Frequency

Chuck Gose & Jenni Field
  • 5,0 (9)
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Frequency is where internal comms, HR, leadership and employee experience come together with lively conversation, expert insights, and plenty of friendly debate. Hosted by industry firestarters Chuck Gose and Jenni Field, this podcast tackles the big workplace challenges—from reaching frontline employees to shaping a strong company culture—all with a mix of sharp opinions, candid stories, and discussion. Chuck and Jenni bring their unique perspectives and personalities to every episode, ensuring you get more than just the usually-tedious industry insights. Whether it’s sparking new ideas or challenging the status quo, Frequency is the conversation you didn’t know you needed. Tune in for a weekly dose of everything you need to know about leadership, workplace culture and employee engagement. a3cffaee93e954f93bbedfafc22bc42959cf432b

  1. HÁ 1 DIA

    78% Start Motivated. Something Breaks Them: Clarity, IC Courage, and AI's Real Blocker

    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% began their current role feeling motivated — but only 16% say their work always feels meaningful. For Jenni, the data points to something organisations keep getting wrong: the assumption that meaning, once communicated, sticks. Chuck zeroes in on the clarity finding and makes the case that it's also one of the more fixable problems: leaders just need to tell people what to focus on, and then actually hold that line from week to week.   2️⃣ The second conversation is sparked by a provocative LinkedIn post from Simon Cavendish, chair of the IABC EMENA and a senior IC consultant, who argues that internal comms has become addicted to alignment with too many IC teams producing beautifully crafted messages for fundamentally bad decisions. Access to leadership, he says, has become more important than actually using that access to push back. The quote Jenni and Chuck both land on: being in the room isn't the win — what we do in the room is the win.    3️⃣ The third story takes on one of the biggest assumptions shaping how organisations measure AI right now: that adoption is the goal. Charter's Brian Elliott brought together practitioners from Atlassian, Zapier, Udemy, and others for a closed-door forum on AI measurement, and the conclusion from those furthest along in their AI journeys is that adoption as a metric is quietly being abandoned. Microsoft's summary of the shift: we used to pay attention to adoption, now we just pay attention to performance. Jenni draws a direct line back to lessons from digital transformation programmes, where teams chased adoption numbers without ever anchoring to business outcomes. Chuck pushes back a little: 97% adoption of anything is a significant signal.   4️⃣ The final story comes from Rebecca Hinds, writing in Inc., who makes the case that the real blocker to AI transformation isn't the tools — it's the narrative leaders encode into their culture before the rollout even starts. Drawing on research from Bob Sutton's AI Transformation 100 report, she surfaces a hard finding: when leaders deploy AI in ways that strip craft and human touch from work, what's left is a hollow shell with little meaning. Chuck pushes back on Jenni's earlier framing that AI change is like any other change campaign — he thinks the scale of what's shifting makes it categorically different. Jenni also flags that ethical dimensions are increasingly in focus, pointing to new AI ethics guidance being developed through CIPR Inside, and the importance of maintaining the human check in any AI-assisted process.   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:  Running on Empty: How Modern Work Created a Motivation Crisis Lead, Follow or Choice: The Choice Facing Internal Comms Why Four Tech Companies Say Adoption Is the Wrong AI Metric The Biggest Threat to Your AI Strategy Isn't the Technology

    29 min

  2. 20 DE ABR.

    $50B Corporate Wellness Market Is Stagnant: BANI, Toxic Culture, and When to Disagree with Your CEO

    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 research across Southeast Asian workplaces, where companies are investing heavily in wellness perks and platforms while seeing little return. William Fleming, a research fellow at Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre, argues that off-the-shelf interventions like generic apps and training modules fail because they treat well-being in isolation — changing the worker rather than the workplace. Chuck points to the work of wellness expert Mark Mohammadpour - link below to find out more.  The second story digs into the BANI framework — Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible — originally coined by futurist Jamais Cascio and recently resurfaced in a McKinsey article. Chuck and Jenni agree the question isn't whether the world is BANI — it clearly is — but what does that means for how organisations communicate and lead.  The third story takes on the increasingly overused phrase "toxic culture," prompted by a LinkedIn article that lists eight signs of a toxic workplace: poor communication, high employee turnover, lack of recognition, micro-management, cliques and favouritism, unethical behaviour, burnout and chronic stress, and resistance to change. Chuck and Jenni both push back — not because the list is wrong, but because it describes most workplaces, and labelling everything toxic risks making the diagnosis meaningless. The final story comes from a panel at Incomm's Strategic Internal Comms Conference, where communications experts debated whether you should ever disagree with your CEO. Chuck's answer is yes — but verbalising that disagreement is a different conversation entirely, shaped heavily by psychological safety, access, and relationship. Jenni reflects on her own practice of using questions rather than direct challenge — asking leaders to help her understand the reasoning behind a decision rather than stating disagreement outright — as a form of productive, adult-to-adult coaching.  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:  Southeast Asia’s business leaders want wellness at work—as long as the programs get real results A BANI world What Does a Toxic Organisational Culture Actually Look Like? Should you ever disagree with your CEO? Learn more about Mark Mohammadpour

