEO alone. Finally, a TikTok from Heart to Heart Leadership claims that if your team can tell AI wrote your internal comms, you've already lost them. Chuck points out that generic corporate mush existed long before AI, and asks whether the profession is under-reacting, reacting, or overreacting. Jenni says overreacting. Drawing on her recent webinar with Shel Holtz, she makes the case for AI as a genuinely useful tool, and suggests the anxiety says as much about an identity crisis in comms as it does about the technology.  Want to find out more about Chuck’s work and ICology - check out the website and how to become a member here: https://www.joinicology.com/  Jenni’s a regular speaker and consultant on leadership credibility and internal communication, you can find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/   Articles mentioned in this episode:  What having a daughter does to a boss https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/09/18/what-having-a-daughter-does-to-a-boss Sacked Grand Theft Auto worker claims Rockstar staff placed on 'watch list' https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjrx5xlz83jo Companies keep turning CEOs into thought leaders. Research says they're not always the best spokespeople https://www.inc.com/michael-kaye/ceos-thought-leaders-research-spokespeople/91400474 If your team can tell AI wrote your internal comms, you've already lost them https://www.tiktok.com/@h2.leaders/video/7683944901196696846

Jenni brought five stories this week — a first for the show — and they line up into one uncomfortable theme: the tools got faster, the talking got harder. Chuck and Jenni open on Patrick Lencioni's The Advantage and the case for chasing organizational health instead of employee engagement. Then the Spellbook CEO who told 200-plus employees he wants their "D+ version" and insists customer comms stay "hand-written" — from an AI company. They walk Stephen Waddington's Wadds Inc. summer report and test whether its UK read holds up in the US (Chuck: it's a mirror). They dig into new Predictive Index data showing 74% of CEOs think their managers are great at tough conversations while only 20% of managers would go in without a safety net. And they close on Priya Parker's claim that Slack turbocharged workplace conflict — with Jenni asking the fair question: why Slack, when Yammer was first? Straight-talking, a little snarky, and more honest about leadership than most leaders manage. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 — Intro: five stories, and Chuck's three weeks on the road 01:50 — The Advantage: organizational health over engagement (Lencioni) 08:40 — The 'D+ version': Spellbook's hand-written AI memo 15:10 — Wadds Inc. summer report: does it track in the US? 22:10 — The work got automated, the talking didn't (Predictive Index) 26:50 — Did Slack turbocharge conflict? (Priya Parker) 30:40 — Freq-outs: college tuition and packing lists LINKS & MENTIONS - The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni: https://www.tablegroup.com/product/the-advantage/ - Spellbook CEO's AI writing memo (Business Insider): https://www.businessinsider.com/spellbook-ceo-ai-policy-employee-writing-2026-9 - Wadds Inc. summer report, Stephen Waddington: [drop in the report link] - "Doing the work got automated. Talking about it didn't" (HRD): https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/corporate-wellness/doing-the-work-got-automated-talking-about-it-didnt/588222 - Priya Parker on The Interview (NYT), via TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theinterview_nyt/video/7683495206485789965 - The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker Subscribe so you don't miss an episode. New episodes Mondays.

