Frequency

Articles mentioned in this episode: 

1️⃣ The AI Paradox: Employees Are Ready, Organisations Are Not

2️⃣ Vibe Coding Built 380,000 Publicly Accessible Apps — Many With Your Company's Data Inside

3️⃣ The Gap Between What Leaders Think and What Employees Experience

4️⃣ Meetings Are Now the Primary Way We Experience Each Other at Work — So Why Are Most Still an Afterthought?

5️⃣ Yondr at Work: Phone Bans Are Spreading — and the Evidence Is Mixed

In Episode 58 of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose dig into five stories with a golden thread of technology. 

Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index, drawing on 20,000 workers across 31 countries, makes the case that the biggest barrier to getting value from AI isn't the technology and it isn't the people — it's the organisation itself. Two thirds of AI users say the technology lets them spend more time on high-value work, and 58% say they're producing output they couldn't have produced before. Jenni pushes back on some of the data's framing, arguing that producing work you couldn't produce before only matters if it's work that needed doing!

Chuck breaks down new research from Israeli cybersecurity firm Red Access, which scanned apps built with vibe coding tools — platforms that let non-developers build and deploy software using AI — and found 380,000 publicly accessible assets, around 5,000 of which contained sensitive corporate data. Jenni draws a useful parallel to the arrival of Canva — democratising a capability is fundamentally a good thing, the security problem is the risk attached, not the essence of what's possible - vibe designing anyone?

The starkest data of the episode comes from Axios HQ's 2026 internal comms report. 27% of leaders believe their employees are fully aligned with the organisation's goals. Only 9% of employees agree. Poor communication is estimated to cost between $3,600 and $37,000 per employee per year — and as Chuck walks through the maths for a company of a thousand, ten thousand, or more, the numbers become impossible to ignore. 

Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering, gets her due in a story on meeting design. Parker's argument — that in remote, hybrid, and distributed workplaces, meetings are no longer just one tool among many, but the primary way people experience the organisation. Her provocation that most meetings fail before they start, because the person calling them has mistaken a category for a purpose, draws Jenni to argue that employees don't have to wait for organisations to fix this: you have agency over the meetings you're in and the ones you run.

Finally, the phone pouch has arrived in the workplace. Companies including ID.me are locking employee devices in Yonder-style sealed pouches during shifts, and JP Morgan Chase's Jamie Dimon has called phones in meetings disrespectful. For Jenni, the more fundamental issue is the trust signal it sends: rather than having a direct conversation about behaviour, companies are taking the easier route and removing the object. Chuck's closing point is characteristically grounding — he'd lock his phone up if Jamie Dimon locked his up first.

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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/

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Articles mentioned in this episode: 

1️⃣ IoIC's IC Index

2️⃣ Credibility gap in internal comms despite high professional esteem

3️⃣ It’s about capability not happiness at work

4️⃣ What if employee frustration was your most valuable architecture data?

In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose look at employee trust and organisational change, a hard interrogation of whether IC is genuinely credible or simply politely tolerated, what actually drives performance inside organisations, and why employee frustration with technology might be one of the most valuable datasets an organisation is currently ignoring.

Jenni and Chuck draw a sharp distinction between respect and credibility — respect doesn't produce followership, credibility does — and argue that the math here tells a story the profession needs to sit with. If 70% of IC professionals cannot connect their work to business outcomes, the question becomes whether the respect the majority feel is for the content and channels function, not for strategic influence or leadership. 

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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/ 

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Articles mentioned in this episode: 

News items mentioned in this episode: 

1️⃣ Internal Comms Is Absorbing a Crisis It Didn't Create

2️⃣ Better Signals, Less Noise: The State of Workplace Communication

3️⃣ 'New Normal' Prompts New Guidelines for CEO Communications

4️⃣ Meta Is Tracking Employee Keystrokes to Train Its AI

5️⃣ Your Employees' Old Slack Messages Have a New Owner

About this week's episode of Frequency: 

This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose dig into a cluster of stories that all point to the same uncomfortable truth: in communications, playing it safe is often the riskiest move of all. From burned-out IC practitioners to CEOs retreating from the public eye to a tech giant quietly watching its own employees, the thread running through this episode is what happens when organisations choose silence over substance.

