Fifty-two episodes in exactly a year, and the anniversary edition is about who benefits from words that do not mean anything. A Cornell psychologist’s corporate BS receptivity scale finds that the people most impressed by jargon score worst on analytical thinking and workplace decision-making — and report the highest job satisfaction. Jenni’s response is a story about a leader she calls Pete, and the six months it took her to work out she had joined a cult. From there Chuck lines up AI;DR, the reader’s new way of opting out of anything that smells like a chatbot wrote it, a survey of 750 CFOs expecting AI to cut 0.4% of headcount from clerical and admin roles, and the productivity research showing output declines past 48 hours a week and adds nothing past 63.
Chuck opens with the Cornell research finding that people who love corporate BS are bad at their jobs: a receptivity scale tested on more than 1,000 workers, where the people who rate jargon-heavy language as business savvy score significantly worse on analytical thinking, cognitive reflection and workplace decision-making. They also spread it — rating their bosses as more visionary, feeling more inspired by mission statements, and promoting the leaders who traffic in it most, producing what researcher Shane Littrell calls a clogged toilet of inefficiency. The twist Chuck wants to sit with is that high receptivity comes with higher job satisfaction, which makes the loop self-sealing: the employees pushing jargon-heavy leaders up the ladder are the least equipped to notice those leaders making bad decisions. Jenni answers with a case study she anonymizes as Pete, a leader whose briefings were a lot of long words with very little meaning behind them, while everyone around her said he was amazing. Six months in she realized she was working in a cult and decided it was time to leave — and a year later the colleagues who had defended him had reached the same conclusion, which is her argument that the satisfaction is temporary, a point-in-time reading of someone else’s charisma. Chuck’s word for it is ignorance is bliss, and Jenni’s is con artist: charisma with nothing underneath. Her more useful point is about the job itself. Challenging that language was her responsibility as the communicator, and the questions that do it — what does this actually mean, what are we trying to say, to what end — take a specific analytical skill that not every comms person is inclined toward. Littrell’s own advice is less about banning buzzwords than rewarding clarity from the top, and the study’s example is the 2014 Microsoft memo that buried a mass layoff under ten paragraphs of abstract language. Both hosts expect AI to make this worse: you feed something in, it comes back sounding great, and it is not.
The second story is the arrival of AI;DR, the new TL;DR — AI, didn’t read — coined by developer David Minnigerode on Threads after reading an Anthropic researcher’s resignation letter. Where TL;DR was about length, AI;DR is about authenticity, and it arrives with supporting evidence: Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year was slop, and a 2024 study found more than half of long-form LinkedIn posts are likely AI-assisted, on platforms whose algorithms reward volume over quality. Jenni applauds the whole idea, and the line she keeps is the simplest one — if you could not be bothered to write it, why should anyone be bothered to read it. Her evidence is a client comms plan she reviewed that still contained the instruction to adjust the dates to suit your calendar, which she recognized instantly because she generates the same material and then actually edits it, treating the output like a first draft from someone on her team. Chuck’s qualification matters: AI-assisted is fine, and the study only says likely assisted. The problem is assistance turning into authorship. Jenni pushes the objection past AI entirely — an Instagram post she skipped recently was not skipped because it was AI, it was skipped because it was not real, and she expects the same reflex to spread to images and video, with people quietly removing themselves from places that feel fake. The workplace version is the one communicators should care about: an employee scanning an all-staff message and thinking AI;DR before the second paragraph is a trust problem no amount of polish will fix.
