Presence, Productivity & Powerful Storytelling

Chuck: Welcome to Frequency, I’m Chuck Gose.

Jenni: And I’m Jenni Field.

Chuck: Frequency is your go-to for real talk about comms, culture, and employee experience, beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. Jenni, here’s what matters to me today — this is the first time we’re recording where one of us isn’t in our home office. I’m in Charlotte, North Carolina, for the ScreenCloud Summit, and I mentioned before we hit record that whenever I’m working out of a hotel, I end up rearranging the furniture — moving desks, moving chairs, I haven’t moved a bed yet, but I wouldn’t put it past me, because you’ve got to get the good light. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you’re looking at very bland wallpaper, but that’s better than seeing an actual hotel room. It got me thinking, though — what are your habits with hotel housekeeping? Are you someone who wants housekeeping in every day, fresh towels, made bed, or is it “stay out of my room”?

Jenni: If I’m given the choice, stay out of my room — I’m usually only there a couple of nights, and even though they say hang the towel to reuse it, they always take it anyway. I don’t need a fresh towel every day at home, so I don’t need one in a hotel either.

Chuck: I think that’s one of the genuine positives out of the pandemic — that realization. My limit is maybe four or five days before a room needs a refresh; past the three-day mark, it’s nice to have a made bed, even though I don’t think I’ve ever actually made a hotel bed myself despite making my own every day. The reason I was thinking about travel habits is that within about a month I’ll be in Canada three separate times, one of them for IABC World Conference in Vancouver in June. I’m hearing from a few Americans — people for whom this has genuinely never come up before — that they’re skipping international travel because of the hassle at the border now. I’m curious what that does to attendance at World Conference this year.

Jenni: I’m excited for the WhatsApp update once you’re there to hear what attendance looks like. People do seem nervous about US travel specifically, but I actually know more people from the UK going to World Conference this year than went in 2019, when I first attended — including several first-timers who don’t seem worried at all. So maybe you’ll see a bigger European contingent and a smaller US one this year.

Chuck: Canada has an interesting relationship with the UK — gets to pick the best of both worlds, in a way. But yes, a couple of people told me they’d originally planned to go from the US and decided it’s just not worth the hassle — stories about phone searches at the border, which I believe have some truth to them, especially for people whose US passport doesn’t reflect their native birth country. That unease is completely understandable.

Jenni: There’s been some similar chatter linked to the World Cup, actually — messaging telling visitors to make sure they go home afterward, which made me laugh when I heard it this week. It’s important we go by people’s actual experiences rather than just what we’re hearing in the news, so I’ll be interested to hear from people I know attending different events this year.

Chuck: Let’s get into this week’s stories.

Jenni: I’ve got quite a few this week, and fair warning, I had to message Chuck ahead of time to say I was going to ramble a bit — this is a bit of a soapbox episode for me. I want to talk about satisfaction, about whether storytelling’s having a resurgence, about the endless “what does internal comms actually do” question, and really dig into return-to-office. First — satisfaction. Last week my freak-out was the book Build the Life You Want by Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey, and I shared some of its content on LinkedIn this week — I’ll link it in the show notes. They describe the “macronutrients of happiness” as enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Enjoyment isn’t pleasure — it takes the urge for pleasure and adds communion and consciousness to it; their example is a Thanksgiving dinner, which brings pleasure because it tastes good, but enjoyment because you share it with people and make a memory. Satisfaction is the thrill of accomplishing something you’ve worked toward — you have to strive for it, and you won’t feel satisfied unless there’s been some sacrifice involved. Purpose is the piece most people say matters most — without it, we’re a bit lost when facing life’s challenges. This got me thinking about employee satisfaction rather than employee engagement — we’ve talked before about engagement possibly being a misdirection, and Gallup’s engagement numbers have trended downward for years. Are we measuring the wrong thing? Setting aside that organizations aren’t responsible for anyone’s happiness — which of these components do you think is actually driving engagement’s downward trend, if any?

Chuck: I love your brain having a great time, Jenni, and I was looking forward to this soapbox. Reading through it, I had a slightly different read on some of these words — satisfaction having an element of suffering baked in doesn’t sound very enjoyable, which is its own separate thing. Should companies look at employee satisfaction? Sure. But my gut reaction to “satisfaction” is that it’s not very aspirational — it’s basically just the baseline, the opposite of dissatisfied. That said, flip the lens: for the vast majority of frontline employees, if satisfaction was the ceiling of what work offered, they’d probably be thrilled. So maybe that’s the goal for a lot of employees, even if for others we want environments that go further than simple satisfaction.

