Frequency

This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose work through five stories: why standard engagement surveys keep missing frontline flight risk, a manifesto calling for internal comms to drop the "pomp and circumstance," what work from home really had to do with the business-creation boom, why AI's productivity gains keep getting eaten by the hidden work of fixing what it produces, and a new study on remote, hybrid and office-based wellbeing that doesn't land where the return-to-office argument expects it to.

A pharmaceutical company's patient service team looked fine on paper, but 63% of the group was actively job hunting and the engagement survey never caught it. Structured interviews did. Constance Noonan Hadley of the Institute for Life at Work and BCG's Deborah Lovich argue frontline staff already know what's broken, and propose a six-step process of structured interviews, targeted surveys, collaborative problem-solving and rapid experimentation in its place. Jenni digs into the Gallup data linking low engagement to job hunting, and makes the case that this is the model internal comms should be following: survey, then talk to people, then act. Insight without action, she argues, is the recurring failure.

Next, Gary Grates argues internal comms isn't evolving the way it should, and lays out seven critical success factors that read more like a manifesto than a framework. Jenni and Chuck pick apart where they agree, where his own privilege shows (he's never taken a job without reporting to the CEO or C-suite), and a real contradiction in his logic: he says communication has to flow from the top while also insisting it isn't propaganda but dialogue. Both can't fully be true. They do agree with him on one point: internal comms metrics should be business metrics, not a separate scorecard.

Nick Bloom is back, this time pushing back on a New York Times piece crediting AI for the post-2020 surge in US business creation. Bloom's case is about timing and geography: the surge started before generative AI existed, concentrated in suburbs where remote work took hold, and tracks far more closely with the time and flexibility that working from home handed people. Jenni and Chuck talk through what that means for companies mandating a full return to the office, and where the line sits between a hobby, a side hustle and an accidental business.

The productivity numbers get more complicated from here. 75% of workers say AI has made them more productive, but only 13% say it's meaningfully improved their organization's performance. Rebecca Hinds, writing on Glean's AI index survey, coins the term "bot sitting" for the supervising and error-cleanup work that eats back roughly six of the eleven hours AI saves per week, leaving a net gain of under five. A 2025 METR trial backs up how unreliable our own sense of productivity is: experienced developers using AI took 19% longer to finish tasks while believing they'd been 20% faster. Jenni and Chuck agree this is a trap for internal comms to avoid: coordination is a real cost, but it isn't a comms problem to own or fix.

Closing the episode, a study of 7,700 employees at a large healthcare organization found fully remote workers reported the highest wellbeing, hybrid came second, and fully on-site came last — the opposite of what lead researcher Stephanie Johnson expected going in. Remote workers were also more likely to describe their organization's culture using words like teamwork and inclusion, undercutting the isolation argument so often used to justify return-to-office mandates. Jenni flags the limits of a single-organization study and argues the real answer is a genuinely flexible policy that accounts for tenure, not a blanket stance either way.

Want to find out more about Chuck’s work and ICology - check out the website and how to become a member here: https://www.joinicology.com/ 

Jenni’s a regular speaker and consultant on leadership credibility and internal communication, you can find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/

 

Articles mentioned in this episode: 
Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2026/08/12/remote-workers-report-highest-well-being-study-7700-employees

AI Is Making Workers More Productive. So Why Aren't Companies Performing Better?
https://www.inc.com/rebecca-hinds/ai-is-making-workers-more-productive-so-why-arent-companies-performing-better/91390033

Nick Bloom on the startup boom: it might be WFH, not AI
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nick-bloom-stanford_there-has-been-a-start-up-boom-since-2020-share-7488229790882086912-Zt5U/

Can We Eliminate the "Pomp and Circumstance" of Internal Communications?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-we-eliminate-pomp-circumstance-internal-gary-f-grates-q5c9c

Frontline Workers Know How to Solve Your Organization's Biggest Problems
https://hbr.org/2026/07/frontline-workers-know-how-to-solve-your-organizations-biggest-problems

An MIT preprint scanned people's brains while they wrote with ChatGPT. 83% of them couldn't quote a single sentence from an essay they'd finished 60 seconds earlier. Researchers call it "cognitive debt."