A survey of about 750 CFOs by Duke University economist John Graham with economists from the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Richmond found that AI is coming for admin jobs: essentially no employment effect in 2025, but an expected 0.4% reduction in overall headcount this year, concentrated almost entirely in clerical, administrative and customer service roles, with respondents twice as likely to say AI will eliminate office and admin support jobs as enhance them. The pattern echoes personal computers in the 1980s, when typists and back-office bookkeepers lost ground while analysts and consultants gained it, and Atlanta Fed economist Salomé Baslandze flags what is really at stake: these are stepping-stone roles, the first rungs for workers without degrees. Jenni thinks organization size genuinely changes the answer — smaller companies do not have the headcount for narrowly defined roles, while larger ones have puffed up into jobs that stopped making sense as they grew, in comms and HR as much as anywhere. She also reads the timing more calmly than the headline does, noting the reduction is not expected to bite until 2027, and she sets the story against IBM doubling down on graduate recruitment a few weeks earlier: two articles, opposite messages, which is why the only sane move is to work out what your own organization needs and shut out some of the noise. Chuck does the multiplication instead. Half a percent of a 200-person company is one person, of 2,000 is ten, of 200,000 is a thousand — real livelihoods, and evidence of a narrow view that stops at the saving rather than asking where the business grows next, the way the ATM eventually did for banks. Jenni’s last objection is to a line in the article claiming CFOs are uniquely positioned to understand the people part of the organization. She would rather see the same survey run across CFOs and chief people officers together, so the numbers and the people arrive in the same room.
The closing story asks how many hours employees should work, using World Bank and UC Berkeley research showing the world’s employed adults average 42 hours a week, and treating the question as a diagnostic rather than something to settle: how a manager answers reveals what kind of manager they are. The evidence is not ambiguous — Stanford’s John Pencavel analyzed British munitions workers from the First World War and found output declined beyond 48 hours a week and added nothing beyond 63 — which sits awkwardly against Sergey Brin reportedly telling teams working on Google’s AI that 60 hours is the sweet spot, Narayana Murthy of Infosys calling for 70-plus-hour weeks, and Elon Musk’s line that nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours. Jenni says the story makes her boil, because the conversation is still about hours rather than output, and she brings the book Rest as the correction: the famous 10,000 hours of practice only produces mastery alongside 12,500 hours of rest and 30,000 hours of sleep, and the culture kept the first number and dropped the other two. Her position is flat — she does not care whether it takes forty hours or two, she cares that the thing is done. Chuck’s question is who the long-hours myth is for, and his answer is that the people advocating it are the ones who profit from the wild success, not the employees, most of whom do not want to change the world and would like to go home. His example is testimony he saw from an employment trial where a salaried employee was worked thirty consecutive days at ten hours a day on the logic that salary buys unlimited time. Jenni’s closing move is to reject the question itself: asking how many hours employees should work says more about a culture than any answer to it would.
What is the corporate BS receptivity scale? It is a measure built by Cornell psychologist Shane Littrell and tested on more than 1,000 workers, scoring how impressed people are by jargon-heavy language such as synergistic leadership or growth-hacking paradigms. Higher receptivity correlates with significantly worse performance on analytical thinking, cognitive reflection and workplace decision-making.
If jargon fans are more satisfied at work, is there a business case for clarity? Chuck’s framing is that the satisfaction makes the problem self-reinforcing, because the people most likely to promote jargon-heavy leaders are the least equipped to notice bad decisions. Jenni’s answer is that the satisfaction does not last: in her own experience the colleagues who thought a jargon-heavy leader was amazing had reached the opposite conclusion a year later.
What does AI;DR mean? AI, didn’t read. It is a way of dismissing content that reads as though a chatbot produced it, coined by developer David Minnigerode on Threads after an Anthropic researcher’s resignation letter. It riffs on TL;DR, but where that was about length, AI;DR is about authenticity — if you could not be bothered to write it, the reader cannot be bothered to read it.
Should communicators worry about AI;DR in internal communication? Yes, because it is a trust signal rather than a style complaint. If employees start scanning an all-staff message and thinking AI;DR before the second paragraph, polish will not recover it. Chuck’s distinction is the practical one: AI-assisted writing is fine, AI-authored writing that nobody edited is what triggers the reflex.