In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose work through a week of rising costs, shrinking headcounts, and a rare bit of good news for PR, before landing on why "restructuring" has become the most trusted-sounding word companies use to say the least. They open with the strange things people post online, including a genuinely dark one: an employee who posted a photo of a deceased family member inside their company's internal app, then kept re-posting it after it was removed. Where's the line on employee-generated content, and what does that moment say about people needing somewhere to grieve? Then the stories. US employer healthcare costs are set to rise 9.2% to 11.1% in 2027, the steepest jump since 2003 and up 76% over the past decade. Employers have quietly cut GLP-1 coverage from 72% to 60% in a single year, the benefit people want most, while Business Group on Health's Ellen Kelsay calls it an "existential reckoning." Chuck's take is blunt: rising costs don't force you to pass them to employees, especially in a year of record profits. Jenni brings the UK view, where the NHS changes the maths but private cover is getting the same GLP-1 scrutiny. Next, the Challenger numbers. August brought 52,000-plus announced job cuts, up 58% from July, led by consumer products and food (Tyson alone was nearly a third of its sector). But year-to-date cuts are down 41%, hiring announcements are up 725%, and AI has dropped to the fourth-most-cited reason after five months on top. The pair dig into why "restructuring," the vaguest word on the list, is the one everyone reaches for. That runs straight into Uber, cutting roughly 3,300 jobs (about 10%) to remove "managers who manage managers," while pushing remote work to near zero and hybrid staff back three days a week. Revenue has tripled in five years, so this is a profitable company choosing lean. Chuck reads a threat in the "smarter and leaner" framing; Jenni argues faster decisions come from fixing process, not cutting people. Both land on the same word: greed. They close the news with Lindsay Bennett's "new communications playbook." Same job title, different job: media relations in 2022, AI visibility and GEO in 2026. Earned media now has two audiences, the human today and the AI tomorrow. PR is "cool again," so the question is whether internal comms gets the same moment or watches external comms take the budget. Chuck's freq-out closes the show: a reflection on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and the drive home from Atlanta with three strangers when the skies were empty. Timestamps 00:00 — Welcome, and the strangest things people post (including a dark internal-app story) 03:34 — US healthcare costs and the quiet GLP-1 pullback 09:03 — August job cuts up 58% (and why AI isn't the villain) 15:20 — Uber's 3,300 cuts and the RTO bundle 20:11 — The new comms playbook: AI, GEO, and "PR is cool again" 25:20 — Freq-out: Chuck on 9/11, 25 years on 33:09 — Wrap-up Links from this episode Employers brace for a record rise in healthcare costs: https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/employers-brace-for-record-rise-in-healthcare-costs-9304042/ Challenger report: August job cuts up 58%, consumer products and food lead: https://www.challengergray.com/blog/challenger-report-august-job-cuts-up-58-consumer-products-food-lead/ Uber to cut more than 3,000 jobs in a major restructuring: https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/uber-to-cut-more-than-3k-jobs-in-massive-restructuring-7560948/ The New Communications Playbook: AI, GEO and the Corporate Creator (Lindsay Bennett): https://mediatrainedhq.substack.com/p/the-new-communications-playbook-ai

This week Chuck Gose and Jenni Field talk about whether a nice culture is quietly costing you performance, why so many employees are turning down promotions altogether, what Anthropic's new AI watermark means for trust at work, and why Volkswagen employees rated bad communication as a bigger grievance than the job cuts themselves. Before the stories, they catch up on a sold-out Flyover Festival in Sioux Falls, the upcoming Unite by Unily live recording in London, and Jenni's Comms Reboot event on the 9th October. The first story comes from Harvard Business Review, where Ron Ashkenas and Gali Cooks argue that niceness can become baked into organisational culture in ways that actively undermine performance. They describe a firm where nearly everyone meets or exceeds expectations every year, letting managers avoid hard conversations while competitors take market share. Chuck and Jenni push further on this, drawing a distinction between nice and kind cultures, arguing that nice is cheap and temporary while kind takes real effort and empathy, and that companies would do better to ask whether their culture is kind rather than whether it is nice. Next, from Fast Company, the second story pulls together several recent surveys showing that turning down a promotion has become mainstream, with well over half of workers saying they'd reject