    39 min

  3. 13 DE ABR.

    Jargon Lovers Score Worst: AIDR, CFO-Led AI Cuts and the 48-Hour Productivity Cliff

    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 receptivity scale" tested on more than 1,000 workers, and the results are uncomfortable. People who rate jargon-heavy language as business savvy score significantly worse on analytical thinking, cognitive reflection, and workplace decision-making — while also reporting higher job satisfaction.  A new term is spreading online: AIDR, short for "AI didn't read," used by readers to dismiss content that smells like it came from a chatbot rather than a person. Developer David Minajirode coined it on. Jenni and Chuck argue that the real issue isn't AI assistance, it's authenticity — if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should anyone be bothered to read it?  A survey of around 750 CFOs by Duke University economist John Graham, alongside economists from the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Richmond, found that while AI had essentially no employment effect in 2025, CFOs now expect a 0.4% reduction in overall headcount this year — concentrated almost entirely in clerical, administrative, and customer service roles.  The final story uses new World Bank and UC Berkeley research — showing the world's employed adults work an average of 42 hours a week — to open up a much bigger question: what does the number of hours actually signal? Stanford research on British munitions workers from World War I found output declined beyond 48 hours and added nothing beyond 63. Yet Sergey Brin has reportedly called 60 hours the sweet spot, and Narayana Murthy of Infosys has advocated for 70-plus-hour weeks.  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:  📍 People who love corporate BS are bad at their jobs, new Cornell research confirms 🔗 https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/people-who-love-corporate-bs-are-bad-at-their-jobs-new-cornell-research-confirms/91314405 📍 'AI; didn't read': AI;DR is the new TL;DR 🔗 https://www.fastcompany.com/91498062/ai-didnt-read-aidr-is-the-new-tldr 📍 America's chief financial officers say AI is coming for admin jobs 🔗 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-admin-job-market-6a1c3436 📍 How many hours should employees work? A question that reveals something about every boss 🔗 https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/04/how-many-hours-should-employees-work

    30 min

  4. 6 DE ABR.

    21% Trust Leaders: Kano's Fix, Ineffective Meetings & the Root of Psychological Safety

    From the science behind psychological safety to a product development model being applied to the trust crisis, via the ongoing debate about whether meetings count as real work, this is an episode full of practical frameworks and direct perspectives. Jenni opens the conversation by exploring the Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast, hosted by Bruce Daisley, which features Professor Katrien Franzen and her research on leadership and social identity. The central insight is the concept of "we-ness" — the idea that without a genuine sense of team belonging, psychological safety simply cannot take hold. Professor Franzen's research identifies four distinct leadership roles: task leader, motivational leader, social leader, and external leader. Jenni and Chuck examine whether it is realistic to expect formal leaders to embody all four. The conversation turns to a Fortune article reporting that business leaders are raising the alarm over meeting culture, with Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan among the latest to speak out. Nearly 80% of workers say they are drowning in meetings, and an Atlassian study of 5,000 workers across four continents found that 72% of meetings are deemed ineffective.  Shel Holtz's recent LinkedIn article introduces a framework that applies the Kano model — developed by Professor Noriaki Kano in the 1980s for product management — to the challenge of rebuilding employee trust. The context makes the framework all the more urgent: Gallup data shows only 21% of US employees strongly agree they trust their organisation's leadership, and the Edelman Trust Barometer has recorded its first global decline in employee trust in the study's 26-year history.  Jenni closes the episode with a look at the UK's Best Workplaces 2026 list. The numbers behind the list make the case compellingly: UK best workplaces perform more than four times better than the market and generate 6.25 times greater revenue per employee. Chuck raises a fair challenge about the nature of paid-for lists and the many great workplaces that simply are not on them, while Jenni argues that for internal comms and HR professionals the more productive question is: what are these organisations doing to build the trust that sits behind these results, and what can we learn from them?   Articles mentioned in this episode:  Nike CEO vents to employees Eat Sleep Work Repeat: We-ness: The secret cause of Psychological Safety Meetings are not work The trust recession Best places to work in the UK 2026 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/

    30 min

  5. 30 DE MAR.

