Culture Cracks and Communication Gaps

Jenni: Welcome to Frequency, I’m Jenni Field.

Chuck: And I’m Chuck Gose. Frequency is your go-to for real talk about comms, culture, and employee experience — beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. Great to be recording again — apologies for the lighting today, we’re recording early because I’m traveling later. Jenni, I wanted to bring something in at the start for once instead of saving it for my freak-out: it’s that time of year on LinkedIn when everyone starts posting “trends for 2026,” and we’re not even in 2026 yet. How can we have trends for a year that hasn’t started?

Jenni: Why do you hate it so much?

Chuck: Because they’re never actually trends — trends should be genuinely new and current, and these are things people have been doing forever, or they’re self-serving, where someone’s “trends” conveniently match exactly what they happen to sell.

Jenni: I haven’t seen this year’s crop yet, but I did a webinar with Workvivo last year on this exact topic and pointed out that according to everyone’s “trends” posts, there were supposedly over 35 trends for internal comms in 2025 — including things like email and video. That’s not how trends work.

Chuck: Exactly — nothing trendy about email. On the topic of trends, though — I saw Zapier is livestreaming a normally internal all-hands meeting publicly. Do you think this becomes an actual trend?

Jenni: No.

Chuck: I completely agree, I’m not buying it either. It’s a live session with the CEO and their chief people and AI transformation officer — this doesn’t feel like a genuine employee all-hands, it feels like a webinar wearing an all-hands costume to get people to sign up.

Jenni: And honestly, I have zero desire to watch someone else’s all-hands — it should be lost on me, because I don’t work there. Anyway, let’s get into what I’ve picked this week: America’s love-hate relationship with work, HR versus the rumor mill during layoffs, and some takeaways from the Gallagher Digital Experience Summit I attended this week in London. But first, “culture rot” — new research from Robert Walters says 82% of UK professionals believe culture rot has arrived or is starting to show in their office. Only 14% feel aligned with their company’s values, twice as many feel completely misaligned, and cost-cutting is named by 81% of employers as a major culprit weakening culture. I’m a big believer that alignment drives organizational success — but if only 14% feel aligned to their values, is the goal of alignment just too much of a stretch?

Chuck: I don’t think alignment itself is the stretch — what’s concerning is that specific number. If 86% of your employees say your stated values don’t match what they see every day, that’s a massive red flag: the values themselves are wrong. Someone made them up in a room somewhere because they sounded good — honesty, transparency, loyalty — words that don’t actually mean anything distinctive to that specific company. Companies absolutely can achieve alignment, and the simpler it is, the better: here are the three things we’re focused on this year. But when only a tiny fraction of employees feel aligned to the values themselves, that’s a serious problem.

Jenni: Can you actually achieve alignment around specific priorities if you don’t have alignment to the values underneath them?

Chuck: I think you can, actually, because if employees aren’t aligned to the values, the values are essentially irrelevant to them — they may not even know what they are. This connects to something we discussed before: the difference between engagement in your specific role versus engagement with the organization. Values alignment is organizational; “here’s what we need to deliver this quarter” is closer to job-level alignment. I think you can achieve the latter even without the former.

Jenni: I’m interested that this is UK-specific data, because I genuinely think values here often just end up on a wall and get forgotten, in a way I don’t see as much with US colleagues who feel real passion behind their organization’s stated principles.

Chuck: It’s a mishmash here too — companies that genuinely define and consistently use their values see real alignment, but a lot of companies’ values are generic enough to apply to any business and mean essentially nothing distinctive.

Jenni: A brand consultant once told me that if “honesty” is one of your values, you’re doing something wrong — it should just be a given, not something you have to call out.

Chuck: Agreed completely — if you have to state that as a value, what does that say about who you’re hiring?

Jenni: Next — an HCA Magazine piece on gossip beating HR to layoff announcements, based on a CareerMind LLC survey: over a third of both laid-off and remaining employees learned about redundancies through rumor before official channels, and trust dropped sharply among both groups as a result. Can internal comms ever actually keep up with the rumor mill?

Chuck: No — the rumor mill is undefeated. The opportunity is acknowledging it rather than confronting it: “we know you’ve heard this, here’s what’s true, here’s what isn’t.” The truly concerning part is when it’s something this serious — layoffs genuinely impacting people’s lives — being learned through rumor before an official announcement. That’s the real problem.

Jenni: I’ve seen situations where people take voluntary redundancy but the organization can’t officially confirm it because contracts and legal processes haven’t finished, even though it’s already circulating informally — that’s genuinely hard to recover from cleanly.

Chuck: I wonder if that’s a difference between our countries — in the US, companies often announce a layoff number before individuals know if they’re affected, which creates its own anxiety but at least sets expectations early.

Jenni: That is different — here, timing after a layoff decision can stretch out over weeks or months depending on negotiation, whereas it sounds much more immediate there.

Chuck: Often, yes — for a lot of companies, when that 8am meeting with your boss and HR appears on your calendar, that’s your last day. I think a real fix here is leaders and HR simply acting like adults about what’s circulating rather than pretending it isn’t happening — we’ve said before that how layoffs are communicated often doesn’t reflect the real impact on the people affected.