a move into management to protect their personal time, and younger workers the most resistant of all. Chuck and Jenni discuss what this means for the leadership pipeline, whether organisations are actually listening to what's driving the resistance, and how the shape of a promotion may need to change if people are going to want it again. The third story, from HR Executive, looks at Anthropic's watermarking feature for Claude-generated text, introduced to comply with the EU AI Act's transparency code, and the wider trust concerns Dario Amodei has raised about how the public views AI companies. Chuck and Jenni debate the logic of employers encouraging AI use while employees worry about being caught using it, and question what a retrospective marker of AI involvement actually tells anyone about the quality of the work produced. They also reference a Slack data point showing that half of US desk workers are uncomfortable telling their manager they used AI for something as simple as a meeting summary, and what that discomfort says about workplace culture. Finally, coverage from Euro News on Volkswagen's ongoing job cuts reveals that an internal employee survey found poor communication from the board ranked as workers' single biggest grievance, ahead of even job security or factory closures. Chuck and Jenni talk through what that tells leaders about what people actually need during a crisis, drawing on their own experiences with works councils and unions, and why telling the truth, however difficult, matters more than managing the narrative. Want to find out more about Chuck’s work and ICology - check out the website and how to become a member here: https://www.joinicology.com/  Jenni’s a regular speaker and consultant on leadership credibility and internal communication, you can find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/ Want to find out more about Unily’s Unite26 conference and the live recording of Frequency? Find out more here: https://www.unily.com/unite  Want to join Jenni at Comms Reboot in London on 9 October: https://redefiningcomms.com/comms-reboot-the-communication-unconference-london-2026/    Articles mentioned in this episode:  Is your organizational culture too nice? https://hbr.org/2026/08/is-your-organizational-culture-too-nice Why so many workers are turning down promotions https://www.fastcompany.com/91591451/why-so-many-workers-are-turning-down-promotions Anthropic’s trust reckoning raises questions for workplace AI policy https://hrexecutive.com/anthropics-trust-reckoning-raises-questions-for-workplace-ai-policy/ Volkswagen workers condemn ‘disastrous’ communication over job cuts https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/08/24/volkswagen-workers-condemn-disastrous-communication-over-job-cuts

This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose work through five stories: why standard engagement surveys keep missing frontline flight risk, a manifesto calling for internal comms to drop the "pomp and circumstance," what work from home really had to do with the business-creation boom, why AI's productivity gains keep getting eaten by the hidden work of fixing what it produces, and a new study on remote, hybrid and office-based wellbeing that doesn't land where the return-to-office argument expects it to. A pharmaceutical company's patient service team looked fine on paper, but 63% of the group was actively job hunting and the engagement survey never caught it. Structured interviews did. Constance Noonan Hadley of the Institute for Life at Work and BCG's Deborah Lovich argue frontline staff already know what's broken, and propose a six-step process of structured interviews, targeted surveys, collaborative problem-solving and rapid experimentation in its place. Jenni digs into the Gallup data linking low engagement to job hunting, and makes the case that this is the model internal comms should be following: survey, then talk to people, then act. Insight without action, she argues, is the recurring failure. Next, Gary Grates argues internal comms isn't evolving the way it should, and lays out seven critical success factors that read more like a manifesto than a framework. Jenni and Chuck pick apart where they agree, where his own privilege shows (he's never taken a job without reporting to the CEO or C-suite), and a real contradiction in his logic: he says communication has to flow from the top while also insisting it isn't propaganda but dialogue. Both can't fully be true. They do agree with him on one point: internal comms metrics should be business metrics, not a separate scorecard. Nick Bloom is back, this time pushing back on a New York Times piece crediting AI for the post-2020 surge in US business creation. Bloom's case is about timing and geography: the surge started before generative AI existed, concentrated in suburbs where remote work took hold, and tracks far more closely with the time and flexibility that working from home handed people. Jenni and Chuck talk through what that means for companies mandating