Twenty-seven percent of leaders believe their employees are fully aligned with the organization’s goals. Nine percent of employees agree — and as Chuck points out, even the leaders’ number means nearly three quarters of them think alignment has failed. Five stories with a technology thread run through the episode: Microsoft’s Work Trend Index arguing the barrier to AI value is the organization rather than the people, 380,000 publicly accessible apps built by non-developers with vibe coding tools, the Axios HQ alignment gap and the dollar figure attached to it, Priya Parker on meetings as the primary way distributed employees experience the organization, and phone pouches arriving at work.
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index, covering 20,000 workers across 31 countries, argues in The AI Paradox that the biggest barrier to getting value out of AI is neither the technology nor the people but the organization itself: 66% of AI users say it lets them spend more time on high-value work and 58% say they are producing work they could not have produced before, while employers have not redesigned the systems, incentives or metrics that would capture any of it. The supporting numbers are the uncomfortable ones — a 15x year-over-year increase in active AI agents on Microsoft 365 and 18x in larger enterprises, 31% of workers in misaligned situations where they are using AI and the organization has not caught up, only 13% saying their employer rewards reinventing work with AI when results fall short, and only one in four saying leadership is clearly aligned on AI direction, with the top 19% labeled frontier firms because readiness and structural capability reinforce each other there. Jenni reads it as another layer on a stack the show has been building for a quarter, connecting it back to the previous week’s IC Index and the suggestion that internal comms should be making sure AI solves the right problems: resolving leadership ambiguity is the leader’s job, the measure stopped being adoption and became what the organization is trying to achieve, and if the honest answer is that everyone is playing in a sandpit then leaders should say so rather than leaving the mess to land on a comms function. Her sharper objection is to the two cheerful headline stats — who decides that work is high-value, and does producing something you could not produce before mean it needed producing? Chuck accuses her of taking management’s side and takes the employee’s: the person doing the job knows its value better than someone eight layers above deciding whether it counts. Where he agrees is on the one in four, which he thinks is the actual problem and the likely source of the frustration sitting in comms and HR teams — using tools well while the organization looks somewhere else entirely.
Israeli cybersecurity firm Red Access scanned apps built with vibe coding tools — Lovable, Base44, Replit, Netlify — and, as Axios reported, found 380,000 publicly accessible assets, around 5,000 of them containing sensitive corporate data, with privacy settings defaulting to public and Google indexing the results while the people who built them had no idea. Chuck runs the specifics: 16 vulnerabilities found in a single Lovable-hosted app in February 2026 exposing nearly 18,000 user records, an April finding that any free account holder could reach another tenant’s source code, database credentials, AI chat history and customer data, and a Q1 2026 assessment of more than 200 vibe-coded apps where 92% had at least one vulnerability traceable to AI hallucination and more than 60% exposed API keys or database credentials in public repositories. His framing is that the pitch — anyone can build with AI — is working exactly as intended, and the security exposure is the other side of the same coin, with employees building things their IT departments know nothing about. Jenni pauses to define vibe coding for anyone who needs it, then gives the analogy that carries the segment: this is Canva arriving and everyone suddenly being able to design. Vibe designing, in her phrase. Democratizing a capability is good on its own terms, the risk is attached rather than intrinsic, and the security problem is real and needs fixing without pretending the essence is a mistake. Chuck extends it to vibe communicating, which is presumably what communicators feel when everyone does it themselves, and lands on the practical question: people will find a way around an IT department that only says no, so the job is teaching the risk while still giving people to-dos instead of to-don’ts.
