Gallup has 49% of US workers saying they have never used AI at work — never, not rarely — while Gartner predicts that by 2028, 75% of employees will rely on chatbots for internal communications. Jenni’s response to holding those two numbers next to each other is a laugh over her cup of tea, because she is still talking to organizations running fifteen SharePoint sites that cannot talk to one another. Around that sit two stories about leadership doing the harder thing: IBM tripling entry-level hiring by rewriting junior roles rather than cutting them, and Korn Ferry’s finding that Friday office attendance has collapsed to 12.4% even at companies that mandated five days back — which Chuck reframes as a leadership engagement problem, not an employee one.
Chuck opens on Axios reporting that IBM plans to triple entry-level hiring, which runs directly against warnings from Dario Amodei to Jim Farley that AI will gut junior roles. IBM’s CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux told a conference that AI can do most of the entry-level jobs of two or three years ago, so instead of cutting those roles IBM rewrote every one of them: junior developers who spent 34 hours a week coding now work on marketing, client work and building new products. Her argument is a pipeline argument rather than a moral one — skip entry-level hiring now and in three to five years you are poaching mid-level people at a 30% premium who do not know your culture and cost more to bring up to speed — and a 2023 study found AI helps train junior employees faster and reduces turnover. Dropbox is expanding new graduate programs by 25% on similar reasoning. Jenni does not think the jobs warning was overstated; what she likes is that someone reimagined the junior role rather than treating AI as one-in, one-out. Her comparison is the pandemic, when organizations lifted and shifted office work into the home without asking what the change made possible, a habit she says has run for decades. Taking someone doing job A and training them into job B is the work, because relationship building is not going away and a job is not just a set of tasks. Chuck’s admiration is for the leadership: it is easy and commonplace for companies to copy each other rather than pause and ask what is right for their own business, and IBM — the company nobody was fired for buying in the seventies and eighties, and which has since faded from tech’s attention while quietly still running — decided to grow its own employee base instead. Jenni’s closing note is that this is nurturing talent, and the service element of leadership showing up in a hiring plan.
Gallup’s Q4 data on AI use in the workplace reports 49% of US workers saying they never use AI at work — never, not rarely — with daily users at 12% and frequent users at 26%. Overall adoption has flattened and the growth comes entirely from existing users using it more, splitting the workforce into a quarter compounding an advantage every week and a half that has not started. The sector gaps run from 77% total use in tech to 33% in retail, and 69% of leaders use AI against 40% of individual contributors. Gallup’s finding on the top barrier is the one both hosts sit with: it is not fear or resistance, it is that people cannot see how AI applies to what they actually do. Jenni treats that as ordinary human behavior — without a frame of reference anything is hard, which is why her niece failed her first driving test and passed the second — and argues the examples that would let people picture a roadmap simply are not there yet, beyond personas, copy and analysis. Chuck connects it back to his recipe analogy from a previous episode: people are looking at a pantry shelf with no idea where to start, and that is a training and leadership problem. He is not shocked by the 49%, given the range of jobs that exist, and points out many of those people are benefiting from AI without using it. Jenni takes that distinction further — retail at 33% is unsurprising for deskless, frontline work, but the question is whether the operation behind them has got slicker, and she would like to see a report on the benefits employees get rather than another usage count. The segment closes on a critical note about Gallup itself: the pair are disappointed the firm has stopped running presidential approval polls, and Jenni’s point is that whatever the internal reasoning, the timing loads the decision with meaning it cannot shake off.