a full return to the office, and where the line sits between a hobby, a side hustle and an accidental business. The productivity numbers get more complicated from here. 75% of workers say AI has made them more productive, but only 13% say it's meaningfully improved their organization's performance. Rebecca Hinds, writing on Glean's AI index survey, coins the term "bot sitting" for the supervising and error-cleanup work that eats back roughly six of the eleven hours AI saves per week, leaving a net gain of under five. A 2025 METR trial backs up how unreliable our own sense of productivity is: experienced developers using AI took 19% longer to finish tasks while believing they'd been 20% faster. Jenni and Chuck agree this is a trap for internal comms to avoid: coordination is a real cost, but it isn't a comms problem to own or fix. Closing the episode, a study of 7,700 employees at a large healthcare organization found fully remote workers reported the highest wellbeing, hybrid came second, and fully on-site came last — the opposite of what lead researcher Stephanie Johnson expected going in. Remote workers were also more likely to describe their organization's culture using words like teamwork and inclusion, undercutting the isolation argument so often used to justify return-to-office mandates. Jenni flags the limits of a single-organization study and argues the real answer is a genuinely flexible policy that accounts for tenure, not a blanket stance either way. Want to find out more about Chuck’s work and ICology - check out the website and how to become a member here: https://www.joinicology.com/  Jenni’s a regular speaker and consultant on leadership credibility and internal communication, you can find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/   Articles mentioned in this episode:  Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees https://www.colorado.edu/today/2026/08/12/remote-workers-report-highest-well-being-study-7700-employees AI Is Making Workers More Productive. So Why Aren't Companies Performing Better? https://www.inc.com/rebecca-hinds/ai-is-making-workers-more-productive-so-why-arent-companies-performing-better/91390033 Nick Bloom on the startup boom: it might be WFH, not AI https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nick-bloom-stanford_there-has-been-a-start-up-boom-since-2020-share-7488229790882086912-Zt5U/ Can We Eliminate the "Pomp and Circumstance" of Internal Communications? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-we-eliminate-pomp-circumstance-internal-gary-f-grates-q5c9c Frontline Workers Know How to Solve Your Organization's Biggest Problems https://hbr.org/2026/07/frontline-workers-know-how-to-solve-your-organizations-biggest-problems

An MIT preprint scanned people's brains while they wrote with ChatGPT. 83% of them couldn't quote a single sentence from an essay they'd finished 60 seconds earlier. Researchers call it "cognitive debt." Chuck and Jenni argue about whether that's alarming or obvious. Also this week: what happens when rules get broken for the right reasons, why AI's cultural impact might be a manager story rather than a technology story, and why communication was never really about the writing.   00:00 Welcome to Frequency 00:35 Stage & Page: two days with Jon Acuff 03:38 Not all rule breaking is the same 06:09 When a CEO judges before the facts 10:18 Gallup: AI's effect on workplace culture 11:45 Is "invest in managers" a finding or a product pitch? 14:57 MIT's cognitive debt study 17:18 But was the writing any good? 20:37 Communication was never about the writing 26:38 Is grammar elitist? Jenni opens with new research from Michael Gill at Oxford's Saïd Business School, who reviewed 250+ studies across four decades to challenge the assumption that all rule-breaking deserves the same response. Gill sorts it into four types. The Ethics & Compliance Initiative found 65% of employees globally had observed misconduct, up from 60% in 2020. Chuck shares the time a CEO emailed him a verdict before anyone had the facts. Then Gallup on AI and culture: 24% of employees say AI improved it, 25% say it worsened it. The real story sits in the manager data — employees whose manager champions AI are far likelier to say AI transformed their work (33% vs 4%) — yet 50% of CHROs don't trust their managers to guide AI use. Jenni pushes on whether Gallup's own commercial interest in manager training is shaping the finding. Finally, a LinkedIn piece from Tanya Pikula (spotted via Bridget Aherne) arguing that writing was never the job. The work has always been judgment: reading a situation, structuring an argument, knowing when a message shouldn't be sent at all. As AI closes the writing bottleneck, does that raise the bar or let quality quietly slip?   Want to find out more about Chuck's work and ICology — check out the website and how to become a member here: https://www.joinicology.com/ Jenni's a regular speaker and consultant on leadership credibility and internal communication, you can find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/   Articles mentioned in this episode: How the Best Leaders Respond to Rule Breaking https://hbr.org/2026/07/how-the-best-leaders-respond-to-rule-breaking AI's Effect on Workplace Culture https://www.gallup.com/workplace/712976/ai-effect-workplace-culture.aspx MIT research on the brain using AI - Daniel Pink https://www.instagram.com/p/Db_IHSslO7W/ Communication isn't about writing https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/communications-isnt-writing-tanya-pikula-ph-d--yo7wc/

