Frequency

In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose dig into the growing gap between AI ambition and workplace reality — from a company quietly doing the opposite of everyone else, to predictions that stretch credibility, to Friday office attendance figures that tell their own story.

IBM Is Tripling Entry-Level Hiring Because of AI — We’ve heard the warnings that AI will gut entry-level jobs but IBM is going in the opposite direction. They shared that rather than cutting junior roles, they rewrote them. Skip entry-level hiring now and in three to five years, you're poaching mid-level talent from competitors at a 30% premium. Dropbox is making a similar bet, expanding its new graduate programme by 25%. Jenni and Chuck explore what this says about the kind of leadership that thinks beyond the short term, and why nurturing talent will always beat lift-and-shift thinking.

Nearly half of US workers say they have never used AI at work . Daily users sit at just 12% and frequent users at 26%. Overall adoption has flatlined; the growth is coming entirely from people who already use it, using it more. The top barrier to adoption is that people simply can't see how AI applies to what they actually do. Jenni and Chuck explore what that means for training, leadership, and the distinction between using AI and benefiting from it.

Gartner's top communications predictions for 2026 include a headline claim that by 2028, three quarters of employees will rely on chatbots for internal communications — effectively spelling the end of the all-staff email, the town hall, and the intranet banner. Jenni is sceptical, to put it mildly. When she's still talking to organisations wrestling with 15 different SharePoint sites that can't communicate with each other, a two-year timeline to chatbot-dependent internal comms doesn't feel grounded in reality. The prediction that comms teams will use employee digital footprints to personalise messaging also raised eyebrows — not because it's wrong, but because the best organisations have been trying to do exactly that for a decade. Jenni and Chuck also pull out a data point that perhaps deserved more attention: for the second year running, misinformation and disinformation ranked as the top global risk by the World Economic Forum. A skills gap worth taking seriously.

KornFerry data from Placer.ai shows that Friday in-office attendance sits at just 12.4%, compared to 24.3% on Tuesdays and 23.7% on Wednesdays — and this is happening even at companies that have issued five-day return to office mandates. KornFerry calls it an engagement problem. Chuck pushes back: this isn't an employee engagement problem, it's a leadership engagement problem. Jenni adds that without data from before the pandemic, nobody can actually say whether 12.4% on a Friday is good, bad, or completely normal.

Freaking Out This Week Jenni has a big announcement — Comms Reboot is coming to Toronto in June, following a successful first outing with the team at ContactMonkey last year. Tickets for the London event in October are already a third sold. Chuck's freak out is Flyover Festival — the employee comms and culture event in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on August 27th. Registration is now open and tickets are already selling. 

 

Articles and links mentioned in this episode:

IBM Plans to Triple Entry-Level Hiring Because of AI

Frequent Use of AI in the Workplace Continued to Rise in Q4

Gartner’s Top Communications Predictions for 2026

It’s Friday: Hello, Anyone There?

ICology's Employee Comms & Culture Flyover Festival

Comms Reboot in Toronto: Email us at [email protected] for info!

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In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose dig into four thought-provoking topics shaping the world of work right now — from how old your company is to whether organisational culture actually exists.

Chuck kicks things off with the latest addition to the workplace lexicon — "job hugging." Move over quiet quitting, there's a new phenomenon describing employees who cling to their current roles for stability and comfort, at the potential cost of their own growth and development.

Does Company Age Determine Your WFH Strategy? Drawing on research from Nick Bloom, Jenni unpacks data showing that work from home is 50% higher in firms founded in the last 10 years, and 25% higher in companies led by CEOs under 30. There's a parallel trend in AI adoption too. But is this really a generational divide, or is it something deeper? 

Is Organisational Culture Change Really a Thing? Rob Briner's work and a CIPD review ask a provocative question: can organisational culture actually be changed — and does it even drive performance in the way we assume? Jenni and Chuck unpack why culture might be a description of behaviour rather than a cause of it, and why focusing on behaviour change programmes could be a far more effective (if more uncomfortable) approach than the culture workshops many organisations invest in.

