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When brands deliberately provoke outrage, is the backlash a crisis or a planned part of the marketing strategy? Reformation’s campaign featuring Olivia Jade Giannulli, whose family was embroiled in the college admissions scandal, raises questions about using controversy to sell products. The campaign’s charitable donation from each sale adds another layer to the discussion, but does generating attention justify the risk to a brand’s reputation? In this episode, Neville and Shel explore the differences between calculated provocation, taking a principled stand, and accidentally causing offense.

Drawing on campaigns from Reformation, Nike, American Eagle, and others, we debate how to measure success beyond mentions and whether communicators should have the authority to stop a campaign when the reputational risks outweigh the likely benefits. Attention may be easy to count; the cost to trust is something else altogether.

Links from this episode:

Marketing Brew Article

The Reformation / Olivia Jade campaign

Rage bait and outrage as brand strategy

Research on whether bad publicity pays

Scandal-to-comeback arcs

Lean in vs. apologize

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, November 30.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi, everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 534. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. When a brand deliberately builds a campaign around a scandal, is that courageous? Or is it just rage bait masquerading as marketing with a charity twist?

Marketing Brew’s Jennimai Nguyen tackled that question last month in a piece that’s been popping up in my feeds more than once. Let’s talk about it, because the case at the center of it is almost perfectly engineered to divide a room of communicators.

Back in 2019, influencer Olivia Jade Giannulli was at the center of Operation Varsity Blues, the college admissions scandal. Her parents, Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud after she was admitted to the University of Southern California through a fake rowing recruitment. She dropped out, went quiet, and eventually came back as an influencer.

Fast-forward to this fall. Reformation, the fashion brand that went public over the summer, made her the face of its “Good Sport” campaign. The hero product is a crewneck sweatshirt that just says “College.” The Instagram caption—and I’m paraphrasing only slightly—says she’s back on campus in a crew that suits her better than the other kind.

Net proceeds from sales of this product go to YES Scholars, a nonprofit that helps underprivileged students get to college. People commenting on the campaign split pretty much the way you’d expect: half the audience calling it iconic and the other half calling it insensitive.

The Marketing Brew piece doesn’t just describe the controversy. Nguyen gets Derek Rucker, a marketing professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School, to lay out a framework for thinking about when leveraging a scandal works and when it doesn’t. It boils down to three things.

First, the old line that any publicity is good publicity. Rucker’s answer is—and I’m quoting him here—“definitively no.” Brands that court controversy can lose sales, lose audiences, and sometimes spend money cleaning up after the campaign.

Second, intentional controversy is really a bet about math. Rucker’s example is Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign in 2018. We discussed that more than once at the time here on FIR. Nike wasn’t surprised by the backlash. They were expecting it, but they were betting that the audience that shared their values was bigger than the audience that didn’t. That is a strategy. He notes that it’s an easier bet for smaller brands because there’s less of an existing audience to alienate.

Reformation, though, just IPO’d and wants to appeal to a broad swath of millennials and Gen Z. That makes the bet riskier.

Third—and this is the part I find most interesting for anybody who deals with crises—you can tell whether the controversy was intentional by watching what the brand does next. Rucker points to two tells. One is the charitable donation attached to the product. Reformation did it with YES Scholars. American Eagle did it last year with the Sydney Sweeney jeans and Crisis Text Line.

The other tell is the absence of an apology. Rucker’s line is that these brands aren’t going to apologize because they’re not sorry. They’re targeting a specific audience, and the people who were offended were never part of that target.

Contrast that with Converse, which pulled its Karina campaign and issued a flat-out apology within days when people pointed out that the imagery evoked the Ku Klux Klan and lynching symbolism. That’s what unintentional controversy looks like. Rucker’s advice there is the opposite: apologize immediately, take it down, and explain to consumers what happened. I would add, beyond what Rucker said, explain what you’re going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

The framework is: intentional or not, and does the response match?

Reformation’s silence isn’t a failure of crisis communications. It was their strategy from the get-go. Yet Rucker’s own closing thought is that, if he were starting a brand, he wouldn’t go this route because there are plenty of ways to stand out that don’t involve controversy.

Neville, I’m curious where you land on this. Is Reformation being clever, or is this a brand that just told its most offended customers it doesn’t need them?

Neville Hobson: It’s interesting. I don’t believe that Olivia Jade story was familiar to a lot of people here. I remember seeing news reports at the time. Isn’t that the issue that Felicity Huffman was involved with, and William H. Macy?

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Same one.

Neville Hobson: Now it rings big bells, I must admit.

My immediate thought, listening to what you were saying and reading some of the reports on all of these, is that controversy generates attention. We know that. But attention isn’t the same as trust, reputation, or commercial success. Communicators have a responsibility to challenge the strategy, not simply manage the fallout.

I’m wondering whether, in these examples—notably American Eagle and Reformation—we’re confusing the ability to generate attention with the ability to build a brand. If everyone’s talking about the controversy but nobody is talking about the product, have they really succeeded? That’s the first thing that comes to mind.

How would you measure the success? I guess this is really the crystallization of my thought here: How would you measure the success of a deliberately controversial campaign?

Shel Holtz: I think it depends on what their goal for the campaign was. If it was building awareness of the brand, that’s pretty easy. You can measure sentiment: How many people supported this? How many didn’t? Into which camps did they fall?

If you’re targeting millennials and Gen Z, and they’re more likely to think this was cool, especially given that the proceeds are going to a charity, then you can call it a success. If the goal was selling a ton of these shirts, that’s pretty easy, too. But the question is, when you release a new product or look at the other items in your product line, have you seen a lift there as well?

I don’t think a communicator would have told Nike not to do the Colin Kaepernick ad. I think they said, “Look, you’re going to get backlash, but it’s from customers we’re not particularly interested in. We’re interested in the larger audience that’s going to support this and buy these shoes.”

That’s what ended up happening. Nike suffered some backlash. I remember seeing shoes being burned in barbecues and things like that. But at the end of the day, Nike’s reputation is fine. Their profits are fine. They didn’t suffer at all. By and large, I think they’re seen as standing up for an important principle when they took the position they did.

Neville Hobson: I’ve been reading recently that their financial situation is actually not particularly good. Nevertheless, I think this is not a good place to be doing this kind of activity. That’s my broad opinion.

There’s a fundamental difference between deliberately challenging conventions, which some of these people do, and simply offending people. I don’t buy the argument that all these people we’ve offended don’t matter because they’re not our audience. That’s an unsustainable argument in my book.

Even if the marketing team believes controversy will generate attention, which is clearly what they do in all these cases, did anyone actually ask whether the reputational hit is worth it?

My question to you is: When does a provocative campaign like any of these cross the line from clever marketing into very poor professional judgment?

Shel Holtz: There was a Newsweek piece on this. The expert they quoted said that provocation becomes a crisis at the moment consumers stop debating the ad and start criticizing the company. That’s when prolonged negativity undermines trust and erases the attention benefit. As long as they’re just talking about the ad, I think your reputation and the degree of trust you may have earned are probably fine.

We can equate this to the very current political situation here in the U.S. I know we don’t like to take sides on the show because we don’t want to offend anybody in our audience. We want people on all sides of the political spectrum to listen because what we’re talking about is how to communicate effectively, and we don’t get into politics.

Nevertheless, Vivek Ramaswamy lost his race to be governor by double digits, and he was only down by two points before he released a very controversial ad. This was the ad that featured his opponent’s estranged mother. She hadn’t seen her in 30 or 35 years. She had been removed from her mother’s care as a child because her stepfather had raped her.

He was advised not to run this ad, but he felt it was beneficial to his campaign, so he did anyway. What I’ve been hearing is that it cost him 10 points in the race.

To the point of this person quoted in Newsweek, the conversation shifted from the ad itself to the guy who decided to run it, and what kind of character is involved in somebody who would make that decision. I think that’s a useful distinction. When they stop debating the ad and start criticizing the company, that’s when you’ve got trouble.

There was one other person quoted in that Newsweek article who draws the line between calculated provocation and a brand blunder. What you got with Reformation was calculated. What you got with Ramaswamy was a blunder. The former anticipates criticism as part of the plan. The latter happens when a brand fails to recognize cultural or historical associations.

I think Reformation falls into the category of, “We were going to anticipate the criticism, and people are still talking about the ad, not the company.” Ramaswamy, meanwhile, went down to a resounding defeat in a red state because of a blunder where he didn’t anticipate the blowback.

Neville Hobson: What troubles me about all this—and I hear what you say, Shel—is that I wouldn’t do stuff like this if I were running communication for one of these big brands.

Some brands, as is obvious from this, knowingly accept alienating one audience to strengthen their relationship with another. I think that’s appalling business practice, personally.

What troubles me is the possibility that we’re normalizing controversy as just another marketing technique, with reputation management reduced to cleaning up afterward. If a brand deliberately sets out to provoke people, it can’t then pretend to be surprised by the reaction.

I wonder where communicators sit with this. Shouldn’t they have the authority to challenge or even stop a campaign when, in their professional judgment, the reputational risk outweighs the likely benefits?

Shel Holtz: I think that’s the counsel communicators need to provide.

There was an older study—it’s 15 years old—from Stanford and Wharton that found negative publicity actually boosted sales, but only for relatively unknown products or brands, because it stimulated awareness of them. It hurt more established brands.

Reformation’s not unknown. This data would suggest that it probably wasn’t a good strategy for them, but so far it doesn’t look like it’s hurting them much.

Neville Hobson: It just seems not to be the way you should behave, in my humble opinion.

My final thought on it is that controversy may buy attention. We’ve got evidence that it obviously does in these examples. But that doesn’t necessarily earn trust at all. If anything, it will damage it, in my view.

Communicators need to understand the difference, and they should understand it better than anyone else. It seems to me to be another marketing technique that is not a good thing at all.

Shel Holtz: I’m inclined to agree. A campaign like this probably wouldn’t even pop into my mind if I were assigned the task of promoting this particular shirt.

Reformation never responded to a request for an interview, and they haven’t confirmed that the controversy was part of their strategy. That was Rucker’s belief.

There are so many different approaches you can take to marketing a product and a brand that I wouldn’t go down this road for fear of the damage it could do to trust.

But I come back to the Colin Kaepernick example from Nike. I think that was more than just courting controversy or using rage bait, which was somebody’s word of the year this year. What happened there went beyond using controversy and scandal to sell products. Nike was taking a stand. They were putting a stake in the ground and saying, “This is what we believe in.”

This was at a time when brands were doing that. We’ve talked before on the show about brands stepping back from taking positions on public issues, despite the Edelman Trust Barometer saying that people want brands to address societal issues and take stands. I think the political climate has led them to dial that way back, but that’s what Nike was doing at the time.

I don’t think they were rage baiting or trying to gin up controversy. They were trying to say, “This is what we stand for. We stand with Colin.” They knew from the research they’d done about their brand, demographics, and market that the vast majority would stand with them, which is pretty much what happened.

It’s a calculation. If it were an issue central to the organization, its culture, its marketplace, and the like, I might say, “We could do an ad that puts out our position on this issue and lets everyone know where we stand.” Do the research and know that 80% of your market isn’t on the other side of it.

But just rage baiting, just ginning up controversy? I wouldn’t recommend that. I find it fascinating that it’s becoming more or less a standard marketing practice.

There’s a piece in Campaign that quotes Rosie Brown, head of strategy at a marketing company with a great name: Kill Boring Dead. She says controversy is now planned. Brands treat backlash as a campaign event with KPIs rather than a crisis. Her distinction is that backlash on a campaign is survivable; backlash on your identity isn’t.

That’s another way to look at this. If you’re willing to take backlash on your brand, that’s fine. But if your identity is tainted, that can be very serious in terms of the damage it causes.

Neville Hobson: I think it’s a great shame that we’ve got someone who says stuff like that. But if that’s the landscape we’re in, then it’s part of what you see with social networks, where they all went down the toilet—notably Twitter, or X—and they think it’s fine.

I suppose you could argue that not all controversy is equal. Deliberate provocation, which is what nearly all the examples we discussed today involve; taking a principled stand, which I’d agree perhaps applies to what you said about Nike; and accidental offense are all different situations.

But what seems to be gaining acceptance in some quarters, particularly in the marketing arena, is that deliberate provocation is okay as long as you’re able to assess the benefit of the attention you’ll get, much of which may well be hostile to you, and the potential for damage to your brand.

I personally can’t imagine anyone being able to demonstrate, with a clear ethical conscience, that this is good business practice.

Shel Holtz: Just one more data point I pulled up: Novig, the brand that used the Sydney Sweeney controversy with its ad, saw brand mentions surge 900% after that ad aired. The company’s founder, Jacob Fortinsky, told Front Office Sports that the controversy “forces us into the national discourse.”

Again, was that their goal? If that was their goal, they succeeded. Why that would be their goal, I don’t know. Maybe they looked long term and said people would remember their name long after the controversy had receded into the background.

But I agree with you. It’s a sad thing to see controversy and rage baiting being used to sell stuff. I think we’re going to see more of it, not less.

Neville Hobson: I’m sure you’re right. We might as well just say the end justifies the means, right?

Shel Holtz: Yeah.

Neville Hobson: That’s very sad.

Shel Holtz: It is. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #534: Is A Scandal-Based Marketing Campaign Worth the Risk? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Reaching frontline employees takes more than an app, a digital sign, or a weekly briefing for supervisors to deliver. Employees working in manufacturing plants, on delivery routes, on construction sites, and in healthcare settings have different opportunities to receive information—and different needs. Communicators may not control the channels those employees rely on, and getting a message in front of someone doesn’t mean they understood it or could act on it. Before auditing channels or proposing another communication tool, organizations need to answer a more basic question: What are they trying to accomplish?

In this episode of “On the Same Page,” Shel Holtz and Mark Dollins explore how to make frontline communication relevant, accessible, and useful. Drawing on recent studies and examples from their careers, they discuss working with local managers, equipping supervisors to interpret decisions, creating opportunities for employees to ask questions, and testing approaches before expanding them. They also challenge the assumption that frontline employees care only about schedules and pay, and offer a practical way to uncover the gap between publishing information and communicating it successfully.

Links from this episode:

Subscribe to Employee Signal, Mark’s New Substack!

Raw Transcript:

Mark Dollins: Hey, Shel, how are you doing?

Shel Holtz: I am doing great, Mark. How about yourself?

Mark Dollins: I’m doing very well here in Connecticut, just past Halloween, and I guess we’re ready for Christmas. We kind of skip directly to the next major holiday. There’s this Thanksgiving thing in the way. It’s crazy.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, on my end Hanukkah starts almost immediately after Thanksgiving, so I’ve got to get ready.

Mark Dollins: They’re all jumbling together. But I was thinking today we could talk about a topic that I hear a lot about from my clients. Of course, I spent a lot of time working on this in my roles leading employee communications for a number of large multinational companies. The topic is frontline communications.

Invariably, the question always comes to me first: “Hey, Mark, we need to figure out how to improve our frontline communications, so we need to do an audit.” And I say, “Well, let’s talk about something that we need to answer first, and that is: What are you trying to accomplish?”

Interestingly enough, most of my clients can’t really answer that question because they haven’t thought it through fully. They’ve got some ideas, but they really do need to have a very clear sense of what they want to do with frontline communications. It comes with a lot of, let’s just say, politics and potential conflict. It’s not as easy as, “Well, we own all the channels and we own all the ability to reach our frontline employees,” because, especially in most larger organizations, the truth is communications does not.

I’m curious if you’ve got similar things happening in your world, where you’re working or in the world of consulting that you’ve come from. I would imagine you’ve tackled this topic a time or two.

Shel Holtz: Most definitely, throughout my career. My first corporate communications job was with an energy company. Oil production was way at the top of the list. You had people out in the oil patch, people on offshore oil rigs, people in refineries, all of them in different conditions and different circumstances for getting information. We had people on ships, on the tankers.

I worked for a pharmaceutical company where you had salespeople out in the field driving around to doctors’ offices all day. You had people working in labs and in production facilities. I was with Mattel, the toy company, so manufacturing was a big deal there, as well as people like retail merchandisers. And now I’m with a construction company, so every construction site, every project, is a different siloed frontline collection of employees.

Certainly, during the 21 years I consulted, this was an issue for a lot of my clients. It’s interesting that you brought this up as a topic. The day you sent me the email suggesting this was the same day I got an invitation to a webinar from Forrester and Staffbase. They had just finished a brand-new survey on frontline communication. So I think we have a lot to talk about here.

Mark Dollins: We certainly do. I think you’ve made probably one of the most important points of all already, and that is: This is not a one-size-fits-all solution for anybody. As you were talking about the industries that you’ve worked in, I was reflecting on the work that I did when I was with PepsiCo for almost 20 years. You would think that the way a Frito-Lay route delivery driver has access to company channels and communications would be somewhat similar to what happens on the beverage side. And the truth is, that’s not the reality.

Not just across industries, but even within the same company, that frontline experience, whether you’re in manufacturing or distribution or whatever you’re doing, is going to be different. It takes a lot of thought and a solution that looks at all those potential scenarios.

Shel Holtz: I think in a lot of those really large organizations, you end up with communicators in big business units, big divisions, and they’re making decisions on their own for their people. They may have a dotted line to the top-line corporate communications, but they’re dealing more with the corporate-level messaging and communications. In a lot of cases, they’re dealing with executive communications and don’t have that much influence over how information gets to the front line.

Mark Dollins: Yeah, and especially when you’re in the manufacturing area, ownership of those channels does not belong to communications. It belongs to those shift supervisors and the staff management at that location. They have very limited windows in which they can communicate, and they’re going to own it as much as they possibly can and prevent outside influences from stepping into it. So that’s another bit of politics that we’ll talk about.

Shel Holtz: And it brings us back to manager communications too, doesn’t it?

Mark Dollins: Absolutely. Number one. I thought maybe we could start with—you know how I’m big on data—talk to us about the results of that survey. It’d be a curious place to start and see how our experiences line up with what the new research is telling us about frontline communications.

Shel Holtz: Sure. There are some interesting findings out of this. I summarized the ones that I found most interesting. First, more than half of employees who responded to this survey, which included managers, by the way, receive necessary work information through six or more channels. So access to information can coexist with fragmentation, but it also leads to the potential for inconsistency.

Mark Dollins: Wow, okay.

Shel Holtz: Do you want to talk about each of these as we go through them?

Mark Dollins: No, keep going. This is all good.

Shel Holtz: Okay. Twenty-seven percent report moderately to very inconsistent information across channels, which speaks to that fragmentation. Getting to your earlier point, distribution of this needs clear ownership and version control.

Forty-eight percent report lower productivity or operational efficiency when needed information is missing. So failures in communication have operational consequences. Forty-four percent report greater risk of errors, quality problems, or missed deadlines. So “Did they see it?” really becomes an inadequate measure of success. I know that’s what a lot of communicators did measure: “Did you see this information?”

And 83% of frontline workers expect a single app combining work activities and information to have a high or very high impact. They’re looking for simplicity, but this measures expectations and not demonstrated results.

Is giving a phone to employees adequate? You have to look at a couple of things. First, do the conditions allow them to use a phone while they’re working? Do they have individual accounts? Is there reliable connectivity where they’re working to use their phones? When they do have allowed time to read, can they also ask questions? Do they have that allowed time? Does the night shift get the same opportunity as the day shift?

There’s a lot to consider here, and the nature of the work also matters. A nurse, a delivery driver, a retail associate, somebody working on a construction project site—they don’t all automatically get the same channel strategy. Or if they do, it wouldn’t be very effective.

Mark Dollins: Nor necessarily should they have the same channel strategy, to our earlier point in this discussion. All of those data points lead me to wanting to know more. As I think about those macro trends, how does this work where I’m working and with my employee communication base?

I’ll go back to that question. People want to audit. Okay, yes, please do audit in order to get the data on how your organization is working with and responding to those issues. You’ve got to have data to help you make those decisions. But before you go out and measure things, you still have to know: What is it that I’m trying to accomplish?

Am I trying to drive a CSR message into an operating environment? If so, the only way I have to get there is through a shift supervisor and a supervisor’s meeting. Probably not going to be a big successful strategy for you, right? What is my lane that I want to stay in, where I actually can influence because I have access to those channels and I can create the right kind of relevant content?

I’m going to go back to something you just said: “Do they actually see it?” as a metric. Well, should they see it, or should they hear it? Or should they receive it directly from face-to-face communication? That’s what a lot of those frontline communication solutions need to have: that face-to-face, verbal, live delivery. It’s not just, “Here, I’m going to hand this out. Read it.”

At the same time, there are kiosks or monitors in a lot of those frontline environments that can be very helpful for saying, “Yes, it is important that you saw that deadline for annual registration for your health benefits is on Thursday, October”—whatever it’s going to be. Those are important things to see. But if you want people to understand or to act and change behavior, the strategies very quickly have to shift to other channels.

That’s why I’m really big on making sure: What is it you’re trying to accomplish by reaching the front line that is actually attainable? Then let’s start talking about the channel auditing strategy. What channels do you have? What channels do you need? Regardless of that, what channels do these people use, and which ones do they trust?

Which ones do you own, and which ones do you not own that maybe either you should, or you need collaboration? As I work with my clients, those are really important questions and issues to sort through first before you start going out and asking questions. I don’t know if you have different approaches, Shel.

Shel Holtz: No, not at all. I agree completely. I think that recognition of the channels you own and the channels you don’t, and establishing that collaboration, is vital because you risk inconsistency and mixed messages if you don’t do that. If the manager gets up at the briefing and says one thing, and the digital signage says something else that’s coming from corporate, and employees are seeing that, that’s an issue.

I know at UPS, for example, when the drivers are loading up their trucks, there’s digital signage. UPS sees that as their primary opportunity to get corporate messages to employees. But when they come back and see their supervisor, and the supervisor says something different, now you have a problem.

Mark Dollins: It’s about us as communicators going into that environment and understanding: What is it that you do here? What do you need? What would be helpful for you, Mr. or Ms. Frontline Manager? Versus, “We’ve created this one-page weekly brief. We want you to read or communicate it to your people.”