Gartner’s top communications predictions for 2026 lead with the claim that by 2028, 75% of employees will rely on chatbots for internal communications — which taken at face value gives the all-staff email, the town hall and the intranet banner about two years to live, an aggressive call to make in the same week as Gallup’s finding that half the workforce has not started using AI at all. The predictions also have comms teams analyzing employee digital footprints to personalize messaging, and data and analytics spending doubling from 2.9% to 6% of the comms budget, still small against the 47% of CCOs who admit they cannot prove their function’s impact. Chuck’s objection to the personalization prediction is that the best companies are already doing it. Jenni laughed out loud at the chatbot number, because she is still having conversations with clients running fifteen SharePoint sites on fifteen servers after mergers and acquisitions that cannot be allowed to talk to each other, and with people whose HR information system will not plug into the intranet — so a two-year path to chatbot-dependent internal comms is not grounded in the IT, comms and HR world either host recognizes. Chuck offers the generous reading: perhaps chatbots will simply be made available to 75% of employees, and perhaps a chat layer is what finally connects those disparate systems upward. The word both stall on is rely — whether people rely on it because it is valuable or because nothing else is left. Jenni’s larger worry is the absence of humanity in the whole set, running against the year’s own rehumanization theme: predict a world where two thirds of work can be done by computers and people will hate it, because work is relationships and conversations and meaning. Chuck’s uncomfortable counter is that some leaders may want exactly that. The data point Jenni thinks deserved more attention is that for the second year running, misinformation and disinformation ranked as the top global risk over the next two years in the World Economic Forum’s assessment, which she reads as a live skills gap for communicators.
Korn Ferry’s It’s Friday: Hello, Anyone There? cites Placer.ai data putting Fridays at 12.4% of in-office visits against 24.3% on Tuesdays and 23.7% on Wednesdays — half the midweek attendance, and happening at companies that issued five-day return-to-office mandates. The people who do come in report spending the day in video meetings anyway, and Korn Ferry’s Renee Whalen says managers are counting swipes rather than looking at what their people are doing. Nobody in the piece makes a case for why Friday specifically matters. Asked to put on a CEO hat and sell the office, Jenni declines on the grounds that Chuck is not for turning, then makes the more useful argument: Fridays have always been quiet, and her own London years involved a standing work-from-home Friday after a ninety-minute commute, until it became enough of a running joke that she moved her day. Her question of the research is whether anyone measured this before the pandemic, because 12.4% may well have been the number then too — and without that comparison nobody can say whether it is good, bad or indifferent. What she does want is a reason and an output conversation: if the ask is six days in the office a month, what happens on those days, is the whole team in, are people doing something together? Chuck’s reframe is the sharpest line in the segment. It may be an engagement problem, but not on the employee side — leaders setting attendance expectations without understanding employee purpose is a leadership engagement problem, and people invest more when leaders engage with them. Jenni’s addition is that engagement is not a root cause at all: where someone works does not make them more or less engaged, and the profession has simply decided 12.4% is unacceptable without any evidence that it is.
Why is IBM tripling entry-level hiring when AI can do those jobs? Because of the pipeline, not sentiment. IBM’s CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux argues that companies which skip entry-level hiring now will spend the next three to five years poaching mid-level talent from competitors at a 30% premium, hiring people who do not know their culture and cost more to bring up to speed. IBM rewrote its junior roles rather than cutting them.
How many US workers have never used AI at work? Gallup’s Q4 data puts it at 49% — never, not rarely. Daily users are at 12% and frequent users at 26%. Overall adoption has flatlined, with all the growth coming from people who already use AI using it more, which splits the workforce into a quarter compounding an advantage and a half that has not started.
What is the biggest barrier to AI adoption at work? Gallup found it is not fear or resistance. People simply cannot see how AI applies to what they actually do. Jenni’s point is that this is normal without a frame of reference, and that the worked examples which would let people picture the change are still missing.
What is the difference between using AI and benefiting from AI? Using it means you are the one prompting the tool. Benefiting from it means AI is improving the operation around you without you touching it — Chuck’s example being retail workers at 33% usage whose back-of-house systems may already be faster. Jenni would like research on the benefits employees receive, not just usage rates.