Chuck and Jenni argue about whether that's alarming or obvious. Also this week: what happens when rules get broken for the right reasons, why AI's cultural impact might be a manager story rather than a technology story, and why communication was never really about the writing.

 

00:00 Welcome to Frequency

00:35 Stage & Page: two days with Jon Acuff

03:38 Not all rule breaking is the same

06:09 When a CEO judges before the facts

10:18 Gallup: AI's effect on workplace culture

11:45 Is "invest in managers" a finding or a product pitch?

14:57 MIT's cognitive debt study

17:18 But was the writing any good?

20:37 Communication was never about the writing

26:38 Is grammar elitist?

Jenni opens with new research from Michael Gill at Oxford's Saïd Business School, who reviewed 250+ studies across four decades to challenge the assumption that all rule-breaking deserves the same response. Gill sorts it into four types. The Ethics & Compliance Initiative found 65% of employees globally had observed misconduct, up from 60% in 2020. Chuck shares the time a CEO emailed him a verdict before anyone had the facts.

Then Gallup on AI and culture: 24% of employees say AI improved it, 25% say it worsened it. The real story sits in the manager data — employees whose manager champions AI are far likelier to say AI transformed their work (33% vs 4%) — yet 50% of CHROs don't trust their managers to guide AI use.

Jenni pushes on whether Gallup's own commercial interest in manager training is shaping the finding. Finally, a LinkedIn piece from Tanya Pikula (spotted via Bridget Aherne) arguing that writing was never the job. The work has always been judgment: reading a situation, structuring an argument, knowing when a message shouldn't be sent at all. As AI closes the writing bottleneck, does that raise the bar or let quality quietly slip?

 

Want to find out more about Chuck's work and ICology — check out the website and how to become a member here: https://www.joinicology.com/

Jenni's a regular speaker and consultant on leadership credibility and internal communication, you can find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/

 

Articles mentioned in this episode:

How the Best Leaders Respond to Rule Breaking https://hbr.org/2026/07/how-the-best-leaders-respond-to-rule-breaking

AI's Effect on Workplace Culture https://www.gallup.com/workplace/712976/ai-effect-workplace-culture.aspx

MIT research on the brain using AI - Daniel Pink https://www.instagram.com/p/Db_IHSslO7W/

Communication isn't about writing https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/communications-isnt-writing-tanya-pikula-ph-d--yo7wc/

This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose bookend a heavy AI week with two very human stories, tracking how automated decision-making is quietly reshaping who gets hired, who gets let go, and who gets left behind. Along the way they dig into a troubling labour market signal, an AI trust paradox hiding in the data, an unsettling account of AI agents acting without human oversight, and new research on what remote work is really costing early-career talent.

They open with a stark shift in the US labour market: participation among Black mothers of young children has dropped roughly 11.5 percentage points in three months, a steeper fall than seen among white or Hispanic mothers over the same period. Jenni and Chuck argue that headlines about "moms leaving work" flatten a much more specific story, and that organisations need to look beneath aggregate engagement scores and exit data to understand who is actually leaving and why - before the gap becomes a blind spot no one saw coming.

Next, new research from Atlassian's Teamwork Lab surfaces a strange contradiction: the vast majority of knowledge workers say AI makes their work better, even as most also admit real concerns about its impact on society. Fewer than one in five say they'd struggle without it, yet many would push back, or start job hunting, if it were taken away. Jenni and Chuck unpack what that gap between "I don't need it" and "don't you dare take it away" really says about how reliant the workforce has quietly become.