What do CFOs expect AI to do to headcount? In a survey of about 750 CFOs by Duke’s John Graham with the Atlanta and Richmond Feds, AI had essentially no employment effect in 2025, but CFOs expect a 0.4% reduction in overall headcount this year, concentrated in clerical, administrative and customer service roles. They were twice as likely to say AI would eliminate office and admin support jobs as enhance them.
Why does it matter that admin roles are the ones being cut? Because they are stepping stones. Atlanta Fed economist Salomé Baslandze’s point is that clerical and administrative jobs are the first rungs of the career ladder for workers without degrees, so removing them removes the route in. Chuck’s added concern is that CFOs are stopping at the saving rather than asking where the business grows instead.
How many hours a week is actually productive? The world’s employed adults average 42 hours a week, and Stanford’s John Pencavel found output from British munitions workers declined beyond 48 hours and added nothing beyond 63. Jenni’s addition from the book Rest is that the 10,000 hours of practice everyone quotes came with 12,500 hours of rest and 30,000 hours of sleep — and that the useful measure is output, not hours.
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’re going to be talking about people who love corporate BS, a new version of TL;DR for the AI world, answering the question, why are CFOs in charge of firing because of AI? And also, how many hours is too many hours at work?
Jenni: They’re all excellent topics, but the most important topic today is that this is episode 52. And I know last week we spoke about the fact it was episode 50 and then 51, but this officially marks a year of Frequency. 52 weeks, 52 episodes. I’ve missed one, which I will hold my hands up to, but I feel like that also deserves a round of applause after last week. So we should definitely celebrate 52.
Chuck: And that’s true, because I’m uber competitive, I need to not miss one. So don’t we say I’ve done one more episode than you?
Jenni: Well, yes. Fair. And then the other thing I wanted to mention today, which we haven’t really talked about behind the scenes, but I feel like we might end up doing it, is Reddit. So I’ve recently joined Reddit to join the internal comms threads and stuff there. And there’s quite a thriving community in there talking about speakers for internal comms, talking about tech platforms, talking about networking and communities. I talked about ICology in there the other day. So I’d love to know if people are on Reddit and how they’re using it for internal comms and HR. And if there are any good communities you think I should join, if you’re listening, then let me know. Because you’re not on it, are you, at the moment?
Chuck: I have an account and I’ve peeked every now and then at a couple of Reddit threads. I think I’m still lamenting the loss of Twitter. So do you think it fits what Twitter used to be, or is it different?
Jenni: I think it’s different. I think it’s going to be somewhere in between Twitter and Threads, which I never really got on board with because it felt too chaotic to me. I think it’s going to be somewhere in the middle. So I’ll give it a while. It’s only been about a month, so I’m going to just stay on there. But I’m trying to be quite active in the community and answering stuff and doing things. And I’ve made some connections on LinkedIn through it and stuff. We’ll see how it goes. I might be back on here in a few months’ time going, Reddit is awful, don’t go there. We’ll see what happens.
Chuck: Well, I’ve heard there’s a Claude skill or an action you have Claude do where it’ll scrape certain conversations inside Reddit to give you topics and ideas of what people are asking about and talking about, from a content creation standpoint. So that’s where it piqued my interest a little bit.
Jenni: Yeah, to be fair, I did see somebody answer someone’s question the other day and it was very clearly written by AI in that response. And I was like, ah, there’s definitely people here that are just copying and pasting. So we’ll see if there’s a nice little community in there, and hopefully for me a different one to LinkedIn, because I think there are different people in those spaces. And I think that’s what’s important to me, is listening in other communities and being part of other communities that maybe aren’t always the ones everyone else is in.