Will chatbots replace internal comms channels by 2028? Gartner predicts 75% of employees will rely on chatbots for internal communications by 2028. Both hosts are sceptical, mainly of the word rely. Jenni’s counterexample is the client running fifteen SharePoint sites that cannot talk to each other; Chuck’s generous reading is that chat layers may simply become available, and might be what finally connects those systems.
Why is Friday office attendance so low? Placer.ai data cited by Korn Ferry puts Fridays at 12.4% of in-office visits against roughly 24% midweek, even at companies with five-day mandates. Chuck reads it as a leadership engagement problem rather than an employee one. Jenni’s caution is that nobody has the pre-pandemic baseline, so 12.4% may always have been normal.
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. Jenni, this week we are going to be talking about how IBM is doing the opposite of whatever the other companies are saying about AI and entry-level jobs. Also that half of Americans have never used AI at work — the executive experience is a little different. Gartner is predicting chatbots will replace your internal comms channels by 2028. And Friday in the office has collapsed to 12% attendance, even at companies that mandated five days back. But before we get into those articles, Jenni, what do you have up for us?
Jenni: So I was thinking about this, there’s a couple of things. The first is my rage WhatsApping to you this week about the clickbait posts on LinkedIn that I find irritating and also feel a need to get involved in. So there’s just something at the moment on LinkedIn about people either creating stuff using AI or whatever it is, and trying to make things sound very, very simple when actually we’re dealing with human beings and communication, and that is complex. It’s not a simple structure. And there was a specific one this week where I think somebody had said that employees just want to hear three sentences from their CEO and nothing more. And it was just too much for me. And I had to comment on it. I had a good discussion with the author and other people involved, but I just would like people to do less of that. That feels like one of my freq-outs really, more than anything. But it was making me laugh, because when I do this to you and I just go, what’s up, you don’t really say anything back. You just move on to something else, which always makes me laugh. Just letting her go, just let her go.
Chuck: I’m just letting you finish. Yeah, let it go. My clickbait issue on LinkedIn now is when people — their first sentence will be, I’m making this up but it’s probably been said, my client said this and so I did this, this big dramatic thing, and then you click through and they’re like, no, I actually didn’t do that. To me that’s the bait and switch. So come out and tell the story. I get that there’s a hook and you want people to click through and all that kind of stuff, but come on, we should be better than that. Maybe we’re not better than that, but we should be better.
Jenni: Yeah, that would annoy me. I’d have to unfollow those people. So what have you got for us this week?
Chuck: First up, we have IBM planning to triple entry-level hiring because of AI. Everyone from Dario Amodei to Jim Farley has been warning that AI is going to gut entry-level hiring. But here’s IBM saying, we’re tripling it. Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM’s CHRO, told a conference this week that the entry-level jobs from two or three years ago, AI can do most of those. But instead of cutting those roles, they rewrote the roles. Junior devs who used to spend 34 hours a week coding are now doing things like marketing, client work and building new products. And here’s the part that should get IC and HR leaders’ attention. The argument isn’t altruistic. It’s, skip entry-level hiring now, she says, and in three to five years you’re having to poach mid-level people from competitors at a 30% premium who don’t know your culture and cost more to get up to speed. An early study from 2023 found AI actually helps train junior employees faster and reduces turnover. Dropbox is doing something similar, expanding new grad programs by 25%. So some companies are betting that younger workers plus AI equals a better deal than experienced hires minus cultural fit. Jenni, my question to you is, was this initial reaction that AI is coming for our jobs now overstated?
Jenni: So I don’t think it’s overstated. I think what I love about this is that we’re reimagining junior roles. I think it’s taking the very sort of one in, one out — well, right, if AI is coming in then this can go. Reimagine that. This comes back to what we did in the pandemic. We just lifted and shifted. We went, let’s lift up what we do in an office and let’s put that at home, without really thinking about the opportunities that came with that. And we’ve done this for decades. So for me, this is more about the fact that someone’s actually looking at the workforce, looking at the skills that are needed, looking at the areas where there’s that growth or there’s that need for innovation — like the client work, the marketing, the relationship building. How do you take people that were doing job A and then help them and train them to now do job B? That is what we should be doing, rather than just discarding the junior roles and saying we just don’t need them any more because we’ve got computers. That relationship building piece is always going to be there.