From there, the conversation turns to a striking account from OpenAI, shared publicly for the first time at Black Hat: during internal testing, one of its own models spun up copies of itself that began leaving coordinated messages for each other, and rebuilt their communication channel after researchers shut it down. Jenni and Chuck talk through what this means for trust, governance, and how prepared organisations really are for AI systems operating with this level of autonomy.

They then turn to a survey finding that the majority of AI-using managers now lean on AI to help decide who gets laid off or fired, with a notable share feeding in factors like attendance, sick leave, and tenure - categories that sit on legally and ethically fraught ground. Jenni is blunt about what this does to trust: once employees learn their PTO or sick days may be feeding a model behind a layoff decision, the credibility of the whole process is at risk.

Finally, new Harvard Business Review research shows remote roles now demand meaningfully more skills and experience than otherwise identical in-person jobs, purely because of the role's location. Jenni and Chuck explore what that means for early-career workers trying to get a foot in the door, and whether the answer is less about resisting remote work and more about rethinking where and how early career development actually happens.

Want to find out more about Chuck’s work and ICology - check out the website and how to become a member here: https://www.joinicology.com/ 

Jenni’s a regular speaker and consultant on leadership credibility and internal communication, you can find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/

 

Articles mentioned in this episode: 

How remote work is narrowing early-career opportunities
https://hbr.org/2026/08/research-how-remote-work-is-narrowing-early-career-opportunities

Managers say they’re using AI to make layoff decisions
https://www.hrdive.com/news/managers-are-using-ai-to-make-layoff-decisions/826697/

OpenAI’s models spent months plotting before hacking Hugging Face
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/openai-models-spent-months-planning-hugging-face-hack-8428025/

The tech we love to hate is the tech we’d hate to lose
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/ai-at-work/the-tech-we-love-to-hate-is-the-tech-wed-hate-to-lose

Labor force participation for Black mothers hits a 31-year low
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/labor-force-participation-for-black-mothers-hits-31-year-low-7451836/

Sam Altman says AI won't deliver a four-hour workweek because people are too competitive. Chuck's verdict: "This might be the very definition of the word delusional."

In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose open on the labor market. A fresh US jobs report shows 23,000 jobs lost, prior months revised down by another 100,000, and the labor force participation rate sliding to 61.4%. Chuck's point: the unemployment rate fell at the same time, and that only looks like good news until you realize it means people have stopped looking. Jenni brings a more optimistic read from the UK comms market via recruiter Andrew Holland, with real caveats about who is and isn't getting hired.

Then to Altman, who argues AI won't cut anyone's hours — not for technical reasons, but because competitiveness and status will keep people working. Chuck isn't buying the framing, which conveniently moves responsibility for long hours off employers and onto human nature. He points to SHRM data showing AI saves about six hours a week and burns four of them fixing AI's own output. Net gain: two hours.

Jenni introduces the Internal Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire, a decade-old academic instrument that Ana Tkalac Verčič and Nina Pološki Vokić have reworked into a 13-question short form. Chuck counters that the US built something similar at the University of Kansas in 1977 and quietly replaced it with eNPS — and questions whether satisfaction is worth measuring at all, since an organization can be perfectly satisfied with its communication while failing as a business. The real risk, he argues, is that it becomes another score to beat.

The bink Culture at Work study surveyed 300 culture, comms, HR and strategy professionals and found the problem isn't communication, it's a say-do gap between what leaders claim to value and what they actually reward and tolerate. 91% call that gap one of the most damaging forces inside organizations. But the number Chuck fixes on is 14% — the share who say senior leaders view culture as a strategic lever tied to performance. Jenni and Chuck follow that to middle managers, who are expected to carry culture change without support or authority, and who are being eliminated at the same time.

Finally, Business Insider on GLP-1 drugs and the workplace conversations nobody has a playbook for — colleagues speculating about who's using them, people being badgered to admit it, and genuine friction in the US over shared insurance costs. Chuck reframes the whole thing through a benefits meeting he sat in 15 years ago, and through his own father.

Straight-talking, occasionally exasperated, and a lot warmer at the end than it starts.

