Chuck Gose and Jenni Field debate whether a viral “potty sheet” is really the gold standard of frontline communication, dig into AT&T’s dismissive response to employee feedback on return-to-office, weigh a UK council’s decision to turn a retiring employee into an AI chatbot, and unpack research on how perceived effort shapes trust in B2B marketing — and what that means for internal comms.
Chuck reacts to a LinkedIn post by Jen Becker describing a manufacturing client that settled on a paper flyer taped inside a bathroom stall as its most effective frontline channel. Chuck argues that while simplicity has real value, celebrating a “potty sheet” as the pinnacle of communication feels like giving up on innovation rather than solving a real problem. Jenni counters that her own frontline research shows notice boards succeed for similar reasons — employees can choose to engage with them — and argues the real lesson is to nail the simple foundations before chasing shinier tools.
Discussing reporting from Business Insider on AT&T CEO John Stankey’s response to a return-to-office employee survey, Chuck and Jenni agree the real failure was asking for feedback the company had no intention of acting on. Jenni references her own past writing on the principle “if you don’t care about me, why should I care about you,” and Chuck cites a colleague’s rule of thumb — “only ask what you can act upon” — as the standard AT&T’s leadership failed to meet.
Jenni is genuinely enthusiastic about an HR Grapevine story describing how a UK city council trained an AI chatbot on a retiring employee’s years of institutional knowledge to support colleagues after she leaves. Chuck raises questions about what happens as more employees retire and whether this approach can really scale, while both hosts agree it raises real questions about legacy, ethics, and what such a chatbot is actually trained on.
Chuck walks through findings from Marketing Week on two behavioral biases — the “illusion of effort,” where audiences trust identical content more when they believe more effort went into it, and the “red sneakers effect,” where people who break dress-code norms are often rated as more competent and trustworthy. Chuck argues both effects apply directly inside organizations: employees can sense when communication was rushed versus genuinely crafted, and leaders who allow themselves to be authentically different may earn more trust, not less.
Jenni closes the show sharing a personal deep dive into Gallup’s U.S. employee engagement data going back to 2000, discovering it has never exceeded roughly 36% in 25 years. She and Chuck debate whether engagement is simply the wrong metric for organizational health, drawing a comparison to how economists interpret unemployment rates.
Is a simple, low-tech “potty sheet” really the gold standard for frontline communication? It has real value but shouldn’t be celebrated as the pinnacle, in Chuck’s view — a LinkedIn post from Jen Becker described a manufacturing client whose most effective frontline channel was a flyer taped inside a bathroom stall. Jenni counters that her own frontline research shows notice boards succeed for similar reasons — employees can choose to engage — and argues the lesson is to nail simple foundations before chasing shinier tools.
What went wrong with AT&T’s response to its return-to-office employee survey? The real failure, Chuck and Jenni agree, was asking employees for feedback the company had no intention of acting on — echoing the principle that “if you don’t care about me, why should I care about you,” and a colleague’s rule of thumb that you should “only ask what you can act upon.”
Should organizations turn retiring employees’ institutional knowledge into AI chatbots? It’s a genuinely promising approach, in Jenni’s view — an HR Grapevine story describes a UK city council training an AI chatbot on a retiring employee’s years of institutional knowledge to support colleagues after she leaves — though Chuck raises open questions about whether the approach can really scale as more employees retire, and both hosts flag real questions about legacy, ethics, and what such a chatbot is actually trained on.
How does perceived effort change how much people trust a piece of communication? Significantly — Marketing Week research on the “illusion of effort” shows audiences trust identical content more when they believe more effort went into it, and the “red sneakers effect” shows people who break dress-code norms are often rated as more competent and trustworthy. Chuck argues both apply inside organizations: employees can sense rushed versus genuinely crafted communication.
Has U.S. employee engagement ever actually been high, according to 25 years of Gallup data? No — Jenni’s own deep dive into Gallup’s U.S. employee engagement data back to 2000 found it has never exceeded roughly 36% in 25 years, prompting her and Chuck to debate whether engagement is simply the wrong metric for organizational health altogether.
Chuck: Welcome to Frequency. I’m Chuck Gose.
Jenni: I’m Jenni Field. Frequency is your go-to for real talk about comms, culture and employee experience — beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. To kick us off, Chuck, I want to ask you a question I heard used to open a client team meeting this week: share a song that represents your mood right now. We haven’t prepped this.
Chuck: You know what, I’ve got one — this’ll be a good lead into my freak-out later. “Imitation of Life” by R.E.M. What about you?