A Substack article by Stephen Waddington references the Ocean Tomo intangible asset market value study, which reveals a striking structural inversion: in 1975, tangible assets made up 83% of S&P 500 market value. By 2025, that figure had fallen to just 8%. So what does this mean for internal comms, HR, and employee experience teams still fighting to prove their value?

An eight-month Harvard Business Review study of a US technology company found that rather than reducing workload, AI tools led employees to work faster, take on more tasks, and extend their working hours — without being asked. The result? Potential workload creep, cognitive fatigue, and burnout. Jenni and Chuck share their own experiences with AI, debate whether governance is the answer, and explore what it means to genuinely use AI versus simply benefit from it.

Freaking Out This Week: Chuck is buzzing about Transform and the ICology event he's running at it on March 23rd in Las Vegas. If you want to join, you'll need to sign up via Chuck's link Jenni's freak out? An organisation being advised to model 60 — yes, 60 — behaviours, complete with physical red cards for anyone not exhibiting them. Mildly terrifying is an understatement.

Articles and links mentioned in this episode:

Does the age of your company determine your WFH strategy?

𝗢rganizational culture change: Is that really a thing?

CIPR 2022 Review mentioned by Rob Briner

If 92% of corporate value is intangible, why is public relations still treated as overhead?

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It

 

Join ICology at Transform's EX Factor Summit!

In this week's episode, Jenni and Chuck unpack the uncomfortable truth behind repeated workplace policies, the widening AI proficiency gap, and why simple acts of appreciation remain the most overlooked retention strategy.

What we're discussing
Home Depot's Groundhog Day RTO Announcement Home Depot just announced corporate employees need to return to office five days a week starting April 6th - except they already announced this exact policy in January 2025. Stanford's Nick Bloom reports 17% of companies are on their third RTO policy. When you have to announce the same thing twice, is it a communication problem or a compliance problem? We explore why employees called leadership's bluff and what this says about credibility and culture.

The AI Proficiency Crisis After three years and hundreds of millions in AI investment, Section's survey of 5,000 knowledge workers reveals: 90% of the workforce doesn't know how to use AI effectively, yet 50% think they're proficient. The gap between perception and reality is the real problem. Meanwhile, 25% don't know what to use AI for, and manager support for AI dropped 11% since May 2025. We discuss the shadow use of AI and whether companies are really this naive.

Chief Communication Officers Hit $1M+ Salaries CCO compensation now reaches $900K-$1M, with nearly half earning seven figures. More than half command $5M+ budgets, and 70% increase in direct CEO reporting lines since 2023. But here's the catch: one-third still haven't defined their AI-driven communications approach. Internal comms is the second most desired trait when hiring, yet it still takes second fiddle to corp comms and media relations in actual focus.

The Retention Crisis Is Here Only 1 in 4 employees feel appreciated at work. 34% are actively job hunting. The talent retention crisis everyone predicted after the pandemic is here—and worse than forecast. The fixes aren't complicated: recognition, appreciation, connection. These cost almost nothing, yet companies aren't doing them. We explore why organizations penny-pinch on what matters while CEOs collect seven-figure packages.

Key takeaways

Repeating announcements signals policy failure, not employee non-compliance

The Dunning-Kruger effect is alive and well in AI adoption

High salaries don't automatically translate to strategic leadership

Simple recognition programs outperform complex retention strategies

Links & Resources

Why Home Depot Keeps Announcing RTO 

The AI Proficiency Report

Korn Ferry Survey Reveals Chief Communications Officers' Rising Influence and Compensation in 2025 

2026 Engagement and Retention Report 

Substack CEO bombs Decoder interview

In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose start with a deceptively simple question: where are all the good industry events? That conversation quickly opens up a wider reflection on whether the internal comms and employee experience space has hit a point of stagnation — and what it would take to bring the right people together for deeper, more meaningful conversations.

The episode moves into weightier territory with a discussion sparked by Shel Holtz’s open letter to PRSA, calling on the organisation to take a stand on ICE operations in Minneapolis. Jenni and Chuck explore the ethics of neutrality, the idea that silence is itself a decision, and the responsibility professional bodies have to model the values they expect communicators to uphold.

