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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

This week Chuck and Jenni dig into what heavy AI use is actually doing to us, why most executive offsites fail before they even start, a co-founder who got fired for breaking the very return-to-office rule he signed off on, whether AI is really to blame for Gen Z's job struggles, and what the latest remote work research says about loneliness at work. Plus Nick Bloom makes another appearance to push back on the doom narrative. Mark Zao-Sanders' third annual AI usage study moves the conversation past adoption and into what heavy use is doing to people, coining the term "think slop" for the growing sense that users are outsourcing their thinking to the machine. Drawing on nearly 13,000 real use cases, the study finds therapy and emotional support has doubled to become the top use case for the second year running, while enterprise ROI remains mostly marginal outside of narrow, specific applications like personalised email campaigns. Chuck and Jenni compare how their own AI habits have shifted, from content generation toward thought partnering, administrative troubleshooting, and call summarisation. Gustavo Razzetti, author of Remote, Not Distant, has run over 300 executive offsites and says most fail for the same reason: treating bonding as the point instead of paying down what he calls "conversational debt," the compounding cost of every real conversation a team keeps avoiding. Jenni and Chuck debate whether leaders can actually handle the discomfort a good offsite requires, and agree the real test isn't the room, it's whether anything changes in the weeks that follow. William Neport, co-founder of the $8 billion investment firm Bramshill, was fired after refusing to comply with the return-to-office mandate he himself signed alongside his two co-founders. His defence is that the policy was written for employees, not owners, and he's now suing for $30 million while arguing the mandate was really a mechanism to force him out of his equity stake. Jenni doesn't hold back on what a "rules for thee, not for me" policy does to leadership credibility, and both hosts question why this apparently wasn't discussed among the three founders in the first place. New research from the St. Louis Fed complicates the popular narrative that AI is eating entry-level jobs. Looking at 18 to 24 year olds, a general shortage of job openings accounts for the bulk of rising youth unemployment, while AI-skilled hiring shifts explain only a small fraction of it. Chuck and Jenni discuss why blaming AI is the easier story to tell, and Jenni raises concerns about which human skills, like relationship building and influence, are getting neglected while everyone focuses on upskilling in AI. A new study from the New York Fed, University of Virginia, and Harvard finds remote work accounts for roughly a third of the rise in mental distress since 2011, hitting people who live alone hardest. Stanford's Nick Bloom pushes back hard, arguing his randomised trials show remote work improving mental health and that the real issue is loneliness, not location. Jenni argues it's a design problem, not a location problem, and that organisations have a role to play in creating connection without needing to justify it with a return on investment. Before getting into the stories, Jenni shares news of a new quarterly LinkedIn newsletter, Frequency Check, launching soon, along with details on Frequency Live in London this September at Unite26 with the folks at Unily (use code FREQUENCY20) and ICology's Flyover Festival in Sioux Falls on August 27. ____________________________ 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 People Are Really Using AI in 2026 https://hbr.org/2026/06/how-people-are-really-using-ai-in-2026 Why Executive Team Offsites Fail (And How to Avoid It) https://think.fearlessculture.design/p/why-executive-team-offsites-fail The Cofounder Fired for Breaking His Own Return-to-Office Rule https://finance.yahoo.com/small-business/articles/investment-firm-cofounder-sues-being-171729024.html Gen Z’s Meager Job Prospects May Not Have AI to Blame https://www.fastcompany.com/91568772/gen-zs-meager-job-prospects-may-not-have-ai-to-blame Too Many Zooms, Too Little Face Time: Is Remote Work Making Us Lonely? https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/06/29/remote-work-from-home-loneliness-epidemic-americans/90651835007/