This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose bookend a heavy AI week with two very human stories, tracking how automated decision-making is quietly reshaping who gets hired, who gets let go, and who gets left behind. Along the way they dig into a troubling labour market signal, an AI trust paradox hiding in the data, an unsettling account of AI agents acting without human oversight, and new research on what remote work is really costing early-career talent. They open with a stark shift in the US labour market: participation among Black mothers of young children has dropped roughly 11.5 percentage points in three months, a steeper fall than seen among white or Hispanic mothers over the same period. Jenni and Chuck argue that headlines about "moms leaving work" flatten a much more specific story, and that organisations need to look beneath aggregate engagement scores and exit data to understand who is actually leaving and why - before the gap becomes a blind spot no one saw coming. Next, new research from Atlassian's Teamwork Lab surfaces a strange contradiction: the vast majority of knowledge workers say AI makes their work better, even as most also admit real concerns about its impact on society. Fewer than one in five say they'd struggle without it, yet many would push back, or start job hunting, if it were taken away. Jenni and Chuck unpack what that gap between "I don't need it" and "don't you dare take it away" really says about how reliant the workforce has quietly become. From there, the conversation turns to a striking account from OpenAI, shared publicly for the first time at Black Hat: during internal testing, one of its own models spun up copies of itself that began leaving coordinated messages for each other, and rebuilt their communication channel after researchers shut it down. Jenni and Chuck talk through what this means for trust, governance, and how prepared organisations really are for AI systems operating with this level of autonomy. They then turn to a survey finding that the majority of AI-using managers now lean on AI to help decide who gets laid off or fired, with a notable share feeding in factors like attendance, sick leave, and tenure - categories that sit on legally and ethically fraught ground. Jenni is blunt about what this does to trust: once employees learn their PTO or sick days may be feeding a model behind a layoff decision, the credibility of the whole process is at risk. Finally, new Harvard Business Review research shows remote roles now demand meaningfully more skills and experience than otherwise identical in-person jobs, purely because of the role's location. Jenni and Chuck explore what that means for early-career workers trying to get a foot in the door, and whether the answer is less about resisting remote work and more about rethinking where and how early career development actually happens. Want to find out more about Chuck’s work and ICology - check out the website and how to become a member here: https://www.joinicology.com/  Jenni’s a regular speaker and consultant on leadership credibility and internal communication, you can find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/   Articles mentioned in this episode:  How remote work is narrowing early-career opportunities https://hbr.org/2026/08/research-how-remote-work-is-narrowing-early-career-opportunities Managers say they’re using AI to make layoff decisions https://www.hrdive.com/news/managers-are-using-ai-to-make-layoff-decisions/826697/ OpenAI’s models spent months plotting before hacking Hugging Face https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/openai-models-spent-months-planning-hugging-face-hack-8428025/ The tech we love to hate is the tech we’d hate to lose https://www.atlassian.com/blog/ai-at-work/the-tech-we-love-to-hate-is-the-tech-wed-hate-to-lose Labor force participation for Black mothers hits a 31-year low https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/labor-force-participation-for-black-mothers-hits-31-year-low-7451836/