The starkest numbers of the episode come from Axios HQ’s 2026 internal comms report: 27% of leaders believe employees are fully aligned with the organization’s goals against 9% of employees who agree, 80% of leaders think their communication is helpful and relevant against 53% of employees, and the same 80-to-50 split on clarity. Employees report spending two thirds of the working day on their actual job, with the rest disappearing into bad communication, avoidable meetings and noise the leaders are not sitting in. The cost is put at $3,600 to $37,000 per employee per year, and Chuck does two useful things with it. First he flags the range as a tenfold gap that deserves caution, then he takes the conservative end and multiplies: $3.6 million a year for a thousand people, $36 million at ten thousand, an extra zero each time — which, if you believe the figures, is a case for investment rather than a talking point. He also reverses the leaders’ number, since 27% saying aligned means 73% saying not aligned, and suspects much of it is that employees genuinely cannot recite goals nobody made recitable. Jenni’s answer to when improving communication stops being the answer is now, and she is openly shocked. What she hears from clients across comms, HR, boards and executive committees is a real absence of strategic direction, and she refuses the excuse that the world moves too quickly to set one: adapt to the pace, put a stake in the ground, then communicate the changes well. Her prescription is two days in a room to decide what the organization is actually doing. Chuck calls that the worst possible move, because leaders spend plenty of time talking to each other and almost none talking to everybody else. Jenni’s counter is that they do not — an hour here and an hour there is not the same as working out what they are doing and what it means across the organization — and that sending them out for three or six months of listening first is how you kick the decision down the road while the money keeps leaking.
Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering, has been building a body of work on workplace meetings, and her argument that meetings are now the primary way we experience each other at work is that for remote, hybrid and distributed teams a meeting is not one tool among many but the main channel through which people experience the organization. Her provocation is that most meetings fail before they start because whoever called them mistook a category for a purpose: “we’re meeting about the product launch” is a category, while a purpose is specific enough to decide against, telling you who should be in the room, what success looks like and when you are finished. Her more recent work adds that hybrid formats disadvantage certain participants by design and that connection in a distributed workplace has to be deliberately built, which Chuck reads as sitting right beside the Microsoft data on how badly organizations capture the value of the people they employ. Jenni, who has now heard the book recommended three times in three weeks and is treating that as a sign, thinks the framing is genuinely new and reaches for the adjacent work she trusts — Erica Dhawan on digital body language, and Chris Dyer and Kim Shepherd’s Remote Work on meeting types and how to show up for each. Her position is that the meeting’s owner designs it, that organizational parameters help, and that the profession should stop repeating that meetings are not work when the real problem is that they are bad. Chuck’s favorite idea from Parker is the uncomfortable one: gathering well means deciding who a thing is not for, and the same people who complain about having too many meetings never want to be left out of one. His practical version is giving people templates by meeting type — a one-on-one, a team meeting — and he says the book changed how he thinks about bringing people together at ICology. Jenni’s closing note is the one for listeners: you do not need permission, you control your own behavior in the meetings you attend and run.
Phone pouches have left the concert venue for the workplace, with companies including ID.me locking employee devices in Yondr-style sealed pouches during shifts, and JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon calling phones in meetings disrespectful. The evidence behind the spreading trend is shakier than the headlines: University of Southampton research suggests bans help with routine, repetitive work by removing distraction and gets much murkier for complex roles needing creativity or judgment, because a pouch locks up a phone and not a wandering mind. Jenni’s answer to whether she would allow it is an immediate no, and her reasoning is practical before it is philosophical — at a hot desk with no work handset, a parent or a carer has been cut off from the people who might need them. She accepts the comparison cases and distinguishes them: a comedy show bans filming, a classroom is an hour of learning by a child who is more easily distracted, a secure government site takes everything into a locker as a known part of the deal. An office is none of those, and an adult in charge of their own seven hours is not a child. Chuck adds the contexts where policies genuinely apply — security-sensitive environments, retail, hospitality and healthcare where a phone in front of a customer reads badly — and the casino that launched an employee app full of maps, opening times and restaurant details while its policy told employees not to use their phones in front of customers, which leaves the employee with an impossible instruction. Jenni’s core objection is the substitution: rather than having a direct conversation about behavior in meetings, the organization removes the object, because that is easier. Chuck ends where the trust argument lands, noting he is not aware that JP Morgan Chase is actually pouching anyone and that this is its CEO’s opinion — and that he would happily lock his phone away the day Jamie Dimon locks up his.
What does Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index say is blocking AI value? The organization, not the technology and not the workforce. Across 20,000 workers in 31 countries, 66% of AI users said it lets them spend more time on high-value work and 58% said they are producing output they could not have produced before, but employers have not redesigned systems, incentives or metrics to capture it. Only 13% say their employer rewards reinventing work with AI when results fall short, and only one in four say leadership is clearly aligned on AI direction.