This week, Chuck and Jenni dig into four stories reshaping how we think about generations, empathy, and boundaries at work: why the evidence for "generational differences" keeps failing to show up, the hidden emotional toll being carried disproportionately by women managers, new data on Britain's always-on work culture, and the ongoing debate about what business casual even means anymore. The conversation opens with a challenge to one of comms' most persistent assumptions. Drawing on a LinkedIn post and research roundup from Rob Briner, there is little support for the idea that Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, and boomers genuinely differ in their attitudes, needs, or communication styles. Chuck and Jenni discuss why the theory endures anyway, pointing to environment and life stage, not generation, as the real drivers of behaviour. From there, the conversation turns to a Business Insider piece on the hidden cost of empathy at work. The article follows several women, including an HR executive who returned from maternity leave to find herself functioning as her team's unofficial therapist, and cites Harvard Business School research showing over 80% of women managers surveyed spend at least 30% of their working week on caring tasks, nearly a full day, with 59% saying that load has grown over the past year. Chuck and Jenni talk through why this burden falls disproportionately on women, the risk of untrained managers overstepping into territory better suited to trained professionals, and what organisations should be doing to build in proper support and boundaries. Next, new research from HiBob puts numbers behind Britain's always-on culture, with 42% of UK workers considering quitting due to stress, 58% reporting increased pressure compared to two years ago, and over half checking work messages on holiday or within minutes of waking. Chuck shares a story about his father's first pager as a marker of when "reachable" quietly became "expected to respond," and the pair discuss whether work has always felt like this - how can we know without research from years ago? The episode closes on a lighter note with a Wall Street Journal piece on Gen Z redefining business casual, prompted by Jenni's own real-world sighting of some questionably casual office attire. Chuck and Jenni share sharply different takes, weighing individuality and comfort against the message clothing sends before anyone's said a word, with an assist from Jenni's stylist on where the line sits. _______________________ 00:00 Intro 01:14 Freq-out: fired over a $2 cookie (Ford) 06:22 Do generations at work matter? (Rob Briner & "zombie ideas") 12:31 The hidden cost of empathy at work 20:02 The "always-on" culture (HiBob research) 28:45 Gen Z redefines "business casual" 34:20 Freq-outs: the World Cup red-card U-turn (+ a birthday) _______________________ 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:  Generations at work don’t matter https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rob-briner_oh-dear-oh-dear-oh-dear-this-is-getting-share-7478814435411689473-fNoP/   The hidden cost of empathy at work https://www.businessinsider.com/hidden-cost-empathy-tax-work-women-2026-7   New Research from HiBob and the impact of Always on culture https://www.hibob.com/news/britains-workforce-transformation-gap/   Gen Z redefine ‘business casual’ https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/gen-z-redefines-what-constitutes-business-casual-8959026

This week Jenni and Chuck are digging into the real return on AI-driven layoffs, why AI-generated writing has stalled instead of taking over the internet, what's really happening as companies go quiet on LGBTQ+ support, and a new report picking a fight with the entire employee engagement industry. Gartner surveyed 350 executives at billion-dollar-plus companies and found that roughly 80% of those deploying autonomous AI made workforce cuts — but the cuts had almost no relationship to actual return on investment. Jenni and Chuck unpack why this creates a messaging problem for comms teams: when a company frames AI as a growth story but the visible news is a headcount reduction, employees notice the gap between what's said and what's done, and that's where trust erodes. Gartner also predicts autonomous business will become a net positive job creator by 2028–2029, driven by new forms of work AI can't absorb — a reminder that in past waves of technological change, roles have shifted rather than simply vanished. Next, a Graphite analysis of tens of thousands of English-language URLs from Common Crawl shows that AI-generated articles have flattened at around half for over a year. Jenni and Chuck talk through what that plateau might mean, from the risk of AI models increasingly training on AI-generated content, to how easy it's becoming to spot formulaic, AI-flavoured writing in places like CEO messages and LinkedIn posts. The conversation lands on a practical question for internal comms teams: it's less about whether AI wrote something, and more about whether it still sounds like a real person who works there. A Harris poll catches the current DEI rollback in action. The majority of LGBTQ+ employees have noticed a meaningful shift in how their workplace talks about LGBTQ+ issues, and a significant share say the conversation has dropped off or never started at all — with only around a third reporting a workplace that combines strong policy with genuinely supportive culture. Jenni's advice for leaders tempted to see silence as the "safe" option is blunt: silence is still a choice, and it should be tested against the company's stated values rather than treated as neutral. The data backs her up — a large majority of LGBTQ+ employees say they're more likely to stay at a company that visibly supports them, and non-LGBTQ+ employees overwhelmingly say the way a company treats its LGBTQ+ colleagues signals how it treats everyone. Finally, a new Integral report challenges the value of employee engagement as a predictor of workplace behaviour. Around three-quarters of the workforce counts as "engaged" by traditional measures, yet a third of them work in environments where they expect destructive colleague behaviour at triple the rate of their peers. Jenni, who has been writing about why engagement alone is the wrong measure of organisational health, calls it one of the most useful reports she's read on the topic, particularly its focus on behaviour over a single tidy score. Chuck connects the dots back to the LGBTQ+ story earlier in the episode, tying the "freedom to speak up" condition directly to whether employees feel safe bringing themselves to work. This week's conversation also ties back to a few earlier episodes worth revisiting: Episode 13, where Jenni and Chuck first talked about the risks and dangers employees feel in bringing themselves to work; Episode 55, which covered the Firstup report comparing UK and North American employee engagement and the role benefits play in why people stay; and Episode 63, where Jenni discussed Dorie Clark's The Long Game. –––––––––––––––– 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:  AI Layoffs Free Up Budget but Don't Deliver Returns https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-05-gartner-says-autonomous-business-and-artificial-intelligence-layoffs-may-create-budget-room-but-do-not-deliver-returns AI Writing Hits a Ceiling https://www.axios.com/2026/05/15/human-vs-ai-written-articles Companies Are Going Quiet on LGBTQ+ Support — and Employees Notice https://theharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Inclusive-Insights-Report-Workplace-June-2026.pdf The Engagement Fallacy: Why Engaged Employees Still Quietly Quit https://www.teamintegral.com/integral-index/