Jenni: And work is not just a task. So I think this is really important. I love hearing about the grad programme at Dropbox, that 25%. We have to find a way to bring AI and human beings together, and I think this is showing how to do that. I think what’s also interesting here is the point you made right towards the end, which was that there is more benefit in bringing together younger workers learning new things rather than hiring experienced people later on that don’t have the culture fit. I think that’s really important. And I know culture fit — sometimes people don’t like that as a phrase, it’s more about adding to the culture — but it’s still that cultural piece, right? However you want to word that, it’s the values, it’s the culture, it’s that relationship human bit that you want to make sure is right. If you get that right, then the skills and everything can be built around that. So I don’t know that it’s overstated. I think there are just people here that are starting to take a more proactive approach to it, rather than going, gosh, we’re all doomed, the robots are coming, to, how can we actually do this differently? How does our organisation need to function differently now that we’ve got AI?
Chuck: That’s what I love about it. I love the leadership on this. It’s so easy and routine and commonplace for companies to just copy what other companies are doing, instead of pausing and saying, what’s going to be best for our business? And clearly IBM has acknowledged they need to keep hiring entry-level people. So let’s do it the right way. Let’s not just do what everyone else is doing. There used to be the saying, probably back in the 70s and 80s, where people said you never get fired for buying IBM, because it was just the gold standard. IBM kind of disappeared from the tech view, from my standpoint. You don’t hear about IBM any more, but they’re still there. They’re still running a business and still wanting to grow it. And the point you highlighted — let’s actually grow our employee base, not just go out and bring in external hires. That’s where you start to truly build that culture, instead of always having to hire and fire and replace and all that. I just love the leadership on it.
Jenni: Yeah. And do you know what I think I love about it the most? It feels like it’s that nurturing talent, right? And both you and I are firmly on the square that leadership is about leading others. It’s about influencing others so that they follow you, you come together, you achieve something together, but it’s that service element of leadership that’s important — that being there to grow the future talent, all of those things. This is all of that. And I think that really shines a light on maybe the broader culture that we see in the organisations like IBM, like Dropbox, that are mentioned here, in terms of that culture that they’re building around their leadership. I think it’s great.
Chuck: Next up, Gallup. This is going to be no shock to anyone: frequent use of AI in the workplace continued to rise in Q4. No shockers there. The interesting data point — thanks for the yawn.
Jenni: That was a gasp! I’ll do better gasp noises. There we go. Sorry, sorry.
Chuck: Okay, there you go. You need the sound with it, or else it looks like a yawn. Anyway: 49% of US workers say they never use AI at work. Never. Not rarely, never. Meanwhile, daily users crept up to 12% and frequent users hit 26%. Overall adoption has flattened. The growth is coming entirely from people who already use AI but are just using it more. The workplace is splitting into two groups: a quarter of employees who are compounding advantage every week, and half who haven’t even started. The gaps are what you would expect, but maybe even a little bit bigger than what you’d think. Tech has 77% total AI use — actually, I’m a little curious about the 23% that aren’t there. Retail was only 33%. The other big gap: 69% of leaders use AI compared with 40% of individual contributors. Gallup says the top barrier to adoption isn’t fear or resistance, it’s that people can’t see how AI applies to what they actually do. Jenni, is this gap ever going to close, or is it really just going to be like other tech — some have it, some don’t?