The episode opens with the Shifting Ground Report which surveyed 24 internal comms professionals. The findings are striking: 88% said their personal wellbeing had been affected by overlapping crises, and 83% reported stress or burnout. Nearly three quarters say they are aiming for a strategic communications model, yet only 18% believe they have actually got there, and 61% have no formal change comms approach in place. The report makes the case that neutral, sanitised language is not safe communication; it simply transfers risk from the organisation's legal exposure onto employees' trust. Jenni draws a direct parallel to psychological safety research, arguing that the very behaviour designed to feel cautious is the behaviour that undermines candour and organisational health.

The second story comes from a survey of 1,175 full-time US employees, and it surfaces a paradox every communicator should sit with: half of employees say the volume of communication they receive is about right, yet 44% simultaneously report feeling overwhelmed. On AI, 81% say they believe they can tell when something has been written by AI — a claim Chuck challenges with a pointed observation about AI detection tools flagging Mary Shelley. The shorthand from the survey is "reduce, don't produce," which Jenni and Chuck agree captures a governance conversation most organisations have still not had.

The third story looks beyond the internal function to the Golin CEO Impact Index, which tracks the public communications activity of the top 250 Fortune 500 CEOs - it tells a story about what happens when you say no to one thing and yes to something else!

Meta's are capturing employee keystrokes and mouse clicks across hundreds of sites and apps — including Google, LinkedIn, Slack, and GitHub — with the stated purpose of teaching its AI models how to use computers. Employees who called the programme dystopian did so in internal messages Meta was also monitoring. Jenni raises a pointed scientific objection: if you tell people they are being tracked, or they find out they have been, behaviour changes — meaning the "big and unbiased data set" Meta sought was never achievable in the first place. The absence of meaningful communication around the launch is, as Chuck notes, itself a choice, and one that sits alongside all the other stories this week as an illustration of what silence costs.

The episode closes with a fifth story about Asset Hub, built by a startup called Simple Closure, that helps shuttered companies sell their internal data — Slack conversations, email threads, meeting notes — as AI training material. Approximately 100 deals have been processed, with payouts ranging from tens of thousands to well into six figures. The legal question of who owns employee communications, and whether a company can sell them, remains largely untested. Jenni's reaction is clear: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

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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/

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In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose dig into four stories that, taken together, make a pretty uncomfortable case: that modern work is increasingly built on theatre and ambiguity.

From a personal essay that went viral, to engagement data from two continents, to the real story behind return-to-office mandates, this episode asks what happens when the structures organisations rely on stop working - and nobody says anything.

The first story is a personal essay from someone who confessed to spending an entire year at a software company doing no work - and never being found out. Her piece draws on David Graeber's concept of bullshit jobs - roles so pointless that even the person doing them cannot justify their existence - with Graeber estimating that 20 to 50% of all jobs fit that description.

Firstup have published some reports into employee engagement, surveying over 3,000 employees across corporate, manager, and hourly worker roles in both North America and the UK. The headline finding is that employee engagement scores look healthy on paper, but they are masking a significant and growing retention crisis. Nearly half of employees say they are engaged, and nearly half are also planning to leave within 12 months. The real question Chuck and Jenni discuss is what are the drivers behind why people stay if they aren’t engaged?

The third story, from Startups Magazine, is titled The Clarity Crisis: Why Your Culture Problem is Actually a Communication Problem. Its central argument is that what leaders diagnose as a culture problem is most often a communication problem, specifically a failure around clarity. It’s not new, but how does this knowledge start to have an impact with managers and leaders in the workplace?

The final story examines some return-to-office stats and trends for the USA. Only 27% of companies have returned to a fully in-person model, while 67% continue to offer some form of hybrid flexibility. Perhaps the most revealing statistic in the report: 25% of executives and 18% of HR professionals admit they hoped some employees would voluntarily leave because of an RTO policy - something Chuck calls out as weak.  