Jenni: “The Dog Days Are Over” by Florence and the Machine. I feel quite uplifted at the moment — some of that’s from a surprise visit I made this week to my best friend Advita, who lives four hours away by train, along with my other best friend Trudy. We just popped in for lunch because she was feeling a bit flat. It reminded me both of the flexibility I have to work from a train for the day, which not everyone has, and the joy of doing something spontaneous instead of the same routine.
Chuck: That’s a solid eight-hour round trip — very kind of you both.
Jenni: I left the house at half six in the morning and got home at half seven at night. Long day, but worth it. What are your articles this week?
Chuck: Before our first story — a reminder that sometimes the simplest comms are the most effective, or are they? The rest of the episode heads in the opposite direction: how AT&T’s CEO responded to employee feedback on RTO, how a UK council turned a retiring employee into an AI chatbot, and what internal comms can learn from the surprising power of perceived effort in B2B marketing. First, simplicity. Jen Becker shared a LinkedIn post about a manufacturing client where, after considering every high-tech option, the clear winner for communication was a “potty sheet” — a paper flyer taped inside a bathroom stall door. She argues it was simple, effective, and memorable. I get the instinct, and I’m very pro-print, very pro-frontline — but treating a toilet-stall flyer as the gold standard feels like giving up on innovation rather than solving the actual problem. Who’s maintaining these sheets? What happens when the message changes or it gets torn down? Jenni, where do you land?
Jenni: The message of simplicity is right, even if the “potty sheet” itself — said in my poshest British accent — is probably LinkedIn bait. In my own research with frontline and deskless workers, notice boards consistently perform well for similar reasons: employees can choose to engage with them, and it feels more personal than corporate noise. I don’t think we should chase shiny tools before getting the simple foundations right, but I’ll try not to say “potty sheet” too many more times.
Chuck: I don’t think this was staged to bait a reaction — I think it’s a genuine effort, and sometimes you go with what works for your organization. But I genuinely wonder whose job it is to maintain these, going into every bathroom in a facility. We know from the Unilever/ScreenCloud research that it can take days for information to trickle down as it is — this seems impractical to sustain, and I don’t love that we’re celebrating it as some kind of innovation ceiling.
Jenni: Someone’s going to put small digital screens on the backs of toilet doors next.
Chuck: Nobody’s making that investment. If we’re talking about the real value of print, I just don’t think that particular location is where it belongs.
Jenni: Speaking of dismissiveness — great segue, actually. AT&T recently surveyed employees on its return-to-office policy. The results were clearly negative, but instead of acknowledging that, CEO John Stankey sent a follow-up email suggesting employees had misunderstood the policy’s intent — essentially rejecting the feedback outright. What’s your take, and what’s the long-term cost of leadership disregarding sentiment like this?
Chuck: If you’re going to ask for feedback, you have to actually want to do something with it. I don’t know what outcome they were hoping for here — telling people “you’ve misunderstood” isn’t leading with empathy. The cost is trust, and trust doesn’t only erode instantly; it’s usually chipped away by small moments like this over time. I wrote a blog years ago called “If you don’t care about me, why should I care about you,” and this is exactly that dynamic.
Jenni: My hunch is confirmation bias — they went looking for data to validate a decision they’d already made to bring people back five days a week, and when they didn’t get it, they just discounted the feedback. A colleague of mine, Julia Marcus, has a great line: “only ask what you can act upon.” AT&T didn’t meet that bar here — employees said clearly they didn’t like the approach, and leadership just said “whatever” in effect.
Chuck: When I worked in-house, we actually stopped running an employee survey for about four years at one point, because we knew the real issues were outside our control. I’m not saying that was right, but “only survey what you can act on” does hold up as a principle. I can’t fathom the intended outcome of AT&T’s approach here — it just seems designed to frustrate people further.
Chuck: Moving to your neck of the woods — a UK city council took a novel approach to institutional knowledge loss: they turned a retiring employee into an AI-powered chatbot, trained on her years of experience and documentation, to keep answering colleagues’ questions after she leaves. Does this respect the human side of work, or reduce someone’s legacy to a database?
Jenni: I genuinely love this. Traditionally, decades of institutional knowledge either get lost entirely or crammed into handover documents that can’t capture everything. Preserving that with technology is clever — I believe they nicknamed the chatbot after the retiring employee. I’d do something similar for my own website in a heartbeat, letting people query my blogs and podcast content directly. It’s a richer search experience and, I think, a nice form of legacy.
Chuck: What happens with the next retiring employee, and the one after that? Is there just one chatbot forever?
Jenni: Fair point — do we end up with “Hey Bob,” “Hey Frank,” “Hey Sandra” for everyone eventually? Maybe there’s a threshold, like 30 years of service. But the underlying goal — not losing that knowledge when someone leaves — is one organizations have grappled with forever, so I still think it’s a smart application, even with open questions about scale.