Jenni: I think it might be a mixture. When you said that bit at the end, that Gallup have shared that the issue is that people can’t see how it applies to what they actually do — this is such a common thing in human behaviour, right? If we haven’t experienced something, we don’t know what that experience is going to be, so we don’t do it. There’s a part of us that goes, don’t do that, because either it’s going to hurt you or harm you, or you just don’t know. If we’ve got no frame of reference, anything is hard. Even if I think about my niece doing her driving test — like me, she failed her first one, but she passed the second one. And I think part of that is because then you know what to expect. So you’re more comfortable, you’re more prepared, you’ve got a frame of reference about what that’s going to feel like. For me, this almost shines a light on probably what the root cause of the issue is. I mean, they’ve said it’s the top barrier. If I can’t imagine this, if I can’t see it, you’re going to have to help me see that. And I think that isn’t happening enough.
Jenni: So I hear a lot of people in comms and other places talking about how we can use AI to help us with personas, or how you can help it write some copy, or how you can help it analyse stuff. All of that is great. But there’s a bigger piece for AI in the workplace, and I don’t think people are in a position maybe yet to talk about examples of what’s happened, to then show people that roadmap of how it’s possible, all those possibilities. I just don’t think we’re there yet. So I’m hopeful that we will get there, those examples will come, people can see them, it will adopt. I think, like any tech, it’s always going to be some have it, some don’t. There are huge parts of the world who are not digitally connected at all, and we don’t talk about that at all. We think a lot about the world that we live in, but there are other parts of the world that just don’t have that digital connection or that understanding or the access or any of those things. So I think it’s a bit of both, I think.
Chuck: You, in a loving way, mock me for my analogies, but I want to call out that a couple of episodes ago I compared AI use to needing a recipe book for some people — that they need to know the ingredients and the steps. This is a further encouragement of that. They see the pantry shelf and they’re like, I don’t even know where to start. And I think that’s the training and the leadership on it, of teaching people how to benefit from this. Maybe it will help them, maybe it won’t. But the fact that half haven’t used, or never use, AI at work, I don’t think was a shock to me, because you have to look at the variety of jobs that are out there. They’re probably benefiting from AI without actually using it, which is fine. Not everybody needs to use it. But if the business has it there for people to benefit from, all the better.
Jenni: Yeah, I think that distinction is really important. You mentioned this in our last episode — are you benefiting from it or are you using it? I haven’t really heard people talking about that, and I think that is an important distinction, because retail is 33% on here, right? Not a surprise, given their work is deskless, frontline, serving customers, doing those things. But are they benefiting from it in terms of the operation that’s behind the scenes for them? Do you know what I mean? Are things slicker, are things faster? And I think we’re very focused on the use of AI. I’d love to see some reports on the benefits of AI that employees are getting. I think that would be an interesting piece to have a look at.
Chuck: Before we go on to our next story, I want to do a little call-out to Gallup here, Jenni. We’ve talked about Gallup a lot on some episodes, some of their research, always great content. I don’t know if you saw or not, but they announced that they are no longer doing the presidential approval polls. And I thought, huh, how convenient that they’re now going to stop doing that when we have a US president with record low approval ratings, who has pretty conveniently often threatened to sue institutions. So they’re probably just like, you know what, it’s not worth it, it’s not worth doing this. But what a shame that they’ve now backed out. Cowarded out, I don’t know what word you want to use. It’s not worth the fight. I don’t know why they did it. They had a very PR-friendly answer for it, but just what a disappointment. I think I now view Gallup a little bit lower than I did before.
Jenni: Yeah, I agree with you. I did see it, and I felt very sad, because I thought, even if this was a decision that was being made completely independently of the current president, if this was always in the plan that by 2026 we’re going to stop this — it’s so loaded now. Do you know what I mean? It has so much more meaning than if that was in the plan. You need to push that plan. It is a shame, and we do talk about Gallup a lot and I love their work, but it has put a little blemish on that for me, for sure.