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: 

This week on Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose look at the data behind why employees lose motivation, the question of whether internal comms has become too comfortable to be useful, and two perspectives on where the real friction in AI transformation actually lives.

1️⃣ The first story comes from the Predictive Index, which surveyed more than 1,000 US employees in 2026 and found that 78% began their current role feeling motivated — but only 16% say their work always feels meaningful. For Jenni, the data points to something organisations keep getting wrong: the assumption that meaning, once communicated, sticks. Chuck zeroes in on the clarity finding and makes the case that it's also one of the more fixable problems: leaders just need to tell people what to focus on, and then actually hold that line from week to week.

2️⃣ The second conversation is sparked by a provocative LinkedIn post from Simon Cavendish, chair of the IABC EMENA and a senior IC consultant, who argues that internal comms has become addicted to alignment with too many IC teams producing beautifully crafted messages for fundamentally bad decisions. Access to leadership, he says, has become more important than actually using that access to push back. The quote Jenni and Chuck both land on: being in the room isn't the win — what we do in the room is the win. 

3️⃣ The third story takes on one of the biggest assumptions shaping how organisations measure AI right now: that adoption is the goal. Charter's Brian Elliott brought together practitioners from Atlassian, Zapier, Udemy, and others for a closed-door forum on AI measurement, and the conclusion from those furthest along in their AI journeys is that adoption as a metric is quietly being abandoned. Microsoft's summary of the shift: we used to pay attention to adoption, now we just pay attention to performance. Jenni draws a direct line back to lessons from digital transformation programmes, where teams chased adoption numbers without ever anchoring to business outcomes. Chuck pushes back a little: 97% adoption of anything is a significant signal.

4️⃣ The final story comes from Rebecca Hinds, writing in Inc., who makes the case that the real blocker to AI transformation isn't the tools — it's the narrative leaders encode into their culture before the rollout even starts. Drawing on research from Bob Sutton's AI Transformation 100 report, she surfaces a hard finding: when leaders deploy AI in ways that strip craft and human touch from work, what's left is a hollow shell with little meaning. Chuck pushes back on Jenni's earlier framing that AI change is like any other change campaign — he thinks the scale of what's shifting makes it categorically different. Jenni also flags that ethical dimensions are increasingly in focus, pointing to new AI ethics guidance being developed through CIPR Inside, and the importance of maintaining the human check in any AI-assisted process.

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: 

This week on Frequency, Chuck and Jenni explore why the $50 billion global corporate wellness market has become its only stagnant sector, break down the BANI framework and what it demands from communicators and leaders, debate whether "toxic culture" is a useful label at all, and tackle the career-defining question of whether you should ever push back on your CEO.

Articles mentioned in this episode: 

This episode marks one year of Frequency! 

Articles mentioned in this episode: 

📍 America's chief financial officers say AI is coming for admin jobs

📍 How many hours should employees work? A question that reveals something about every boss

From the science behind psychological safety to a product development model being applied to the trust crisis, via the ongoing debate about whether meetings count as real work, this is an episode full of practical frameworks and direct perspectives.

Jenni opens the conversation by exploring the Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast, hosted by Bruce Daisley, which features Professor Katrien Franzen and her research on leadership and social identity. The central insight is the concept of "we-ness" — the idea that without a genuine sense of team belonging, psychological safety simply cannot take hold. Professor Franzen's research identifies four distinct leadership roles: task leader, motivational leader, social leader, and external leader. Jenni and Chuck examine whether it is realistic to expect formal leaders to embody all four.

The conversation turns to a Fortune article reporting that business leaders are raising the alarm over meeting culture, with Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan among the latest to speak out. Nearly 80% of workers say they are drowning in meetings, and an Atlassian study of 5,000 workers across four continents found that 72% of meetings are deemed ineffective. 

Shel Holtz's recent LinkedIn article introduces a framework that applies the Kano model — developed by Professor Noriaki Kano in the 1980s for product management — to the challenge of rebuilding employee trust. The context makes the framework all the more urgent: Gallup data shows only 21% of US employees strongly agree they trust their organisation's leadership, and the Edelman Trust Barometer has recorded its first global decline in employee trust in the study's 26-year history. 