Chuck: I’m curious what exactly the chatbot was trained on. I’ve seen this issue elsewhere too — some authors and public figures are now contracting to protect their own likeness from unauthorized AI impersonations. We’ve all also used a bad AI customer-service chatbot on a website, and that’s not the experience anyone wants.
Jenni: Definitely not — I end up repeating “I want to talk to a human” into the phone until it gives in.
Chuck: To wrap up — maybe my favorite story this week. Marketing Week explored hidden biases in B2B marketing, starting with the “illusion of effort”: the same ad was shown to three groups, told it was made by AI in ten minutes, by an agency in a week, or through three months of agency-and-origami-artist collaboration. Trust in the brand rose from 38% to 59% purely based on perceived effort, with similar jumps in perceived creativity and innovation. A second bias, the “red sneakers effect,” found a casually dressed speaker at a cybersecurity conference was rated 43% higher on trust, innovation, and competence than someone in traditional business attire. Why does this matter for internal comms?
Jenni: This resonates with conversations I’m having right now with leadership teams about how much time to spend preparing for town halls and all-staff meetings — most start prepping about a week out when I think it needs to start six weeks out. Even if you think the lack of prep won’t show, it will — in the handoffs, the confidence answering questions, all of it. Employees deserve at least the same preparation you’d give an investor briefing. The effort data is fascinating because it quantifies exactly the trust dynamic we talk about constantly in internal comms — I just don’t yet know how you communicate “we put in real effort” without it sounding like boasting.
Chuck: I don’t have a clean answer either — I see communicators swing to both extremes, underplaying real effort or performing “busy, busy, busy” in a way that doesn’t ring true. On the red-sneakers effect, we’ve talked before about how most employees don’t feel they can be themselves at work — this data suggests being authentically yourself, while still respecting norms, actually builds more trust and respect, not less. Though I’d caution against staging authenticity that isn’t real — if a leader’s normally buttoned-up and someone dresses them down for effect, that reads as inauthentic in the same way a rushed ad does.
Jenni: This also speaks to a bigger trust conversation. I don’t think most organizations are treating trust as an integrated strategy — it’s often treated as a one-off initiative rather than a coordinated set of touchpoints, and this research shows there’s a lot more to it than words and slide decks alone.
Chuck: That wraps this week’s articles. What’s your freak-out?
Jenni: I posted some recent Gallup Q2 U.S. engagement data on LinkedIn today, and someone commented that the numbers were “dismal but not surprising.” That sent me down a rabbit hole checking how far back the data goes — engagement started around 26% in 2000, peaked at 36% in 2020, and sits around 31% now. It’s never exceeded roughly 36% in 25 years. If it’s never been meaningfully higher than that, at what point do we accept that’s just where the aggregate measure sits, rather than treating each year’s number as a fresh crisis?
Chuck: I’ve accepted it. I think there’s an assumption that employees should default to “engaged,” when maybe we should expect the opposite and build deliberate ways to engage them instead — similar to how we’ve had too narrow a view of trust. Is this like an unemployment rate, where a healthy range isn’t zero, and a slight tick up or down is normal unless there’s an external shock?
Jenni: I’ve clearly got more digging to do on this — but I think engagement, as commonly measured, might just be the wrong metric for organizational health altogether.
Chuck: What gets measured gets managed — organizations report the numbers that let them hit whatever target they’ve set.
Jenni: And if the honest number’s 40%, but nothing changes as a result, why measure it at all? On a much lighter note to close — my other freak-out is about a “crab mentality” illustration Chuck sent me this week, about how crabs in a bowl pull down any crab that tries to climb out. Chuck, tell them yours.
Chuck: I’d been feeling uninspired for a few days, until that illustration reframed LinkedIn for me as a bit of a bowl — some of us trying to climb out and elevate the conversation, with other crabs pulling us back down. Might be time for a bit of a connections trim.
Jenni: I saw a post the other day that just said “you are not a failure,” and thought — I don’t need that in my morning feed either. Definitely time for some pruning.
Chuck: Thank you all for joining us this week. All the articles that inspired this conversation are in the show notes — rate and review after you’ve listened, subscribe so you don’t miss an episode, and pass this along to someone who’d enjoy it; find us on YouTube too. 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 comms and leadership in workplaces today. Keep tuning in and turning up.
Chuck is a US-based internal communications strategist and the founder of ICology – a community and resource hub for IC professionals. He brings a practitioner lens to every conversation. Chuck is a recognised voice in the industry, a regular speaker and event host, and one of the most connected people in the North American IC world.
Jenni is a UK-based leadership and internal communications consultant, author of two best-selling books, and international speaker. She runs Redefining Communications, a consultancy working with organisations around the world to help them communicate better and close the gap between what leaders say and what employees experience.