    60% Want a Layoff: Career Dysmorphia, AI Brain Fry & the Reciprocity Gap

    In Episode 50, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose are back together — Jenni returning from a trip to Japan and Chuck recording live from Las Vegas during Transform — to dig into four stories shaping the future of work, careers, and our relationship with AI. The first story explores what's being called "career dysmorphia," with nearly six in ten millennial workers privately hoping for a layoff rather than choosing to leave on their own. A survey of 2,000 Gen Z and millennial workers found 37% dissatisfied with their roles and 55% unsettled in their careers. Jenni pushes back on the idea that this is purely a workplace problem, arguing it's really about personal agency. Chuck adds that with AI eliminating entry-level roles and 76% of HR professionals surveyed expecting significant hiring reductions, Gen Z may arrive to find there's no ladder at all. The second story looks at women in their 40s and 50s leaving corporate roles in growing numbers — not because of burnout, but because, as McKinsey researcher Lareina Yee frames it, it's the absence of reciprocity. Chuck notes that the true cost of these departures — estimated at up to 213% of salary — still fails to capture the ripple effect on the teams left behind. Jenni connects RTO mandates as the tipping point, the straw that breaks the camel's back after years of consistently poor leadership behaviours stacking up. The third story centres on Anthropic's study of nearly 81,000 Claude users across 159 countries and 70 languages — described as the largest and most multilingual qualitative study ever conducted on AI. Jenni and Chuck explore the striking geographic divide, with workers in lower- and middle-income countries far more optimistic about AI than those in Western Europe and North America, and question whether the dominant Western mindset of efficiency and productivity is a form of greed compared to the learning and opportunity lens seen elsewhere. The fourth story introduces "AI brain fry" — a term coined by a Harvard Business Review study from BCG researcher Gabriella Rosen Kellerman — describing a specific form of cognitive overload from maintaining constant oversight of AI output, already affecting 14% of US workers. Jenni draws a sharp parallel to the long-established research on multitasking, questioning whether this is truly a new phenomenon or simply the same cognitive limits colliding with a tool of unprecedented scale. Chuck's advice to comms teams: be open, share your workflows, and talk to your manager — because the teams doing that are measurably reducing fatigue and doing better.   Articles mentioned in this episode: Millennials Don't Want to Quit. They Want to Get Laid Off. You're Not Burnt Out. You're Done. What 81,000 People Want from AI AI Brain Fry   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. Find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/

    35 min

  6. 23 DE MAR.

    Uber CEO Will Push You Out, Cracker Barrel's Leaked Memo Backfires & 67% of HR Pros Have No Career Path