You can imagine how well that usually goes over, right? It’s like, “These corporate people want me to read this to you, but we’re not going to have time. You guys can read it over here. I’ll put it on the dresser,” or whatever it is that’s nearby, “and you can read it at your leisure.” It’s just not going to work.

But when you sit down and have the conversation with a leader who’s there working with your front line and start asking questions—“What’s helpful to you? What are you struggling with right now? How could an adjustment in communications help? What is the content that would be helpful for you?”—chances are good you’re going to find something in there that a corporate communicator, someone who has enterprise responsibilities, can actually act upon.

I’m also a big believer in not doing everything at once. Get a pilot going. Get some small wins that have very clear outcomes that matter to the stakeholders you’re trying to reach. When I say stakeholders, be clear about who that is. It’s the employee as well as the managers we’ve been talking about, as well as you and your boss or whoever’s driving you to do more with frontline communications.

When you have those small wins, that’s when you say, “Now it’s time to scale it up. We’ve got a great story to tell. We have proof points that say, ‘Look what’s happening at manufacturing or frontline location A, B, or C.’ They’re actually seeing a measurable improvement in something that people care about.”

Versus, “Here’s our solution to give you a one-page summary,” which I have heard on many occasions. I go, “Just stop. Please save yourself a lot of time and frustration.” You’ve got to ask the questions. Learn first and then come up with a solution.

Shel Holtz: Right. And multiple channels—despite the fact that employees may think having one app is great, you give it to them and then they don’t use it, or even worse, it’s a bad app. That becomes an issue.

But even if it’s a good app and they do use it, getting a briefing at the beginning of the shift, seeing a printed notice, having digital signage and the mobile information increases the opportunity for people to see it, the likelihood they’re going to see it. It also creates reinforcement. We keep hearing that it takes seven exposures to a message before it sticks. I’ve heard lately that number has actually gone up. I don’t remember if it’s up to nine.

Mark Dollins: Would not surprise me at all, especially with all the diverse channels reaching people. It reaches people in different ways. You walk by a monitor and absorb information differently than somebody talking to you about it.

Shel Holtz: I think it used to be seven, but I’ve heard recently that it’s gone up, with more recent research. I think that’s attention issues with digital.

Mark Dollins: Guilty myself. One other thing to think about as we think about the channel solution is: What’s the right content that’s actually going to resonate? This is where I think we also get in our own way. We don’t really think about how this content can be presented in a way that’s clear, direct, concise, but also maybe a little innovative and, dare I say, fun, if it’s a topic that lends itself to fun.

Have we put the filter in that says, “What’s in it for me, the employee?” And, to get back to our earlier point, “What’s in it for me, the manager?” If we always have that in mind as we’re creating that content, our odds of success in connecting with our frontline stakeholders and the managers who work with them are greatly increased.

We have to think not just about the channel itself, but: Do we have the right recipe for the kind of content that will keep people engaged? I know some people focus more on one or the other, but it really is about the total package.

Maybe one last point I would make is that it’s almost thinking about it not from, “What are we doing in corporate to reach them?” but, “Let’s define the personas that are out there.” To your earlier point, Shel, let’s define a couple of different personas on that front line: what they look like, what their world is like, where they get their information, what channels are reaching them—all the things we’ve talked about.

Maybe we start with the end case: What is that persona’s experience like, and what would make it better or easier for him or her? Then we start coming up with solutions. Maybe we don’t need seven channels to do that. Maybe we need 12, I don’t know. Maybe we need one or two really good ones that are better at it than just using repetitive and different versions of the same content. It’s just flipping the model around to look at that end-user experience first.

Shel Holtz: Having those personas can be invaluable. If you have a lot of people who are driving—it could be a delivery person, a FedEx driver, for example. Before we started recording, I was telling you that I had the fortune to meet Ed Robertson, the late Ed Robertson, who was the head of internal comms at FedEx. He reported directly to the CEO. That’s how internal comms was valued at FedEx.

He came up with, I think it was initially a cassette and then a CD for the drivers so that they could listen to a show they put together. Today we would think about doing a podcast and just send them the notice that there’s a new podcast to listen to.

Mark Dollins: This is going way back, but I even remember him being credited with putting monitors in the hallways at a check-in station so that when drivers came to get their trucks, they had no choice but to walk through this hallway and see these repeated monitors with messages the company wanted them to see. Nothing really super involved, but I thought, “Gosh, that’s so brilliant,” understanding the employee experience and how to take advantage of something that doesn’t necessarily take more time but gets their focus. I still remember that from many years ago when I was new.

Shel Holtz: Right. It would certainly get their attention, which is the second step in what he called the pyramid of communication quality. But above that, it had to be relevant. So that gets to what messages you were putting on those monitors. If they’re walking down that hall and saying, “Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care,” then the monitors were just a waste of time and money.

Mark Dollins: Exactly. The content has to be there. Maybe one other thing that’s crossing my mind as we’re talking about this is remembering that we’re not the only ones seeking access to those channels. Aside from the people who own them in the frontline environment, there are other parts of our corporate group, our brothers and sisters, who are also vying for access to those channels. It’s a competition.

When we approach whoever owns those channels, we need to remember we’re not the only ones vying for that attention, trying to insert ourselves into a channel that works for them as they have it. Understanding that also helps us be better prepared for potential solutions, either collaboratively with some of those other functions—HR, compliance, whoever needs to get access. I can think of a million different parts of an organization that all want to get to that front line and make sure everybody sees this message.

We’re not alone. We need to find out what’s happening. How are they doing it? Does it make sense to collaborate? Should we be working together? Or maybe we shouldn’t. That’s okay. But let’s ask the question and get the true big picture of what’s happening.

That’s almost a separate persona, right? That persona of the manager who has responsibilities in that plant, in manufacturing, at that front line. Who is trying to reach into his or her world to insert themselves into that channel, just like us? Let’s think that one through. The more we know, the better solutions we can come up with that get people understanding: “We get you. We understand where you are. We’re here to help.” Ask the questions before just throwing a solution out there.

Shel Holtz: We have digital signage, and it’s on a lot of our project sites. We work with a vendor that allows the project manager, project director, whoever the top dog is on the project, to put their own content on it. We work with them and talk to them about what they need to get to people, because it’s different from project to project.

We try to limit the corporate messages to just a few, just the things we absolutely need to get out there. If there’s a deadline for taking the annual safety training, we’ll put that on the digital signage. If we need RSVPs to the holiday party by a deadline, that’ll go up there. If there’s new software we need everybody to start using and stop using the old one, we’ll do that. But we try to leave most of that space for local information.

At one project, they did “Three things you need to know this week.” Others put their safety data up there because they wanted to improve that. It’s important, I think, to leave some of this decision-making at the local frontline level, but to work with them so they understand how to best convey that information through whatever channel they’re using.

Mark Dollins: Right. The only way we can do that is by having a conversation with them. What I often will see is, “We need to get our CSR agenda out to the front line.” I’m like, “Well, how do you expect you’re going to do that?” It’s like, “We just wanted to share our sustainability report.” I go, “What are you going to do with that?”

As opposed to, “If we had an example in your plant of someone who’s working on this and tied it to, ‘You should feel good about this. This is a point of pride, consistent with our values.’” Versus another topic: “Hey, let’s have a values series going out to the front line.” It’s like, “About what?”

You really have to understand that those are operationally driven environments. To insert a corporate feel-good kind of message, you can do it, but you’ve got to be smart about it. Otherwise, it falls on deaf ears and you get rejected faster than you’d like.

Shel Holtz: That happens all the time. I also think if the message is important enough—and it really does have to rise to that level—then an executive roadshow is not an inappropriate tool. This can be very important. First of all, it’s face-to-face visibility for frontline employees with the senior leaders of your organization, and that never hurts.

It’s an opportunity for two-way communication, because presumably if you’re going to have three or four, even one or two executives meeting with all the people at the construction site or at the distribution center, it’s an opportunity for them to raise their hands and ask questions, or to fill out little cards and submit them if they’re not comfortable raising their hand and talking to the CEO directly.

But it’s also an opportunity to say, “Hey, this is why this is important to you,” and then to ask questions of the audience: “Why does this matter here? How do you see this? What’s happening, or what needs to happen here on this site, in this facility, in order for this to be meaningful and to have an impact on the way you do your work?”

Mark Dollins: An amazing thing happens when we operate outside of a vacuum, when we start engaging others in the solution, but also in defining the problem that the solution is here to help with. I find we often try to get really quickly to the solution that we think will work because we understand channels and communication—and we do—but we don’t understand the problem. We don’t understand what we’re solving for. Therein lies the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity to do things that add value.

Shel Holtz: I think two-way communication is also something outside of the executive roadshow. Two-way is really important on the front line. Employees really do need confidence that raising a problem is going to be safe and that somebody will respond.

There was a survey two years ago from Catalyst, of 1,800 frontline employees, and it linked manager fairness, support, and openness with better team relationships. Twenty-nine percent said their manager didn’t demonstrate openness. The study emphasized making actions taken in response to employee feedback visible. So it’s not just, “I got feedback,” but everybody knows the feedback was given.

Mark Dollins: And here’s what we’re doing with that feedback, right? It makes a big difference.

Shel Holtz: I’d also come back just for a minute to the issue of the manager, the supervisor, the person who’s having the huddle at the beginning of the shift. Are we enabling them to interpret decisions, or are we just giving them another distribution task? You mentioned this early: Just giving them the message to deliver really isn’t enough.

Mark Dollins: No. Context is everything, right? Why are we talking to you about this? Well, let’s tell you why.

Shel Holtz: There was a survey last year. This was another Staffbase survey. They did this one with YouGov: 3,574 employees across six countries. Only 48% of non-desk employees felt well informed by their managers, compared to 65% of desk-based employees. I think that’s an issue. For some reason, managers at the front line don’t feel it’s their job or don’t feel they should have to convey these kinds of messages, whereas those managers in the office apparently do.

Mark Dollins: We’ve talked about this on other On the Same Page podcasts, about how important it is for employee communicators to focus on managers as a distinct stakeholder group, a subsegmented stakeholder group within employee communications. Giving them the content doesn’t mean they’re going to deliver it or deliver it well.

Understanding their orientation to communication—to your point, “It’s not part of my job,” which we would all very much disagree with—is a big thing to understand. It looks like we need to do a job of explaining why it is part of your job and what happens when you do it well, and sadly, what happens when you don’t.

There has to be context and consequences for doing the right thing and an understanding of what happens when you do it poorly, and the impact not just on your team, but on you personally. There’s the “What’s in it for me?”

When we help managers understand what’s in it for them to be a good communicator, we help them develop the skill set, the awareness, the understanding, and then we give them the right content and the tools to do that. Now we’re doing something really powerful and empowering them to do the things we need for the sake of our company.

Shel Holtz: And you’re still going to end up with managers who aren’t going to do it or are going to do a poor job, which is why those multiple channels continue to be important.

Mark Dollins: Of course. You can’t bat a thousand, but you can bat a lot closer to it by focusing on those folks and giving them some help. It’s interesting, because of communicators I’ve talked to over the years, I’d say about a 50–50 split. Fifty percent say, “Yeah, that’s our job and we’re working on it.” The other half say, “That’s HR and org development and training.”

I’m like, “No, it’s yours, trust me.” You can do it in partnership with HR and executive development, however you want to do it. At the end of the day, if you’re responsible for engaging employees in communication, it means you have to understand how that communication reaches them. One of the most impactful ways is having their manager well empowered and equipped to deliver it to them. So that’s your job.

Shel Holtz: When we talk about the influence that internal communications has, I think influence with executives and influence with HR counts. If you can convince them to add communication to the mix of what managers are evaluated on, then they’re going to pay more attention to it. If they’re already being evaluated on it and it counts for 5% of their performance review, they’ll be willing.

Mark Dollins: That’s a whole other podcast we could get into: How do you do that? I’d love to talk about that more because, yes, that is often a conversation I’ll have with people who lead employee communications, corporate communications, and HR. I’m finding more HR folks actually do include communications, but not in the way we would necessarily define it. I think there are always opportunities to refine that definition and really get into more of the details about what that looks like in terms of behaviors.

Shel Holtz: One more data point. This is from a survey last year, Workvivo’s research: 7,500 frontline workers globally. Forty-eight percent considered most communications that came to them from the company irrelevant to them. This goes back to an earlier point: What is relevant, and how do we get that information to them?

But 69% wanted to understand company decisions better, and 58% wanted updates from their CEO. That challenges this idea that frontline employees only care about the stuff happening at the front line, and what they want to hear from the corporation is about schedules and pay.

Mark Dollins: Employees are getting smarter all the time. They’re learning how to ask the right questions and understand bigger, broader topics and issues as they relate to them and their futures and, quite frankly, their company’s reputation in the marketplace. We should expect that employees are getting smarter and wanting to know more about the big picture from their most senior executives. If we’re doing our jobs as employee communications leaders, we’re putting those leaders in positions to provide not just the answers, but the context to those questions and decisions.

Shel Holtz: Right. And again, recognizing that some may not hear that from their managers, it gets to this notion of tailoring information to the employee. These days it’s very easy; it didn’t used to be. We can get information to the front line that’s different for a project engineer than it is for a foreman.

A lot of the information they need is the same, but a lot isn’t. The project engineers aren’t doing huddles. They’re not talking to people at the beginning of a shift. They don’t need that information, so it’s different. Our intranet is the dumping ground. That’s where everything goes, but then we can parse it out from there. The tools are there to make that really easy.

Mark Dollins: Right. I think that’s when it doesn’t become a repository but a place for doing work, as we always like to say. In my world, my experience working with intranets, it becomes a useful, valuable channel for the organization. It’s when it becomes a repository for information that it’s not viewed that way.

Shel Holtz: Right. If I were going to summarize all this, I’d say: Choose an important announcement. Ask employees across different shifts how they learned about it, what they understood, and where they went with questions. Include employees who never opened the digital version. This is an exercise that can expose the difference between publishing information and successfully communicating it. It gets back to your point that it starts with asking.

Mark Dollins: Love it.

Shel Holtz: I wanted to ask you: On your microphone, it says Employee Signal. That’s your new Substack, isn’t it?

Mark Dollins: I’m sending a signal, Shel. Employee Signal is a new newsletter and podcast. It’s available on Substack, and thank you, Shel, you’re willing to place this also on the FIR network. This will be a monthly update solely about employee communications issues. I go into a lot more detail about some of the topics we’ve covered.

The first edition, which we just put out last month, is all about change communication and the discrepancy between the recognition among employee communication leaders that we need to understand the discipline of change management and the number of people who are actually getting the knowledge or certification that demonstrates we understand change management as a discipline we can apply communications to. We go into a lot of detail.

There’s a free edition of Employee Signal every month. There’s also a paid version if somebody wants to pay a couple of bucks. I put some tools out there based on best practices, case studies, and workable tools that can be deployed immediately, along with some very specific AI-related prompts that can help you save a little time in getting to what you need in the world of employee communication.

I’m happy to have shared this, and thank you for asking, Shel. I’m excited to launch this and keep things moving in the world that I care about and love so much.

Shel Holtz: I’m a big fan of cross-promotion of podcasts on the FIR Podcast Network. Delighted to have you there. We’re going to have to talk about getting you set up so they can start appearing there.

Mark Dollins: Great.

Shel Holtz: Internal communicators, having seen the first edition of this, I would definitely urge you to subscribe. It’s a great resource. Mark, I’ll see you in two weeks.

Mark Dollins: Thank you, Shel. You got it. Have a good one.

The post OTSP #11: Are You Reaching Your Frontline? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

What becomes possible when people feel seen at work? As workplaces feel increasingly transactional, helping people know they matter is both a human and leadership imperative. When people feel seen, they are more likely to engage, contribute, connect, and thrive.

There are many ways we help people feel seen, but one of the simplest and most powerful is appreciation: noticing who people are, what they bring, and the difference they make — and letting them know.

In this conversation, four IABC Fellows explored the role leaders and communicators play in creating workplaces where people feel seen, and appreciation becomes part of how we lead, communicate, and connect. What changes in people, teams, and organizations when people know they matter, and what gets in the way?

About the panel:

Although Zora Artis began her career outside the communications field, she has had an outsize impact on the profession since entering it more than 20 years ago to as an account director and then strategic planner with branding and integrated marcomms agencies. Since then, she has led her own brand and communications consultancy and served as CEO of a 20-person creative, digital, and strategic communication firm. In 2019, formed her current management consulting practice, bringing together strategic alignment, brand, and communication expertise. She has received five Gold Quill awards. Her significant contributions to the profession and the body of knowledge include her original research with IABC colleague Wayne Aspland on strategic alignment, the role of communications and leadership – the first substantial research effort for the reconfigured IABC Foundation – and co-authoring a subsequent white paper, “The Road to Alignment,” supported by 27 senior communicators from five continents. Zora has also researched the correlation between strategic alignment and experiences and the impact on stakeholder value and brand. This has led her to develop her own proprietary Alignment Experience Framework. She has also examined gender equity, perceptions, and bias in organizations, and wrote a chapter on this topic for the Quadriga University e-reader, Women in PR. Since joining IABC a decade ago, she has contributed as a volunteer, including serving as chair of the IABC Asia Pacific Region and IEB director; she currently chairs the 2022 World Conference Program Advisory Committee. As a certified company director and chair of the IABC Audit and Risk Committee, she introduced proper risk oversight into the board’s processes. Zora received the 2021 and 2015 IABC Chair’s Award for Leadership and was named IABC’s 2020 Regional Leader of the Year. She is also a Strategic Communication Management Professional, Fellow of the Australian Marketing Institute, and Certified Practicing Marketer.

John G. Clemons, SCMP, ABC, APR, IABC Fellow, an independent communications consultant based in North Carolina, has held senior executive and consultant roles throughout his career in corporate and organizational communications. He specializes in providing strategic counsel and support to top executives and corporate offices at Fortune 500 companies. John has served as chair of IABC and holds accreditations from both IABC and PRSA. John has worked with Walmart, Raytheon, and Marriott (among others). John has been an adjunct instructor for six years at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Loyola University in New Orleans.

Founder and Principal of Fluency Leadership, Catherine Ducharme, IABC Fellow, PCC, CLC, is a career communicator, certified coach, and facilitator with more than 35 years of experience in communication and leadership. She has held senior roles across public relations, corporate, internal, and marketing communication in industries, including high-tech and health sciences, grounding her work in deep, real-world expertise. Building on that foundation, Catherine now focuses on developing communication and marketing professionals to be exceptional leaders. Catherine is also the author of the book SEEN: The Power of Appreciation at Work.

Jennifer Wah, MC, ABC, has helped clients deliver ideas, plans, words, and results since she founded her storytelling and communications firm, Forwords Communication Inc., in 1997. With more than two dozen awards for strategic communications, writing, and consulting, Jennifer is recognized as a storyteller and strategist. She has worked in industries ranging from healthcare and academia to financial services and the resource sector, and she is passionate about using storytelling strategically to support business outcomes. Although she has delivered workshops and training throughout her career, Jennifer formally added teaching to her experience in 2013, first with Royal Roads University and more recently as an adjunct professor of business communications with the UBC Sauder School of Business, where she now works part-time to impart crucial communication skills to the next generation of business leaders. When she is not working, Jennifer spends her time cooking, walking her dog, Orion, or discussing food, hockey, or music with her husband and two young adult children in North Vancouver, Canada.