This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose are talking about long-term thinking in a short-term world, what the resignation of the UK Prime Minister reveals about leadership communication, new data from Gallup on the state of global employee engagement, and the ongoing confusion between remote and hybrid work. Jenni opens by reflecting on the resignation of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with coverage noting that critics felt he lacked the communication skills to connect with the public — described as coming across as stiff and wooden in an era where authenticity and emotion dominate. Jenni and Chuck explore what this reveals about the expectations placed on leaders, drawing a parallel to the CEO experience and asking whether the patience to let leaders develop their communication over time has simply disappeared.  Gallup's State of the Global Workforce 2026 report lands with a striking headline: global employee engagement has dropped to 20%, its lowest level since 2020, with an estimated $10 trillion cost to the global economy in lost productivity. But the finding Jenni and Chuck dig into most is the shift in manager engagement — once consistently higher than that of the people they lead, it has now fallen to near parity.  A New York Times Instagram post claiming remote work explains a third of the deterioration in American mental health over the past 15 years prompted a pointed response from organisational psychologist Adam Grant, who argued that hybrid work is in fact healthier than full office attendance. Jenni and Chuck agree with both — and that's the problem. Remote and hybrid are not the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable muddies conversations happening inside organisations right now.  Jenni brings a book to the table this week: The Long Game by Dorie Clark, which she finished after hearing them speak at a Chris Ducker leadership event. The book centres on long-term thinking in a short-term world — and Jenni draws a direct line between its ideas and the pressures she sees on communications, HR, and leadership teams who are reacting to the next three to six months rather than building toward a clear destination. Three quotes from the book shape the conversation, including the idea that enduring discomfort and humiliation may be necessary for the most powerful long-term rewards — which Chuck reflects on through the lens of building Frequency from zero.   CHAPTERS 00:00 Intro + good news: Meta stops tracking employees 05:05 UK PM resigns — can leadership communication be taught? 09:05 Gallup 2026: engagement at a 5-year low (and the manager problem) 16:14 Remote vs hybrid: why we keep confusing them 22:33 The Long Game: long-term thinking, by Dorie Clark _____________________________ 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:  UK prime minister has resigned https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwygj95xrp9o Global employee engagement has fallen to its lowest level since 2020 https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx We ran the numbers and remote work is bad for us https://www.instagram.com/p/DZzbfz0Egtw/?igsh=MW95ZWhqbXV1ZXA3MA%3D%3D The Long Game by Dorie Clark https://dorieclark.com/longgame/

Jenni and Chuck are in the same room for the first time in 60+ episodes, and they spend it arguing about whether your headphones are quietly making coworkers think less of you. Before that, four reports worth a comms team's attention: email benchmarks, CCO pay, and a leadership sentiment gap. Recorded in person in Toronto after IABC World Conference and Comms Reboot, this week's episode digs into the data that cuts against communicators' instincts. Workshop's 2026 report (186 million emails, 580 companies) sets the median internal open rate at 73%. The headline isn't the number, it's what argues with your habits: small targeted sends beat mass blasts, plain text beats image-heavy email even though 97% of emails still include an image, and SMS clicks run nearly three times higher. Who are we really designing these emails for? A Wall Street Journal piece tracks the Chief Communications Officer's rise, now reporting straight to the CEO at nearly half of organizations, with base pay past $450K. The catch: workload satisfaction is falling and the role keeps absorbing reputational risk that used to belong to the whole leadership team. Culture Amp analyzed 1.7 million employees and found a 40-point sentiment gap between the C-suite and individual contributors, plus a reminder of how far one leader's quality travels through performance, attrition, and trust. Then the headphones debate. Research says coworkers judge each other not for what's playing, but for the story they invent about why you've got them on. Jenni and Chuck do not agree, and it becomes the liveliest stretch of the episode. _____________________________ 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:  The Internal Email Benchmark Is Now 73%  Workshop — 2026 Internal Communication Benchmarks & Best Practices Comms Chiefs Stormed the C-Suite. Now They're Overwhelmed. The Wall Street Journal — The Revenge of the Publicists: How Comms Execs Stormed the C-Suite Leaders Think Work Is Great. Their Employees Disagree by 40 Points. Culture Amp — The Leadership Advantage: How Great Leaders Elevate Organizational Performance Your Headphones Are Sending a Message You Didn't Write Harvard Business Review — Research: What Message Are Your Headphones Sending Your Coworkers?