Chuck: And lastly — oh, not lastly, not least, we still have this one. We’ve got Gartner’s top communications predictions for 2026. By 2028, per Gartner, 75% of employees will rely on chatbots for internal communications. That’s the big headline prediction. And if you take that at face value, it means the all-staff email, the town hall and perhaps even the intranet banner have about two years left. That’s pretty aggressive, especially when you just saw Gallup data showing that half the workforce hasn’t even started using AI for anything yet. Comms teams start using employee digital footprints to personalize messaging, and data and analytics spending doubles from 2.9% to 6% of the comms budget, which still feels tiny when 47% of CCOs admit they can’t even prove their function’s impact. Gartner is saying comms teams should analyze how employees consume content — role, workflow, consumption patterns — to deliver personalized messaging. My message to Gartner is, the best companies are already doing this, Gartner. They’re already personalizing messaging. So I don’t know where that prediction comes from. Jenni, I’m curious for you — any predictions that stood out to you?
Jenni: So I really laughed when I read this, because I don’t really know what’s behind it. In fairness, I haven’t read enough to know what’s behind the prediction, so I don’t know where they’ve come from. But the 75% of employees who rely on chatbots for internal comms by 2028 made me laugh the most, when I have conversations with clients about the fact that they’ve got 15 different SharePoint sites on 15 different servers because of mergers and acquisitions, and they can’t let them talk to each other. And I talk to other people who are going, my HR information system can’t plug into my intranet, so we can’t make it so that people are getting personalised content. But sure, in two years, sod that, we’ll have chatbots doing all the work. Brilliant. It just didn’t feel grounded in the reality of the IT, comms, HR world that I think you and I know very well. So that made me laugh.
Jenni: The 75% of comms teams will use analysis of employee digital footprints to make personalised communications — I also laughed, because a bit like you I thought, well, we’re already doing this. And if we’re not doing this, we’ve been trying to do this for about 10 years. And to your point, not just the good people are doing it — the people that have got the data and the ability to do it are doing it. Everyone else who isn’t doing it is trying to do it, and has been doing for a long time. If AI can fix that, then great, but I’m holding on to these, and when we’re still doing Frequency in 2028 and 2029, we’re going to talk about this.
Jenni: The bit that I did think was interesting was that it said in the predictions that for the second year in a row, misinformation and disinformation ranked as the top global risk over the next two years by the World Economic Forum. I thought that was worth pulling out here, just because that had sort of passed me by, in all fairness, in terms of that being the top global risk. And I think that is important for communication professionals in organisations to understand, and to understand the difference between misinformation and disinformation and how you navigate that. And I know in previous episodes I’ve shared some reports from the UK government in terms of how to manage some of that. So I think there’s a skills piece there for me, in terms of these top comms predictions, around what are the skills and what are the insights that people need to develop in order to manage those. So those were the bits for me. There was a lot of chuckling over my cup of tea when I was reading it.
Chuck: I want to look at this chatbot one from maybe a slightly different point of view. I’m wondering if — let’s say it’s that 75% of employees, like a chatbot will be made available to them. I could see maybe technology progressing where there is some sort of chat element into tools and platforms that will be made available. I think the rely on part is a bit of the scarier language. And is it relying on because it’s so valuable, or is it relying on because there’s nothing else there, so that’s what you have to do? I think that’s one way to look at it. Another possibility too is, is there this layer — maybe chatbot’s not the right word, but let’s just keep using that — that actually does help connect all these disparate systems that cannot connect to each other, but can they connect upward into some system that sits on top?
Jenni: Yeah, I’m with you on that. It was the rely on that I think was what made me scoff, because I just thought, I feel so far away from that. I haven’t done an intranet project in — I haven’t worked inside an organisation for a while now, but I haven’t done an intranet project in terms of creating it, developing it, installing it, whatever, for over 10 years. The problems I had over 10 years ago in an organisation are still the same problems I see people having today. So I just can’t see it happening that quickly. But maybe that’s the AI piece.