Whose job is it to resolve leadership ambiguity about AI? Jenni’s answer is unambiguous: the leaders’. They have to set direction and say what the organization is trying to achieve, because adoption stopped being the measure. If the honest answer is that the organization is experimenting, she wants leaders to say that out loud — the problem with leaving it vague is that the resulting mess lands on a comms function that cannot set strategy.
What is vibe coding, and why is it a security risk? Vibe coding is building software with AI tools without being a developer — you describe what you want, then build, test and iterate. Red Access scanned apps built on platforms like Lovable, Base44, Replit and Netlify and found 380,000 publicly accessible assets, around 5,000 containing sensitive corporate data, with privacy settings often defaulting to public. A Q1 2026 assessment of more than 200 vibe-coded apps found 92% had at least one vulnerability traceable to AI hallucination and over 60% exposed API keys or database credentials in public repositories.
How big is the gap between what leaders think and what employees experience? Roughly threefold on alignment. Axios HQ’s 2026 report found 27% of leaders believe employees are fully aligned with organizational goals against 9% of employees. On whether communication is helpful and relevant it is 80% of leaders versus 53% of employees, and on clarity 80% versus 50%. Employees also say only two thirds of their working day goes on their actual job.
What does poor communication cost per employee? The report puts it between $3,600 and $37,000 per employee per year. Chuck flags that as a tenfold range worth treating carefully, then takes the conservative end: $3.6 million a year at a thousand employees, $36 million at ten thousand. His point is that if you accept the figures at all, this is a case for investment rather than a statistic to quote.
Why does Priya Parker say most meetings fail before they start? Because the person calling the meeting mistook a category for a purpose. “We’re meeting about the product launch” describes a topic; a purpose is specific enough to make decisions against, and it tells you who belongs in the room, what success looks like and when you are done. Her wider argument is that for distributed teams, meetings are the primary way people experience the organization, so connection has to be designed rather than assumed.
Do workplace phone bans and locked pouches actually work? The evidence is mixed. University of Southampton research suggests bans help with routine, repetitive work by cutting distraction, but it gets murkier for complex roles that need creativity or judgment — you can lock up a phone but not a distracted mind. Both hosts think the bigger issue is what pouching a personal device signals about trust, and Jenni’s view is that it substitutes for a conversation about behavior that somebody did not want to have.
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. As we kick off this week, I was thinking about last year — Riverside, where we record our podcast, did this whole, what’s the word you said the most? And it was like AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, over and over again. We’re going to be kicking off with the AI paradox this week. Risks with quote unquote vibe coding. A shocking gap between leaders and employees — I hope the sarcasm came through there. The importance of meetings. And companies are banning phones at work.
Jenni: Ooh, like they’re banning them in school. Before we get into that, I wanted to kick off today with a bit of celebration. Several million episodes ago, we talked about the importance of celebrating our friends and celebrating the work that they’re doing. And there are three friends I want to celebrate on the podcast this week.
The first is my best friend, Advita Patel, who has published her second book, which is called Decoding Confidence. It’s a fantastic read about how to develop your confidence as a leader, and I’ll put a link in the show notes so you can pick up a copy. She has also done a little podcast series about it if you want to listen to some of that.
The next friend is Rachel Miller, who has published her second book recently, which is Successful Change Communication. Rachel’s book is out and available now, and it’s got lots of expert views in it, focused very much on the internal comms practitioner and how to improve change comms in your organisation.
And the third friend I’m doing a shout out for is someone who is not in comms, but is my friend Steph, who has spent the last five years doing her degree part-time while also being a teacher, full-time mum, all of those things. And she’s just finished her last assignment, which means after five years she’s getting her weekends back and she doesn’t know what to do with herself with the amount of time she’s going to have. She’s absolutely delighted, and we had a little celebration for her at the weekend with some cake. So I just wanted to give her a little shout out to celebrate it, because I think that’s tremendous work doing all of that.
And while we’re on friends — to you, our friends listening, don’t forget that if you want to join us at Unilever’s Unite 26 in London on the 29th and 30th of September, where we’ll be doing a live show of Frequency, you can use the discount code FREQUENCY20 to get 20% off your ticket.