Raw transcript:

Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode 134 of Circle of Fellows. This is the monthly panel discussion among Fellows of the International Association of Business Communicators, of which I am one. I’m Shel Holtz. I am Senior Director of Communications at Webcor. We’re a commercial general contractor operating in California, and I’m coming to you from our headquarters offices in San Francisco. Today I am joined by four of my friends, four IABC Fellows. I will ask them to introduce themselves in just a minute. First, I want to let everyone know what we are talking about today: the role communications can play in ensuring that employees feel seen and heard at work. From the description that we shared: In this conversation, we’ll explore the role leaders and communicators play in creating workplaces where people feel seen and appreciation becomes part of how we lead, communicate, and connect. Recognition undoubtedly will be part of this conversation as well. I hope that you who are joining us live will participate in the conversation. You should do that by sharing a comment in the comment field on YouTube. I’ll be able to share that on the screen for our panelists, and we will pivot to talk about your observation, your question, your experience. I’m very much looking forward to your engagement. It really makes these things even more fun than they already are. They’re already fun because I get to moderate a panel of friends. I’m going to ask them to introduce themselves now, starting with Zora. Hello, everyone. I’m coming to you from Melbourne in Australia, so it’s Friday morning for me. I love being here with friends, as Shel put it: Catherine, John, Jennifer, and Shel, of course. I’m a strategic alignment specialist. I am a facilitator, leadership coach, and advisor. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Zora. John, you’re up. Hello, everyone. I’m John Clemons, and I’m coming to you from Huntersville, North Carolina. I’ve worked in my career for a number of Fortune 100 companies, including Marriott International, AT&T, and Walmart. I am now a communications consultant and an adjunct professor for two universities. Great to see you, John. Catherine, you’re next. Hi. I’m Catherine Ducharme, coming to you from Vancouver, British Columbia. I am a leadership coach, and I develop leaders. I’ve been in communications for most of my career, and I’m also the author of the book SEEN: The Power of Appreciation at Work. This is a topic that’s near and dear to me, so I’m looking forward to discussing it with my friends here. I think it’s highly appropriate that you be part of this panel, given the theme of your book. Next to you is your neighbor here on this panel, as well as in Vancouver, Jennifer. Hi, everyone. Just theoretically up the street from Catherine, and pleased to be here. I work as a storytelling consultant with my own boutique agency, Forwords Communication. I teach at the UBC Sauder School of Business as an instructor there. I love it all, and love these Circle of Fellows gatherings and the conversations that come out of them, which are always both unexpected and insightful. I’m particularly pleased to be here on this topic. I love Catherine’s new book. Terrific. I’m going to have to give that a read. This is a really interesting topic. I have been focused to some extent here at my job on psychological safety, something that we believe in. As I was reading through the topic and some of the comments that you, the panel, shared in advance, I connected those dots: You can’t feel seen and heard if you don’t feel safe to speak up in the first place. I was wondering if you felt that way, if you think psychological safety is part of what we’re talking about here. Catherine, I’d like to start with you, given that this is the focus of your book. I love that thread that you pull through of psychological safety, because I think being seen is all about building relationships and trust. Without psychological safety underpinning everything, if we don’t feel safe to speak up, to see people in a vulnerable way, to show up differently, we remain quiet. I think that’s what’s happening in a lot of workplaces today. It becomes very transactional. Some of us can feel like cogs in the wheel because we don’t feel safe to say what we need to say, to see each other as human beings in the workplace. Catherine, can you explain a little bit what you just said, “show up differently”? What exactly are you saying? I love that. I think particularly as leaders in the workplace, we have an opportunity to be more relational in how we show up. As organizations, we can often focus on getting the work done, efficiency, results, metrics, and all of that’s important. But if we don’t see people, the people behind who’s making that happen, if we don’t see the value of how people contribute, then we’re missing out on something, because it’s relationships that get the work done. It’s incumbent on leaders and communicators to say, “How do I show up in a way that’s more human, where we see what people bring to it and we actually emphasize that value rather than just the metrics?” Thank you. There was another book that came out earlier this year called Forward Talk by a fellow called Gustavo Razzetti, who does a lot of work on culture. He was wondering why people stay silent, so he did a survey. Over 5,000 people responded. When the question was, “Why don’t people speak up?” most said it’s because of fear. Then when the question was, “Why don’t you speak up?” it’s because they’ve either been shut down themselves, they’ve seen somebody else shut down, or they’ve tried before and nothing’s changed. It becomes apathy to a degree as well, so people stay silent as a consequence. It was something like over 70% stay silent because of that, which is quite a striking number. Just to layer into this, our friend and colleague Priya Bates, who’s not on this call, speaks a lot about diversity and wrote a book on culture and inclusivity. It occurs to me that when we’re talking about psychological safety, and exactly what you’re describing, Zora, the culture where someone doesn’t feel comfortable or has been shut down, that can in some cases have to do with the cultural filters around diversity. Understanding how someone shows up, how someone might communicate, how someone might express or receive appreciation or feel seen in a different way than I might—that’s a nuance that is a pretty important one in workplaces. To both of your points, for minorities, what I’ve seen with myself and with other African American professionals in particular, they feel like they are not heard when they are in those meetings. We all have stories where we’ve said something, and then someone else who may be Caucasian says the same thing. Then people go, “Okay, okay,” but you have just said that a few minutes ago. That makes you back down from commenting because you realize you’re not being heard, so why should I say anything else? John, the data really backs that up. Particularly African Americans and Hispanics feel that recognition in the workplace, of being given credit, is actually not fair. That really bears out in the data. We just wrapped up Construction Inclusion Week. I think it was last week or the week before. It’s an annual event organized by a coalition of construction companies, and a lot participate. It’s based on this idea that inclusion means listening and bringing people into the conversation who may not be like you. It seems to me that in addition to psychological safety, or as a requirement for building psychological safety among all our people, inclusion is also really important in helping employees feel seen and heard. I wanted to make a point about psychological safety, which is, of course, part of organizational culture and has the tone set by leadership. One of the things that I find most hopeful and inspiring about this movement that Catherine has written about, and that is having a bit of a moment, is the individual ability to participate in appreciation or to participate in feeling and creating a culture of being seen. Even within organizations where I have not felt particularly seen, appreciated, or heard—John, completely different than what you’re describing—but I will say that as a woman of a certain age, I have found myself far less visible than I have been at other points in my career. In a similar, but not at all nearly as impactful or concerning a way, others of different generations taking my words and being heard in different ways. I don’t want to go down that thread. I wanted to focus on our individual ability to contribute to a culture of appreciation. That’s really about the one-on-one connections that we have with people. Yes. I write about how we don’t need a program or a policy to actually see people and appreciate people in the workplace. What usually gets the attention in the workplace is the loud voices or just the results. In fact, in the book, I really make the distinction between recognition and appreciation. Recognition tends to be about the results and the outcomes, whereas appreciation is about who you are. One is about what you do; the other is about who you are. It’s seeing the people in the workplace who may be the quieter voices, but they’re the peacemakers in the organization, or they make things run smoothly, or they speak to customers in a certain way because they’re really listening. I think there’s an opportunity to really see the strengths and qualities of people in the workplace, and when you see it, to name it out loud, because then that becomes feedback for them on what’s working and how somebody’s contributing in the workplace. I like that, Catherine, because if you look at people in the workplace, in the environment that you’re working in, whether you’re a leader, manager, or another team member, and you’re showing them appreciation and acknowledging them for who they are and how they make a difference, rather than just “What did you create today?” or “What did you produce today?” I think that makes a big difference for them as an individual. I appreciate that distinction between recognition and appreciation. It’s not one that I had made in my own head before, and I was going to raise the idea of recognition. How do you get an organization to demonstrate that appreciation? Does that happen at a high level? We talk to our leaders about the fact that recognition is not really aimed at the employee that you’re trying to recognize. It’s trying to get everybody else to say, “This is the kind of behavior that earns recognition. You want to get recognized, do what this person did.” Appreciation is something else altogether. Does it happen at a higher level, or does it happen within the teams? I will say I’ve worked for employers where appreciation is so big, so huge. One company that I worked for started with a yearly appreciation day, and it was so successful that it was expanded to appreciation week. This is a global company, and they had all kinds of specialty items, free lunches, working with Habitat for Humanity, doing community work, recognizing employees, an awards program. This was something employees looked forward to, and at that company, you were appreciated. I’ve worked with other companies where it was very important for you to assimilate, to become like others, as opposed to being an individual. If you were an individual and a little bit different in your approach to communicating and operating, then you stood out, and you were not seen. You were moved to the side. In my experience, it depends on the organization that you work for. John, that makes it sound like culture is in play here. Yes. How we do things. That’s absolutely right. I think there are ways to build appreciative cultures, and it does require you to look at what matters in the workplace and what is recognized. In certain cultures, there’s a feeling that we’re a team, and if I recognize one person on my team and not the others, I’m showing favoritism. I go into a whole chapter on that, because that really gets us into the participation ribbons: We’re all special, we all need to be appreciated. But I believe people have their moments where really seeing and valuing what they did and how they contribute is important to point out, because it’s feedback for them in their development. While it can be a cultural thing, I think it can start with just the leader, as a leadership behavior and a skill to notice what’s good in team members and just to say it. It doesn’t take much more than that. I was just going to ask, John, in the organization that you referenced, to what degree did that come from leadership? Without getting into the weeds, what did you notice about leadership in that circumstance versus others? Where employees were appreciated, those leaders, and in fact the founder of the company, would go to the cafeteria and just sit down with a tray and start having conversations with employees, starting with “What do you do for our company?” That would become almost like company lore. Having a Christmas party for those employees who have done an outstanding job during the year and inviting them to his home—that was an extraordinary experience. Then with those companies where employees just did not respond, they did not ask questions, it was the leader in that situation who really did not appreciate the work that his employees were doing. It was a company where we had to put out a lot of contracts, and we would lose them repeatedly. I think it was driven by this person’s leadership and how he made employees feel. I’ve seen the extremes in both situations. To Catherine’s point, it starts with the leadership, and that’s where it can break down, as you said. Leaders modeling the right type of behavior and being genuine in how they’re doing it and why they’re doing it as well, rather than it being performative. Yes. One of the questions in the book was: Appreciation is free, it’s abundant, it’s renewable. As soon as you give it away, you have more to give, yet it’s surprisingly rare. Looking into that, what’s the barrier for a lot of people? There are many barriers, but one is people aren’t sure how to do it. They may say, “Hey, good job,” or “You aced that goal,” and feel they’re appreciating someone, but the recipient doesn’t feel seen through that. It’s often how it lands, not how we give it. Recognition always strikes me as programmatic. While there are certainly managers who are good at it more organically, most organizations need to have recognition programs to ensure that recognition happens. Again, that’s to influence the behavior of others. Appreciation seems to me to be more of an organic thing that happens because it’s in somebody’s character. Can it be trained? Is it something that should be included in manager training? I totally believe it can be trained. I think looking at the barriers that keep leaders from giving appreciation and challenging that, because often it’s about our discomfort with giving appreciation rather than being focused on others. What’s the benefit? How can I lift this person up? How can I help them with their development by pointing out what their strengths are and how their qualities make a difference? I think it’s context setting. Then there are some really practical things. I came up with a mnemonic called TAPS that really talks about how you give appreciation. It needs to be timely and authentic. It needs to be about the person, not about the results. Then it needs to be specific: In what way are they making an impact? In what way is how they showed up really making a difference or making a contribution? I totally believe it can be trained. Catherine, in your research for your book, do you find that some leaders view recognizing or appreciating employees as a sign of weakness, that they’re giving up something? There are all kinds of reasons, and that’s one of them. I think it can feel vulnerable for some people. “Can I say that? Is that too squishy? It doesn’t feel professional,” which is a bit at arm’s length. One of the interesting things I found is that our comfort or discomfort with appreciation impacts how we give it. If we find receiving appreciation very uncomfortable, we’re likely to withhold that because we don’t want to create that experience for somebody else. It does come down to what’s our relationship with appreciation? Have we seen it modeled? How do we receive it, and then how do we give it? It seems to me, based on that, Catherine, that it’s also important for managers to have a good understanding of the personalities of the people on their team and how they like to receive appreciation. You don’t want to make somebody uncomfortable. Totally. There’s a whole chapter on tailoring appreciation, but it’s relational. It’s about getting to know your people and what matters to them, what’s important, and how they like to receive appreciation. I was going to say, Zora, you point to research that speaks to the gaps between what leadership thinks and how it’s received. I’m curious if you can talk to that, because I think perception can be a factor too. That’s right. There’s been so much research out there, as well as the work that I’ve done when I was looking at alignment and leadership. The perception, mostly at the C-suite but also at the senior leadership level, is they genuinely believe that employees trust them more than they actually do. There is a significant gap. There is a gap even around AI as well, but I won’t go into that just yet. It’s really about leaders being able to recognize what that gap is. I think a lot of that comes down to those in the organization who have that enterprise-wide, potentially stakeholder-wide view, that lens, which is people in the communication profession, who will see and feel and hear where the gaps are. They will see what leaders are saying and doing, the decisions they’re making, what they’re resourcing, how they’re treating people. They will see where those don’t match up with what they say the culture is supposed to be, or what they expect of people when they’re not doing it themselves. When there are those gaps, it takes courage on our part as communication professionals to surface that and bring it to leaders so they understand there is a gap, and to help them understand how to address that. There’s an opportunity for us, but it’s not an easy one. I wonder if there’s anything generational going on here. As I was reading the description of this session in preparation to post the announcement that it was the topic for this panel, I became aware of something I hadn’t really been aware of, although in the back of my head I was noticing it. Younger people in this organization tend to respond when something is done for them, even if it’s just a response to a request. They’ve asked for something and you deliver it. They say, “Thanks. I appreciate you.” That “I appreciate you” is kind of new, and I am hearing it mostly from younger employees. Is appreciation something that is more highly valued, maybe in Gen Z these days? I don’t know who wants to take that. When I was doing my research, the generational stuff really didn’t come up, because when you think about a time where you’ve been truly seen and appreciated, and somebody has really valued a quality that you bring to the workplace, that resonates. I have coaching clients who have kept appreciation notes they’ve received from a leader for 10 or 15 years as a way to remind them of their value. In that way, appreciation sustains. I hear you, Shel. I’m hearing more people saying, “I appreciate you,” and every time they do, I get warm fuzzies. But no matter who you are, to be seen and heard and valued is a human need, because we’re wired for that connection. I’m glad if it’s being verbalized more. Shel, I hear that and I see it in messages from friends more and more: “I appreciate you.” But when it comes to myself, I think about it before I say, “I appreciate you,” because I’m thinking about the person and how they will receive it. “My God, why is he sending that emotional message to me?” as opposed to “I appreciate it,” which takes the personal out. I think about it before I put it on a page or say it. It’s not something I just do. Right. I’ve been hearing “I appreciate it” for decades. “I appreciate you” seems to be fairly current, fairly recent. Just to make a sidebar observation from a generational perspective: In the classroom, I teach first-year and third-year students. In both cases, and in my own kids, who are of a similar age, young adult children, there is more of a rightful expectation of psychological safety in the workplace, in their communities, and therefore a greater desire to have appreciation expressed and received. I have students who come to office hours who are seeking appreciation and feedback. Obviously they’re grade-motivated, but they are, at their very human core, not afraid to ask for appreciation in ways that I really admire. How do they ask for it? They will say, “Could I have some feedback on this assignment? What did I do well? What didn’t I?” We’ll go through that. Toward the end, I’ve had an increasing number of students over the last year or so say, “Would you mind me asking some ways that I show up well in class?” Again, this is more about what they’re doing than who they are, because I don’t necessarily know them. But I believe I can tell that what they’re getting at is a greater set of data about how they’re showing up in the world. I think that is generational, to be able to ask for that, a greater vulnerability and a higher bar around psychological safety in the classroom and in communities. I was going to say, I imagine there are some older people hearing this who are thinking, “Wow, is that needy?” I’m sorry, Zora, go ahead. There’s a fellow, an Australian, who is also a coach who works with a lot of high-performance athletes as well as executives. His name’s Ben Crowe, and he wrote a book last year called Where the Light Gets In. He talks a lot about the difference between moving, as individuals, from a human doing to a human being, and recognizing the difference. It was really obvious in the work he did with the former world number one tennis player, Ash Barty. She was doing extremely well, won Wimbledon, and then she retired the year after, I think, because she didn’t want to be defined by what she’d done. She wanted to be defined by who she is. There’s much more of this recognition about who am I as a person, and appreciating myself for who I am rather than just what I do and what I achieve. There’s an element of the individual starting to appreciate themselves more. When they do, that shows up in how they are, how they do work, and how they treat other people. Their performance actually improves, and it improves in the workplace. It’s really fascinating stuff. It’s really cool. It seems that speaks to the need to take this to our manager communication. I think a lot of people who have risen through the ranks over time and achieved that level in the organization of being a manager know how to recognize what people did, but don’t know how to recognize or even see how people are. You want to talk about people not feeling seen: If their manager doesn’t see them as a person, only as a producer of outcomes, that’s an obstacle to appreciation. I’ve found in my career that if there were messages from leadership that needed to be cascaded down, we would look at those mid-level managers to share key messages. They would have scripts, the Q&A, everything. But the problem was they didn’t really know how to communicate. We assumed they knew how to communicate, but it was stalled because they didn’t know how to approach it. They had everything they needed, but actually doing it fell short. I agree, John. It’s a skill, and I think that’s where communicators can play a huge role in shaping culture and supporting managers in where you can bring in appreciation. Appreciation isn’t only just words. We show appreciation by how present we are in a conversation, how curious we are, if we’re involving people, if we’re giving them context. All of those are forms of saying to people, “I see you. I value you. I’m inviting you in.” It’s such a playground for communicators to help shape that and help leaders build those skills. Jennifer, I know that you have been doing some work about office-first communication. We’ve been talking about generations, which is dividing employees up into classes. Those who are in the office and those who are remote is also a distinguishing set of classes of employees. Is it harder to feel or to give appreciation to people who are not in the same room as you, if it’s over a Zoom call, for example? Like all of our communication, it requires thinking about the audience and how they will receive it. Is it harder? I don’t know if I would say harder. I would say it’s easier to make an impact in person. I’ve been thinking of this as we’ve been talking about some of the examples. John, when I asked you about the leader of the organization where you felt appreciation was part of the culture, you talked about in-person expressions of that. I’ve been doing some work with a couple of clients on office-first environments. The research is not showing greater productivity for being in the workplace versus working from home, let’s say. There’s for sure room for that hybrid approach. However, what we’re missing out on in the longer term, in the interest of the short-term convenience of not having to drive to an office, of saving on gas and transit and maybe shorter childcare and all of those important things, is several things, including one of the things I’ve been working into some of my communication planning: proximity to success. I think that is true in all aspects, including the expression of appreciation. In other words, when we actually see firsthand the way something should be done, the way a conversation should go, the way a conflict is handled, the way appreciation is expressed, it has a far greater, exponentially far greater impact, the research shows, than when we don’t see that firsthand in real life. That’s something workplaces culturally are going to have to address, or consider at least, as we see the impact of post-COVID changing workplaces. I think appreciation can be delivered over a screen, absolutely. With each of you individually, I hope I’ve expressed appreciation for who you are over a screen at some point in the time we’ve known each other. I think we’ve probably all done that for each other. But we know it, to Catherine’s point, when we are able to gather in a room together, be fully present, show with our body language and our eyes and our engagement how much we appreciate each other and appreciate what we bring to, in this case, our IABC community, but also as professionals out into the world. I would say biologically too. There’s the oxytocin and the dopamine and all the brain chemicals that are released when we’re in close proximity. Oxytocin is the bonding kind of chemical; we feel it more. I would say there’s a more felt connection. But the research also shows that appreciation online works in terms of aligning our brains, and we feel closer to a person. Zora, you shared some thoughts about AI as it relates to all of this. A lot of it is around the idea of trust, which is a word that has come up several times in the conversation already. Trust is something that communicators are very accustomed to dealing with. One of our jobs is to build trust between the organization and its various stakeholders. One of the data points that I’m aware of with AI inside the organization is that employees are starting to turn to AI instead of subject matter expert colleagues when they have a question, which is producing fewer employee-to-employee interactions and therefore fewer opportunities for appreciation. “I’m a subject matter expert. People used to come to me all the time, and I felt really appreciated for my knowledge, and now no one’s calling me anymore. They’re all just going to a chatbot.” I wonder what you think the impact of AI is on trust and, by extension, on appreciation and this need or desire to feel seen and heard. I feel like the workplace environment is becoming much more transactional, with AI being introduced at speed. A lot of decisions are being made at speed, and change is just a constant thing that happens. It’s almost like it needs to be a capability across an organization. I think there’s clearly a breakdown of trust, and there’s lots of research showing a breakdown between leaders and employees. The way AI is being introduced, the way people are going to that because it’s simpler, quicker, easier, all of that sort of thing. But then there’s that element of: Do we know why AI is being introduced? Do we really genuinely understand why it’s being introduced? If they’re saying it’s to improve productivity, what does that actually mean? If it’s not clearly communicated and people aren’t involved in the conversations and given some sort of autonomy in this, how are they going to interpret things? They’re going to interpret things in their own ways, and they’re going to potentially feel threatened. Then there’ll be a lack of trust. If they’re feeling threatened, they’ll be less engaged. It’s going to have a detrimental impact on engagement within the organization and potentially performance as well. Then you’ve got all the layoffs that come along, and it’s like, “How can we trust people at the top?” It’s certainly hard to feel appreciated when you see your colleagues being laid off and wonder if the same thing is coming for you, despite a track record of outstanding performance reviews. I was speaking at a conference last week, and it was technology people, knowledge management folk, intranet people. I was talking to one particular fellow, and he worked for a large law firm that has just gone through another round of layoffs, and it’s in the knowledge management team. Last year they reduced their team from, say, the mid-20s to the high teens. This year, he just lost his role. He was second-in-command, literally lost his role last month. Now the whole team’s been wiped out because AI’s there. What does that say to the rest of the organization? I get that. I remember years and years ago hearing an anthropologist talk about how, as humans, we have this need to balance. When one thing is getting over-indexed, like the transactional workplace, then somewhere there’s a need to go, “What about the relational part of the workplace? Relationships, human interactions, being kind, noticing what’s good in people?” As a species, humans have that need to balance. Hopefully that provides some optimism around this bleak AI world where it’s all transactional and we don’t need to talk to people. We are wired for connection. I’ve got to trust, and I’m an unapologetic optimist, that humanity, human-led leadership, heart-led leadership, is going to become more of a factor because of the way a lot of workplaces are going. I’m reading more and more about some leaders moving toward that servant leadership model. Zora, you also pointed to Boston Consulting Group research. I was already familiar with this: 90% of CEOs believe that the workforce trusts leadership, but only 46% of employees agree. We could talk about the trust element of this, but it led me to wonder: We have been talking about appreciation here as a top-down process, where we want to make sure that the people who report to us, or report through the chain up to us, feel appreciated. It seems to me this is something all humans need, that leaders need to feel appreciated too. But I don’t hear a lot about what happens in organizations to help leaders feel appreciated. I can imagine the approach they take to leadership would be influenced if they felt they weren’t appreciated. There is also research showing that because of the complexity of the work and the uncertainty, a lot of leaders are genuinely under a lot of pressure and feeling, to some degree, that they don’t necessarily have all the capabilities they need to do the job to the level of expectations that are there for them. Your point about them feeling like they’re seen, heard, and appreciated is a really good one, because what’s happening to them? Who’s doing that work for them? Who’s showing them that they matter? Other board members? The CEO? They say the higher you get in leadership, the less feedback you get. I would say the less appreciation you get too. If leaders can instill a culture of appreciation even within their team, then it can be shared among the team, from the team to the leaders. If they can model or understand how to give it, it’s not a one-way thing. Back to the point of psychological safety, that needs to be in place. Anyone can appreciate anyone at any time if they know how to do it. Even if they’re learning how to do it, that’s okay too. It’s the intention behind the appreciation. But your point at the beginning, Catherine, was that it’s a capability, a leadership capability. For it to become a leadership capability, it needs to become part of the rhythm of the work. It needs to become a practice. That will require vulnerability from everyone in the team so they can practice and do it well. In the United States—I don’t know if they do it in Melbourne or in Canada—a number of companies have annual employee opinion surveys or associate opinion surveys. We communicators would get that information. I think that’s a huge responsibility for communicators, to share the information, the results of what employees are saying, which could lead to greater appreciation and recognition, because employees are telling you that they are not happy with X. The leader of the company needs to know that and then take action to resolve the situation, which could lead to greater recognition. I think one of the things we’re talking about is career resilience. Zora, your story about the conference and the person you spoke to who had just lost their job and their team had been wiped out: That’s a really hard moment in your life to feel in any way appreciated, when you are dispensed with in that way. I’ll be vulnerable for a moment and share that early in my career I was fired from my first communications job. I was young and had messed up, and I deserved that consequence. But one of the things I did not have at that early stage of my career was professional resilience in a way that allowed me at that time to bounce back with any necessary speed, because we have to. Generally, most of us have to get back out into the workplace. Circling back to what we were talking about generationally, I admire this next generation for seeking out the building blocks of that resilience that they, on some level, perhaps consciously or unconsciously, know they are going to need. In my circumstances, I acknowledged that I had messed up, but I thought I would be a little bit immune because I thought I had been appreciated. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t a culture where that was going to be valued, and my lack of resilience on lots of fronts didn’t let me process that. I think what we’re talking about culturally, from a leadership perspective, obviously needs to be there. But it really comes down to us building that muscle within us individually, both the giving and the receiving. I also think leaders have a role to play in building that resilience. Appreciation is seeing who a person is, their qualities, their strengths, their character. I started out my career with a mentor for whom that was second skin. I was very clear about where I was succeeding and what my strengths were, and that built resilience. At the same time, when I had these learning edges, as I like to call them, and when I screwed up, he would have those conversations with me too. That gets back to the John Gottman memo: We need to receive five positives to one negative. I think appreciation can build that resilience. To your point, Jennifer, it also has to be intrinsically within us. But the more we know about ourselves and how we show up, I think that builds resilience too. If anybody can feel seen and heard, you would think it’s leadership in an organization. Yet there are leaders who could just be introverts, could feel they’re too busy to be visible to employees. How important is executive visibility to the ideas of appreciation and psychological safety and trust and everything we’ve been talking about today? I think it’s essential. I think it’s really essential that leaders get out of their offices and take the time to see and meet and hear some of the people who are working hard for them. I think it would give them a greater appreciation for the work they do too, to lead people who want to give, who want to serve, who want to be in those roles and make a company successful. I’ve had meetings with them, and I’ve done the impromptu coffee-with-the-CEO type thing, where you just invite some employees to meet the CEO or the president of the company, really relaxed, no formal agenda. Those have proven to be really successful. They need to be out there. I remember hearing about John Chambers when he was the CEO at Cisco Systems. They would have a monthly event at their headquarters in San Jose. Everybody having a birthday would get together with the CEO, with John Chambers. There was no program, there was no talk. He was just wandering around wishing everybody a happy birthday and chatting with them, regardless of their level. I swear people would have followed this guy anywhere. When they do show up, it’s to show up with that curiosity, to listen, because a form of appreciation is just being present and attentive and creating space for people. You talk about the introvert leaders or the ones who don’t have time. They can be introvert leaders too. If you’re asking questions about other people, if you bring in the curiosity, it’s easier to have those conversations because people are responding to that. It doesn’t have to be scripted. As you say, John, it’s just showing up and being there and not having anything scripted, but showing up with curiosity and listening. Shel, I think you’re saying that some CEOs and presidents are introverted or they don’t have time. Those are excuses. I don’t buy into that at all. Okay. I plus-one that, John. We’ve been talking a lot about all of this without really getting tactical in terms of what communicators can do to promote it. I’d love to hear your thoughts about the role of the communicator here. I think it’s seeing appreciation as a skill, and also seeing appreciation as a little distinct from recognition, from gratitude, from acknowledgment, a compliment. Communicators who know how to communicate and connect with audiences are well positioned to help teach those skills. There are practicalities of how you give appreciation and what’s the difference between the two. Then the channels where appreciation can be brought in can be where communicators play a role too. Absolutely. We are the catalyst for greater appreciation and recognition and communication. We know how to do that. Just to underscore, I know you mentioned it earlier, Cath, but to get practical: Since I have been close to you as you’ve gone through the research and developed this book, your TAPS acronym really works. It’s something we can take into workplaces and teach and model and practice, and even develop as a program. As you say, it’s generally a low- or no-budget item within organizations that can have big payoffs. I would just add that there’s an opportunity to shift from top-down communication and cascades to more conversations, and show people that they matter and you want to hear from them. Give them some element of involvement in how things are done. Opportunities to be seen and heard that they may not get through the normal course of their day-to-day activities. Right. Correct. I’ve got to get your book. I’ll just say, Catherine, I’ve got to get your book. I’ve already made a note. Excellent. I’ll send you the links. It’s available on Amazon. Excellent. It’s been as fast an hour as they usually are, but we are at the end of our time. I have just enough time to let everybody know that episode 135 of Circle of Fellows is scheduled for Thursday, November 19. It will be at noon Eastern time, which means nobody from Australia. It is an international panel, though. Diane Gayeski is in the U.S., Andrea Greenhous is in Canada, Andre Oberholzer is in South Africa, and Gloria Walker is in the U.K. A global panel. The topic will focus on long-term communication value, inclusive communication, cross-team collaboration, and role clarity. Somehow we’re going to pull all those threads together and unify them. It sounds like it’ll be a great conversation. I want to thank all of you for your time and for your insights. Of course, as always, a big thank-you to Anna Willey, who is the behind-the-scenes producer of Circle of Fellows. It couldn’t happen at all without Anna. Thanks to Anna, and thanks to all of you. We’ll see everybody next month. All right. Great job. Thank you. Take care.