Jenni: So are we actually aspiring to engagement, or is engagement the “mid” option here? I don’t know why companies want engagement specifically, or what they think it delivers — I think they just know they want it, the way you want people engaged in any community you’re building. But going back to something we’ve said before, when employees aren’t engaged, we tend to demonize them for it rather than asking why, as if something’s automatically wrong with them.

Jenni: As we’re talking, I’m realizing — to be “engaged” is to be engaged in something else. You’re asking me, as an employee, to be engaged in the organization. Satisfaction is about my own needs being met in the work I’m doing, which is completely different, and it’s always felt hard to influence engagement directly because it depends on so many different factors, whereas satisfaction — if it comes from having worked hard toward something and accomplished it — is much more directly within reach, and it matters if you actually want me happy at work, which is presumably the point of engagement in the first place. I could talk about this all day, but I want to get to return-to-office. We talked about this a bit last week, and the data increasingly shows hybrid winning that argument, but there was a Forbes article this week arguing RTO isn’t really about productivity, it’s about power — “the uncomfortable truth is the return-to-office debate isn’t about work, it’s about trust.” There’s some truth in that, but after sitting with this for weeks, months, maybe years, I’ve landed on this: RTO is the new poster. Years ago, whenever an organization needed to communicate anything, the answer was always “we need a poster” — and RTO has become that reflexive, one-size-fits-all solution for whatever’s actually wrong at work.

Jenni: If you break down what people are actually saying — first, trust isn’t one-directional. It can’t be framed as “leaders don’t trust employees,” because trust has to be built together, and this constant framing of leaders versus employees isn’t helpful for the relationship either. But something clearly isn’t working — whether it’s culture not showing up properly, misaligned behaviors, missed numbers, or people calling in sick — there’s always a root cause, and organizations don’t make significant changes like this unless something’s broken. So the real question should be: what’s broken, and what is RTO actually meant to solve? If leadership can have that honest conversation first, the right solution follows. For me, the deeper root goes back to something I wrote in 2021 about what I called “the pandemic revolution” — work fundamentally needs to be fluid, and the Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five construct doesn’t fit how most knowledge work actually happens anymore, even though the schedule itself hasn’t caught up. What do you think is really going on underneath the RTO mandates?

Chuck: I’ll quote the great American poet Taylor Swift: band-aids don’t fix bullet holes. There are real problems inside these companies, and I think leaders believe RTO is the band-aid that cures all of it — they’re romanticizing the old way of working as something that was actually working, without recognizing it wasn’t working for a lot of people. From the employee side, remote and hybrid genuinely are working — going back to your satisfaction point, a lot of people are satisfied with the flexibility. So I do think it’s absolutely a control issue. I saw an interview with the Uber CEO on CNBC insisting people can’t be productive outside the office — from a company that completely reinvented how people move around cities, still falling back on “you have to be in the office to be productive.” That’s control. Employees are ignoring how well remote and hybrid work for a lot of people, and leadership is reaching for what it can control: you’re an employee, you work for us, you’ll be here from this time to this time, or else. The “or else” is what bothers me most — when a reporter asked that Uber CEO what remote employees are supposed to do, his answer was essentially “keep working for us or leave,” which is the opposite of everything companies say about retention. It’s like grounding your kids for no reason — “we didn’t do anything wrong, this was all working fine” — and suddenly there’s a curfew.

Jenni: I don’t disagree with organizations taking a stand on culture if they’ve got real reasoning behind it — that’s fine, as long as they consider the impact on people, especially if they hired someone under one arrangement and are now changing the terms; that’s messy and unfair. But you said something about productivity that’s the real issue for me — we can’t actually define productivity for knowledge workers. I’ve read a lot on this, because it’s central to the RTO debate, and you can find data supporting “more productive at home” and “more productive in office” equally. But nobody’s defined what “productive” even means in this context. We’re still stuck in a “more equals more productive” mindset, when more isn’t automatically better — knowledge work involves thinking time and space that isn’t about churning out more reports. Until an organization defines what productivity actually means for them, the argument doesn’t hold up. If someone tells me they’re more productive in the office, my question back is: what does productivity look like to you?

Chuck: I think organizations also treat this like a zero-sum game, which we know it isn’t — one person’s ideal productivity setup is another person’s worst, and someone might thrive in the office five days a week while someone else needs Tuesday through Thursday and struggles on Mondays and Fridays, and someone living hours away might not make sense in an office at all. It comes down to employee choice and what’s best for them — and isn’t that what employers should want in the first place?