Chuck: Well done on that friends to friends transition, Jenni. That was really good.
Let’s get into the stories this week. Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index surveyed 20,000 workers across 31 countries and landed on a finding that should make your company leadership uncomfortable. The biggest barrier to getting value from AI isn’t the technology and it isn’t the people, it’s the organization itself. 66% of AI users say it lets them spend more time on high value work. 58% say they’re producing work they couldn’t have produced before, but employers aren’t redesigning systems, incentives or metrics that actually capture that value. Microsoft calls the top 19% of AI users quote unquote frontier firms, where their organizational and individual readiness and structural capability reinforce each other.
The report found a 15x year over year increase in active AI agents on Microsoft 365, 18x in larger enterprises. 31% of workers are in misaligned situations, using AI but the organization around them hasn’t caught up. Only 13% of employees say their employer rewards reinventing work with AI when results fall short. Only one in four say leadership is clearly aligned on AI direction. The report’s framing, as AI takes on execution and human agency should expand, is optimistic. Whether organizations are actually built to use that free capacity for anything useful is a different question entirely.
Jenni, only 25% of workers say their leaders are clearly aligned on AI direction. Whose job is it to resolve that leadership ambiguity, or does trying to do so simply create another problem?
Jenni: So this feels like a layer upon layer upon layer of data that we’ve talked about now, I think, for the last quarter almost, about where we are with AI in organisations. If I think back to last week when we talked about the IC Index and the confidence in the future of the workplace, and they were saying that internal comms are in a position to help make sure that AI is being used to solve the right problems — this feels like part of that data set, of people saying people aren’t really aligned. We’ve then also talked about stuff in the past around, it’s how you message it that’s a problem, about the fact that people that are using AI aren’t freeing up time for more thinking and things like that, they’re just doing more work, which isn’t really helpful. So it feels like all of the data is pointing to just a big old mess in organisations about how we’re using AI.
And in terms of whose job is it to resolve that ambiguity, it is the leader’s job to do that. They have to set the direction. They have to have that clarity around, this is what we’re doing. We talked about that report recently, or that article that said, to what end? The measurement is no longer adoption. It’s actually, what are we actually trying to do? Somebody has to set that in stone almost, like this is what we’re going to try and do. If we’re just playing, then just say you’re playing. If the direction is, we are just in a sandpit right now, we’re just going to play around and see what happens, then that’s fine. But this lack of clarity is causing so much mess in organisations, that is then going to fall on something like a comms function to fix, when actually it’s the leader’s job to do that, in my opinion.
Chuck: I think the data points that stand out to me are this one, where two thirds are saying that AI lets them spend more time on high value work. That is exciting. And that 58% said they’re producing work they couldn’t have produced before. That is intriguing. But I’m wondering too at times, especially from the comms and HR side, this 31% of workers in misaligned situations where they’re using it but the org hasn’t caught up — I’m wondering if that’s where some communicators and HR people are sitting. Where they’re using it in ways that the org is focusing on other areas right now, or they don’t know yet quite what that benefit’s going to be. And that’s where I think that frustration is probably going to sit. Whether you’re forced to use tools you don’t want to use, or you’re benefiting in ways that the org doesn’t really care about quite yet, I can see that being that frustration. If you’re producing this high value work but the org isn’t caught up to that yet, I could see that being a big frustration for employees.
Jenni: Yeah, but I also question some of that data. It’s a bit like, again, we talked about last week, if you’re going to say, do people trust me? Yes, they absolutely do. Are you doing high value work? Who’s to say that’s high value work? Who’s determining that? And if you’re producing work that you couldn’t have produced before, yes, that’s great, but is it something that you did need to produce before, or have you just created something that you didn’t need to do?
Chuck: I can’t believe you’re taking the side of management on this, Jenni. What a suit.
Jenni: Like, where is the business impact? And that for me is still what’s missing. If it had said, 66% of AI users saying it’s letting them spend more time on activities that are having a direct impact on the organisation’s goals, priorities, success. If it said 58% say they’re producing work that is having a profound change in innovation and what we do. But it’s not saying that. It’s just saying, I think I’m doing more high value stuff and I’m producing stuff I couldn’t do before. None of that is showing whether or not that is actually useful or helpful for the organisation’s success.