Jenni closes the episode with a look at the UK's Best Workplaces 2026 list. The numbers behind the list make the case compellingly: UK best workplaces perform more than four times better than the market and generate 6.25 times greater revenue per employee. Chuck raises a fair challenge about the nature of paid-for lists and the many great workplaces that simply are not on them, while Jenni argues that for internal comms and HR professionals the more productive question is: what are these organisations doing to build the trust that sits behind these results, and what can we learn from them?

Articles mentioned in this 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/

In Episode 50, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose are back together — Jenni returning from a trip to Japan and Chuck recording live from Las Vegas during Transform — to dig into four stories shaping the future of work, careers, and our relationship with AI.

Articles mentioned in this 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. Find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/

Jenni Field is away this week, so Chuck Gose goes solo covering four stories that all, in different ways, come back to the same question: what does leadership actually communicate about how much it values its people?

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi went on The Diary of a CEO podcast and said the quiet part loud: he expects immediate responses to weekend emails, doesn't talk about work-life balance at Uber, and will push employees out if they can't keep pace. Chuck isn't entirely unsympathetic — there's something genuinely useful about a leader who names the culture explicitly rather than letting unspoken norms do the damage quietly. The problem is the contradiction. Claiming flexibility while expecting Saturday email responses at 9:30pm is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Chuck draws the contrast with Linear CEO Karri Saarinen, who has deliberately built a 40-hour-week culture around quality over speed. The question isn't which CEO is right. It's whether employees at either company actually know what they're signing up for.

Cracker Barrel made headlines when a leaked internal memo instructed employees to eat at Cracker Barrel restaurants for most meals during business travel, with alcohol no longer reimbursable without senior pre-approval. Chuck's take: the policy is largely unremarkable. SAP Concur named this exact trend "travelscrimping" in their 2025 Global Business Travel Survey. What made it a story was the absence of proactive framing — a two-year-old policy became a crisis because it leaked without context. The real communication failure wasn't the policy. It was letting a leaked memo define the narrative first. And in a company still recovering from a $100 million rebrand reversal, that trust deficit made the pile-on predictable.

The frontline workforce gets the most substantive treatment of the episode. Chuck walks through a Fortune op-ed by Stacey Zolt Hara of Burson, anchored by former United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz and his framework for operational excellence: focus on the person holding the wrench. Munoz is credited with turning around a deeply disgruntled 85,000-person workforce by making frontline workers the centrepiece of the culture rebuild. The data backing the argument is striking — 87% of frontline workers aren't sure whether company culture applies to them at all, and a 2025 Aspen Institute study found U.S. GDP would be 10% higher if the essential economy had kept pace with white-collar productivity growth. Chuck flags that the article is a Burson op-ed — a comms firm making the case for comms investment — but doesn't let that undermine the substance. And he notes the harder truth behind the How Institute's finding that 94% of employees say moral leadership matters, but only 6% of CEOs deliver it: the problem isn't awareness. It's that incentive structures don't reward it.

The episode closes with a story that lands closer to home — a survey from the HR Certification Institute finding that 67% of HR practitioners have no clear or well-defined career path, and 41% are considering leaving the profession entirely. Chuck calls it less an irony than an indictment: the function responsible for career frameworks, succession planning, and leadership pipelines for everyone else hasn't applied any of that to itself. The structural problems are architectural — flat hierarchies, lean teams, subjective promotions — and people analytics as a career differentiator is realistic only for the top 15-20% of practitioners who sit inside data-mature organisations. Chuck closes with a thread that connects back to the Munoz story: HR practitioners are their own version of the guy with the wrench. Essential to the operation. Excluded from conversations about their own futures.

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. Find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/

Articles mentioned in this episode:

Uber CEO Says Hard Work Is "the Most Important Skill in Life" — and He'll Push You Out If You Can't Keep Up 

Cracker Barrel Tells Employees to Eat at Cracker Barrel on Work Trips 

To Unlock Employee Effort, Don't Overlook the Person Holding the Wrench 

HR Is Supposed to Design Career Paths. So Why Are Its Own So Unclear?