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 Field and Chuck Gose dig into a cluster of stories that all point to the same uncomfortable truth: in communications, playing it safe is often the riskiest move of all. From burned-out IC practitioners to CEOs retreating from the public eye to a tech giant quietly watching its own employees, the thread running through this episode is what happens when organisations choose silence over substance.

The episode opens with the Shifting Ground Report which surveyed 24 internal comms professionals. The findings are striking: 88% said their personal wellbeing had been affected by overlapping crises, and 83% reported stress or burnout. Nearly three quarters say they are aiming for a strategic communications model, yet only 18% believe they have actually got there, and 61% have no formal change comms approach in place. The report makes the case that neutral, sanitised language is not safe communication; it simply transfers risk from the organisation's legal exposure onto employees' trust. Jenni draws a direct parallel to psychological safety research, arguing that the very behaviour designed to feel cautious is the behaviour that undermines candour and organisational health.

The second story comes from a survey of 1,175 full-time US employees, and it surfaces a paradox every communicator should sit with: half of employees say the volume of communication they receive is about right, yet 44% simultaneously report feeling overwhelmed. On AI, 81% say they believe they can tell when something has been written by AI — a claim Chuck challenges with a pointed observation about AI detection tools flagging Mary Shelley. The shorthand from the survey is "reduce, don't produce," which Jenni and Chuck agree captures a governance conversation most organisations have still not had.

The third story looks beyond the internal function to the Golin CEO Impact Index, which tracks the public communications activity of the top 250 Fortune 500 CEOs - it tells a story about what happens when you say no to one thing and yes to something else!

Meta's are capturing employee keystrokes and mouse clicks across hundreds of sites and apps — including Google, LinkedIn, Slack, and GitHub — with the stated purpose of teaching its AI models how to use computers. Employees who called the programme dystopian did so in internal messages Meta was also monitoring. Jenni raises a pointed scientific objection: if you tell people they are being tracked, or they find out they have been, behaviour changes — meaning the "big and unbiased data set" Meta sought was never achievable in the first place. The absence of meaningful communication around the launch is, as Chuck notes, itself a choice, and one that sits alongside all the other stories this week as an illustration of what silence costs.

The episode closes with a fifth story about Asset Hub, built by a startup called Simple Closure, that helps shuttered companies sell their internal data — Slack conversations, email threads, meeting notes — as AI training material. Approximately 100 deals have been processed, with payouts ranging from tens of thousands to well into six figures. The legal question of who owns employee communications, and whether a company can sell them, remains largely untested. Jenni's reaction is clear: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

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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/

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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 on stop working - and nobody says anything.

The first story is a personal essay from someone who confessed to spending an entire year at a software company doing no work - and never being found out. Her piece draws on David Graeber's concept of bullshit jobs - roles so pointless that even the person doing them cannot justify their existence - with Graeber estimating that 20 to 50% of all jobs fit that description.

Firstup have published some reports into employee engagement, surveying over 3,000 employees across corporate, manager, and hourly worker roles in both North America and the UK. The headline finding is that employee engagement scores look healthy on paper, but they are masking a significant and growing retention crisis. Nearly half of employees say they are engaged, and nearly half are also planning to leave within 12 months. The real question Chuck and Jenni discuss is what are the drivers behind why people stay if they aren’t engaged?

The third story, from Startups Magazine, is titled The Clarity Crisis: Why Your Culture Problem is Actually a Communication Problem. Its central argument is that what leaders diagnose as a culture problem is most often a communication problem, specifically a failure around clarity. It’s not new, but how does this knowledge start to have an impact with managers and leaders in the workplace?

The final story examines some return-to-office stats and trends for the USA. Only 27% of companies have returned to a fully in-person model, while 67% continue to offer some form of hybrid flexibility. Perhaps the most revealing statistic in the report: 25% of executives and 18% of HR professionals admit they hoped some employees would voluntarily leave because of an RTO policy - something Chuck calls out as weak.

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:

• (00:40) The US and UK special relationship
• (04:11) I did no work for a year and no one noticed
• (10:19) Firstup report on employee engagement
• (17:14) The clarity crisis: why your ‘culture’ problem is actually a communication problem
• (22:20) Essential Return-to-Office Statistics and Trends (2026) USA insights

Episode's official page: Half Feel Engaged Yet Plan to Leave: Bullshit Jobs, the Clarity Crisis and RTO as Stealth Layoffs

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