From there, Jenni brings in a Harvard Business Review article urging leaders to get off the “transformation treadmill.” Together, they unpack why constant transformation often signals deeper systemic problems, and why addressing root causes, rather than reacting to symptoms, is the real work leaders tend to avoid.

Trust takes centre stage with a frank critique of the Edelman Trust Barometer. While the data highlights growing insularity, grievance and distrust, Jenni and Chuck question whether the proposed solutions offer anything genuinely new, and whether organisations are willing to do the uncomfortable, personal work that trust actually requires.

The episode closes with a look at Gartner’s predicted workplace trends for 2026, including AI, systems thinking and the growing role of HR in risk and readiness. They debate whether these are true trends or hopeful predictions, and why process expertise,  not tech obsession, is likely to matter most.

As always, they end with their Freak Outs of the week, covering everything from wills and “death wishes” to wellness retreats, rebranding Vegas as self-care, and the importance of stepping back to reflect.

Thoughtful, challenging and quietly provocative — this episode asks leaders to slow down, look harder, and stop pretending the answers are new.

 

Articles mentioned in this episode: 

An Open Letter to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) from Shel Holtz on LinkedIn

Get off the transformation treadmill

The danger of insular trust mindset 

9 Trends Shaping Work in 2026 and Beyond

Resist & Unsubscribe

In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose kick things off with a surprisingly revealing conversation about bread — and quickly land on a much bigger question: when recognition misses the point, what does it say about how organisations really value people?

That idea becomes a thread running through the episode, as they move into a frank discussion about performative communication. Using recent ICE-related events in the US as a backdrop, they explore the growing pressure employees are putting on leaders to take meaningful, visible stands, and why cautious, logo-signed “de-escalation” statements often feel more like corporate self-protection than leadership. Jenni and Chuck question what employees are actually asking for, and whether silence, symbolism or collective action carries the most weight.

From there, the conversation turns to meetings — why they continue to frustrate people, and what role AI realistically has in fixing them. While tools like AI note-takers and summaries can help with accountability, they argue the real issue is capability, not technology. Poorly run meetings, unclear purpose and a lack of facilitation skills won’t be solved by automation alone. Better meetings still matter — especially for trust, debate and decision-making — and cutting them entirely is not the answer.

This leads into a wider challenge around AI adoption and productivity. As leaders increasingly point to AI’s potential impact on GDP as justification for rapid rollout, Jenni questions whether economic upside is the right — or sufficient — argument. They unpack research showing many organisations are using AI without investing in training or redesigning how work actually gets done. The risk, they argue, is treating AI as a cost-saving shortcut rather than a capability shift. Without strong foundations, clear processes and proper enablement, AI won’t fix broken systems — it will simply amplify them.

The episode then tackles Amazon’s latest round of layoffs and the way employees discovered the news through internal errors. Jenni and Chuck reflect on what moments like this signal about leadership control, humanity and trust — and why how information is shared matters just as much as what is shared.

Finally, they react to reports that AI company Anthropic destroyed large quantities of books to train its models, raising uncomfortable questions about ethics, ownership and optics — especially when legality, public perception and values collide.

They close with their Freq Out of the week, sharing candid reflections on conference speaker rejections, feedback that stings, and why rejection isn’t always a signal that your work isn’t needed — sometimes it’s just redirection.

 

Articles mentioned in this episode:

Tech workers push CEOs to condemn ICE as Minnesota CEOs issue a “de-escalation” letter
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/26/tech-workers-ceos-ice https://www.axios.com/2026/01/25/minneapolis-shooting-ice-target-3m-ceos-letter 

The LinkedIn post that inspired the bread conversation

Dropbox bets on AI to fix meetings and protect time

HR Dive: AI could boost GDP, but only if employees are trained

BBC: Amazon layoffs confirmed after an internal email error

Ars Technica: Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to train AI

Remote Work by Chris Dyer and Kim Shepherd (not Scott)