Frequency

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

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

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

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

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