The post Circle of Fellows #134: Lead, Communicate, and Connect appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this long-form October 2026 episode of For Immediate Release, Neville and Shel report on FGS Global’s research, “Winning the Debate on AI.” More than 7,000 people across seven countries rate AI as the least trusted technology in widespread use, yet 37% became more positive after hearing about its benefits. Shel looks at Microsoft’s move of communications into its corporate, external, and legal affairs group, and its plan to put employees out front telling the company’s story. Neville examines OpenAI’s Locked Chats and the gap between the name and what the feature delivers. Shel reports on Fresh’s finding that 28% of employees meet company news through an AI summary first, and on how to write content that survives it. Neville asks what a Northern Ireland council’s return to a printed newsletter says about channels and measurement. Shel closes with the Wharton 2026 AI Adoption Report, in which managers and the employees they manage describe two very different workplaces.

In his Tech Report, Dan York reports on the critical PHP vulnerabilities fixed in the October 21 security release. The two remote code execution flaws affect any server hosting a PHP application, which is why WordPress and other platforms urged immediate updates. Dan covers why the release was coordinated, the role AI plays in the story, and the xkcd comic that captures how much of the internet depends on a few critical components. He then turns to Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net 2026 report, “Seismic Shifts on the Global Internet,” and to the French government’s pressure on Meta, TikTok, and other platforms as protests spread this weekend. He closes with two fediverse stories: the Social Web Foundation’s Fediverse Multimedia Grants, funded by a $200,000 Interledger Foundation grant, and what’s coming in Mastodon 5.0, including a redesigned composer and navigation.

We’d love to hear from you: comment on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, or WhatsApp, email [email protected] with or without an audio file attached (or use the voicemail button on the FIR website to record a comment directly from the web).

Links from this episode:

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, November 30.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to the For Immediate Release podcast, long-form Episode 533 for October 2026. I’m Neville Hobson in Somerset, England.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

Neville Hobson: This month we have our usual six great stories to share with you, plus, as usual, Dan York’s Tech Report. But first, let’s begin with a recap of the episodes we’ve published over the past month and some listener comments.

In the long-form Episode 529 for September, published on the 28th of September, our lead story reported on a Press Gazette investigation that found dozens of experts quoted in the mainstream media who don’t actually exist. And PR agencies are unwittingly sharing them with the press. This poses a credibility issue for the agencies and the media, we said, requiring a layer of verification unlike anything we faced before. Other stories include a crisis communication handbook for boards from the CIPR and the UK Institute of Directors. And we’ve got a handful of comments here, don’t we, Shel?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we have a couple. Philippe Borremans, our friend, said, “Thanks for covering the CIPR and Institute of Directors handbook. It was a great collaboration with colleagues, and I think the final result is really worth a look.”

And Jane Wilson said, “Love the line, ‘You can’t communicate your way out of a crisis you behaved your way into.’ I use a similar line: you can’t communicate out of a crisis while the fire is still burning. There needs to be operational behavior, resolution, or a plan to resolve. For comms to do our jobs. And I agree wholeheartedly, it’s a governance issue.”

And Neville, you had a reply to Jane. You wrote, “Deepwater Horizon is such a powerful illustration of this point. No amount of carefully crafted messaging could change the reality that oil kept pouring into the Gulf, and Hayward’s remark just compounded an already disastrous situation. It’s a reminder that what leaders say matters enormously, but what the organization actually does matters even more. Which brings us right back to governance and accountability, long before anyone starts drafting a holding statement.”

Neville Hobson: Good comments Jane made, I thought. So in FIR 530, on the fifth of October, we discussed a Financial Times report claiming that the volume of AI slop appearing as thought leadership on LinkedIn has led to a surge in interest in human ghostwriters. And this is the one that attracted quite a few comments, right, Shel?

Shel Holtz: This attracted 14 comments. This one really seemed to strike a nerve with people. It’s too much to read all of the comments as they were written, but we do have a summary.

Chris Norton kicked things off. He was hosting a GEO/AEO event the week after he shared his post, and has been talking with SEOs and copywriters. One of them ran a 300-person SEO and copywriting agency and just closed it because the market vanished. Chris still believes people want taste and human authenticity in 2026. We’ll accept some automation, he says, but we’d still rather talk to a human at the co-op checkout than pack our own bags. And Neville, you replied that the scarce commodity may no longer be words at all, but judgment, taste, and genuine perspective, and that those become more valuable as AI makes competent content effortless.

Dennis Howlett uses Claude to draft his FOIAs and his posts. He trained it on the Diginomica library for style, then edits everything, often rewriting. He runs it through Grammarly, then passes it back to Claude for a legal check. It makes him more efficient.

Jeff DeCanya says it definitely matters. Working with a human ghostwriter isn’t the same as feeding a prompt to an algorithm. Neville, you called that the strongest argument on the other side, since the human process involves challenge, interpretation, and a real relationship with the subject.

Mac Worsham offered a useful test for any byline: could the named author explain the prompt and why each point is there? If so, the drafting tool matters less than critics fear. If not, a human ghostwriter wouldn’t fix it either. He also commented on a different post. Neville, you posted and I posted, and he commented on both of our posts sharing the episode. He said the line about not being able to communicate your way out of a crisis you behaved your way into is maybe the most powerful sentence in the profession right now. That’s actually from the previous episode; I don’t know why he left it on this one, but well. It treats crisis communication as governance and moves the question upstream, to the gap between what an organization says and what it does. He sees the fake expert story, that previous story, as the same lesson from the other side. Back to this episode.

Sherilyn Starkey wondered whether calligraphers had the same debate when Gutenberg unveiled movable type, asking whether it had really done the thinking. Authenticity, she says, has always had a technology problem.

Megan Thomas says ghostwriting for leaders who give zero input always feels wrong to her, and she sees no difference between that and using AI with no input or care. She’s fine with AI used responsibly and with appropriate human attention, and she loves that authentic comms are back in demand, “ums,” “ahs,” and typos included.

Rita Zonia says AI helps enormously with the mechanics of writing, but tends to stay skin-deep on its own. She finds it amusing that a lot of organizations thought they could decimate comms teams and let AI pick up the work, only to discover the tool is only as good as its operator. So great comms people are making a comeback. Experienced writers and ghostwriters know how to get beneath what someone says, ask the extra questions, and spot the little odd comment that’s actually the story. Finding what’s worth saying, and saying it authentically and succinctly, is still a very human skill.

Sharon O’Day has seen tools that generate a podcast from your news articles or presentations, with vendors pitching materials in your CEO’s voice. Philosophically, she says, that’s no different from ghostwriting text, and yet it gives her what the kids call “the ick.” Catherine Atkinson, replying to Sharon, said she’s doing that kind of writing now, with many years of experience in writing voice from journalism and screenwriting. What she’s seeing is a rush to fix big problems.

And Joe, who has a name that’s interesting to pronounce. It’s S-Z-N-K-O-W-S-K-I. So, “Znowski,” I’m going to guess. I apologize, Joe. Joe has been ghostwriting since 2008 and says the desire for authenticity is boomeranging back to where it was before ChatGPT. That puts ghostwriters in a great spot, but only if they’re willing to do the hard work and fun work of interviewing, research, and collaboration.

And Melissa Edwards found it all encouraging for communicators. A lot of comments from that episode.

Neville Hobson: Terrific. That’s really terrific, getting that qualitative insight into people’s different views.

Okay, so “Factual Accuracy Isn’t a Comms Strategy” was the theme of our discussion in FIR 531 on the 12th of October. We considered research suggesting that using familiar language can help accurate information compete with misinformation. But we asked, where’s the line between persuasion and manipulation?

In FIR 532 on the 19th of October, we asked, does a seat at the executive leadership table give communicators genuine influence, or does influence come from being the trusted advisor a CEO turns to? We revisited this perennial debate about communicators having a seat at the top table, with some different perspectives. And now you’re up to date on FIR episodes.

Shel Holtz: One more episode to bring you up to date on, and that is Circle of Fellows, the monthly panel conversation, usually moderated by yours truly, sometimes by Brad Whitworth. It is a panel of four IABC Fellows from the International Association of Business Communicators. This was part two of our discussion about artificial intelligence and communication leaders’ moment. Adrian Cropley was back for this episode, along with Mary Hills, Robin McCasland, and Cyrus Mavalwalla.

The next episode of Circle of Fellows is titled “Lead, Communicate, and Connect.” We’ll be talking about the communicator’s role in creating workplaces where people feel seen and appreciation becomes part of how we lead, communicate, and connect. Zora Artis, John Clemens, Catherine DuCharme, and Jennifer Waugh will join me for this conversation. It is scheduled for 6 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, October 29th.

And one last note: we had a lot of comments on a couple of our episodes over the past month. We love those comments. We love having other perspectives brought into the show, and we would be very grateful for your comment. There are lots of ways to do that. Every comment we got over the last month came through LinkedIn, from people who left their comments on the posts where we share the announcement of a new episode’s availability. So that seems to be the easiest and most popular way to comment, and we encourage you to do that. We also share on Facebook, on Threads, and on WhatsApp, and I check those too for comments, so you can comment there.

You can send us email at [email protected]. You can attach an audio file to that. We would love to play your voice speaking your comment out loud. You can do that through your own recording mechanism and attach it to that email. You can also use the tool we have on our website: go to the site and click the button that says “Send voicemail” and record your comment. Or leave your comment in the show notes. And you can comment on absolutely anything you want, including any of the six topics that we are going to be discussing today. And Neville, those are going to start right now with you.

Neville Hobson: That’s true. So I’ve been reading an interesting new research report from FGS Global, a strategic communication consultancy, called “Winning the Debate on AI.” It explores public attitudes towards artificial intelligence based on a survey of more than 7,000 people across seven countries, including the UK and the US, alongside interviews with political, regulatory, and business leaders.

What caught my attention was a striking contradiction. AI is being adopted at remarkable speed, yet public sentiment towards it remains surprisingly negative. For example, 71% of people surveyed said they’d used AI in the previous six months, yet when asked how positively they viewed different technologies, AI came at the bottom of the list, even below social media.

But here’s where it gets interesting. When people were presented with AI’s potential benefits, 37% said their views became more positive. FGS sees this as evidence that public opinion remains open to persuasion and that organizations have an opportunity to shape the debate. That sounds like good news for communicators, but it raises a question I’ve been thinking about: is AI’s reputation problem really something we can solve through better communication? Or does the technology industry need to change some of its behavior before people have good reason to trust it?

There are a few things I think are worth exploring here. Are people skeptical about AI because they don’t understand its benefits, or because they have legitimate concerns about how it’s being developed and deployed? Where’s the line between helping people understand AI and trying to persuade them to accept something they might reasonably distrust? And what should communicators be doing? Promoting AI’s benefits, or helping their organization build the transparency, accountability, and safeguards that earn public confidence?

One other finding struck me. When researchers asked about AI’s benefits, everyday convenience resonated much more strongly than sweeping promises about economic growth. Perhaps that’s telling us something quite simple. People don’t necessarily want to hear about how AI will transform the global economy. They want to know how it will improve their lives and what safeguards are in place when things go wrong.

Which brings me back to the title of the report, “Winning the Debate on AI.” I don’t think the real challenge is winning the debate at all. I think it’s earning the trust that makes persuasion unnecessary. How do you see it, Shel?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more on that. There is a tremendous amount of persuasion that needs to be happening. I think that the industry needs an association. I have not seen the equivalent in artificial intelligence, among the frontier labs for example, of the pharmaceutical association or the oil and gas association. I used to interact regularly with the Toy Manufacturers Association when I worked at Mattel. They represented the industry. They had the investment, of course; they got all of the money from the organizations that belonged to the association, which were all of the big companies. They conducted the research. They identified the issues. They worked with PR agencies or had their own in-house communicators, or both. They framed the approach that was going to be taken and fed that back out to the member organizations, who were all in lockstep then about how they were going to wield this influence and build this trust, rather than each one doing its own thing.

Right now you have Dario Amodei coming out and saying, “Yeah, 10% chance this could kill us all.” Well, you have Google taking a completely different approach, and OpenAI saying other things. In fact, OpenAI saying conflicting things. And God knows what’s coming out of xAI. It’s a hodgepodge. There’s no coordinated messaging, there’s no common understanding or common agreement among these companies about what the issues and challenges are. The information that’s in this report would be invaluable if there was a coordinated effort in the industry.

Knowing that people are interested in “what’s in it for me,” well, that’s not rocket science. That shouldn’t be a shock to people. But “what’s in it for me” covers a lot of ground, everything from “it can make my life easier when I want to book dinner and a movie as a date night” to “this could cure my lung cancer or prevent me from getting it.” So, talking about this in realistic terms. But right now what you have is this combination of so many different issues associated with AI coming at people from so many different directions. You have the concerns about the future of civilization. You have the concerns about what this means to work. You have the concerns about the data centers, everything from “my electric bills are going up” to “it’s creating health hazards.” You have the concerns about its impact on the economy and what happens if the AI bubble bursts, and there are a lot of people who are reading and hearing about that.

There are so many different issues coming at people from so many different directions, and there isn’t a coordinated effort to address them. It’s being dealt with almost entirely defensively. “Here comes another one, let’s react.” And you don’t build trust that way. No matter how hard they try, there really needs to be a different approach to building and gaining that trust. And by the way, you do that through action. You do need communication so that people know that you’ve taken these actions, but communication alone is not going to address this. These organizations need to behave in a way that builds trust.

And you’re seeing the beginnings of it with the data centers. No more nondisclosure agreements with the cities and counties where they’re getting the agreements to build them. They’re now going in and having town halls first, to hear the concerns of the local residents and come back with proposals to address them. You’re now seeing money pumped back into the community, so people’s kids are going to new schools and health clinics are opening because of the revenues coming from these data centers. They’re taking steps to address the concerns that people have about noise and water use, with closed-loop systems and the like. But all of this is in reaction to the ton of hate that was coming at them when it was learned what was going on behind closed doors, with no concern for all of these things. So they need to be proactive about these things, and they need to build and earn that trust. And they need communications to let people know that this is what they’re doing.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, agreed. That’s well summarized, I think. It is a major, major issue, the misinformation that’s out there. Much of it is not deliberate; it’s well meaning. But you go on any social network and you’ll find any regular Joe with an opinion, and he will share it. I’ve lost count of how many people leaving such posts on LinkedIn where I’ve asked a question, “What’s your source?”, because they don’t cite a source for anything, and I don’t get answers to those questions. So you don’t pay any attention to those kinds of comments. But most people do.

I think of a handful of people I know who are skeptics, very much so, about all this. They react constantly: “Look at what I just read,” and another one saying the world’s going to end tomorrow. They look alarmed about what they’re doing with ChatGPT, so they stop doing it even. I think it leads to misunderstanding, because not only do you not have enough information to clearly explain what’s going on, it’s conflicting, because some say different things.

But I think the significant thing about earning trust is utter clarity in explaining what’s in it for you, and in our own organizations, what’s in it for all of us. It reminds me a bit of podcasting. Not in the early days, but things I’ve noticed over the years, particularly over the last couple of years, where I see people posting “here are the benefits of podcasting,” and they justify what they’re trying to talk about by saying the global take-up is X, and this guy Joe Rogan’s got three million listeners, look at what he’s getting out of it. That doesn’t relate at all to the real world for most people.

So talking about how AI is going to help us all be economically beneficial in five years’ time just goes over the heads of most people. If you say it’ll enable you to get the best deals on your holiday, or it’ll help you understand something you’ve been trying to do… A good example as well, one that should interest most people, is the role AI played in the PHP issue that arose these past few days, where AI discovered the fault that had lain hidden in the code. No one knew, or people in the tech community certainly did nothing about it, for 22 years. Which, as an aside, raises the question: what the hell was the tech industry doing? They didn’t fix this. The answer I read from someone was that they believed the chances of anyone taking advantage of this were close to zero. Well, guess what?

And I think that comes back to the owners of the AI tools, who should be doing more. OpenAI and Anthropic, in my opinion, instead of getting the headlines about “this latest cool thing we can do,” and we’ve got a story coming up about ChatGPT shortly, should talk more about what it means to the average Joe and the average company, and focus on something that they know people are concerned about. They do enough surveys themselves.