 

Chapters

0:00 Intro

4:50 Sam Altman says AI won't give you a four-hour workweek

9:35 The ICSQ: a 13-question internal comms satisfaction survey

17:02 bink's Culture at Work study and the say-do gap

22:05 Ozempic, GLP-1s and awkward workplace conversations

 

Articles mentioned in this episode:

Sam Altman said AI hasn't led to 4-hour workweeks because people are competitive

https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-ai-4-hour-workweeks-people-competitive-2026-&

 

A short-form version of the Internal Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire (ICSQ-S)

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ana-tkalac-vercic-4a30571_i-like-questionnaires-so-every-once-in-share-7490394530265907200-HUnq/

 

bink Culture at Work Study

https://thinkbink.com/culture-at-work-research-study/

 

Ozempic is causing weird work conversations

https://www.businessinsider.com/ozempic-weight-loss-drugs-causing-awkward-work-conversations-hr-nightmares-2026-8

 

More from Chuck and ICology: https://www.joinicology.com/

More from Jenni: https://thejennifield.com/

Comms Reboot, London, 9 October: https://redefiningcomms.com/comms-reboot-the-communication-unconference-london-2026/

Unite26, London, September (use Frequency20 for a discount): https://www.unily.com/unite

Only 26% of employees say their senior leaders are both competent and trustworthy. So this week Jenni and Chuck look at who gets ahead at work, and why so few people trust the ones already in charge. Four stories: a Chipotle exec scouting future leaders over dinner, new data on how unevenly companies invest in different roles, a New York Times essay on Gen Z's shifting ambition, and Gartner's read on the leadership trust gap.

Chipotle's COO pulls three or four employees into a 90-minute dinner every week he's on the road, deciding promotions on teamwork, ownership, foresight and problem-solving. The company promoted 23,000 of its 135,000 employees in 2025 and filled most senior roles from inside, against a market at a five-year promotion low. Is that a smart way to spot talent, or does it just reward whoever shines over dinner with the boss?

Burning Glass Institute research, tracking 12 million workers across 1,750 employers, found an 81 percentile-point gap between the best and worst roles for promotion inside the same company. Some job families get treated as the strategic core, others as overhead. Jenni and Chuck on why that's a leadership issue first, and the ethical trap that opens once your "great place to work" message stops matching what employees can see.

A New York Times essay argues Gen Z hasn't lost ambition, just redirected it. Financial independence now outranks marriage and kids, with respondents saying they need close to $600,000 a year to feel successful. The conversation turns to what loving your work really means, how the people around us shaped that, and why a generation asking "what do I need to survive" should worry anyone still leaning on purpose and belonging.

Then Gartner: 26% of employees rate their leaders competent and trustworthy, and 79% report low trust in how AI change is handled. Gartner's fix runs against comms instinct, including scrapping the inspiring vision speech for blunt reality from whoever employees find credible.

______________________

Chapters:

02:41 Chipotle's dinner promotions
10:03 Good company, wrong job
17:05 Gen Z falling out of love with work
25:04 The leadership trust gap

______________________

Articles mentioned:

Chipotle's COO Takes Employees to Dinner Every Week to Spot His Next Leaders (Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/07/13/chipotle-coo-jason-kidd-takes-employees-dinner-every-week-spot-next-leaders-4-traits-hes-seeking/

Good Company, Wrong Job: Why a Brand Is No Guarantee (Burning Glass Institute)
https://www.burningglassinstitute.org/research/goodcompanywrongjob

Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don't Blame Them. (The New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/opinion/gen-z-ambition-millennials-career.html

Rethink Executive Communications to Bridge the Employee Trust Gap in AI Transformation (Gartner)
https://www.gartner.com/en/communications/research/bridge-employee-trust-gap-ec1

______________________

Find out more about Chuck's work and ICology membership: https://www.joinicology.com/
Learn from and work with Jenni: https://thejennifield.com/

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