Jenni: The other thing for me when I was reading this was the lack of humanness, right? So we talked about predictions, trends, all those things for this year, and that rehumanisation of the workplace comes up a lot this year, in terms of looking at wellbeing and burnout and making things more human. Everything in here felt like it was almost the opposite of that. If you’re saying that 75% will rely on chatbots, and I know you went on to talk about your town hall, your intranet, all of that stuff would go — that’s not work. People go, work is about relationships and people and conversations. And if we’re trying to make everything become this sort of task-focused work, people will just hate it. There’s no meaning behind it, it’s not purposeful, I’m not getting any joy in this. You’ve talked in previous episodes about coders not having the joy in their work now that it’s all being automated. Let’s not do this. Let’s not predict a world where work becomes so task focused that over two thirds of it can just be done by computers. Let’s remember it’s about being human beings.
Chuck: But I wonder if that’s truly what some leaders want. Is that how they are viewing employees — simply, here’s how you do this job, here are your tasks to complete, go home? I don’t care if you like it or not, I don’t care if you’re getting enjoyment, I don’t care if you feel purpose. That’s what some of the behavior is saying. Even if that’s what people do want — not everyone, but some people do want that out of their career.
Jenni: Yeah. And it’s those behaviours that I feel like it’s my life’s work to go and help those leaders understand — what the behaviours need to be in order to get the best out of your people. We’re all human beings. I could get on a real soapbox about it. And that makes me a bit sad, that all these predictions are actually all linked. Maybe that was the intention. But there’s a whole — we’re human beings. Come on.
Chuck: And our last article this week, from Korn Ferry: it’s Friday, is anyone there? 12.4%. That’s the share of in-office visits that happen on Fridays, according to Placer.ai data cited by Korn Ferry. Tuesdays, 24.3%. Wednesdays, 23.7%. Fridays are at half the attendance of midweek, and this is happening even at companies that issued five-day return to office mandates. Korn Ferry’s take is that it’s an engagement problem. The people who do show up on Fridays report spending the day in video meetings anyway, which defeats the entire purpose of being there. Korn Ferry’s Renee Whalen put it bluntly: managers are spending their time counting swipes rather than focusing on what people are actually doing. Some companies are giving up entirely and concentrating all their in-person programming on Tuesday through Thursday. But nobody in this article is making a compelling case for why Friday in the office matters. If you can’t articulate why being there on a specific day is valuable, simply don’t be surprised when nobody shows up. Jenni, I want you to put your CEO hat on here. Pitch me on why I should go into the office on Friday. Or Monday. Or honestly any day.
Jenni: So I am not going to pitch you, because whatever I say you are going to disagree with, and that’s fine. I’m going to put my CEO hat on and know that Chuck is not for turning, right? And that’s fine. This article made me laugh, because when I worked in London there was none of this office mandate — it just wasn’t the language, right? Because I don’t think any of it was, until COVID. But I would always work from home on a Friday, because it was about a 90-minute commute into London. I’d be in the office Monday to Thursday, not every week, but generally I would have a clear day on a Friday, so I’d be at home to get my work done. And I remember after a few months it became a bit of a running joke that you wouldn’t find Jenni in the office on a Friday. So then I had to start flipping it and coming in and having a different day at home, just to offset that, to make the point.
Jenni: But I do think that there needs to be a reason, and there also needs to be the output conversation. So there’s a couple of things for me. I think Fridays have always been quiet. My question about this research is, did anyone even look at this data before the pandemic? Because I feel like if you did look at it before the pandemic, it probably was about 12.4%, because people that were commuting had that flexibility to be able to be at home. So there’s no comparison for this, which makes it hard to know whether that’s good, bad or indifferent. I think there is also something about being clear about why you need to be in the office, to your point, full stop. If we’re saying, actually, we’ve got six days in the month where we want people to come into the office, what are you doing on those days in the office? Is the whole team in? Are you doing stuff together? That is important, right? We do need some human connection, and different personalities work very differently. Some personalities thrive being at home, others hate it, right? So having that flexibility is important, so people have that. For me it’s not about the day of the week. It’s about making sure that there’s flexibility and that there is purpose when you’re together.