Jenni: I think you have to balance what’s best for the individual against what’s best for the organization as a whole — organizations are people, but you can’t tailor to every single person’s individual needs across a workforce of thousands. That’s not realistic.

Chuck: I actually think you can. I genuinely think there are ways to do it — we know one blanket rule can’t cover everyone, life doesn’t work that way. The elements of control just make “everyone’s in the office” the easy answer. The hard work is actually caring about what’s genuinely best for your people, which, in my opinion, is exactly what leaders should be doing.

Jenni: I don’t disagree that they should — I just think there has to be compromise on both sides.

Chuck: And that’s exactly my issue with “everyone back in the office five days a week” — there’s zero compromise built into that at all. All right — next topic, and I could have found a dozen articles on this in the last week alone: what do you actually do, if you work in internal comms? It’s a conversation I’ve watched play out on LinkedIn and in Substacks for what feels like decades — people trying to define the role of internal comms in a way leaders and the rest of the organization will actually understand. Is this a genuinely unresolved issue, or is it internal comms talking to itself in an echo chamber while everyone else just cares whether the work gets delivered?

Chuck: I wonder what the actual end game is here. What are we doing to ourselves? If LinkedIn added an eye-roll emoji reaction, I would use it on every single “woe is us, nobody understands us” post in this genre — and here’s the thing, it’s not unique to comms. I’ve seen the identical post from marketing people, saying nobody understands what it’s really like to work in marketing, and from HR, saying the same thing. Of course nobody outside those functions fully understands them — I don’t understand what it’s like to be an engineer either, but engineers aren’t running “woe is us” campaigns about it. I don’t know what the goal is here, and I’m honestly exhausted by the constant reflection on who we are and what we mean to people. Just do the work. People figure it out from the work. Constantly relitigating this doesn’t help — it actively hurts, and there’s a strange camaraderie in that self-doubt that I want no part of.

Jenni: This comes back to root cause for me — what’s the actual outcome we’re trying to achieve? I saw a post from someone doing a PhD on the PR profession more broadly, who said it’s “a profession that doesn’t want to learn,” and that landed for me. Not everyone, but there’s a pattern of people staying in this echo chamber of complaint without taking the action that would actually improve things — and there’s so much available to help people get better at this. Where you report into is out of your control, and I’ve reported into marketing, HR, commercial, the CEO — it made no difference. What you can control is how you show up and improve your own work, rather than posting that nobody’s listening.

Chuck: I want to see people leading the conversation instead — where are we taking this? It reminds me of a very early ICology podcast episode with Heather Wagner, a former colleague of mine from Rolls-Royce, who’d also worked at the BBC, Apple, and Warner Brothers. Her advice, paraphrasing, was: never wait for someone else to invest in you. If you want to grow, invest in yourself — don’t wait on a training budget that may or may not materialize. I have a theory that I could walk into any comms conference and tell you who paid their own way versus whose company paid for them — the company-paid attendees tend to disappear, not taking notes, not engaged, while the self-funded ones are completely dialed in, because it’s their money and their time. A director of accounting at one company does a completely different job than a director of accounting somewhere else, and we somehow expect there to be one rock-solid definition of internal comms when that expectation doesn’t exist anywhere else in business. Let’s stop trying to pin the definition down and instead put the energy into leading into new territory.

Jenni: That deserves a round of applause on a stage. Last thing I want to cover: storytelling. It’s come up for years in internal comms — I used to teach it — but there was a recent article on the future of internal comms asking whether business storytelling is a genuine game-changer, and separately, I had breakfast with someone who’d organized a networking event built entirely around five-minute personal stories from attendees, just to spark conversation. It made me wonder if storytelling’s having a resurgence — it didn’t make any of this year’s internal comms trend lists, which I guess means it doesn’t count. But is it something that’s always mattered to you, or does it feel like it’s coming back?

Chuck: I guess that means it doesn’t count. Scott Galloway, a professor and podcast regular, calls storytelling the number-one business skill, and I think this could be communicators’ superpower, especially in the conversation about AI as a threat — AI still isn’t very good at storytelling. Maybe it will be eventually, but right now it isn’t. The question is how we build that muscle deliberately. Back in March, ICology hosted a session with Greg Monaco on perfecting your pitch — and internal communicators pitch things constantly, even if they don’t think of it that way. All those LinkedIn complaints we just talked about? That’s a bad story. Nobody wants to hear “woe is us.” Pitch your strengths, pitch what you do — when people ask me what ICology is, I don’t say “it’s a podcast,” I tell a story, and it means more to people. Communicators can lead here, because we already know people remember stories better than data points — we just need to build that muscle and coach each other on it. I don’t want to call it a trend, because trends fade, but I think it deserves fresh oxygen.