Chuck: All right, let’s get into the stories this week. First up, people who love corporate BS are bad at their jobs. A Cornell psychologist built a quote-unquote corporate BS receptivity scale and tested it on more than 1,000 workers, and the results are a little uncomfortable. People who rate jargon-heavy language as quote-unquote business savvy score significantly worse on analytical thinking, cognitive reflection, and workplace decision-making. The more impressed someone is by words like synergistic leadership or growth-hacking paradigms, the worse they actually perform at their job. And it gets worse than that. Jargon fans also tend to spread this stuff. They rate their bosses as more visionary, feel more inspired by mission statements, and are more likely to promote the leaders who traffic in it the most, creating what researcher Shane Littrell calls, quote, a clogged toilet of inefficiency. There’s a nice visual for all of us. High BS receptivity also comes with higher job satisfaction, though, which means the problem is self-reinforcing. The employees who most likely push jargon-heavy leaders up the ladder are the ones least equipped to notice when those leaders are making bad decisions. Littrell’s advice is less about banning buzzwords and more about rewarding clarity from the top. The study points to this classic 2014 Microsoft memo that buried the announcement of 12,000 layoffs under 10 paragraphs of abstract corporate language. The jargon hid something very real, from real people, with real consequences. Jenni, what I think is interesting about this — we’ve talked about employee satisfaction and happiness and the challenge of those, and if these people are satisfied, what’s this conundrum we’ve got? So if employees love corporate BS and they’re more likely to be satisfied at work, is there actually a business case for clarity, or does jargon quietly keep the peace in ways that benefit organizations short term?
Jenni: So it’s such a conundrum, isn’t it? Because I’ve written in my notes here — I’m going to change the name of the person — on here I’ve written, note for Jenni, Pete. Right? And I know you’ll be like, what’s she talking about? So I once worked with a leader who we will call Pete for the purposes of this podcast. And when I joined, I was like, I don’t know what he’s saying. In every brief, it was just a lot of words, big words, but there wasn’t really very much meaning behind it. And everyone was like, my God, Pete’s amazing. And I was like, is he? I don’t really know what… And then after about six months, I realised I was working in a cult. So I decided it was probably time to leave. But I feel like that’s exactly what this creates. It’s that charisma without the other things to back up the likeability factors, for me. It’s the con artist. It’s all of those things where I can talk a really good game, make you feel great, but eventually it’s not going to work. The issue here with people feeling more satisfied — I’d love to know that over time. So is that just a point in time they feel more satisfied? And then if you were to track the satisfaction of those people longer term, would that actually happen? Because if I think about Pete, that’s what I called him, Pete, and the cult that I was in, I remember talking to people who were like, no, it’s great, what are you talking about? A year on, they were like, my God, this is a cult. So I think eventually you do come out the other side, but I think for a while you’re sort of swimming in someone else’s charisma. And that is what I think makes this really hard.
Chuck: I think it’s also a little bit of that phrase, ignorance is bliss, where you’re not really focused on the why and the how. It’s truly just what’s being said, and you’re sort of oddly impressed. And I think your use of the phrase con artist is pretty spot on here, where you kind of get people spinning around and you sound really intelligent and sound really fancy. You and I both are on LinkedIn quite a bit. We see a lot of this stuff on LinkedIn where it’s just words, words, words, words, words — you make yourself sound fancy. And there have been times I’ve worked with leaders and I was like, did you just read that somewhere, and you thought it sounded really good, and so you’ve got to interject this into a meeting somewhere? I don’t know what we do with this. Is it truly just a state of the way the human mind works?
Jenni: I think it is a bit, but I think also the job of the communicator is to challenge that. So I was challenging Pete and saying, I don’t know what this means. And actually we had much bigger challenges around that. But it was my job, you know, to say, this doesn’t mean anything, this doesn’t actually have any sort of tangible meaning behind it. But that also, I think, takes that really analytical skill of a communicator. Both you and I are quite good at, what does that really mean? What are we trying to say? To what end? These are all questions we talk about a lot. I think if you’re not that way inclined to think as a comms person, that makes it very difficult to do. So I think we have to step into that space and we have to ask those questions. And then we decide whether we want to stay in the cult or whether we want to leave. And that’s our decision to be made.
Chuck: And I’m wondering too, is AI only going to make this worse? I think we know the answer to that is probably yes.