Chuck: I think though, when it goes back to that data point, only one in four say leadership is aligned on AI direction. That’s the problem. That’s the problem. You clearly don’t even know that your leaders aren’t even aware of what’s going on, or what we should be using this for, or how are we benefiting. So I’m not going to put that onus then on the employee to make that decision. I’m going to take the side of the employee, Jenni. You can take the side of management on this one. I’m going to believe them when they say they’re doing high value work and the work they’re producing, because they know their job better than anybody else. Who decides value? Is it the person doing the work, or is it the person eight layers above looking down on them deciding if that’s valuable enough?
Jenni: That’s a very big question, which we shall not answer today.
Chuck: Next up, an Israeli cybersecurity firm called Red Access scanned apps built with vibe coding tools — things like Lovable, Base44, Replit, Netlify, which I have used — and found 380,000 publicly accessible assets. Around 5,000 of them contained sensitive corporate data. Every IT person who listened to this, their hair stood up. Privacy settings on many of these tools defaulted to public, and the apps are being indexed by Google. The people who built them often had no idea this was happening.
Lovable, which doesn’t sound very lovable right now, had a particularly rough run. In February of 2026, a researcher found 16 vulnerabilities in a single Lovable-hosted app, exposing nearly 18,000 user records. In April, another researcher revealed that any free Lovable account holder could access a different tenant’s source code, database credentials, AI chat history and customer data. The Q1 2026 assessment of more than 200 vibe-coded apps found that 92% had at least one vulnerability traceable to AI hallucination, and more than 60% exposed API keys or database credentials in public repositories. If you’re not an IT person, trust me, this is not good stuff.
And this isn’t a niche developer problem. Employees across organizations are using these tools right now to build things their IT departments do not know about. The vibe coding pitch is simply, anyone can build with AI. I think I have probably also said that. It works exactly as intended. The security implications are the other side of the same coin. I have said that, but I also do not work for some massive company. Jenni, vibe coding platforms are giving employees genuine capability to build tools without involving IT. Is this fundamentally a good thing with a security problem attached, or is it shadow IT no matter how AI powered it is?
Jenni: It’s a good question. I need to come back to the term vibe coding and just clarify what that means for people listening. Because in my head I’m like, we’re coding, man.
Chuck: That’s kind of what it’s like. I’m glad you’re doing that. For those watching the video, you will see Jenni vibe coding. It’s basically people that have an idea and you just start building it. You’re not a developer, you don’t know all the code, but you’re just actively building, testing, continuing, playing. Basically it’s like coders who aren’t coders can now vibe code. Because you’re coding on vibes, you’re not coding on tech skills.
Jenni: Yeah. So I think that this is fundamentally a good thing with a security problem. And if I link it into something that’s got, I would say, security risk, it’s almost like when Canva came out and all of a sudden people could design. We were vibe designing. Does that count?
Chuck: You can go with it.
Jenni: It’s the same thing. It’s like you can only go so far, you can do so much, but you’re kind of playing, doing stuff, things that you couldn’t do before because there’s a tool that’s now available to do it. This for me is not a bad thing. You’ve had hours of fun vibe coding and testing and doing stuff and making games, all sorts of things, right? There’s something brilliant in that, that technology is making this more accessible. But the security problem attached with it is the risk. So I think, yes, it is fundamentally a good thing with a security problem attached.
Chuck: I love that you compare this to design. So we’ve got vibe coding, we’ve got vibe designing. And I think that you look at it from the professional side of things — communicators are probably frustrated with other people vibe communicating, just kind of doing it themselves, not relying on the experts or the people to come to to do it. This has got to be frustrating for IT teams. But I think it’s also a good lesson to learn — what’s your Jurassic Park thing you always come back to?
Jenni: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Chuck: Yeah, there you go. And also, nature finds a way. People will find a way. If IT is saying, no, we’re not going to do that, no, you can’t do that — people will find a way. They’ll do a workaround. So how do you make this happen? How do you teach and educate the risks and dangers of this but still encourage? How do you give people the to-dos and not the to-don’ts? If you give people enough don’ts, they won’t mess with it. But there’s a lot of value in people understanding what goes into some of these things. And it also shows the risk that’s out there.