Jenni: As you were talking about storytelling, it made me think about creativity as the broader skill underneath it. Creativity’s been a huge theme at my Comms Reboot events since the pandemic — a massive group wanted to discuss it at my first one in Birmingham in 2022, and again in London in 2024. I think creativity and storytelling are really the same thing, just described with different language — task-focused to-do lists are what’s crowding out the time and space needed for either.

Chuck: As a profession we say we want to bring more value to the conversation, but we also say we don’t want to just be order-takers — though sometimes you do have to take orders, we’re all employees. If your to-do list only has tasks on it, “be creative” never makes the cut, because it doesn’t look like a task. My knee-jerk response whenever someone tells me they’re “not creative” is to send them the Adobe Creative Types quiz — it identifies your creative strengths and weaknesses, and who you pair best with. One of my types is “visionary” — big ideas, but weak on execution without help, which is partly why I love collaboration and partly why this podcast exists. Everybody is creative; I don’t love it when people insist they’re not. Creativity isn’t a to-do list item, it’s the extra element you bring, and the return on it is exponential, even if it scares some people who aren’t naturally drawn to creative risk.

Jenni: Can we put a link to that creativity quiz in the show notes? I’m going to take it. The biggest thing I’m taking from today, before we get to freak-outs, is intentionality — getting to the root cause of things, and being deliberate with our time and mindset so we can actually take action. That’s what’s staying with me.

Chuck: Time is another construct we criticize leaders for — “I don’t have time,” “it’s not a priority” — but we do the same thing ourselves, so it’s a bit hypocritical of all of us. That’s another post I want the eye-roll emoji for: people talking about “humanizing leaders.” What have we done to them to make them seem inhuman in the first place? Can we retire that phrase? All right — what am I freaking out about this week: a stat I saw about how many people around the world use a Meta product. Something like three and a half billion people use a Meta product every single day — Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram. That’s somewhere between 40 and 50% of the entire world’s population using at least one of their products daily, and if you exclude people without reasonable internet access, infants, and so on, that number jumps closer to 70% of the eligible population. That genuinely blew me away, thinking about the power and influence a small number of tech companies have — and I’m one of the 3.5 billion myself, since I use WhatsApp and Instagram, even though I don’t use Facebook.

Jenni: Yeah, that’s slightly terrifying. Mine’s in a similar vein — I was listening to a podcast this week about fitness for women who are pre- or post-menopausal, and one of the hosts said something that’s stuck with me well beyond nutrition: if you’re basing your decisions on short-form content — Reels, Instagram posts — it’s not going to be nuanced or rich enough to be reliably accurate, because it’s built from sound bites cut and shaped to deliver a certain message. I read a lot, I listen to podcasts and audiobooks, and I do spend time on Instagram, but I think I spend more time in long-form spaces overall — and I wonder how many people, given those enormous platform numbers, are making genuinely big life decisions based on short clips that have been edited to push a particular message, which feeds distrust and dehumanization more broadly. It made me reflective about the value of long-form, well-researched content for actually helping people make decisions in any part of their life.

Chuck: It would probably be frightening to know how many long-term, impactful decisions people have made based on a single TikTok video — which reminds me of the actual weekly pain of wanting to send you something on TikTok and remembering you’re not on it, so I have to go hunting for it on Instagram or YouTube instead, and sometimes I just give up. I saw that Uber CEO interview I mentioned earlier on TikTok originally, and couldn’t find it anywhere else, so I just talked about it instead of sending you the clip. I think short clips work as a teaser or appetizer for a lot of people, and some people want the full meal after that, and others are fine stopping there. It’s probably frightening how many people stop there, but it also opens people to perspectives they’d never have found otherwise if all they consumed was long-form — nobody’s got three-plus hours for a Joe Rogan episode by default. There are pluses and minuses, but the real risk is making a big decision off a snippet you never went back to validate.

Jenni: Yeah — staying curious enough to go find out more before you act on it is the important part. And you can still send me TikToks, I’ll just go find them somewhere else — send them anyway.

Chuck: Deal — I’ll send the link and leave it to you to track down the original. That’s it for this week. Thank you so much for joining us. All the articles that inspired this conversation are in the show notes, so don’t forget to check those out, and please rate and review after you’ve listened. Subscribe so you don’t miss another episode, and pass this along to someone you think would enjoy listening or watching, because you can find us on YouTube. Thank you to Poet Ali for contributing the music to the show. We’ll be back next week with more news, insights, and opinions about everything comms and leadership in the workplace today. Keep tuning in and keep turning up.