Jenni: Yes. Because you put something into AI and it comes back and you go, this sounds great. And it doesn’t. But you think it does, because it sounds all fancy. Whereas actually it just needs to say what it needs to say. It doesn’t need to have any more jargon on top of it. And sometimes you need words and phrases and things to do stuff, but the minute you get into the sort of high corporate BS stuff, it’s the wankonomics stuff we talked about a few months ago when I got the book for Christmas. It’s all of that stuff that you have to sort of see through.
Chuck: Next up, AI;DR is the new TL;DR. A new term is spreading online: AI;DR, short for AI, didn’t read. Used to dismiss posts that smell like they came from a chatbot rather than a person. Developer David Minnigerode coined it on Threads after reading an Anthropic researcher’s resignation letter. Quote-unquote, some of those sentences, yeesh, he wrote. It riffs on TL;DR, but where that was about length, AI;DR is about authenticity. Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year was slop. A 2024 study found that more than half of long-form LinkedIn posts are likely AI-assisted. The platforms’ algorithms reward volume over quality, which means AI-generated content keeps working until readers start tuning it out entirely. AI;DR is the clear signal that a real audience backlash is forming, driven by people who’ve simply decided that if you couldn’t be bothered to write it, they can’t be bothered to read it. This isn’t just an internet culture story, though. If employees are developing the same reflex, scanning an all-staff message and thinking AI;DR before they reach the second paragraph, that’s a trust problem that no amount of polish will fix. So Jenni, if AI;DR is a way for readers to opt out, should communicators be worried about it, or is it just going to happen anyway?
Jenni: I applaud this in so many ways. The line that you said of, if you can’t be bothered to write it, then why should I be bothered to read it, I think makes complete sense. And I think it smacks of the challenge we talked about in previous episodes about AI generating too much content, and stuff that you don’t then have the ability to deal with because you’re a human being. I was reviewing something for a client the other day and it was a comms plan, and it even had, still in the comms plan, adjust the dates to suit your calendar. And I was like, I know that’s from AI, because I can generate the same stuff, but I actually go through it, review it, edit it. You literally use it as though someone in my team drafts it. I think we’re trying to do too much too quickly and it’s making us lazy. And I agree with, if you can’t be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it? I completely support that. And I think from a trust perspective, which we spoke about a lot last week, it’s really important to think about what is it you’re trying to achieve. If you’re trying to build trust, then you’ve really got to think about the use of AI in your comms and what role that plays.
Chuck: I think the thing I want to call out is where it talks about that 2024 study that found more than half of long-form LinkedIn posts are likely AI-assisted. The AI-assisted part I’m okay with. And it’s also likely AI-assisted — they don’t really know. So there’s nothing wrong, again, with people using AI-assisted anything, as long as it is assisting and not owning, writing for you, taking over, whatever. So I think this has been going on for a long time. I think the DR part, that didn’t-read part, is already there. So if people are suspecting that this is just gibberish being spit out by something else, yeah, of course they’re not going to read it, because you didn’t take the time. Why should they take the time?
Jenni: No, and you can just tell. There was someone’s Instagram post I saw the other day and I was like, that’s AI. And I’m like, I’m not going to read that. I mean, also it’s Instagram, so the picture should tell the story anyway. I was just like, I’m not going to read that, because it’s not real. And I think that’s the bit that people get past. It’s not that it’s AI, didn’t read, it’s, it’s not real. And I think that’s the backlash that we’re going to start to see on any AI-generated stuff, whether it’s images, videos, stuff like that. People will just remove themselves from platforms or places where they don’t feel like something’s real. That’s innate in us as human beings, to keep us safe. So it’s going to be interesting to watch this year how that plays out in terms of trust, leadership comms, comms roles, skills, all of that stuff around this.