    Jenni Field is away this week, so Chuck Gose goes solo covering four stories that all, in different ways, come back to the same question: what does leadership actually communicate about how much it values its people? Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi went on The Diary of a CEO podcast and said the quiet part loud: he expects immediate responses to weekend emails, doesn't talk about work-life balance at Uber, and will push employees out if they can't keep pace. Chuck isn't entirely unsympathetic — there's something genuinely useful about a leader who names the culture explicitly rather than letting unspoken norms do the damage quietly. The problem is the contradiction. Claiming flexibility while expecting Saturday email responses at 9:30pm is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Chuck draws the contrast with Linear CEO Karri Saarinen, who has deliberately built a 40-hour-week culture around quality over speed. The question isn't which CEO is right. It's whether employees at either company actually know what they're signing up for. Cracker Barrel made headlines when a leaked internal memo instructed employees to eat at Cracker Barrel restaurants for most meals during business travel, with alcohol no longer reimbursable without senior pre-approval. Chuck's take: the policy is largely unremarkable. SAP Concur named this exact trend "travelscrimping" in their 2025 Global Business Travel Survey. What made it a story was the absence of proactive framing — a two-year-old policy became a crisis because it leaked without context. The real communication failure wasn't the policy. It was letting a leaked memo define the narrative first. And in a company still recovering from a $100 million rebrand reversal, that trust deficit made the pile-on predictable. The frontline workforce gets the most substantive treatment of the episode. Chuck walks through a Fortune op-ed by Stacey Zolt Hara of Burson, anchored by former United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz and his framework for operational excellence: focus on the person holding the wrench. Munoz is credited with turning around a deeply disgruntled 85,000-person workforce by making frontline workers the centrepiece of the culture rebuild. The data backing the argument is striking — 87% of frontline workers aren't sure whether company culture applies to them at all, and a 2025 Aspen Institute study found U.S. GDP would be 10% higher if the essential economy had kept pace with white-collar productivity growth. Chuck flags that the article is a Burson op-ed — a comms firm making the case for comms investment — but doesn't let that undermine the substance. And he notes the harder truth behind the How Institute's finding that 94% of employees say moral leadership matters, but only 6% of CEOs deliver it: the problem isn't awareness. It's that incentive structures don't reward it. The episode closes with a story that lands closer to home — a survey from the HR Certification Institute finding that 67% of HR practitioners have no clear or well-defined career path, and 41% are considering leaving the profession entirely. Chuck calls it less an irony than an indictment: the function responsible for career frameworks, succession planning, and leadership pipelines for everyone else hasn't applied any of that to itself. The structural problems are architectural — flat hierarchies, lean teams, subjective promotions — and people analytics as a career differentiator is realistic only for the top 15-20% of practitioners who sit inside data-mature organisations. Chuck closes with a thread that connects back to the Munoz story: HR practitioners are their own version of the guy with the wrench. Essential to the operation. Excluded from conversations about their own futures.   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. Find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/   Articles mentioned in this episode: Uber CEO Says Hard Work Is "the Most Important Skill in Life" — and He'll Push You Out If You Can't Keep Up  Cracker Barrel Tells Employees to Eat at Cracker Barrel on Work Trips  To Unlock Employee Effort, Don't Overlook the Person Holding the Wrench  HR Is Supposed to Design Career Paths. So Why Are Its Own So Unclear?

    19 min

  7. 16 DE MAR.

    Culture Talk Destroys Trust: 72% Fail, AI Agents, PDFs & Dorsey's 40% Cuts

    This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose cover four stories dominating the workplace conversation right now — from whether AI is truly transforming organisations or just repeating history's mistakes, to why the more you talk about culture, the less anyone believes you. McKinsey is calling AI agents the biggest organisational shift since the Industrial Revolution, with teams of two to five people potentially supervising 50 to 100 AI agents. Jenni draws a direct parallel to the Industrial Revolution itself — arguing we're making the same mistake: doing a straight lift-and-shift of people to agents, rather than fundamentally reimagining what work looks like. The real question isn't how many agents replace how many people. It's what work even means. Bruce Daisley, former VP at Twitter EMEA and author of The Joy of Work, presents a provocative thesis backed by a striking number — 72% of formal culture change initiatives produce no meaningful improvement in trust, engagement, or retention. Jenni connects this to the ongoing culture vs. behaviour debate: culture has become a big word without much meaning, and the proof is always in the pudding. If leaders aren't showing up differently, no amount of values posters will cut through. The Economist is asking whether the PDF will survive the AI revolution — and the answer is genuinely uncertain. Over 2.5 trillion PDFs exist, LLMs regularly struggle to read them accurately, and one in five email-based cyber attacks are routed through PDF attachments. For comms and HR professionals, this hits close to home — employee handbooks, policies, and benefits guides are often locked inside a format that AI-powered tools can't reliably process. Jenni points out she was having this exact same conversation 15 years ago when digital workplaces first arrived. Nobody owned the problem then. Nobody owns it now. Block, the parent of Square, Cash App, and Afterpay, is cutting its workforce from over 10,000 to just under 6,000. CEO Jack Dorsey pointed to AI as the driver and predicted most companies would do the same within a year — a statement that sent the stock up 24%. Chuck and Jenni aren't buying it. They call it AI washing: using AI as cover for a workforce that grew 150% during COVID and never came back down. The profit-per-employee figure tells the real story — quadrupling to north of $2 million means this was already a profitable business. And the entire announcement? Written in lowercase, Chuck is not a fan. Want to find out more about Chuck Gose'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: The Agentic Organization: Contours of the Next Paradigm for the AI Era The More You Talk About Culture, the Less People Believe You The War Against PDFs Is Heating Up (paywall) Jack Dorsey Cuts 40% of Block's Workforce and Says Most Companies Will Follow Within a Year

    30 min

  8. 9 DE MAR.