So I think communicators, and again, let’s bring this back to reality for people: what do you need to do in your organization to help people understand all this? In the absence of any kind of handy toolkit or playbook you can get that makes sense to you, you have to understand this, promote the benefits, and help the organization build transparency and accountability. These are messages we’ve been talking about for quite a while on the podcast. And I think the point I made earlier holds: everyday convenience resonates much more strongly than sweeping promises about economic growth that people can’t relate to.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, there are other things that I think communicators can help these organizations do, things that we have seen in other industries, like the computer industry. So let’s take, for example, OpenAI announcing that they have solved one of the twelve Millennium math problems. And this came as a complete surprise to the mathematics community. Now, these are people who have gotten PhDs, they have devoted their whole lives to mathematics, and many of them pick one of these challenges and spend their careers working on it. And suddenly here’s OpenAI announcing, “We solved it. It took two weeks.” And they did this without the involvement of the mathematics community.

Now, if they had used their PR capabilities appropriately, they would have said, “Here’s what we’re working on.” And a good PR person would have said, “You should do this in concert with representatives from the mathematics profession, in the open, so that they are engaged with this.” They can, first of all, be involved in making sure that the process is a valid one. Even if it solves the problem, maybe it went about it a bad way, or there’s not sufficient documentation to prove that this actually is the solution. And then you figure out how mathematicians can use this, rather than end up where we are today, which is with mathematicians furious about this and also terrified that there’s going to be no need for them within the next couple of years. And everybody who’s heard this story, they’re not going, “The poor mathematicians.” They’re going, “My profession is next.” And that’s how you erode trust.

If they had partnered with mathematicians and come out and said, “Here is how AI and humans work together, where each provides what they’re best at, to solving these problems and identifying new ones,” then everybody’s optimistic. That’s how it’s going to go for my profession too. And they had no clue about this, probably because they never consulted their communicators.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. There are tons of things we could continue discussing on this, but that’s a foundational overview, let’s say, on what you need to do. You’ve got to build trust. So I’m sure we’ll be returning to this topic soon.

Shel Holtz: No doubt. But for now, let’s turn away from AI altogether and talk about how Microsoft is rethinking the way it communicates. On September 24th, internal memos from Satya Nadella and Brad Smith, reported by GeekWire, moved the communication function out of marketing. It now sits in Brad Smith’s corporate, external, and legal affairs group. Okay, that makes sense to me. Brent Colburn is leading it on an interim basis. Frank Shaw, who has run Microsoft’s communications for, well, nearly 20 years, is leaving at the end of the year and moving into an advisory role in the meantime.

The bigger piece here, though, is the strategy. Microsoft wants employees and executives out front, telling the company’s stories in their own voices, quote, “under a shared strategy and set of principles,” end quote. The press has called this “building in public.” Forbes, which is where I spotted this, frames it as a trade-off: more voices, less control.

Now, so far nobody has published those principles. The way I see it, this is essentially a strategic narrative. I developed one of these where I work for pretty much the same purpose, so that our people, leaders, people out in client interviews, the marketing department developing proposals, all speak in their own voice and tell their own stories, but guided by a set of principles. But we haven’t heard anything about that yet for Microsoft, nor have we heard anything about the approval process or what training might be required before employees can post. Where are they going to post? How can they post? Can they do a podcast? Can they do TikToks? We haven’t even seen a timetable. So it’s hard to assess how this might work or might not work.

Before we get to the pros and cons of this approach, I do want to make the point that this is hardly new. Some of you may remember Robert Scoble. In the early days of blogging, he was a Microsoft employee. He was writing as the Scobleizer. It was an early blog. In fact, in 2005, The Economist wrote about it, and I’m quoting here: “He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public relations types have been failing abjectly for years. He has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience.” That was the Scobleizer in 2005.

By 2006, roughly 3,000 Microsoft employees were blogging on the company’s developer network. Neville, you and I interviewed Robert in March of 2005. You can still hear that interview over on our archive site, and we covered his departure from Microsoft in 2006. One report said he was the third best-known employee at Microsoft, behind Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates at the time.

So, what’s different this time around? A couple of things. First, this is a stated enterprise strategy that came from the CEO. Second is the home for it. It’s not sitting under marketing; it’s under the legal and policy side of the house. When we debated reporting lines on Episode 532, I joked that comms should report to legal, and that’s what Microsoft did, though I doubt they’d say it that way. Third, there are the platforms. Channel 9 and Microsoft blogs were owned; Microsoft controlled the stage. Today those voices live on X and LinkedIn, platforms Microsoft can’t control. And all of this is in the middle of an AI race where every competitor’s engineers are doing the same thing, and under real regulatory scrutiny.

What are people saying about this? Named practitioner reaction is pretty thin so far. Mostly it’s just media coverage. GeekWire noted that Shaw’s shift surprised some people inside the company. The sharpest analysis I found was from ContentGrip, which says the communications job becomes one of designing a system of credible voices rather than being the voice.

And real quickly, just some pros and cons. On the plus side is credibility. An engineer explaining her own work is more believable than a press release. It’s faster. It reaches more of the right people through fragmented channels that no media list covers. It gives you a listening post; Scoble used his blog as a free focus group. And in an age of AI-generated everything, verifiably human voices are going to carry some weight.

On the minus side, there’s, well, a lot. There’s inconsistent messaging. There’s legal and regulatory exposure, especially for a public company facing antitrust attention. There are disclosure risks and leaks. There’s uneven participation: some employees are going to shine at this, and others are going to feel pressured into doing it. There’s a loss of control, which is part of the whole point, but it’s also the whole problem. And with the issues, we’re just scratching the surface. It’s not like things don’t happen like this all the time with organizational support or indifference. Where I work, we have people posting videos from construction sites to LinkedIn all the time. Are we upset by it? Hell no. We cross-post most of it to our official accounts. We love it.

So if you’re doing this at your organization, the Microsoft story points to three things. Publish clear principles people can actually remember. Train and coach the people you’re asking to speak, because enthusiasm isn’t a skill. And build an escalation path and monitoring so someone can help fast when a post goes sideways.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, there’s a lot here, Shel, I must say. A key point in my mind, when I hear this kind of story, is that the Scobleizer, and indeed IBM, did something similar to this, which is where we met Philippe Borremans, when he was at IBM involved in the blogging initiative.

Shel Holtz: That’s right.

Neville Hobson: Right. The landscape is utterly, utterly different to what it was then. There are more people, apart from anything else, and there’s more access to opinions and to anything other people say online. Back 20 years ago, you were still on dial-up for a large part. DSL might be your fastest choice. Mobile networks weren’t anything to speak of at all. So it was limited what people could do. But also the awareness and the desire weren’t fully formed yet. That’s emerged over the last two decades. Now everyone’s online, we’ve got AI on the scene, and attitudes are shifting away from the command-and-control behavior exhibited by companies 20 years ago, Microsoft being one of them: official spokespeople only, no one’s allowed to say anything publicly. That was the mantra in the ’90s, certainly. Now it’s different, so encourage it.

It’s no small thing, though, for large enterprises to suddenly shift tactics and do this. But the trend, I’ll call it that, is clearly there to do this, and Microsoft may well be a great ongoing live case study on how this works. I can think of, for instance, when I was working at IBM a decade ago, involved in mobile app development, I was using tools that would help employees share content on social networks with pre-created messaging. That was so fake, in my humble opinion. Now you want it to be natural, and with it comes the inherent risk that they’re going to say something that, by mistake, is not really what you would like people to be talking about. It’s not about “you can only talk about certain things.” I think you’ve got to say, talk about what you want related to work. But you mentioned something really significant, which is you’ve got to have guidance and training from the very, very outset.

And undoubtedly there are other things you could do to lessen what some people might see as pressure to do this. There’s no pressure. You don’t have to do this. You need to make that message very clear. Equally, if you don’t do it, there’s no penalty, but peer pressure will help improve that, I would imagine, if you do it right. We don’t have time to go into a lot of detail on this, but I think finding champions within the organization who can lead the charge, who stimulate people to do all this, would be great.

But I think you’ve still got another issue, which I don’t know how you would solve, which is that much of what employees in a big company like Microsoft post is going to be just so much noise amongst all the other noise that’s out there. You’re competing for people’s attention. So I doubt you can expect to achieve mass conversion to people paying attention to what you say online in that kind of environment. So maybe you need to concentrate on small communities that you have a relationship with. But the idea, I think, is really good. And I think IBM is probably the best model, because at the time there wasn’t really anyone else doing it the way they did it. They published guidance, examples, manuals that were publicly accessible by anyone, and that helped drive awareness of what others could do. That was really quite something. It’d be interesting if Microsoft does something like that with this. But I think it’s a good step.

I read the Forbes article. I didn’t think they were quite right with their title, by the way, which was “Rethinking Communication as Employees Take on a Storytelling Role.” That looked to me like there’s a keyword they put in the headline so it shows up. This is way, way beyond just storytelling. This is something where you are an extension of the organization in how you communicate externally and, indeed, even internally. So it’s a huge task, I think, and I wish them well. I think it’d be great to see how they get on with this.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think this is a step beyond advocacy, because in employee advocacy programs you’re asking people to amplify a message that you have already distributed. And in this case, you’re telling people, go out there and tell your own stories and engage in your own conversations with people. There is nothing new about this. Not only did Microsoft do it before IBM, we had General Motors with a social media team engaging in the car blogs, and not about GM stuff, just becoming part of the community. Dell had a program that I think was on par with IBM’s. I remember speaking at one of their certification programs for the people who were going to become bloggers on behalf of Dell. There were a couple of hundred people in this program, and I think there were 11 of us speaking there. Christopher Barger was there. Richard Binhammer was at Dell at the time.

Neville Hobson: I did similar with Dell in the UK. The same thing. It was a global thing they were trying to do.

Shel Holtz: Right. But they trained people heavily. They trained people very deeply in all of this.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. There are so many examples we could spend the rest of the show just talking about what others did. It’s not new, you’re absolutely right. But it needs revisiting again, because I think people have forgotten this.

Shel Holtz: Well, this is why I raised the story. Here we go again, with somebody saying employees are authentic, their voices are authentic, it’s going to have more credibility than sending out a press release or putting something on our media site. I think that’s great. Why hasn’t it become the standard? It’s because too many organizations don’t take the time and trouble to do the training and to provide the resources to make it easy. They don’t think through what this means to employees who may feel pressured to participate. They don’t teach you where the regulatory risks are. Don’t mention another employee’s health problem in the United States. For God’s sake, that’s a HIPAA violation. So there are all kinds of risks here. You can mitigate them with the appropriate program before you just tell people, go out and blog, or go out and post on LinkedIn and X and whatever.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s good. So I mentioned earlier that we had a story about ChatGPT to mention. Here it comes. OpenAI has just introduced an interesting new feature for ChatGPT called Locked Chats. It lets you hide individual conversations from your normal chat history and protect access to them with a four-digit PIN. It’s being rolled out across ChatGPT’s consumer and business plans, including Enterprise. At first glance this seems like a useful addition.

But here’s where it gets interesting. OpenAI is quite explicit that locking a conversation doesn’t encrypt it separately, doesn’t change how long the company retains it, and doesn’t override an organization’s compliance policies. In Enterprise and Edu workspaces, the content can still be available through authorized compliance systems. So a locked chat isn’t necessarily a confidential chat in the way some users might imagine.

Consider what an employee might reasonably assume when they see a feature called Locked Chats. They might think the conversations are now completely private, even from their employer, or that sensitive corporate information becomes secure simply because the conversation requires a PIN. Neither assumption is necessarily correct. OpenAI’s own documentation makes some important distinctions. Locking isn’t encryption; the feature doesn’t create an end-to-end encrypted vault. Data retention doesn’t change; locked conversations remain subject to the same retention and model improvement settings. Organizational oversight remains; locked chats in Enterprise and Edu workspaces are still included in message logs available through OpenAI’s compliance platform. And forgetting the PIN has major consequences: resetting it permanently deletes the locked conversations and the protected content that you might have shared with ChatGPT.

And this raises some questions for communicators. For example, are employees becoming increasingly comfortable discussing sensitive workplace matters with AI assistants, perhaps without fully understanding who can access that information? How clearly are organizations explaining the distinction between privacy, confidentiality, and security when they introduce AI tools? And is there a danger that features like this create a false sense of security, encouraging people to share information they perhaps shouldn’t be putting into an AI system in the first place?

I think there’s a broader issue here about AI literacy, though. We often talk about teaching people how to use AI effectively, but perhaps we aren’t paying enough attention to helping them understand the implications of using it. And there’s another thought. As ChatGPT and similar systems have become more integrated into everyday work, employees may increasingly regard their AI conversations as personal spaces, even when they’re using company-provided tools. That could create some interesting tensions between individual expectations of privacy and an organization’s legitimate responsibilities for governance, security, and compliance. So is a feature like Locked Chats simply a welcome improvement to the user experience, or does it highlight a bigger challenge for organizations trying to establish sensible boundaries around AI at work?

Shel Holtz: Well, I’m going to use it, because any extra degree of security is a good thing. But this is clearly a branding issue as far as I’m concerned. The word “locked” suggests more protection than it obviously provides, based on everything OpenAI has told us about it. I think that’s a pretty good example of how product naming shapes the expectations of the user, and of the gap between a help center disclosure and what people assume. Calling it “locked” is going to set an expectation for people who don’t pay attention to the fine print, and it’s going to be misleading. As a communicator, I probably would have advised a different name for it. I don’t know; I haven’t given any thought to what I would call it. That could be a listener exercise. Send us your ideas for what you would have called it.

But yeah, I think it’s a poor branding choice. I think it sets a bad expectation. It is still up to the organization, when we’re talking about the use of something like this in the enterprise, to make sure employees understand what it is, what it can do, and what it can’t do. If we are involved in a lawsuit, in discovery, those chats are still going to be accessible. The fact that you locked it doesn’t mean it’s not going to end up in the court records and in the hands of the adversary in the lawsuit. So this becomes governance in the organization. It becomes part of the training, the ongoing training. This is why we talk about the fact that AI training in the organization is not a one-and-done thing. This technology continues to evolve and change dramatically, and it will be incumbent upon communicators, the trainers, and the IT department to work together to make sure that employees understand: this is the utility that you can get out of this feature, and this is what it will not do for you.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. And I think also, I read in one article commenting on this that you can have guidelines written and published on a website accessible to all employees. No guarantee they’re going to read it. Well, yeah, that’s true, but you still have to do it. You should communicate it and make it available and help people understand all this. But you need to do more to help people understand the consequences. That’s the point that strikes me. Not how to use ChatGPT, but the consequences of this. So that, I think, is one way of addressing expectations of privacy that balances that out with organizations’ responsibility. These are communication issues.

I think, like you, I’m going to give it a go when I see it in my copy of ChatGPT. It is rolling out, as I mentioned; I haven’t got it yet. Would I use it? I’m a bit different to everyone else employed in an organization, because my use of these tools has now changed in terms of workplace needs, so there’s not an awful lot that I would be alarmed about if it was accessible. That said, I don’t want it to be just open to anyone to look at if they don’t have a need to. So there’s that issue. But it comes down to, this is related to what we’ve been talking about earlier, too: building trust. And you think the employer needs to do more than they might think they need to do with the addition of a feature to this tool. Undoubtedly Claude, maybe Gemini, will come up with something like this as well.

Shel Holtz: Of course. I was just going to say, Anthropic and Gemini will look at the criticism that’s coming out of what OpenAI did and come out with versions that address some of those, and they’ll be able to market that “ours doesn’t do this” or “ours is better because of that.”

Neville Hobson: That’s right. So lots to consider on this from a communicator’s point of view and from a user’s point of view. Just be aware of the limitations.

[Dan York’s Tech Report]

Shel Holtz: Thanks for that report, Dan. It arrived just moments before we started recording, so we have not had a chance to listen to it. I know that it’s a little late because of your travels. I read your post that it took you about 30 hours to get home from the conference you were attending, and I’m very grateful that you still found time to record your report. I’m looking forward to hearing about it. I’m definitely interested in your take on that PHP vulnerability that we discussed briefly earlier, and interested in hearing about the features of Mastodon 5.0, since I still host the mastocom.org Mastodon instance. So I appreciate that.

Internal communicators, this one’s for you. You craft a message. You know the kinds of messages you craft: benefits change, reorganization, safety policy. You consider the structure, the tone, what leadership wants to say, and how employees will react to it. And then your employees never read it, because instead they paste it into an AI tool and read what comes back.

That’s not hypothetical. Fresh, an intranet company, surveyed a thousand professionals in the UK and the US, both communicators and employees. 88% of employees say they use AI to summarize workplace communications. 28% now encounter company news through AI first, before the intranet, before the leadership email, before word of mouth. Only 12% read internal communications in full. 95% of employees trust AI to capture the key points accurately. Yet 92% of internal communicators say those summaries distort emotional tone and intent. Both of these things can be true, because the employees can’t see what got left out. That’s the nature of a summary. And just a third of organizations have any formal monitoring or policy for how their content gets reinterpreted.

So, how accurate are these summaries? Well, there’s research, although not about internal comms. There was a study in Royal Society Open Science that looked at almost 5,000 AI summaries of scientific abstracts and articles. The summaries were far more likely than the originals to overgeneralize, and the newer the model, the worse it got. Llama 3.3 was 39 times as likely to produce generalized conclusions. ChatGPT-4o was nine times as likely. In one example, “a diabetes drug was better than placebo” in the original became “effective and safe treatment” in the summary. The qualifiers just disappeared. The researchers told the bots to stay faithful to the source and not introduce inaccuracies, but they still produced about twice as many generalized conclusions. So “just tell the AI to be careful” isn’t a fix.

Now, scientific abstracts aren’t an all-hands memo, but the failure is the same one we worry about: the conditions, the exceptions, and the caveats get dropped in the summaries. “We’re moving to the new system, with exceptions for field staff pending approval” might turn into “We’re moving to the new system.” A piece in Digital Journal points out that summarizing means choosing what to leave out, and a short answer is a starting point, not a substitute for the source.

So what do we do? First, write content that survives the summary. David Bowman of Fresh, the UK organization that did that study, put it this way: “To be heard in 2026, organizations must design content to survive the summary.” In practice, that means lead with the point. Put what’s happening, who it affects, what they need to do, and by when in the very first few lines. I know you want to write in that feature style, with an example before you get into the news, to make it human. It doesn’t survive the summary. Write your own one-sentence bottom line. If you don’t supply the summary, the machine is going to do that. Keep qualifiers attached to the claim. Don’t bury “this only applies to this cohort of employees” in paragraph six. Label what’s decided and what isn’t. Cut, shorten. The way Bowman said it, subtraction is now a strategic necessity. Fewer messages means the important one is less likely to get mangled. And test it. Run your own announcement through whatever AI tool your employees use and see what comes back. You may not like it.

Second, consider channels that don’t invite the paste-and-summarize habit. This might include live town halls, manager-led team conversations, and face-to-face with people who aren’t at a desk all day. Conversation carries the context and the tone that a summary strips out, and you can see in the room whether it landed. I’ll be honest, though, this isn’t a wall. Meetings get transcribed, and video can be summarized. The point isn’t to hide from AI. It’s to put the important stuff where a human explains it to another human.

And then there’s governance. Only a third of organizations have any policy. Find out how your employees actually consume your content. Tell leaders that sending isn’t the same as being understood, and that the summary is now a channel they don’t control. The audience isn’t skimming anymore. They’re delegating the reading. Our job is to make the message hold up when the reading is done by the machine.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s an interesting scenario you’ve described, I think, Shel. One of the articles you shared, in IT Brief, I found quite interesting. A couple of quotes struck me. The report presents the issue less as a technical shift than as a behavioral one. That makes total sense to me. This is largely behavior, it seems to me. But the conclusion makes sense to me too. It underlines how quickly AI tools are moving from optional assistance to frontline filters for corporate information. 28% of employees now are seeing company news through AI before any original source. I don’t see that changing at all.

And I think the reality is that this is how people like to share information. It gives them a sense of control, I suppose. It could be that they might reinterpret what the official news from a company is, maybe with a hint of skepticism about what they really mean. And you’ll even find some who’ll say, “This really means this.” And that kind of content will spread outside the organization. So it’s a complicated landscape, it seems to me, and I think there are no easy answers.

Shel Holtz: No, I think it is important, though, for internal communicators to find a way to poll your population and find out the degree to which this is happening in your organization. Because I firmly believe that if you find out that some significant percentage of your employees are engaging with organizational content this way, and I’m not talking about best practices or things that are in the archives. I’m talking about the news that’s being presented, the information that leaders are sharing in their emails, the things that you’re sharing through your intranet that you think are important for all employees to understand. The new policy, right? The fact that there is a laptop swap program coming up and all employees need to go and fill in this information about their current company equipment. This is important, that employees get this. And if you find that a preponderance of employees in your organization are using the summaries, you need to restrategize your whole approach to communication. It may end up relying more on face-to-face.

And I’m actually thinking about this as subject matter for a new book: that we are going to come to rely on managers like we have never relied on managers before to become the conveyors of this information directly to the members of their teams. We’ve been talking about this in internal communications for decades, but it is now a required part of the strategy, if in fact your ability to get the message across is being eroded by the summaries that employees are creating. It’s also going to change the approach you take to writing and where you put this stuff for people to get. So I think you need to ask your employees where they’re at with this, and keep doing that so that you’re ready. Even if they’re not doing it now, when they start doing it, which I think is probably inevitable.

Neville, I do this with all the newsletters that I get on AI through Gmail. I have a skill set up in Claude. I subscribe to probably 20 AI-related emails. There is absolutely no way that I’m going to be able to read all of those every day. But my Gmail summary skill does a great job of telling me, “Here are the things that they’re all covering. The Neuron covered this, and TLDR covered that, and Casey Newton’s newsletter covered this other thing.” I can skim that in about two or three minutes, and it’s great. But am I getting the context? Am I getting the nuance? Am I missing something? Is it skewing some of that information as it creates a summary? Yeah, I read this knowing full well that that’s possible. But it’s better than not being able to read them at all. And I’m sure that there are employees who are tremendously busy on their jobs who feel the same way about reading the information that comes to them from the company.

Neville Hobson: Yep, makes total sense, I agree.