Chuck: And continuing on the AI train: America’s chief financial officers say AI is coming for admin jobs. A survey of about 750 CFOs by Duke University economist John Graham and economists from the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Richmond found that AI had essentially no employment effect in 2025. However, CFOs expect a 0.4% reduction in overall headcount this year, concentrated almost entirely in clerical, administrative, and customer service roles. They were twice as likely to say AI would eliminate jobs in office and admin support than to say it would enhance them. The pattern echoes what happened with personal computers in the 1980s, when typists and back-office bookkeepers lost ground while analysts and consultants gained it. Atlanta Fed economist Salomé Baslandze — hope I got that right — flagged something worth sitting with. The roles most at risk are, quote-unquote, stepping stones, the first rungs on the career ladder for workers without degrees. These aren’t just any jobs, they’re the ones that give people a route in. Larger companies are already leaning toward cutting routine roles. Smaller companies are more likely to expand technical headcount. For communicators, this split matters. The organizations making cuts are likely the ones where employee trust is most fragile, and where messaging around workforce reduction will shape how the rest of the organization responds. And apologies to Salomé if I butchered your last name there. The research shows larger companies are cutting routine roles while smaller ones are expanding this technical headcount. Jenni, does organizational size change how companies should be approaching AI and workforce messaging?
Jenni: Yes, I think it does, actually, because I think when you’re smaller you don’t have the headcount to have very specific tasks in different roles. I think some larger organisations are quite — there’s a word and I can’t think of it — they’re sort of quite puffed up, is all I’ve got, with people doing roles that maybe aren’t needed because things have grown and become so individual that it doesn’t quite make sense. And I say that about comms teams, HR teams, finance teams, ops teams. It’s everywhere. I think when you’re smaller, you’re having to do lots of things to kind of chip in and get things done. So how you approach AI, how you approach headcount, all of that stuff, I think does make a difference in terms of how you’re using it, how it helps, what your tasks are. I think the important thing here is that the 0.4% reduction — it’s talking in the article about the fact that we’re not going to see this in 2026, maybe 2027, so I think that fear of it happening immediately isn’t quite right. It’s going to take a bit longer for that to become a reality. But I also think it’s interesting reading this article and comparing it to a conversation we had a few weeks ago about the company that was doubling down on its recruitment. I can’t remember the name of the company now.
Chuck: IBM.
Jenni: They were doubling down on their recruitment of graduates to come in and do more roles. So this is why I love doing this podcast, because you get an article like this, and you get an article with the opposite message. And it’s like, what are you meant to do? Because there’s so many different views on how this works. I think you’ve got to think about what your organisation needs, how AI can help it, and then what’s going to be the right solution for your organisation, and almost shut out some of the noise that’s out there about what people are doing.
Chuck: I think this speaks a lot to the view that some CFOs have, where they truly do view people and headcount from the cost side of things. So this 0.4% might not sound like a lot, but over time — and we’re going to make the math simple, let’s say it’s 0.5% — in a 200-person company, that’s one person. It may not sound like a lot. In 2,000, that’s 10. In 20,000, that’s 100. And 200,000. All of a sudden that becomes real people that are impacted. But I think this shows sometimes that narrow view that they have, where we look at IBM and other organizations who are saying, yeah, these roles are going to be eliminated, but we’re not going to then eliminate the numbers, we’re going to add in other areas where we think there’s growth. So this shows this very limited view of saying, well, since AI can replace those roles, they’re going to go away. Not, where are we going to grow the business in other parts of it? Which brings up the idea — we talked about this in past episodes — like the ATM. The fear was that it was going to eliminate jobs in banks. Well, it eliminated some jobs in banks, but actually grew other jobs. And so that’s where I’d like to see the CFOs. Yeah, they’re looking at this from a numbers standpoint, and 0.4% may not seem like a lot, but that is the livelihood of people. And I would rather CFOs say, okay, great, if we’ve got this cost saving, where are we then going to invest and grow the business, instead of shrinking the business?