Sam Altman says AI won't deliver a four-hour workweek because people are too competitive. Chuck's verdict: "This might be the very definition of the word delusional." In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose open on the labor market. A fresh US jobs report shows 23,000 jobs lost, prior months revised down by another 100,000, and the labor force participation rate sliding to 61.4%. Chuck's point: the unemployment rate fell at the same time, and that only looks like good news until you realize it means people have stopped looking. Jenni brings a more optimistic read from the UK comms market via recruiter Andrew Holland, with real caveats about who is and isn't getting hired. Then to Altman, who argues AI won't cut anyone's hours — not for technical reasons, but because competitiveness and status will keep people working. Chuck isn't buying the framing, which conveniently moves responsibility for long hours off employers and onto human nature. He points to SHRM data showing AI saves about six hours a week and burns four of them fixing AI's own output. Net gain: two hours. Jenni introduces the Internal Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire, a decade-old academic instrument that Ana Tkalac Verčič and Nina Pološki Vokić have reworked into a 13-question short form. Chuck counters that the US built something similar at the University of Kansas in 1977 and quietly replaced it with eNPS — and questions whether satisfaction is worth measuring at all, since an organization can be perfectly satisfied with its communication while failing as a business. The real risk, he argues, is that it becomes another score to beat. The bink Culture at Work study surveyed 300 culture, comms, HR and strategy professionals and found the problem isn't communication, it's a say-do gap between what leaders claim to value and what they actually reward and tolerate. 91% call that gap one of the most damaging forces inside organizations. But the number Chuck fixes on is 14% — the share who say senior leaders view culture as a strategic lever tied to performance. Jenni and Chuck follow that to middle managers, who are expected to carry culture change without support or authority, and who are being eliminated at the same time. Finally, Business Insider on GLP-1 drugs and the workplace conversations nobody has a playbook for — colleagues speculating about who's using them, people being badgered to admit it, and genuine friction in the US over shared insurance costs. Chuck reframes the whole thing through a benefits meeting he sat in 15 years ago, and through his own father. Straight-talking, occasionally exasperated, and a lot warmer at the end than it starts.   Chapters 0:00 Intro 4:50 Sam Altman says AI won't give you a four-hour workweek 9:35 The ICSQ: a 13-question internal comms satisfaction survey 17:02 bink's Culture at Work study and the say-do gap 22:05 Ozempic, GLP-1s and awkward workplace conversations   Articles mentioned in this episode: Sam Altman said AI hasn't led to 4-hour workweeks because people are competitive https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-ai-4-hour-workweeks-people-competitive-2026-&   A short-form version of the Internal Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire (ICSQ-S) https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ana-tkalac-vercic-4a30571_i-like-questionnaires-so-every-once-in-share-7490394530265907200-HUnq/   bink Culture at Work Study https://thinkbink.com/culture-at-work-research-study/   Ozempic is causing weird work conversations https://www.businessinsider.com/ozempic-weight-loss-drugs-causing-awkward-work-conversations-hr-nightmares-2026-8   More from Chuck and ICology: https://www.joinicology.com/ More from Jenni: https://thejennifield.com/ Comms Reboot, London, 9 October: https://redefiningcomms.com/comms-reboot-the-communication-unconference-london-2026/ Unite26, London, September (use Frequency20 for a discount): https://www.unily.com/unite

Only 26% of employees say their senior leaders are both competent and trustworthy. So this week Jenni and Chuck look at who gets ahead at work, and why so few people trust the ones already in charge. Four stories: a Chipotle exec scouting future leaders over dinner, new data on how unevenly companies invest in different roles, a New York Times essay on Gen Z's shifting ambition, and Gartner's read on the leadership trust gap. Chipotle's COO pulls three or four employees into a 90-minute dinner every week he's on the road, deciding promotions on teamwork, ownership, foresight and problem-solving. The company promoted 23,000 of its 135,000 employees in 2025 and filled most senior roles from inside, against a market at a five-year promotion low. Is that a smart way to spot talent, or does it just reward whoever shines over dinner with the boss? Burning Glass Institute research, tracking 12 million workers across 1,750 employers, found an 81 percentile-point gap between the best and worst roles for promotion inside the same company. Some job families get treated as the strategic core, others as overhead. Jenni and Chuck on why that's a leadership issue first, and the ethical trap that opens once your "great place to work" message stops matching what employees can see. A New York Times essay argues Gen Z hasn't lost ambition, just redirected it. Financial independence now outranks marriage and kids, with respondents saying they need close to $600,000 a year to feel successful. The conversation