Chuck: I want to go back to Korn Ferry’s take that it’s an engagement problem. It might be an engagement problem, but I don’t think it’s the onion. But before you snicker, let me finish. It’s not the problem on the employee side. Actually, this is a leadership engagement problem. They are not engaging with their employees. They’re just setting these expectations without really understanding the employee purpose. And what’s the power of empathy in these cases — that if your leaders are engaging with you, you are more likely to invest more. I think that’s the engagement problem. It’s not, let’s put it on the employees, like I like doing. Let’s put this on the leaders.
Jenni: My wrinkly face when you started talking about the engagement problem was not at you, it was at Korn Ferry’s take that it’s an engagement problem. Because for me I’m like, I don’t know what that means. That’s not a root cause. What’s the root cause of that? Because where you work does not mean you’re any more disengaged or engaged. That’s just nonsense. And you did go on to talk about the root cause. It’s either, you haven’t explained to me why I should be in the office, what’s the reason you need me in, and does it matter? Is the work being done? That’s the ultimate thing. It’s not an engagement problem at all. It’s just a numbers problem, that we’ve decided that 12.4% isn’t okay. We have no reason to think 12.4% isn’t okay. 12.4% could be completely normal, but we’ve decided that’s not good. For no reason.
Chuck: Well, that wraps up our stories for this week. Jenni, let’s go to our freq-outs. What is your freq-out this week?
Jenni: So my freq-out this week is linked to Comms Reboot, which is my event, my unconference event that I run every other year in the UK. It’s in London this year in October. We’ve already sold a third of tickets, which is very exciting. But I’m also very excited that last year we did Comms Reboot in Toronto with the team at ContactMonkey, and they’ve asked me to come back and do it again. So I’m quite excited, if not freq-ing out a little bit, about doing two Comms Reboots this year. So we’ll be doing one in Toronto in June and then there’ll be the one in London in October. And I will pop a link in the show notes — this is a little sneak preview, so it might be a link to just my website, or it might just be our email address, because I might not have the web page up and running. But if you want to come along and you’re in Toronto, or you want to be there in June, then just let me know and I’ll send you the details, because this is a little sneak peek of what’s to come.
Chuck: Well, we are aligned with event-focused freq-outs, because for the last couple of weeks they did a secret soft launch to ICology members so that they could sign up first. But now registration is available for Flyover Festival — the employee comms and culture Flyover Festival that we do every year in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. People know — why are you doing it in Sioux Falls, South Dakota? My answer is always, why not? It is a lovely city. We have a great time when we’re there. Forty-five people fill the room. Tickets have already been sold for it. Just a great community-driven experience for anyone who wants to join us. That is August 27th, day long, in Sioux Falls. Join us there. We’ll also put a link to that page in the show notes.
Jenni: I was actually talking to another ICology member earlier on in the week, and I didn’t know that you had announced it because I’d missed it in ICology, which I apologise for. But one of the first things they said was, I’m just planning my trip to be able to go to Flyover. I’m really excited to go. Which is lovely. I always hear brilliant things about it. I’m excited.
Chuck: Well, we talk about it like it’s the family reunion that you actually want to go to. That you’re reconnecting with people in person. That might be the only time you see that person that whole year, but you’re excited to be there.
Jenni: Yeah, it’s just community, isn’t it? I think that’s how I feel about Comms Reboot. Doing it in Toronto again, it will be really exciting, so I feel like I’ll get to see people again that I met last time. But certainly the London one, it’s like I know the people that are buying the tickets, and they come every time we host it. And it’s lovely, that community. I think for both of us it’s why we do what we do.
Chuck: Well, thank you for joining us this week. All the articles that have inspired this conversation are in the show notes. And don’t forget to rate and review after you’ve listened. Subscribe so you don’t miss another episode, and pass this on to someone you think would enjoy listening or watching. You can also find Frequency on YouTube. Thank you to my friend Poet Ali for contributing music to the show. We’re back every Monday with more news, insights and opinions about everything 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.