Jenni: Yes. I also thought it was interesting in the article, because it said something like, CFOs are uniquely positioned to understand the people part of the organisation. I was like, are they? Or is that not an HR people team? Are they not uniquely positioned, the HR and people team? Surely this should be a survey of — if you did a survey of CFOs and CPOs and did that together, what would that tell you? Because then you’ve got the numbers and the people kind of coming together. I think that data would be really interesting. I just thought it was an interesting take, that they are uniquely positioned. I was like, I’m not sure that they are.
Chuck: They have a unique position. I don’t know if they are uniquely positioned.
Jenni: They do. Yes, there is a difference there.
Chuck: And last up, we’re going to talk about how many hours should employees work. The world’s employed adults work an average of 42 hours a week, according to new research by the World Bank and UC Berkeley. The 40-hour work week is the norm, but the debate about whether it should be is still very much alive. The Economist frames the question not as something to settle, but as a diagnostic: how you answer it reveals what kind of manager you are. The productivity evidence is harder to ignore than the culture war around it. Stanford’s John Pencavel analyzed British munitions workers from World War I — see, we’re bringing in British stuff here, Jenni — World War I, and found output declined beyond 48 hours per week and added nothing beyond 63. Sergey Brin reportedly told teams working on Google’s AI that 60 hours a week is the sweet spot, a claim that sits awkwardly alongside the data we just shared. Now, Narayana Murthy of Infosys has called for 70-plus-hour work weeks to drive national prosperity in India. And Elon Musk, who we should never listen to, once said nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours. The interesting question for me isn’t the number, it’s what the number signals. When a CEO publicly endorses a 60-hour work week, they’re not describing productivity science, they’re telling employees something about what the organization actually values, and how safe it is to leave on time. Jenni, the research shows productivity plateaus around 48 hours, stops adding output beyond 63. If the evidence is this clear, why does the long-hours myth persist, and who in the organization benefits from keeping it alive?
Jenni: I mean, this makes me boil with rage somehow inside, because this is — we’re still talking about hours at work, not the actual output or the outcomes or actually what’s happening. And that’s where we’re still getting it wrong. I love the fact that research says it plateaus about 48 hours, stops adding after 63. That makes sense. When I was reading this, it reminded me of a book that I read last year, which I’ve got next to me, which is called Rest, which I think I recommended to you, if not sent to you, perhaps, to read. Now, this book is all about why you get more work done when you work less. And one part of this book talks about the 10,000 hours of practice. So quite often we hear this phrase of, if you do 10,000 hours of something, you’ll become an expert in it. So I think that’s where some of this myth comes from, which is like, you’ve got to do all this work in order to achieve something. But the research in the book talks about the fact that those 10,000 hours of doing something has to be accompanied by 12 and a half thousand hours of rest and 30,000 hours of sleep in order for that success to be realised. And that’s where I think it goes wrong. I think we’ve heard this 10,000 hours and that has led to this belief that you have to do so much work in order to be great at something or achieve something, that we sort of dropped off the rest of that, the 12,500 hours of rest and the 30,000 hours of sleep. And it’s a message I will keep sharing with people: that it’s not about the hours you put in, it’s about the output. I don’t care if you’re working 40 hours, 60 hours, 70 hours. What I care about is that that thing is done. And if that thing takes a long time, then it does. But if it takes you two hours and you’ve then got the rest of the day off, then great. That’s the focus.
Chuck: I think for me it comes down to, who’s it for? And going back to Elon, where he’s like, nobody’s changed the world on 40 hours. Some people don’t want to change the world. They just want to work. They’re not the CEO. They’re not the person that’s going to profit from some kind of wild success. So yes, of course those people are like, yes, please work 60, 70 hours — but it’s for their benefit, not the employee’s benefit. The employees do not benefit from working that long. I saw — I don’t know the circumstances of this case — but I saw testimony from an employment trial where this person worked their employee 30 consecutive days for 10 hours a day, because they said, well, no, they’re salaried, they don’t get paid hourly, so they’re salaried, so they work as much as I need them to. That, I think, is an extreme view. I think this is a little bit of a taste of that, though, where if they were paying these people hourly, they would not want them working 60, 70, 80 hours a week, 100% no. But because of the salary, it’s like, well, I paid you this amount, I’m going to get as much out of you as I possibly can. Which I think that is the danger.