Okay, so here’s an interesting story, nothing to do with AI, utterly nothing, from Northern Ireland, that caught my eye. A local council is abandoning its digital newsletter for residents and going back to a printed magazine delivered through letterboxes. Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council says readership of its digital newsletter has collapsed. One edition in 2024 attracted around 1,650 views, but a more recent edition managed fewer than 120. So the council is spending £30,000, which I would say is probably about $38,000, on a trial printed magazine, which will go to 60,000 households.

Now, I rather like the idea of print making a comeback. We’ve talked a number of times before about how traditional communication channels still have a place in an increasingly digital world. But what really interests me is why the digital newsletter failed so spectacularly. Was it the format? Was the content not sufficiently interesting or relevant to residents? Did people even know the newsletter existed? Was it promoted effectively? Or perhaps the council simply didn’t understand how its residents wanted to receive information.

And there’s this. The council has an online registration form for its digital magazine. It asks residents for their name, address, postcode, and email address, together with consent to receive emails about accessing the publication. That raises another possibility: was a digital edition sufficiently easy to discover and access? We can’t tell from the registration form alone how residents actually received or found the newsletter, and the articles I’ve read don’t really talk any more about this. But it’s another reminder that the experience surrounding a publication can matter as much as the publication itself.

We don’t know the answers, as I mentioned, and the reports I’ve seen don’t really explore them. There’s more, such as the question of measurement. The council knows its digital newsletter attracted very few views. But how will it know whether the printed magazine is any more successful? Delivering 60,000 copies doesn’t mean 60,000 households will read it.

So there are a few questions worth exploring. For example, are organizations sometimes too quick to blame a communication channel when the real problem might be their content, their audience understanding, or the distribution strategy? Could returning to print actually be a sensible decision, particularly when communicating with an entire community rather than a self-selecting digital audience? And how should we measure success? Is it enough that people receive or read a publication? Or should we be looking for evidence that they understand something, take action, or engage more with the organization?

And I think there’s a wider issue here as well. Digital isn’t automatically better simply because it’s digital, and print isn’t automatically outdated. What matters is reaching the right people with something that’s relevant to them, in a format they’re willing to engage with. So here’s a closing thought: a channel can deliver your message, but it can’t make people interested in it.

Shel Holtz: I have so many thoughts about this, I’m not even sure where to start. In terms of the declining readership of the digital publication, did they ask people why they weren’t reading it? Did they survey their residents? They might have been able to make changes.

Neville Hobson: We don’t know any of that.

Shel Holtz: No, I understand we don’t, and it would be very helpful to know. If they asked, and people said, “We don’t care what information you provided or in what digital format, we’re not going to read this because we just don’t care,” that’s one thing. But if they came back and said, “You’re talking too much about this when I’m actually interested in that,” then you can make changes and probably increase your open rates. Did they do any other research, into the reasons that people may not be opening it? We don’t know. Was it going to their spam folder, for example? Was it reaching them at all? Did it have the appropriate kind of subject line that was going to entice people to open it? Did they do A/B testing on their subject lines? There are so many questions about why the digital version didn’t succeed.

Will a print version succeed? Well, maybe. The councillors kept over and over again pointing to older residents, which is a reminder to segment your audiences. The debate about digital versus print is sometimes hiding the real question, which is, who are we trying to reach? Now, you and I are in our seventies, and we are digitally savvy. Our work lives involved all of this stuff.

Neville Hobson: Digitally native.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we are. We’ve been working online since what, the 1980s?

Neville Hobson: The ’80s.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. So I don’t buy this “older people only read print.” I think that may have been true 30 years ago. But this is what these councillors seem to believe. And as long as that’s their belief, it does allow us to remember that segment, and who we are trying to reach, and who’s more likely to pay attention to what kind of content. But the question that I really have is, why in the world wouldn’t you do both? Accommodate the people who would rather get print and the people who would rather have digital, and let the people who are reading digital opt out of print so you can save a little money, for goodness’ sake.

I graduated from college in 1976. I get a four-color magazine from my university four times a year that goes immediately into the recycling bin. It looks like it is well written, it looks like it is beautifully designed, and I simply don’t care. I just don’t have the time or interest. I have no connection anymore to my university beyond some of the people I went to school with there. I have no time to read the Atlantic Monthly that I pay money for. I’m not going to take the time to read this, so it goes straight into the bin. Wouldn’t they like to know that, and stop sending it to me and reduce the cost of their print run?

So yeah, I think there are ways to manage this stuff. You know I’m a fan of print. You know what I think the advantages of print are, especially for the people who are going to take a minute to at least flip through it and go, “My goodness, I didn’t expect to find this article here.” That hardly ever happens online, because you get what you’re looking for, and print allows that serendipitous discovery of really interesting or important content. I wish I could send a print magazine to the homes of my employees. You know why? Not only would they flip through it, and you know what employees look for first when they’re flipping through a magazine: pictures of people that they know. But their families would get to see it and suddenly feel like they’re a little bit more a part of the company their husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers are working for. I think there’s tremendous value in the tactile nature of print.

But does that mean it’s necessarily going to work in this instance, without the research to figure out what people want to read about, what people need to know about, how to ensure they’re going to pay attention to it? This all sounds to me like a research failure, and I would really need to know more about what research they did. They’re also going to need to do research to figure out if the print publication is working. They’re going to need to ask.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. It’s a shame that there isn’t more information. I didn’t dig any further than that. In fact, the links to the two publications in Northern Ireland that had the story are in the show notes for this episode, so you can read more detail there. But not the answers to what did they do, why did they do this, why didn’t they do that, did they do research, et cetera. I’d also be keen to know of any listener in Northern Ireland who has any insight into this story. If you’d like to share your insight with us, we’d really like to know that.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. And I’ll leave this report with one thought: what a great opportunity for human-led design. Because the one thing about print is that you can’t escape its notice. Even if it comes in the mail, you go through it quickly and you see it. And how good is the cover design, right? That becomes vital to people stopping and going, “Maybe I’ll flip through this.” It’s so easy to skip a subject line in a list of today’s email in your inbox. It’s harder to skip that print publication when you’re holding it in your hand and the cover is in your face. It had better be a good cover, or it’s going into the recycling bin.

Neville Hobson: Your comment about your university magazine I found quite interesting. If you’ve been getting this thing for years, and each time you stick it in the recycling bin, don’t they email subscribers occasionally saying, “We’d like your views about the magazine, do you like it?” Or I guess not.

Shel Holtz: No, no. I occasionally get one from the journalism department, and I’ll pay attention to that, first of all because it will report on people that I know, and second because I am very interested in what they are teaching journalists these days in university, especially since many of them are going to come into corporate communications. But the one from the university that talks about all the other departments that I don’t care about? Nope, don’t care.

Well, some listeners may think that I have saved the most interesting item for last. The 2026 AI Adoption Report from Wharton Human-AI Research and GBK Collective was published on October 13. It’s the fourth annual edition. It is long, and it is full of data on ROI and agents, so I’m going to try to stick to just what matters to us as organizational communicators.

They asked about 1,400 full-time employees at U.S. private-sector companies with more than a thousand employees. Those were the people who were surveyed in July. About a thousand were managers and above. This is the first year they also surveyed 409 entry- and mid-level employees, which is great, because that’s where it gets interesting. In the report’s own words, there is no group in this study where managers and the employees they manage describe the same working environment. I want to say that again: there is no group in this study where managers and employees were aligned.

So, the numbers. 79% of managers and above say leadership has provided a clear long-term AI vision. Among entry- and mid-level employees, it’s 64%. 84% of managers say managers are empowered to lead AI change. Employees say 65%. And the biggest gap of all is training. 78% of managers say employees get adequate AI training. Only 56% of entry- and mid-level employees agree. There’s also a general alignment measure: 39% of managers describe an organization that clears four or five alignment factors for employees; for employees, it’s only 26%.

Now, the report doesn’t have a section dedicated to communication, and probably should, but a gap where leaders believe they’ve explained the vision and provided training, and employees say they haven’t, is pretty clearly a communication problem. We have seen this pattern before. It’s the “we told them” syndrome.

The sentiment numbers say the same. 84% of managers say their view of AI has improved over the past year. For entry- and mid-level employees, it’s 68%. For a positive impact on society, managers are at 76%, employees at 55%. And 46% of entry- and mid-level employees worry their own skills are declining from AI use. Now, that fascinates me. They fear that their own skills are declining because AI is doing the work. The report is careful to say, and this is a quote, “far from a backlash against technology,” but it’s not the same experience as the one that leaders are having.

So let’s move on to the business results. Companies using AI in a way the researchers call “transformational” are far more likely to report strongly positive ROI: 67%, versus 19% for companies whose AI use isn’t described as transformational. Departments with strongly positive ROI were also more likely to have changed their management structure because of AI, 64% versus 47%, and they didn’t report more layoffs or hiring freezes. A few other correlations. Among organizations with a newly designated chief AI officer, 58% report strongly positive ROI, versus 8% with no such role. Those standardized on a single approved platform, 50% versus 9% for those still experimenting. Again, those are correlations and not causations.

One more finding, on agents. Two-thirds of departments say they use AI agents, but only 17% let an AI agent finish a task without a person approving each step. Brian Smith of GBK says most companies are, quote, “paying for autonomy and then reviewing every action.”

So what do we do with this? Well, and this is getting to be a litany: don’t assume your message has landed. Measure the gaps. Ask employees the same questions leaders get asked. Is the vision clear? Is the training adequate? Do you know what you’re allowed to do? If you find the same gap Wharton found, you have a case.

Second, claim a role in AI training communication. Department leadership gets named for user training by 51% of respondents, the C-suite by 30%. Communication isn’t on the list. Communicators who can make the training findable, practical, and understandable will win. They’ll matter.

Third, equip managers. There’s that message about managers again. They’re the channel employees actually trust, and the data suggests they’re more optimistic than the people they manage. Give them the real questions employees are asking, not just talking points.

Fourth, be honest about jobs. 37% of managers say AI has led to staff reductions, and they expect fewer entry-level hires. Employees notice when you’re silent about that.

And last, govern what you’re communicating. If your company is adopting agents and platforms, the communication plan for who’s accountable and what the rules are belongs right there with the technology plan.

There’s a lot there, Neville. What jumped out at you?

Neville Hobson: There is a lot, Shel. I haven’t read the report; it’s big. But I did pay attention to the key takeaways on the page they posted on the website describing the report. A couple of things from that jumped out at me, related to something you mentioned about the chief AI officer. If you look at the acronym, CAIO, I think it’s fabulous, absolutely fabulous.

Shel Holtz: Ha! Ciao.

Neville Hobson: So it’s interesting that someone with dedicated AI ownership, says Wharton… Well, they may say more about that in the report. I’d like to know what they mean by “dedicated AI ownership.” Is the person’s prime role this, nothing else on their plate they’ve got to pay attention to, or what? That would be helpful to know. But 58% of organizations with someone in that role report positive ROI. Again, it’s only 8% for a company that doesn’t have anyone with a dedicated role. Well, there’s good evidence of what you should be doing in an organization, if you’re able to. It may well be that you need to have someone with that role as part of something else he or she is doing as well, because you may not have the resources to have someone just dedicated to that. That would be better than not having anyone, I would say.

The bit about agents, where they’re putting steps in place to check everything at each stage, sounds counterproductive, but it could well be that those doing that are going to say, “I told you so, these agents are dangerous,” if you look at what’s been written in the tech press over the last couple of weeks. I remember when we talked about this specific topic in one of our short episodes earlier in the year, about the growth of agents and how they’re going to take over various things in organizations. Largely that’s happening. But we’re now seeing a strong pushback based on some of the scare stories. For instance, I read one in the Wall Street Journal, I think it was, about AI agents gaining access to people’s bank accounts without permission. And you’re thinking, this plays into the reporting about AI taking control and “we’re all going to die.” It’s that kind of talk. So I think that makes it inevitable that you’re going to have big handbrakes on some of these things without oversight. But again, determining what’s best there is the CAIO’s job, I would say.

From what I read about this, and hearing what you’ve explained, what Wharton calls “adaptive organizations,” there are some really good examples here of what adaptive organizations do differently from those who are not thinking about these developments. So I think there’s plenty here. I’m not sure I’ll have time to read the full report, but I see there’s an executive summary. I’ll download that and see what it says. But it’s interesting, Shel, that this survey has credibility, I think, and this kind of study is worth paying attention to, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: I dropped the whole report into Claude and asked it to extract and summarize the elements that would be relevant for communicators, and that’s how I crafted the report I just delivered. I’m glad you focused on the chief AI officer. I was really fascinated by this particular data point, for a number of reasons. We talk all the time about companies creating the “chief blank officer” role for trendy things. I think we just recently mentioned that there were companies that had chief metaverse officers there for 15 minutes. But in this case, I think it makes sense. There are a lot of companies that are hiring a senior AI person, probably sitting in the IT department. But are they speaking strategically to the organization about the non-IT parts of this?

We have reported on data that said there are CEOs who have decided that AI is so important that they are becoming the leader of the AI effort. But they’re speaking to employees and to other stakeholder audiences about so many other topics that the AI stuff may get lost in there. If you send the message to your employees, and frankly to outside audiences who are interested as well, that this is such an important thing in our organization that we have elevated it to a board-level officer position, with all of the regulatory responsibility that goes along with a true officer position, then people pay attention. That person has credibility when they speak, and employees are going to listen, as opposed to hearing some of it from the CEO and some of it from HR and some of it from legal and some of it from IT, and “what do I make of all of this?” It’s easy for me to see why employees in an organization with a chief AI officer feel better about what’s happening and understand it more than in organizations that haven’t named one.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you. Although I have to say, the acronym stuck in my mind. I can see that: “Hey, ciao, ciao, ciao.”

Shel Holtz: Yeah, ciao. Well, you could always go with the U.S. government’s insistence now that we call it superintelligence, and that would make it a chief SI officer.

Neville Hobson: Oh my God.

Shel Holtz: It’s a whole other topic.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Let’s not talk about the midterms. Okay, that’s a big topic. So I think that’s a great report, Shel. I’m going to take a look at that executive summary to understand what they’re saying here. So thanks for sharing it.

Shel Holtz: My pleasure. And that will draw to a close this episode of For Immediate Release, Episode 533, our long-form episode for October 2026. Our next long-form episode is scheduled to drop on Monday, November 30th. Neville, you and I will record that on Saturday, November 28th, right after Thanksgiving here in the U.S., anyway.

Neville Hobson: Yep.

Shel Holtz: So I look forward to talking to you then. But of course, we will be recording some shorter midweek episodes between now and then. I hope you will all subscribe. If you’re not already subscribed to the podcast, we’ve already let you know where to leave comments. Your ratings and reviews are of tremendous value to us, and we are immensely grateful for the time and effort that you take to do that as well. So until our next short midweek episode, that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #533: The Two Distinct Realities of AI Adoption appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

When companies talk about trust, the conversation usually centers on whether employees trust their leaders. But what happens when employees stop trusting each other? Edelman’s latest Trust at Work study found that trust in coworkers is falling faster than trust in managers or CEOs. That decline can undermine collaboration, weaken communication, and leave employees questioning their colleagues’ motives. Bad experiences with organizational change, including the introduction of AI, may be making matters worse.

In this episode of On the Same Page, Shel and Mark explore why internal communicators should pay more attention to peer-to-peer trust. They discuss the everyday behaviors that build or erode trust, how managers shape relationships within their teams, and why candor matters when plans change or answers aren’t available. Along the way, they consider what communicators can measure, the behaviors they can reinforce, and where communication alone cannot solve the problem. Trust may appear in the company’s values, but keeping it alive takes more than putting the word on a wall.

Links from this episode:

Raw transcript:

Shel Holtz: Mark, trust is key to any organizational communication effort. When I think about trust as an internal communications factor, I think about it in several ways. How much do employees trust leaders? How much do they trust their managers? It works in the opposite direction, too: How much do leaders and managers trust employees? I also think about departments that may not trust one another. I’ve heard some interesting stories about departmental trust.

But one thing I hadn’t considered was the possibility that employees simply don’t trust each other.

Edelman just released its Trust at Work study, surveying more than 10,000 employees across 10 markets. Trust in coworkers fell from 82% in August 2024 to 73% today. Trust in direct managers dropped from 79% to 72%, and trust in CEOs fell from 70% to 66%. Each is a record low in Edelman’s data.

Here’s what bothers me: Two years ago, coworkers were the group employees trusted most, ahead of managers and the CEO. Now, their trust is declining fastest.

Mark Dollins: We often talk about culture and how, when it isn’t consciously attended to, things happen that usually aren’t what you want. I suspect trust, which is often expressed as a cultural value, is eroding partly because organizations and employees expect it to be there without thinking much about it.

Add remote working and team structures in which people aren’t in the same location, and it’s easy to see how trust can erode. In one sense, that decline is shocking. In another, it isn’t surprising that it’s happening. The speed of the decline surprises me most.

Shel Holtz: Me too. AI may have something to do with it. Some data suggests employees are turning to AI instead of reaching out to coworkers. The less interaction you have with colleagues, perhaps the less you trust them.

There would certainly be implications for internal communications if employees trusted each other less. What do you see as some of those impacts?

Mark Dollins: You’re less productive if you don’t trust each other, and you’re less likely to collaborate. Even when you do collaborate, you may not trust what you receive.

People start looking for ulterior motives. It’s no longer just about the work. It becomes, “What is this person trying to accomplish? Am I truly a collaborator, or am I standing in the way of what they want?”

We’ve all heard employees say, “I get the work done, but I don’t trust that person,” whether they’re talking about a manager, a peer, or somebody in another department. You still have to work together, get along, and build trust.

Shel Holtz: It may also affect how employees receive our messages. Someone might say, “I’ll go along with this, but I don’t trust other people to pay attention to it.”

What does that do to the impact we’re trying to achieve—the change in behavior, attitude, opinion, or belief?

Mark Dollins: If we aren’t paying attention, this will continue. Communicators should be actively engaged in the issue.

Trust discussions often focus on external stakeholders and whether they believe the company is doing the right thing. Internally, we’re now recognizing there’s much more to it. If we can’t trust each other to get the job done, we have a problem that starts much closer to home. This is ground zero for internal communicators.

Shel Holtz: Some of Edelman’s findings should particularly interest you, given your focus on change. Three-quarters of respondents had experienced at least one transformation in the past year. The most common, reported by 53%, was AI implementation.

Among employees who had a bad transformation experience, trust in coworkers with different values dropped from 77% to 50%. When change goes badly, it doesn’t just erode trust in leadership. People retreat into their own camps.

Mark Dollins: Sadly, this is only the beginning of change on that scale. AI isn’t going away. I suspect it will become bigger and more complex, especially as regulation adds another dimension to how we use and trust it.

That reinforces what we discussed about change management as an essential part of AI adoption or any significant technological change. We can’t treat this as simply a technology rollout. It’s change with a capital C, and it needs to be managed.

Shel Holtz: I looked for other research exploring declining trust among employees. Workday’s Human Connection Workplace Index found that a third of employees rarely or never have a conversation with a colleague that goes beyond transactional work.

PwC has made the point that people don’t trust what they don’t know. Without regular interaction, you don’t develop trust. Could part of the explanation be that simple?

Mark Dollins: I suspect a good portion of it is.

Think about what builds trust: setting an example, doing what you say you’ll do, following through, and establishing clear expectations. If you’re a leader, you explain the standard and address situations in which people fall short.

Many of the behaviors that build trust between leaders and employees also apply between peers. If I tell you I’ll get something to you today, Shel, and I don’t, your trust in me begins to erode. I deserve that unless I take responsibility and explain: “I know what I promised. I can’t deliver it today, and here’s why. Here’s what I’ll do to make it right.”

Taking ownership builds trust. These are simple things—common decency and human behavior—that sit at the center of peer-to-peer trust.

Shel Holtz: It’s also about bringing people together and spending time together beyond work transactions.

Mark Dollins: It’s easy to distrust people we don’t know. “You’re a stranger. I don’t know you, so I don’t trust you.”

Shel Holtz: We talk about this with safety all the time. You can encourage people to speak up until you’re blue in the face, but it’s different when they know each other well enough to care personally.

“I know about your family and the challenges you’re facing. I see you doing something dangerous, and I’m going to speak up because I don’t want you to get hurt.” That extends well beyond safety.

Mark Dollins: A question for you, Shel: When you work with organizations on their values and how to bring those values to life, trust comes up in almost every set of company values I’ve seen. How do you make it a living, breathing part of the organization?

Shel Holtz: For the past nine years, I’ve worked with one organization. Trust is one of our core values and one of the four planks of our strategic plan. We have committees working on it, we’ve researched it, and we’re taking tangible steps to build trust internally and externally.

If I were advising an organization today, I’d start with measurement. You can say trust between peers has declined, but you can’t explain why without asking. You need to understand what’s underneath it.

Mark Dollins: As you say that, I’m thinking about pulse surveys. They’re a common measurement tool, but I can’t say I’ve seen many that specifically focus on internal trust.

Perhaps some of our viewers can tell us what they’re doing to measure trust in their organizations.

Even when trust isn’t explicitly named as a value, it often appears in how organizations define respect. Respect is another value that comes up frequently, and its definition often includes building trust among stakeholders.

Shel Holtz: We’ve talked about engagement before. I think one reason people have become skeptical of engagement surveys is that they don’t explore these underlying issues.

Our engagement survey has 40 questions. We aren’t tying it to Gallup or another packaged survey. We want to understand the issues underlying engagement, and several questions concern relationships with peers. We do explore that where I work.

I also found an older study, from 2008, showing that employees trust peers more when their formal leader trusts those peers. That effect was stronger when team performance was poor.

Manager behavior helps shape who gets trusted. That connects directly to the manager communication work we do.

Mark Dollins: Often, we don’t do enough of it. We can coach managers to lead in ways that build trust.

Most of us have experienced a micromanager. Managers need to understand what that behavior looks like and how it affects their teams’ willingness to trust them. Whether or not it’s intentional, micromanagement communicates, “I don’t trust you.”