Jenni: It’s like we get so focused on completing the task of the layoff that we forget the human element inside it. Let me share some takeaways from the Gallagher Digital Experience Summit I attended this week. Mark Wright, founder of Simply Communicate, gave his final keynote before stepping down, and opened by saying AI will “hollow out” the company you work for and what you do for a living in internal communications — cheerful way to start day two. He also shared what humans can do that AI can’t: empathy, creativity, critical thinking, emotional ability, judgment. He predicted email will disappear, which I’ll come back to. I also attended a session on AI maturity, and a wonderful roundtable from Dr. Christine Shukis-Brown on linking intranet investment to reducing “digital stress” rather than trying to prove hard productivity numbers, since productivity itself is non-behavioral — what feels productive to me might not look productive to you. My question: if we’re only reading AI-generated summaries of email threads, do we lose context and nuance? Are we becoming more efficient, or just lazier? And why are we still obsessed with killing email?

Chuck: Email’s had a “death sentence” declared on it every two or three years for as long as I can remember, and it’s never actually died — it evolves, sure, the same way we still get a printed newspaper delivered. I don’t buy Mark’s prediction there, much as I respect him. On summaries specifically — I don’t think most internal email actually contains that much nuance to lose in the first place; it’s mostly short, functional exchanges. I actually think AI summaries help people prioritize and catch things that would otherwise slip through email’s poor project-management capabilities.

Jenni: And your thoughts on the digital-stress case study?

Chuck: I love the term “digital stress” — I recognize that frustration instantly from moments something in Canva just won’t cooperate. But stress is part of life generally, digital or otherwise, and I’m skeptical leaders would genuinely feel that pain the way she intended in her pitch exercise — if I’m imagining doing that with leaders I’ve worked for, I picture being laughed at.

Jenni: Fair — but her point was about making leaders understand the accumulation of small frustrations over time, like paper cuts that eventually become unbearable. She’s going to share the peer-reviewed research behind it, which I want to read, because I think it’s a real root cause behind a lot of the exhaustion we keep discussing.

Chuck: That connects to something that’s bothered communicators for ages — how much of the job is quietly built on workarounds, going from A to B via C, D, and E instead of straight there, and how much unrecognized mental load that creates.

Jenni: Exactly. My final piece today is Wall Street Journal reporting on Americans’ love-hate relationship with work, drawing on Sarah Damask’s research into quiet quitting — based on more than 70 interviews. She ties the shift toward “it’s just a job” to three pandemic-era ruptures: mass layoffs, essential workers required to work without clear safety protocols, and return-to-office mandates after remote work had already improved people’s lives. What does this shift mean for the role of internal comms and HR?

Chuck: I never personally experienced those three ruptures directly, but I’ve tried to understand them. I’m not sure why we view “just a job” so negatively, though — if someone does great work and genuinely likes what they do, “just a job” is fine; not everyone needs their identity tied to a company logo. For comms and HR, the job is recognizing that some people are fully engaged in the work itself without needing deep organizational attachment. The best summer job I ever had was on a GM factory line — the team did excellent work while chatting about their weekends the whole time, and the second the shift bell rang, they were completely done thinking about work until the next shift. That’s not a bad thing — that’s actually what the company wanted from that role.

Jenni: I think it’s also about recognizing what “just a job” looks like for different people. I was on a train recently and watched a woman working the entire ride home on a SWOT analysis, and I kept thinking — why does this need to happen right now, on the way home? I used to be that person too, but now I protect that decompression time deliberately. I don’t think there’s much that’s genuinely so urgent it needs doing on a train home, and I think that reflects the shift — needing a real boundary even when you technically can access work all the time.

Chuck: That’s the privilege of flexible work, though — she gets to choose when and what she works on. Maybe that hour on the train was exactly her own choice about how to use her time, not an imposed expectation.

Jenni: Fair — lots of variables we don’t know. Time for freak-outs — what’s yours this week?

Chuck: I wanted to keep today’s positive, so — I’ve been listening religiously to the podcast Pivot with Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher, and they’ve just gone on a live tour to cities like DC, Toronto, Chicago, and San Francisco. It got me wondering — could Frequency ever do that? Take our conversation and energy to a bigger stage beyond a single live episode at an event like Unite?

Jenni: I love that — I don’t see why not. Think about the conferences built around comms, culture, and employee experience; I think there’s real legs in a Frequency tour with live Q&A sessions.

Jenni: My freak-out is more balanced — you posted on LinkedIn asking people to share their own freak-outs, and one from Dove Martin said hers was “do we have too many comms books?” She claimed over 30 internal-comms-focused books have come out in just two years, and I asked to see the actual list. It included both of my books — but my first came out in 2021, not the last two years, and my second isn’t a comms book at all, it’s a leadership book. It also included Drive by Daniel Pink, which is about motivation, and culture books like Let’s Talk Culture. It made me think we need to be really intentional about what actually counts as an internal comms book versus a broader adjacent read on culture, neuroscience, or leadership.

Chuck: I was almost hoping there really were 30 dedicated comms books — that would mean a thriving field of people writing and building. But your point stands: comms professionals reading broadly across adjacent topics is a feature, not a confusion — you shouldn’t pigeonhole your reading to books with “comms” literally in the title.

Jenni: Books “internal comms adjacent,” then. That’s it for this week — thank you for joining us. 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, and we’re back every Monday with more news, insights, and opinions about comms, leadership, and workplaces today. Keep tuning in and turning up.