Jenni: I mean, come on, that is not being a human being and that’s not how you treat people. And it’s almost this — the rise of technology is almost allowing people to compare technology to human beings in terms of output and what’s possible. And that’s not a fair comparison, that’s apples and pears. What we do as human beings is completely different, but we need time to go away and think and mull something over and have that fresh air and do all of that. That’s where our genius comes from, is being able to do that. And to your point, not everybody wants to change the world. Some people want to go to work, get a paycheck, go home and do all the wonderful things that are not work, like being with friends and family and sport and health and hobbies and all those other things. The whole question of this, like, how many hours should employees work, a question that reveals something about every boss — it’s the wrong question. If you’re asking that question, that says more about your culture than anything else.
Chuck: That’s a great point. Well, that wraps up this week’s articles, Jenni. Moving into our freq-outs. What are you freq-ing out about?
Jenni: So I mentioned it last week, I was still reading The Friction Project, and the thing I wanted to — it didn’t freq me out, but it made me go, huh, as I was reading it — was the privilege of leaders. In the book it talks about examples of how leaders and sometimes employees are given amazing experiences because of their privilege, so they don’t experience the true experience their customers might get. So it talked about General Motors as an example, saying that employees would get company cars and they’d get free gas and all this kind of stuff, so they never knew the true experience of buying a car or leasing a car or whatever it might be. So they didn’t know how painful that was. So they were so far away from the reality for their customers and everyone else. Which is just being mindful of that sort of privilege that you might hold in those kinds of leadership positions. And it’s just kind of stayed with me, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but I thought it was — it just stayed with me in terms of how you can circumvent the reality for the masses by being in a privileged position, and what impact that might have in terms of how you treat people.
Chuck: It’s interesting that we’re both thinking about friction, but in different ways. So I listened to a podcast with the author that wrote a book called Friction: A Biography. It starts out with the science of friction and lubrication and all of those things, and then goes into daily life, but also then into our personal lives. And the positive and negative sides of friction — that you actually cannot live in a frictionless world. But so many of the things that we want, we advertise things as frictionless as a positive, when in fact it actually is a huge negative when you don’t have any of that friction. So essentially we’re coming at this word from two different angles.
Jenni: And it’s like — I mean, it’s almost like the apps like Just Eat, Deliveroo, all of those things. They create a frictionless ability for you to get food, but that’s not particularly healthy. I’ve deleted all of them off my phone, so I’ve created the friction, so I can’t do that, because it makes it too easy to create bad habits, to create a bad lifestyle and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I’ll be reading it for a little while, but it was a book recommended to me by Janet Hitchen and it’s one I was listening to and then had to buy because I wanted to highlight it. I’m still working my way through it, but it’s really good for comms people and HR people looking at employee experience and stuff like that. It’s a really good read.
Chuck: Well, my freq-out, Jenni, is I’m a little worried the dry erase board is going to have to make a return. It was my Q4 of last year, for anybody that was listening. It got a little chaotic there and I had a visual board up of all my responsibilities. I was so focused on the EX Factor and Transform, I kept pushing things out into like April, May, June. And I fear the dry erase board is going to have to make a return. I’m not happy about it. But I’ve done it to myself. So I did it to myself. The dry erase board is returning.
Jenni: You have. You are very good with the dry erase board, and actually I think you should bring it back, because it helps you visually see the chaos that you’ve created for yourself.
Chuck: And that I’m accountable to the visualness of the chaos.
Jenni: Exactly. Yeah, you like the visualness. I think it’s got to come back.
Chuck: Well, good. Well, thank you all 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 along 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.