It’s a two-way street. Empower employees to do their jobs and step back. If something goes wrong, address it. But give people the opportunity to demonstrate that they can do the work.

That communicates, “I trust you to do the job I hired you to do, and you can trust me to fulfill my responsibilities to you and the team.”

Shel Holtz: I’ve been thinking about what communicators can do. There are limits; we can’t fix every issue through communication.

First, measure it. PwC found that executives overestimate how much they’re trusted, and most trust measures are subjective. If we don’t ask about peer trust in our surveys, we don’t know where we stand.

Second, get honest about change. Edelman’s prescription is “truth well told”: Explain what’s changing, what isn’t, and how employees have a say. That requires a real conversation, not simply a rollout announcement.

Third, equip managers. Gallup says managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. They help establish the conditions in which peers trust each other, yet many have never been trained to do that.

Mark Dollins: A culture of trust begins at the top. In many organizations I’ve worked with, a lack of transparency and candor has interfered with trust, particularly during significant change.

I’ve always advocated that it’s okay to say, “I don’t know,” or, “I can’t tell you,” provided you explain why.

You might say, “Shel, I know the answer and would like to tell you. Here’s why I can’t, at least not yet.” Or, “About 80% is settled, but the remaining 20% could change what I tell you, and I don’t want to give you information that turns out to be wrong.”

There are many ways to explain what you know, what you don’t know, and why you can’t share everything.

The Dow–DuPont merger is a good example. People wanted specifics about the organizational structure, but we couldn’t provide them because divestitures were still being negotiated in the United States, the EU, and elsewhere. Those decisions would affect the portfolio and, ultimately, the structure.

The discussions were difficult and confidential, including negotiations outside the company. Until those were resolved, we couldn’t fully explain the outcome.

I advocated explaining that uncertainty, even if we had previously said we expected an answer in six months. We could say, “The negotiations are more complex than anticipated. The world around us is responding differently to our plans. We’re working on it, and we’ll update you.”

Give people a revised time frame if you can: “We’re aiming for the next 60 to 90 days.”

I kept pushing leaders not to stop at, “We don’t know,” or, “We can’t answer that.” After hearing that repeatedly for eight or 10 months, people may conclude, “Either you’re lying to us, or you don’t know what you’re doing.” You don’t want either conclusion.

Transparency doesn’t mean revealing trade secrets or Willy Wonka’s chocolate recipe. It means giving people as much explanation and context as you can.

Shel Holtz: I’ve encountered this during periods when communications are restricted around a merger or acquisition. Sometimes even explaining why you can’t say more can disclose something you shouldn’t. But there are usually things you can say instead of saying nothing.

Mark Dollins: Right. You can refer to what you’ve already announced and explain that it’s taking longer than expected. “Hang in there. We’re working on it.”

Shel Holtz: More recently, this has come up with AI. Initially, we told employees, “Use it. Experiment. Try things.”

Now some organizations are saying, “We need to move beyond general experimentation and become more focused on how we apply AI.” They’re also saying, “Please stop burning through so many tokens. It’s costing a fortune. We need you to dial back what we previously encouraged.”

Some leaders seem embarrassed by that rather than explaining what changed. Perhaps the organization moved from a subscription arrangement to token-based pricing. Explain it, and people can understand.

Mark Dollins: Absolutely. This is new territory. We don’t have 10 years of experience with these tools in their current form. Change isn’t a straight line, and we’ll have to adjust as we learn.

You can say, “Thank you for experimenting. You did what we asked. Now we need to adjust, and here’s why.” It’s about candor.

Shel Holtz: AI could also contribute to declining peer trust. Suppose I use it to produce a polished document, save myself time, and send it to you. You start reading and realize it sounds good but has no substance. Now you have to spend two hours making sense of it. Your trust in me is likely to decline.

Mark Dollins: I teach at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and I’ve seen students use AI in ways that make it clear they haven’t done the necessary work. In one case, a student advocated something that didn’t exist.

That doesn’t apply to everyone, but it happens. It makes me examine that person’s work more closely because I can see they’re using AI without checking it. I start wondering whether they’re being careful.

Why wouldn’t the same thing happen at work? If someone produces sloppy or substandard work, I don’t want that to reflect on me, particularly if we’re supposed to be partners on a project.

Shel Holtz: We can address that during AI adoption. You may save time, but if the result is slop, you’re transferring work to colleagues, and their trust in you may suffer.

There’s also a generational dimension. The Workday report found that Gen Z employees were 16 times more likely than Gen X employees to say they don’t trust their coworkers. That makes communication across generations an interesting challenge.

Mark Dollins: It does, and we need to pay attention. A one-size-fits-all approach to trust won’t work. Different generations may have different expectations about what matters and how trust is established.

Something else occurs to me about working in teams. Whether someone has submitted inaccurate AI-generated work or simply made a mistake, trust can be built through how others respond.

If it’s an honest mistake, that’s an opportunity to say, “I understand how that happened. I’ve done something similar. What can I do to help? Don’t beat yourself up over it.”

Intentional misconduct is different. But when somebody makes an honest mistake, showing support can go a long way.

That’s especially relevant if you’re aware that others don’t trust you. Supporting Joe or Sarah when they make a mistake can help people see you differently.

Again, these are basic human behaviors. Getting to know people and standing up for them when there’s a problem can build or rebuild trust.

Shel Holtz: This is an area where communicators can play a significant role because it’s a culture issue: “This is how we do things around here.”

We can reinforce those behaviors through communication and encourage leaders to recognize people who demonstrate them. Leaders also need to address behavior that works against trust.

Mark Dollins: Leaders have opportunities to build trust through how they manage conflict. Almost every team has people who don’t get along. Managers can help find common ground between individuals or groups.

Communicators, working with people who have the right expertise, can develop content and experiences that help managers and employees learn to navigate conflict.

Shel Holtz: Having the managerial courage to hold those difficult conversations is a big deal. That might be a topic for a future episode.

Mark Dollins: Exactly. You don’t need a master’s degree in conflict resolution. A few useful tools can help you accomplish a lot.

Shel Holtz: Can you get a master’s in conflict resolution? I didn’t know that. Somewhere you can, no doubt.

Mark Dollins: I’m sure you can, Shel. I’ll find it for you and get back to you.

Shel Holtz: Sounds great.

Listeners and viewers, we’d love to hear what’s happening in your organization with peer-to-peer trust. Are you measuring it? Have you noticed a decline?

Email [email protected], leave a comment in the show notes at FIRPodcastNetwork.com, or respond on LinkedIn, Facebook, Bluesky, or Threads, where we announce new episodes.

We’ve received comments and will collect and share them in an upcoming episode. Until then, thank you, everybody, and thank you, Mark. It’s been fun.

Mark Dollins: Thanks for joining us. Good to see you, Shel. Take care.

The post OTSP #10: The Decline in Employees’ Trust in Each Other appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most communicators long for that coveted seat at the table. What do those who have attained it have to say about it? What does it take to achieve it? And does it deliver the kind of influence top-level communicators want? Neville and Shel explore the data and share their own thoughts in this short midweek episode.

When misinformation strikes, PR professionals swing into action, directing people to accurate information. But will people follow your links? One study found that people are far more likely to see what you have to say if the invitation sounds much like the language used to invite them to the original misinformation. Neville and Shel discuss the idea in this short midweek FIR episode.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, October 26.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi, everyone. Welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 531. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you find a misinformation campaign online targeting your company, your products, your industry, or whatever. You immediately embark on an effort to combat it using all the strategies, tactics, and tools we’ve been trained to use. Is that a good idea?

Researchers in Australia ran a dozen paired tests on Facebook. In each pair, they ran two ads carrying exactly the same accurate, consensus-based information. One was written the way PR people usually write this stuff: neutral, careful, and measured. The other was written in the style of the communities spreading the misinformation. It was warmer, more direct, and more personal.

The styled ads won every time. All 12 pairs favored the styled version, and 11 of the 12 results were statistically significant. On a message about school education, the styled ad had a click-through rate of 6%. The neutral version—the one using traditional PR techniques—had a rate of 1.1%. That’s about five times as many clicks to get people to exactly the same facts.

Now, “style” can sound like a euphemism for spin. Here’s what the researchers actually did: They built personas of people who engage with misinformation and matched their tone, directness, and emotional framing. One example in the article said, “You want to keep your little one safe. Wondering what vaccinations will mean for your baby?” That isn’t a lie or a scare tactic. It’s how a person talks.

Even styles that weren’t a precise match for the audience beat the neutral version in most of the tests. I’m reading between the lines here—this is my interpretation, not a claim by the study’s authors—but it suggests that part of the problem isn’t just that we’re failing to speak the audience’s language. It’s that our language is so bland it barely registers.

You may be thinking this contradicts what we’ve heard about prebunking, and you’d have a point. Other research I read, including work from Harvard’s Kennedy School that I encountered in Communications Psychology and a review of 32 studies in the Journal of Science Communication, mostly points the other way: Don’t imitate the manipulation; teach people to recognize it.

The Harvard study is a good example. A 19-second Instagram Story ad shown to more than 375,000 users in the UK taught people to spot manipulation techniques. Afterward, 59.55% of those who saw the ad correctly identified the technique, compared with 38.21% in the control group.

So, which is it? I’d say both. Here’s the line I would draw: Copy the warmth, familiarity, and directness, but don’t copy the fear, scapegoating, or fake urgency. The paper suggesting that we imitate the style of misinformation purveyors draws the same line in its ethics section: no impersonation, no amplifying fear, and no stigmatizing language.

The review of 32 studies found no gold-standard intervention. Effects were small to medium and depended heavily on the specific myth. Think of these as tools in the same box rather than competing theories.

I have one caveat: The misinformation study measured clicks, not changed minds. A click is a first step, but it isn’t proof of persuasion. That first step matters, though. If nobody clicks, nobody reads. Nobody gets the accurate information, and you have no hope of changing anybody’s mind.

There’s plenty of adjacent work. The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health runs a creator program, and the World Health Organization has a network called FIDES. Both focus on getting trusted voices into the channels where people already are. Public health agencies have been working on this for a while.

But I looked for a business doing what the study describes, and I couldn’t find one: a company countering a rumor, hoax, or false claim about itself or its products by deliberately adopting the style of the people spreading it. I couldn’t find a single example, despite the research showing stronger engagement.

I’d argue that’s an invitation to experiment. Here’s what I would do. First, listen. Pay attention to how people talk about your company or industry when they’re worried, skeptical, wrong, or deliberately spreading misinformation. Don’t focus on your talking points. Focus on their words.

Then test it. Run a simple A/B test with the same evidence in two versions: your standard statement and one written in your audience’s voice. That’s what the researchers did.

Finally, measure beyond the click. Look at comments, shares, sentiment, and whether the rumor’s reach actually shrinks. Start with something low-stakes, such as an FAQ, an employee-facing rumor, or a customer-service reply. Somebody should be trying this. Why not us?

Neville, communicators spend years learning to sound credible and measured. This research suggests that being measured might be part of why our corrections get ignored. How willing do you think companies would be to test a warmer, more direct voice? Would legal and leadership kill the idea before it had a chance?

Neville Hobson: That’s a good question. I think the brave ones would do it. But listening to you, and having read the piece in The Conversation, another question comes to mind: Are we sometimes so concerned with making our information accurate and authoritative that we forget to make it relevant and worth engaging with?

I’m circling around that thought because some of the conclusions drawn from this study seem questionable to me. If someone is going to use techniques associated with misinformation campaigns, something is missing.

To clarify the distinction, misinformation is incorrect information shared without an intention to deceive. Disinformation is a deliberate attempt to mislead people or influence them to do something they otherwise might not do. Either way, techniques are used to attract attention.

Are we seeing people bring in too much of those approaches? Some elements may be useful, but I’m thinking of an article I read—and I believe blogged about—on AI in warfare, particularly the war in Ukraine. I think it was published on Deutsche Welle’s English-language website. It discussed misinformation and then disinformation that others mirrored, perhaps unintentionally.

I wonder whether people may bring in the whole package, knowingly or unknowingly, and conclude that it’s acceptable to exploit vulnerabilities or manufacture emotional responses that people identify with.

Did I answer your question? I probably did, but here’s one for you: If we borrow the persuasive techniques of misinformation, how do we ensure we aren’t also borrowing the manipulative behaviors that make it effective?

I haven’t looked for guidance on this, and agencies may already have it: “This is what misinformation looks like. Don’t do that. Here’s an example of what you should do.” If that doesn’t exist, there’s an opportunity to develop it because the ethical dimension matters.

There’s also a danger that we celebrate winning the battle for attention without knowing whether we’ve made any progress in helping people understand the message or building trust. Those fundamental questions should be at the forefront.

That connects to your question about why organizations should address this properly. If they don’t, they’re missing opportunities and failing to help the broader community understand what’s right and what’s wrong.

Shel Holtz: I come at this from the perspective of wanting to get people to accurate information. Remember, the A/B test concerned what got people to click. Once they clicked, the information was the same in both versions. The warmer, friendlier language attracted more clicks than the typical bland PR language.

The researchers in Australia included that ethics section addressing stigmatizing language and other concerns. But here’s what I kept thinking as I read it: In marketing, and to some extent in public relations and certainly in internal communications, we’ve embraced audience personas for years.

We get to understand different groups within a larger audience based on their characteristics. We often boil those down into a fictional person who embodies them: “Mary is a 33-year-old single mother and administrative assistant.” Here’s what she’s likely to believe, what she pays attention to, where her skepticism lies, and so forth.

That helps us craft messages for different groups within the audience to get the best possible results. Why aren’t we doing that when confronting misinformation?

We wouldn’t need to use every persona. We’d focus on the groups attracted to the misinformation or being targeted by it. Instead, we tend to default to a crisis communication or issues management approach: “Here’s what they’re saying, and here’s the truth.” That isn’t attracting the clicks.

Again, the study didn’t determine whether people changed their minds after clicking through, and I wish it had. I would have loved to know. But when you have about five times as many people clicking through with a more persona-based approach, it seems to me that’s something we would want to try.

Neville Hobson: I agree. But what’s the real lesson? It certainly isn’t that communicators should behave like misinformation purveyors. It’s that factual accuracy alone isn’t a communication strategy.

It often surprises me how we miss the essential element: understanding the people we’re trying to reach, speaking in language that resonates, and getting their attention without compromising our integrity.

We also need to remember that getting someone to click isn’t the same as getting them to understand, believe, or trust. That’s a different part of the process. As you said, the click is a first step.

I’ve seen things on LinkedIn and Facebook that others called out as disinformation rather than misinformation. One example came from a well-known brand. I’d like to think they didn’t realize what they were doing, but they were called out quite strongly on Facebook.

It’s a minefield. It’s no surprise that people make mistakes, but the consequences can be greater than in the early days, when less of this was happening.

We’re in a time when things happen that we couldn’t have imagined even a couple of years ago. Bad actors, including governments and other groups, manipulate brand messaging to confuse people or get them to click something that downloads malicious software. We’re seeing more of that.

To my knowledge, there isn’t a playbook for this. If you want to emulate how the bad actors attract attention, how will you do it without adopting what they do?

Shel Holtz: I think Philippe Borremans, whom we interviewed several months ago, is right: You can’t rely on a crisis manual that gives you a sequence of steps guaranteed to address the crisis. You need the scaffolding to manage a crisis in whatever form it takes.

You need holding statements ready to be adjusted and published quickly because you have to respond quickly. You need prebunking in place, anticipating what bad actors might say about you and making the facts available beforehand. If you can get independent, third-party media sources to establish some of those points so you can refer to them later, even better.

But how do you get people to look at that information once misinformation or disinformation has been published? That’s where this study comes in.

We need to listen to how the people we’re trying to reach talk. They may not respond when we sound like PR people. They’re more likely to respond when we speak in a way that resonates, demonstrate that we care about their concerns, and share something they find relevant.

That’s why listening matters. It isn’t just about identifying misinformation. It’s also about understanding how it’s being presented in a way that gets so many people to click and pay attention.

We need to engage with that rather than simply push back. We have to listen and participate in the conversation using language that fits the people already having it. That isn’t what I see in many organizational or institutional responses to misinformation.

Neville Hobson: Your point about prepared crisis messages is important. You should have those. But these situations are often so fluid that you also need to be capable of responding on the fly. You may have no prepared message for what somebody just did, and you need to address it in an original way.

That requires the communicator to have the knowledge and confidence to do it. I was going to call it training, but perhaps preparation is a better word.

Shel Holtz: I would say training too.

Neville Hobson: Preparation leads to the point I wanted to make: This isn’t necessarily a new technique for countering misinformation. It’s a reminder that good communication has always begun with understanding the audience.

That thought keeps coming back to me. I read an article about a supposedly new approach, and I think, “We’ve always been trying to understand the audience.”

It’s a complex picture. You need to recognize that you may confront this almost daily, especially if you’re a prominent brand, individual, institution, or government. Even if you aren’t, some people will take a dig at you simply because they don’t like you. Some brands are experiencing that.

You have to prepare. That’s where “what if” scenarios come in. Spend time working through them because I think this is only beginning.

Shel Holtz: It’s going to get worse. And you’re right: This is nothing new. The new consideration is to apply what you’ve been doing all along—understanding your audience and speaking to people in ways that resonate—to your responses to misinformation. That’s something we haven’t been doing enough.

Neville Hobson: Absolutely.

Shel Holtz: And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #531: Should You Mimic Your Detractors? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Companies are urging employees to adopt AI—but a software rollout, training session, or announcement doesn’t necessarily prepare people for changes to their work. When expectations keep shifting, and the destination remains uncertain, how can organizations build trust and help employees move forward?

In episode 9 of On the Same Page, Shel and Mark explore AI adoption as a change management challenge and the role internal communicators should play. They discuss listening to employees, challenging leadership assumptions, and building a flexible approach to change—along with the gap between recognizing the need for change management skills and developing them.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hey, Mark, how’s your experience with AI these days?

Mark Dollins: It’s never-ending. I keep getting both excited and frustrated with it, but it’s all about learning, right?

Shel Holtz: It is. It’s about learning for a lot of employees as well. Many companies are still struggling to introduce AI and drive adoption in their organizations.

I was reading about the Financial Times’ AI transformation program in 2024. They started by listening. They surveyed employees and received 725 responses. What they found was that the biggest obstacle was a lack of time, and that helped shape their approach.

A lack of time isn’t resistance. When we’re asking people to adopt AI and integrate it into their workflows, we’re asking them to make a change. We tend to look for resistance, but not every challenge is resistance. How have you been thinking about change management and AI adoption, given your passion for change management and internal communications?

Mark Dollins: Ironically, one thing communicators have increasingly been doing over the last several years is using AI to become more productive. It’s already saving us time.

But I think professionals in this space increasingly understand that AI isn’t simply a technology rollout. It’s one of the biggest waves of change we need to step into, get in front of, and help manage.

Shel Holtz: I guess the question starts with our role in managing this change. Are we taking the lead? Are we trying to get that coveted seat at the table so we can influence it? Are we waiting for the training and IT departments to say, “Here’s the program. Communicate this and drive the change”? What should we be doing?

Mark Dollins: It’s a little of everything. In the research we’ve done—and we’ll talk more about this in another podcast—Jon Stemmle and I conduct an annual survey about communicators’ attitudes toward and uses of AI. We talk to a couple of hundred communicators around the world to understand what’s changing, what we’re working with, and what we’re struggling with.

We’re finding that communicators are getting a bigger seat at the table. We’re having more influence in setting governance and policies, which is good. We’re using AI more, but we aren’t using it for more strategic purposes.

The biggest thing we haven’t fully signed up for is treating AI as a change management initiative that we should help lead. We tend to view it as a technology rollout or a policy rollout connected to AI. But artificial intelligence is itself a massive change. We’re talking about seismic adjustments in how organizations work. That’s a space employee communicators should be stepping into, and some are beginning to do that.

Shel Holtz: I absolutely agree. The question is whether we’re being asked to help design the change or simply sell decisions that have already been made.

We should use the expertise we bring that others in the organization may not have to the same degree: identifying impacts on employees, testing leaders’ assumptions before a rollout, and listening.

But responsibility requires authority. We can’t resolve workload, staffing, or incentive problems through messaging. What decisions must we be able to influence if we’re going to be held accountable, to any degree, for AI adoption?

Mark Dollins: Even better, let’s not wait to be asked. Let’s step up and say, “We believe we can help this organization better manage this wave of change. Let’s figure out how.”

Some numbers provide context for what I call moving upstream. In 2024, about 45% of communicators reported being involved in shaping AI usage in their organizations. That rose to 70% last year and 76% this year. That’s a good sign. We’re saying we’re shaping it, although I’m not exactly sure how that’s happening in every organization.

Communicators aren’t just using new tools. We’re helping organizations explain, govern, and normalize new ways of working. That’s where change management comes in.

We asked communicators whether they view change management as a competency they should have. That figure rose from 73% in 2024 to 81% last year and is at 79% this year. That tells us this isn’t being treated as a fad. It’s more of a structural expectation.

We’re also seeing growing interest in training or certification to become more proficient at managing change through communications. Around 72–73% of this year’s respondents said AI requires significant change management communications. About 80% believe change management—which is different from change communications—is a competency they should acquire. And about 76% believe communicators should be involved in influencing AI use in their organizations.

There’s clear evidence that, as a global community of employee communicators, we know what we should be doing. The real question is whether we’re doing what needs to be done.

Shel Holtz: At some level, everything we communicate is change communication. We’re putting something out because we want something from people. We want them to do something new or different, stop doing something, do more of something, or think or believe something. All of that is change.

But when it’s a software rollout, the scope may be more contained. We’re adopting Workday as our HR and payroll software, and everyone needs to start using it. I don’t know how much of that requires the full Prosci process or whatever change management protocols you follow.

AI is different. What does the change look like at the end? One thing I learned when I began studying change communication—and I had a great mentor in Tudor Williams—was that you should be able to close your eyes and envision the outcome. I don’t think anybody can do that with AI yet. That presents an interesting challenge for a change program.