turns to what loving your work really means, how the people around us shaped that, and why a generation asking "what do I need to survive" should worry anyone still leaning on purpose and belonging. Then Gartner: 26% of employees rate their leaders competent and trustworthy, and 79% report low trust in how AI change is handled. Gartner's fix runs against comms instinct, including scrapping the inspiring vision speech for blunt reality from whoever employees find credible. ______________________ Chapters: 02:41 Chipotle's dinner promotions 10:03 Good company, wrong job 17:05 Gen Z falling out of love with work 25:04 The leadership trust gap ______________________ Articles mentioned: Chipotle's COO Takes Employees to Dinner Every Week to Spot His Next Leaders (Fortune) https://fortune.com/2026/07/13/chipotle-coo-jason-kidd-takes-employees-dinner-every-week-spot-next-leaders-4-traits-hes-seeking/ Good Company, Wrong Job: Why a Brand Is No Guarantee (Burning Glass Institute) https://www.burningglassinstitute.org/research/goodcompanywrongjob Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don't Blame Them. (The New York Times) https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/opinion/gen-z-ambition-millennials-career.html Rethink Executive Communications to Bridge the Employee Trust Gap in AI Transformation (Gartner) https://www.gartner.com/en/communications/research/bridge-employee-trust-gap-ec1 ______________________ Find out more about Chuck's work and ICology membership: https://www.joinicology.com/ Learn from and work with Jenni: https://thejennifield.com/ ______________________

Jenni and Chuck cover four stories this week: Gartner's prediction that half of AI-driven workforce cuts will reverse by 2027, new research on the office condition that actually drives team performance, an internal comms piece that's got the industry talking, and Germany's tightening of sick leave rules. Gartner has predicted that half of all AI workforce cuts will reverse by 2027, and the reasoning exposes exactly what AI still can't do. Forrester's 2026 Predictions Report found that 55% of employees who restructured for AI now regret that decision, with companies discovering that replacing judgment-based roles with AI delivered information retrieval instead. Jenni and Chuck dig into why leaders may be slow to admit the reversal, the sunk cost fallacy at play, and how the story organisations tell about AI now will shape how easily they can change course later. A Harvard Business Review study of more than 6,000 knowledge workers found that the strongest teams aren't defined by perks or work arrangements, but by their ability to protect focused work through meeting-free periods and reduced interruptions. Jenni and Chuck talk through why "busy" has become a badge of honour, the role managers play in either enabling or blocking focus time, and why learning to say no might be the real skill organisations need to cultivate. Prompted by an article shared by a listener, Jenni brings a piece from Cameron Wood that's been circulating on LinkedIn, unpacking why internal comms keeps having the same conversations. Two lines stood out: that opening isn't reading, reading isn't understanding, understanding isn't believing, and believing isn't changing behaviour, and that most leaders see the function as useful rather than important. Jenni shares data from her own past research with CEOs ranking the value of internal comms, and the pair debate whether working backwards from behaviour change is the better starting point for the function. Germany has tightened its sick leave rules, requiring a medical certificate from the very first day of illness and scrapping the pandemic-era option of phone sign-off. Jenni and Chuck weigh what the policy signals about trust between employers, government and employees, and whether it risks pushing unwell people into work rather than solving the problem it's aimed at. ___________________________ Want to find out more about Chuck’s work and ICology - check out the website and how to become a member here: https://www.joinicology.com/  Jenni’s a regular speaker and consultant on leadership credibility and internal communication, you can find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/ ___________________________   Articles mentioned in this episode:  Half of AI workforce cuts will reverse by 2027 https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-13-gartner-predicts-by-2027-50-percent-of-enterprises-without-a-people-centric-ai-strategy-will-lose-their-top-ai-talent The Office Amenity That Actually Improves Teamwork https://hbr.org/2026/07/the-office-amenity-that-actually-improves-teamwork Internal comms is useful but it’s not important https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jasonanthoine_honesty-about-ic-activity-7482289731754561536-F_1K? Germany are tightening up the sick leave rules https://deutschlandinenglish.com/p/germany-tightens-sick-leave-rules-medical-certificates-required-from-day-one-telephone-sick-leave-ended