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 lim...

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 sta...

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 famil...

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...

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, h...

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 t...

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 wh...

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%....

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...

Jenni and Chuck cover four stories this week: Gartner's prediction that half of AI-driven workforce cuts will reverse by 2027, new research on the office condition that actually drives team performance, an internal comms piece that's got the industry talking, and Germany's tightening of sick leave rules. Gartner has predicted that half of all AI workforce cuts will reverse by 2027, and the reasoni...

This week Chuck and Jenni dig into what heavy AI use is actually doing to us, why most executive offsites fail before they even start, a co-founder who got fired for breaking the very return-to-office rule he signed off on, whether AI is really to blame for Gen Z's job struggles, and what the latest remote work research says about loneliness at work. Plus Nick Bloom makes another appearance to pus...

This week, Chuck and Jenni dig into four stories reshaping how we think about generations, empathy, and boundaries at work: why the evidence for "generational differences" keeps failing to show up, the hidden emotional toll being carried disproportionately by women managers, new data on Britain's always-on work culture, and the ongoing debate about what business casual even means anymore. The conv...

This week Jenni and Chuck are digging into the real return on AI-driven layoffs, why AI-generated writing has stalled instead of taking over the internet, what's really happening as companies go quiet on LGBTQ+ support, and a new report picking a fight with the entire employee engagement industry. Gartner surveyed 350 executives at billion-dollar-plus companies and found that roughly 80% of those...

This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose are talking about long-term thinking in a short-term world, what the resignation of the UK Prime Minister reveals about leadership communication, new data from Gallup on the state of global employee engagement, and the ongoing confusion between remote and hybrid work. Jenni opens by reflecting on the resignation of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with coverage...

Jenni and Chuck are in the same room for the first time in 60+ episodes, and they spend it arguing about whether your headphones are quietly making coworkers think less of you. Before that, four reports worth a comms team's attention: email benchmarks, CCO pay, and a leadership sentiment gap. Recorded in person in Toronto after IABC World Conference and Comms Reboot, this week's episode digs into...

This week Jenni and Chuck dig into four stories that all circle the same theme: more isn't working.  They start with Nick Bloom's latest research on whether working from home helps or hinders mental health, unpicking the tricky question of causality versus correlation, and landing on the idea that autonomy and choice, not location, are what actually drive wellbeing.  From there they turn to a Harv...

Frequency is back with an episode that connects the dots between inauthenticity, artificial intelligence, a shifting workforce, and what bad management really costs. Jenni opens with a few standout takeaways from the Gallagher Summit in London — including a line worth writing on a sticky note: trust travels socially, not structurally. It's a reminder that no matter how sophisticated our digital in...

In this episode, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose cover four stories that together paint a picture of organisations still struggling to align how work is designed with what work actually demands — from the disappearing nine-to-five to a 150-year history that began not with leaders, but with employees. The first story, from the Economic Times, examines how AI and hybrid work are accelerating the end of t...

Articles mentioned in this episode:  1️⃣ The AI Paradox: Employees Are Ready, Organisations Are Not 2️⃣ Vibe Coding Built 380,000 Publicly Accessible Apps — Many With Your Company's Data Inside 3️⃣ The Gap Between What Leaders Think and What Employees Experience 4️⃣ Meetings Are Now the Primary Way We Experience Each Other at Work — So Why Are Most Still an Afterthought? 5️⃣ Yondr at Work: Phone B...

Articles mentioned in this episode:  1️⃣ IoIC's IC Index 2️⃣ Credibility gap in internal comms despite high professional esteem 3️⃣ It’s about capability not happiness at work 4️⃣ What if employee frustration was your most valuable architecture data?   In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose look at employee trust and organisational change, a hard interrogation of whether IC is ge...

News items mentioned in this episode:  1️⃣ Internal Comms Is Absorbing a Crisis It Didn't Create 2️⃣ Better Signals, Less Noise: The State of Workplace Communication 3️⃣ 'New Normal' Prompts New Guidelines for CEO Communications 4️⃣ Meta Is Tracking Employee Keystrokes to Train Its AI 5️⃣ Your Employees' Old Slack Messages Have a New Owner   About this week's episode of Frequency:  This week Jenni...

In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose dig into four stories that, taken together, make a pretty uncomfortable case: that modern work is increasingly built on theatre and ambiguity. From a personal essay that went viral, to engagement data from two continents, to the real story behind return-to-office mandates, this episode asks what happens when the structures organisations rely...

This week on Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose look at the data behind why employees lose motivation, the question of whether internal comms has become too comfortable to be useful, and two perspectives on where the real friction in AI transformation actually lives.   1️⃣ The first story comes from the Predictive Index, which surveyed more than 1,000 US employees in 2026 and found that 78% beg...

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

This episode marks one year of Frequency!  Jenni Field and Chuck Gose dig into four stories that together reveal a system under pressure: from the psychology of corporate jargon to an emerging reader backlash against AI-generated content, the CFOs quietly reshaping workforce decisions, and the persistent myth that more hours means more output. A Cornell psychologist has built a "corporate BS recep...