    Staples Baddie vs McDonald's CEO: 4 IC Reports & the Authenticity Gap

    Staples Baddie vs McDonald's CEO: 4 IC Reports & the Authenticity Gap This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose tackle four reports on the state of internal communications — but not before stopping to examine two wildly different examples of what it actually looks like when employees advocate for their organisation. Chuck opens with what he calls employees acting as advocates. The contrast is stark: the Staples Baddie, a frontline employee who went viral for genuinely showcasing what you can do at Staples, organic, unscripted and probably not who the comms team would have chosen; versus the McDonald’s CEO, deployed to launch a new sandwich in a produced video that somehow made eating a sandwich the most uncomfortable thing on the internet. Jenni puts her finger on exactly why: our brains know immediately when something doesn’t feel real, and when it doesn’t, it gives us the ick. Chuck’s conclusion is simple — go where the authenticity is. The frontline employee wins every time. The Institute of Internal Communication (IOIC)  has published a whitepaper making the case for IC as a strategic powerhouse — proposing new specialist roles including a Chief Trust Officer and Head of Listening, and a significant skills uplift in behavioural science, scenario planning and data literacy. Jenni has two problems with it. First, some of the challenges it assigns to the IC function feel like they belong in the boardroom, Second, and almost ironically, a report about building trust and connection through clear communication is written in dense, jargon-heavy language. Chuck is blunter: communicators don’t need another document telling them to be strategic. What they need is for the organisation to actually resource the function. Mike Klein and Ambuj Dixit spent six weeks speaking to around 60 practitioners, leaders and academics across five Indian cities for the IC Shift India Report, deliberately focusing on what’s working rather than what’s failing. Jenni’s main question on reading it is the same one she finds herself asking across all four reports this week: what is this trying to help us do? The ten observations — leadership communication, readiness, business literacy, channel effectiveness — read much the same as other global reports. The most interesting idea is “leapfrogging”: the argument that Indian IC could skip Western IC’s evolutionary path and jump straight to strategic positioning. But Jenni notes the same report flags fear cultures and a reluctance to challenge direction, which makes that leap very difficult in practice. Gallagher has rebranded the State of the Sector as the Employee Communications Report — and this year’s theme is the readiness gap, the widening space between the risks organisations face and the capability of internal comms teams to respond. The data is striking: 73% of teams want to operate as strategic partners, yet only 18% believe they are. The report’s core argument is that function maturity is the real multiplier: not more channels, not more content, not AI — but a strategy people actually use, clear accountability, governance, and measurement focused on outcomes rather than clicks. When those things are in place, engagement improves and trust erodes more slowly. When they’re not, volume fills the vacuum. The Contact Monkey Global State of Internal Communications 2026 centres on what it calls the culture gap — the distance between what organisations say they want from IC and what they’ve resourced the function to deliver. On trust, only 9% of employees trust leadership messaging completely. The feedback data is perhaps the most revealing: 95% of organisations collect employee feedback, but only 15% clearly communicate what they’ve done with it. Jenni and Chuck both note this explains a great deal about that trust gap — employees are being asked to speak up, and largely hearing nothing back. Want to find out more about Chuck Gose 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:  IOIC Future of Communication whitepaper nextICshift India Report 2026 by Mike Klein and Ambuj Dixit Gallagher’s State of the Sector Report ContactMonkey Global State of Internal Communications 2026 Staples Baddie And the McDonalds CEO

    43 min
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Sobre

Frequency is where internal comms, HR, leadership and employee experience come together with lively conversation, expert insights, and plenty of friendly debate. Hosted by industry firestarters Chuck Gose and Jenni Field, this podcast tackles the big workplace challenges—from reaching frontline employees to shaping a strong company culture—all with a mix of sharp opinions, candid stories, and discussion. Chuck and Jenni bring their unique perspectives and personalities to every episode, ensuring you get more than just the usually-tedious industry insights. Whether it’s sparking new ideas or challenging the status quo, Frequency is the conversation you didn’t know you needed. Tune in for a weekly dose of everything you need to know about leadership, workplace culture and employee engagement. a3cffaee93e954f93bbedfafc22bc42959cf432b

Informações

  • Criado por
    Chuck Gose & Jenni Field
  • Anos de atividade
    2025 - 2026
  • Episódios
    56
  • Classificação
    Livre
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
  • Site do podcast
    Frequency

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