Mark Dollins: AI can be a tool for some change management and communication tactics, but we still need to understand the disciplines themselves.

The question we should ask is whether we really understand change management and how change communications works with it. Over the years, I’ve asked communicators that question, and I often hear, “Yes, I understand change communications. I put out organizational structure announcements, leadership changes, and executive updates.”

Then I ask, “What else went with that?” Often, there’s silence.

That doesn’t happen every time. Our community is getting better at this. But my experience is that many communicators don’t get into the specifics of the change management discipline.

What do I mean by that? Understanding organizational readiness for change, for example. Is the organization ready to make this change? Who are the executive sponsors? Who are the champions who will help lead it? Do we understand the detractors and barriers? Do we have governance and processes for addressing barriers when the people involved can’t reach a resolution?

Those are parts of change management that organizational communicators often aren’t taught when they learn how to communicate change.

Whether the topic is digital transformation, cultural transformation, or AI adoption, it’s deeper than simply a technology change. These aren’t one-and-done activities. They require sustained, focused, strategic communications and an understanding of stakeholders’ individual needs. Not everybody experiences change in the same way, and that understanding should inform our communication.

There’s far more to change management communications when it’s structured and aligned with the discipline of change management. Without that alignment, you can find yourself in a situation I’ve experienced: “Hey, Mark, we have a big change we want you to communicate.” I ask, “What’s the change management plan?” and get blank stares. Then someone says, “Why don’t you develop that?”

That’s why, more than 10 or 15 years ago, I took the time to become certified as a change management professional. I chose Prosci, one of several options. It changed how I viewed the relationship between change communications and change management. The training took about four days and was tremendously helpful.

I’m agnostic about which certification people choose. What matters is understanding the concepts we’ve discussed. That understanding helps us drive successful change through communications.

How’s that for getting on my soapbox?

Shel Holtz: That’s fine. I loved it. What we’ve seen in many organizations is almost the opposite of what you’re describing.

Initially, companies asked communicators to tell employees to experiment with AI, without much clarity about the purpose. Then we told people to use AI a lot. We got into this whole “token maxing” thing, where people were using so much that they blew through a company’s annual budget in a month, and organizations had to dial it back.

It’s hard to get people to buy into a change when you’re continually clawing back the messages you sent earlier. What are we asking employees to trust? What happens to the time they save? Will there be new expectations? Will roles change or disappear? Who gets development opportunities?

We shouldn’t simply accept the message we’re asked to deliver. Part of change communication is pressing leaders to explain what’s been decided, what’s still uncertain, and how employees will be involved.

Blanket assurances that AI won’t cost any jobs, or that it will completely transform the way we work, can make the job harder if we don’t have a plan, a vision, or an understanding of the outcomes.

Mark Dollins: Completely agreed. There’s a difference between being a tactical communicator who says, “We’re rolling out AI. Use it in these three ways,” and asking, before the message goes out, “And then what? Where is this going? What’s the longer-term vision for AI in this organization?”

I’ve had conversations with CEOs who have told me, “In less than a year, every role in our organization will have an AI component.” That’s fascinating, but how are you communicating it, and in what context? If every role has an AI component, what happens next? Will roles be redefined? Should employees expect that?

A responsible communicator, working with the CEO, CHRO, and other leaders, should say, “We can’t communicate only one phase of this. We need to think more broadly.”

It’s okay if some questions haven’t been answered. But let’s not promise that no jobs will ever go away because of AI. We can acknowledge that it’s possible while also explaining the opportunity for employees to learn technologies that expand their capabilities, wherever they are and wherever they go.

Ideally, employees can help us redefine their roles within the organization. That doesn’t always happen, but it’s an outcome worth working toward.

We need to be open about what we know and what we don’t: “We don’t know exactly where this technology will take us. Here’s where we are now, and here’s what we want you to explore so we can learn, improve, and help define the next chapter.”

Shel Holtz: I read about a company that brought together 100 employees, I think in Nashville. They identified challenges they faced in their jobs, grouped people with similar challenges, and had them vibe-code AI solutions. Rather than look for existing tools to buy—or rent, as is often the case—they built solutions to their own problems.

It was apparently successful. But I wondered whether it was a separate, one-off activity or part of a comprehensive strategy. Did employees know it was coming? Had they helped identify it as an approach they wanted to take?

I think it’s great that the company did it. I don’t know whether it was part of a broader change strategy. But I worry about one-off activities that aren’t integrated into a process where employees can see progress toward an articulated goal.

Mark Dollins: You’re describing exactly why change management creates value. It prompts those questions and discussions before communications go out.

Ideally, in that situation, people would have discussed the direction and addressed the questions: “This is one step in a multistep process of defining our future through AI.”

That’s where understanding change management comes into play. I’ll be candid: I don’t use every element of my training every time I help communicate a change. I put it in context. We may not need to go deeply into stakeholder assessment because much of that work has already been done. Or I may recognize that we don’t have executive sponsorship and that we need to address that weakness before moving forward.

It’s about understanding all the components of successful change management.

People sometimes hate hearing this, but communication should follow the change management plan. It shouldn’t have to define the whole plan. We should be able to say, “Here’s our plan for managing change. Now let’s determine how communications can best support it.”

We can become better change management practitioners. With the right credentials and experience, we may even lead the change effort. But especially when we’re getting started, we’ll probably need a partner who knows more about the discipline and who sees us as a partner as well.

Communication is the thread running across every element of change management. Without it, we’re done.

Shel Holtz: Try making a change without communication and see how that goes.

Mark Dollins: Without thoughtful communication. People communicate all the time, but without a strategic approach, their efforts can fail miserably.

Shel Holtz: It’s important to get involved early enough. We’ve said that not every employee difficulty with AI is resistance, but there may well be resistance. You won’t discover what it is unless you ask.

You can make assumptions, but I worry about relying on them. Our employee populations reflect the public to a large degree, and we know the range of public concerns about AI: the environmental impact of data centers, privacy and data security, even fears that it’s going to kill us all.

You can’t address resistance without understanding it. If a sizable group of employees is likely to resist the way management plans to introduce AI, you need to be able to say, “We should rethink this approach.” That won’t happen if we’re brought in too late.

Mark Dollins: Our survey also measured communicators’ skepticism about AI. Skepticism rose in 2026 after falling in 2025. Something happened between last year and this year that made us less trusting.

About 45% of respondents said they remained worried about accuracy and privacy. If communicators have those concerns, we can be certain that many of our colleagues do as well.

Resistance can have many sources, but as you said, you have to ask.

Shel Holtz: You have to ask, and you may need to acknowledge that these issues exist across society, not just within our company. Explain how we’re addressing them, how we plan to use AI, and what we consider ethical adoption.

I also think the plan needs to be a living, breathing thing. In many change programs, you know the outcome. With the Dow–DuPont merger, for example, you knew the endgame. We don’t know the endgame with AI.

We don’t know exactly how workflows will change. Many companies haven’t even gotten that far. Many haven’t prepared their data so AI can retrieve information appropriately as part of a knowledge management system.

This is a different animal. We need a sustainable, ongoing, flexible plan that can pivot as we get new information or frontier model companies release new capabilities. Many factors may require us to change direction. We need to do that strategically and consistently while maintaining employees’ trust that we know what we’re doing.

Mark Dollins: Not to mention emerging regulation. The EU is ahead of the United States in this area. Accountability and regulatory frameworks will be another influence on how we use AI.

When we talk about both struggling with AI and seeing its possibilities, we also have to recognize all the other influences taking shape.

There’s one other research finding I wanted to mention. We looked at whether employee communicators—people with employee or internal communications in their titles or roles—were becoming certified in change management.

We reviewed more than 500 public LinkedIn profiles and found a substantial disparity. Remember, 79% of our survey respondents said change management was a competency they needed. But in the LinkedIn profile sample, about 8% indicated that they were certified in change management.

There was also a difference by seniority. We saw figures around 10–15% for VPs or heads of internal communications, compared with 2–4% for individual contributors with employee or internal communications in their titles.

That suggests more senior communicators are recognizing the value of change management certification, while fewer people further down the talent pipeline are pursuing it. That concerns me.

I’ll go back to your earlier question, Shel: What do we do that isn’t related to change? That’s particularly true of internal communications, but I’d make the argument for external communications too. A new product, service, or person involves change.

Understanding what enables acceptance and the associated behavior feels like a natural part of our work. Why wouldn’t we want to understand that discipline if we’re going to be held accountable for communicating change and, in theory, the resulting behavior?

It was an interesting finding from those LinkedIn profiles.

Shel Holtz: It’s fascinating. You know I’m vice chair of the Global Communication Certification Council, and I’m trying to encourage communicators to become certified in communications. But, good heavens, you can have more than one set of letters after your name. They all provide value.

I appreciate the time, Mark.

Mark Dollins: Always fun, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Listeners, we’d love to hear about your AI adoption, change communication, and change management journeys. Let us know.

There were comments on our last episode, but I haven’t had a chance to pull them together. The next time we meet, we’ll discuss comments from that episode and this one before moving into our next topic.

Mark Dollins: Great. We’d love that.

Shel Holtz: See you then.

Mark Dollins: All right. Take care.

The post OTSP #9: The Uneven Introduction of AI to Employees appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

The volume of AI slop appearing as thought leadership on LinkedIn has, according to the Financial Times, led to a surge in interest in human ghostwriters. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel discuss whether this makes sense or if it’s just another case of people using AI poorly.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, October 26.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode 530 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. AI was supposed to put ghostwriters out of business. Instead, according to the Financial Times, something rather different is happening. LinkedIn is awash with generic AI-generated posts, and the flood of polished but forgettable content is creating new demand for human ghostwriters who can help executives sound human again. There’s a nice irony in that, but it also raises a question I keep coming back to: If I use AI to help write a blog post, a LinkedIn update, or an article published under my name, is AI effectively my ghostwriter?

Shel, you and I have touched on this territory before, most recently in FIR 526 in August, when we discussed Anthropic’s text watermarking. We argued that detecting whether AI was involved in writing something tells you remarkably little about who actually did the thinking. A more useful test is whether the author understands the argument, stands behind it, and can defend every sentence.

I developed that argument afterward in a blog post titled “So AI Helped Write It. Who Cares?” My point wasn’t that authorship doesn’t matter. It does. But there’s an important distinction between asking AI to do your thinking for you and using it to help express thinking that is yours.

Now, a Bloomberg Businessweek article adds another twist. It argues that, for many people at work, using AI to write is simply becoming normal. Writing isn’t necessarily their craft. It’s a means of communicating an idea, answering a customer, updating colleagues, or getting something done.

The article introduces another tension. Some businesses actively expect employees to use AI for writing because it saves time. But it also describes the opposite problem at one company, where AI-generated documents became polished, lengthy, and difficult to read. The CEO concluded that AI was making writing quicker for the sender but slower for the recipient—a point we touched on in our last discussion—and asked employees for rougher versions containing their actual thinking instead. There’s a novel idea.

That brings us back to ghostwriting. We accepted long ago that a CEO might put their name to words written by a communication professional, provided those words express what the CEO thinks. So, is AI-assisted writing fundamentally different?

For me, this raises several questions. If the ideas, argument, and judgment are yours, does it matter whether you, a ghostwriter, or an AI produced the sentences? Where is the boundary between assistance and substitution—editing your thoughts versus generating thoughts for you? In an environment where producing polished prose is becoming almost effortless, will distinctive thinking become more valuable than distinctive writing?

And would you feel differently upon discovering that someone’s LinkedIn post was written by a human ghostwriter rather than ChatGPT? If so, why? And perhaps more importantly, does it matter?

Shel Holtz: Yes, it does matter. You have to consider the audience’s expectations. Those matter as much as the intentions of the person who drafted the speech, article, or whatever it might be.

Think about the difference between an operational update, a CEO’s personal account of a career failure, and a condolence message to an employee. Those messages could be accurate, carefully reviewed, and approved. On the other hand, readers could reasonably expect a particular level of personal involvement from the person whose name appears on them. I think that makes a difference.

But I’d like to step back for a minute and explore ghostwriting itself. I’ve known a couple of people who made their livings, or part of their livings, as ghostwriters. You knew the late Shel Israel, a very good friend of mine.

Neville Hobson: Sure.

Shel Holtz: He was a ghostwriter. He wrote books for people who didn’t know how to write, but he didn’t spend most of his time writing. His clients hired him because they liked his writing and his approach to getting to know them and their styles, so what he wrote sounded like them.

How did he do that? Through a lot of interviews—hours and hours, dozens of hours, on the phone and in person. He challenged the generalities he heard from clients and drew out experiences they might not have thought mattered. As an experienced ghostwriter, he understood which experiences would lend color to the manuscript and what readers would care about.

The Financial Times story opens up a more interesting possibility than simply saying humans write better. Perhaps the valuable service of ghostwriting was never just sitting there typing sentences. One person featured in the article said in a public response that AI remains integral to his business, but people still handle the conversations and relationships.

Another person I know ghostwrites for an online service. Someone signs up and says, “I want to write a memoir. It’s only going to go to 10 people in my family, but I want somebody to write it.” The service matches that person with a writer. There’s a prescribed number of meetings, but they talk for hours. The writer takes notes and produces a first draft.

If I take all those notes and everything I’ve learned about the subject, understand their writing or speaking style, and incorporate that into what I ask AI to produce or help me produce, am I still doing the lion’s share of the work as a ghostwriter? I think I am, especially if the person tasked with doing this isn’t a writer in the first place.

We’ve talked before about people in organizations who might be assigned this work but can’t write their way out of a paper bag. Writing wasn’t what they studied, and it isn’t their area of expertise. If AI can help them use the material they’ve gathered by doing the work of a ghostwriter, I have less of a problem with it.

Neville Hobson: I have a similar view. The FT article includes a good quote from Bernie Hogan, an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute. The journalist asked whether LinkedIn ghostwriters could help cut through AI slop.

The part that caught my attention was his point that the message behind a post can still be sincere, even if you didn’t write it. He compares it to buying a greeting card: Someone else wrote the words, but the sentiment can still reflect what you mean. I agree with that.

His further point is where the rubber meets the road. Because we can’t tell when a LinkedIn post is ghostwritten, is it authentic in readers’ eyes, even if it broadly reflects what the person posting it believes?

That sums up the situation we’re in. I don’t think there will ever be agreement on the broad question of whether it’s wrong for someone else—or an AI—to write something you publish under your name. We’ve discussed the details many times: Is it your thinking? Did you contribute to it? Or did you give AI some material, ask it to write something, and post the result without further involvement?

It isn’t a simple question. I keep coming back to this: Would you feel differently if you discovered that someone’s LinkedIn post was written by a human ghostwriter rather than ChatGPT? If so, why? I’d particularly like critics of AI-assisted writing to answer that.

Shel Holtz: It would be interesting. I like the greeting-card analogy. The greeting was written by a copywriter at Hallmark, American Greetings, or somewhere else, but you don’t just grab the first card off the rack. People spend 15 or 20 minutes looking.

Neville Hobson: You might.

Shel Holtz: You might, but I’ve never seen anybody in the greeting-card aisle just grab a card and go. They pull one off the shelf, open it, read it, put it back, and try another. They’re looking for the one that expresses the sentiment they have. Then, when they get home, they write a little more. I would consider that the human in the loop.

Human ghostwriting deserves the same scrutiny as AI ghostwriting. Someone assigned to write a LinkedIn post can manufacture the persona of the person they’re writing for. They can avoid the hard work, fabricate a profound message, or give someone credit for expertise they don’t have.

An AI-assisted post grounded in a leader’s actual experience, with that experience shared as part of the process, could represent the person more faithfully than a human ghostwriter does. So, are we defending authentic communication, or are we defending an outsourcing arrangement we’re already familiar with?

Neville Hobson: I think we’re defending authentic communication, but the definition of “authentic” seems to be a movable feast.

I don’t believe we’ll resolve this argument in the near future. Where I land—and I think we discussed this in episode 526—is that you, as the human, need to be confident in your thinking and in how the text expresses it. If you are, you can comfortably continue what you’re doing.

Apply that to a human ghostwriting a LinkedIn post for a CEO, senior manager, or someone else. The post will appear on that person’s profile under their name. That’s common practice; I know many people who do it.

The question isn’t simply whether the manager or CEO is happy with it and praises you. Are you satisfied with it? Does it meet your standard for authenticity?

You might outline your ideas, share them with your AI assistant, explain the assignment, and ask it to suggest the best way to tell the story. You might then ask for a proposed draft. It comes back, and you think, “This is a reasonable start. I can work with this.”

You might edit it extensively and create something fresh, then pass it back to your AI assistant. It might suggest three changes. You could decide the second suggestion is useful and incorporate that. That process resembles what you might do with a human ghostwriter.

So, my question is: What’s the difference? Does it matter? I’ve been accused of being terribly naïve for asking that, but I don’t believe it matters if you’ve satisfied those questions about authenticity, honesty, and confidence in what you’ve created with AI’s help.

Others will disagree strongly. I still see absolutist comments on LinkedIn from people saying you can always tell when something was written by AI. I used to ask how they could tell, but I’ve stopped because the responses often suggest they don’t really know. I don’t believe you can reliably tell.

I particularly enjoy examples where somebody submits a passage by Charles Dickens to an AI detector and it comes back as 98% AI-written. Or somebody tests an article they wrote for a magazine in 1995, and the detector says the same thing. What can you do with that?

Let me ask you, Shel: Would you feel differently if you discovered someone’s LinkedIn post was written by a human rather than an AI?

Shel Holtz: Generally, no, assuming they used the AI well.

I’ll disagree with you on one thing, but only to an extent. You can sometimes recognize AI writing when it was given a weak prompt and defaults to a familiar approach. But that’s different from giving it detailed information about the person whose byline will appear, helping it understand their writing style and thinking, sharing other things they’ve written, and providing guidance on what the piece should say. You might even interview the person and share the transcript.

We’ve had this conversation since the early days of blogs, when people debated whether communicators could acceptably ghostwrite for CEOs. I remember where we came down on it. If the CEO calls and says, “Write a thought-leadership post for me on this topic,” then hangs up and leaves you to invent it from scratch, that isn’t acceptable.

If you go into the CEO’s office, interview them, and turn your notes into a post, that’s different. Bill Marriott used to record his thoughts and give the recording to his communicators. They didn’t transcribe it word for word because spoken remarks needed editing to work in writing. But the substance was his.

Did he sit there and type it? Was every word one he had chosen? No, but it was his post. In that case, ghostwriting is perfectly acceptable.

Today, AI can assist with that process. If we maintain the practices that make ghostwriting effective, authentic, and ethical, I have no problem with it. It doesn’t matter to me whether a human or AI helped produce the wording, as long as it reads well and reflects what the person would have said. That person also needs to approve it. We haven’t mentioned that yet.

Neville Hobson: I agree. The process you described, using Shel Israel as an example—interviewing the subject, spending hours preparing, and understanding their thinking—would still apply.

I particularly like the idea of using voice-recording tools that connect to Claude, ChatGPT, or another AI assistant. You could ask the CEO to do a brain dump on the topic, as unstructured as they feel comfortable making it. The recording uploads, you get a transcript, and AI can help interpret or organize it and suggest where you might take the story.

That can save a tremendous amount of time compared with doing everything the traditional way. There’s a benefit to AI assistance, and I hope professional communicators make the most of those tools.

Of course, some people will skim the output or post it as it is. We’re talking about people who bring their professional skills and judgment to the work. Based on the criteria you outlined, I wouldn’t feel differently about a post written with AI assistance. If those steps had been followed, I’d be comfortable with it.

Yet I can think of half a dozen people who would strongly disagree. This seems to be a never-ending discussion.

Shel Holtz: It is. One other thing we haven’t discussed is disclosure.

I don’t think most ghostwriting requires disclosure. I don’t think Shel Israel’s name appeared on the books he ghostwrote. My friend Bill, who writes memoirs through the online service, doesn’t have his name on them either. Those memoirs have a small distribution: “This is my memoir for my children and grandchildren.”

But you may remember an instance when a company wanted a PR agency to tweet on the CEO’s behalf while he was at a conference. The agency initially refused, saying, “We’re not you. We’re not going to pretend to be you.” They eventually agreed that roughly every fifth tweet would remind readers that the agency was tweeting on the CEO’s behalf.

You have to think about where people might feel deceived and where the writing arrangement simply doesn’t matter.

Neville Hobson: I agree. That’s our latest 50 cents’ worth of opinion on this topic. We’d like to hear your thoughts. If you’re a ghostwriter listening to this, we’d especially love to hear what you think. It’s an ongoing conversation.

Shel Holtz: And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #530: Has AI Created a Demand for Human Ghostwriters? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

AI has evolved enough now that one-shotting entire deliverables is tempting, and many people online claim to be doing just that. In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss why that’s a bad idea, and how you can train your AI tool to give you less slop-like content.

Chip is fed up with receiving one too many pieces of material with no human thought applied to them, not in preparation, not in editing, not even in the decision to hit send. His take on the broader one-shotting trend is that when the result is actually good, it’s rarely a true one-shot. The person usually spent months feeding their AI tool context first, the same way a good off-the-cuff article draws on years of accumulated expertise.

Gini suggests treating AI like a capable intern. You wouldn’t send an intern’s first draft straight to a client, so don’t do that with AI either. She describes going back and forth with her tools so much that Claude once asked her to batch her edits instead of making them one at a time. Chip pushes back on the intern comparison, arguing that with enough context and consistent feedback, AI has moved closer to a capable mid-level colleague. That feedback loop is also the focus of Gini’s internal training program, Slack sessions where the team is currently learning to push back, reject, and refine AI output instead of just accepting it.

However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that because it needs your guidance, AI isn’t worth using. Being the human in the loop doesn’t make you the savior of your business. Owners who rely solely on humans without using AI are making as grave of a mistake as people who think they can replace themselves entirely with AI. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 316: Agency owners need to manage AI like employees appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.