Jenni: Yeah, and it’s a big risk, and I think that does need to be addressed, because that risk is significant, especially when you’re dealing with data. We’ve talked about people selling off data and all sorts of stuff like that. There’s a lot in there that needs to be fixed, but the essence of it is there. It’s just there. It’s just, come help yourself.
Chuck: And here they don’t need to sell it. It’s readily available. They can just go poach it. Just help yourself to it.
Next, Jenni, we’re going to talk about the shocking gap between leaders and employees. The numbers from Axios HQ’s 2026 internal comms report are uncomfortable reading for anyone who calls themselves a communications leader. 27% of leaders believe their employees are fully aligned with the organization’s goals. Only 9% of employees agree. The perception gap runs deeper. 80% of leaders think their communications are helpful and relevant. 53% of employees feel the same. The same pattern holds for clarity and engagement — leaders rate themselves at 80%, employees check in at 50%.
It’s also expensive. Employees say they spend two thirds of their working day doing their actual job. The rest disappears into bad communication, avoidable meetings and noise that leaders apparently don’t notice, because they’re not the ones sitting in it. The cost of poor communication runs anywhere from $3,600 to $37,000 per employee per year. Jenni, when the leader-employee alignment gap is this wide, 27% versus 9% — neither of those numbers are ideal — at what point does quote unquote improving communication stop being the answer, and some bigger change become the only true honest response to this?
Jenni: Now. Now is the time where it’s tough. Now. We’re right here, we’re in it. We’ve been in it for probably about six months to a year, if not two, if not 10. We’re in it. And I think that there has to be an uncomfortable conversation. Something is really drastically not working. If we’re saying 27% of leaders believe their employees are fully aligned, that is abysmal in itself. And then only 9% of employees agree. I mean, what are people doing in organisations? From a leadership perspective, they’re probably thinking, what are people doing? Are we doing the right things? Employees — only less than 10% agree that they are aligned to what the organisation’s doing. Something is wrong.
And the only thing I can come back to on this is based on the conversations I have with clients, which is a range of people from comms, HR, boards, executive committees, directors: there is a real lack of clarity of strategic direction. And you can blame that on the fact that the world is changing at a rapid pace, we’ve got to make decisions quickly. All of that I get, but all of that I don’t care about when it comes to you having a strategic direction in your organisation. It’s not an acceptable excuse. And I think that it’s being used as an excuse and it doesn’t wash anymore. This is the world we live in. You have to adapt to that pace. You’ve got to think strategically. You’ve got to put a stake in the ground, get people to move forward, and the changes you need to communicate that well, and go. But this 27% — I mean, I am shocked. And I know we did the shocking in quote marks, but I am shocked.
Chuck: Yeah. Well, I think that it was the gap, that leaders are 3x employees. But even the leaders are really far down the list. To do the reverse math, 73% are saying we are not aligned, which just showcases such a problem.
I also want to point to — everybody likes to run to these dollar figures, which now I’m going to do, with a cautionary tale on this. It says $3,600 to $37,000. That’s a 10x gap right there. That’s a pretty big gap between the two. Let’s take the conservative number on this. You’re a company of a thousand people. I’m going to do the math for you. That’s saying at least that poor communication is costing your company $3.6 million. Conservatively, per this data, $3.6 million. You’re a 10,000 person company, that’s 36 million. The numbers keep adding a zero as you add a zero. And then take the extreme figure of that, and all of a sudden you’re in the tens of millions of dollars that poor communication costs.
If you believe these data figures — and I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t — if you believe these data figures, this becomes something to go armed for investment with. How can we improve communication? Well, we need to get our employees aligned with goals. Do they even know what these goals are? I think that is one of the bigger challenges, that is so simply solved, that employees truly don’t know what the goals even are, because they’re not even understandable or easily recitable.
Jenni: It’s just infuriating. And to your point on the numbers, I don’t know what it’s going to take to get people to actually do the work. And this isn’t about comms people or HR people. This is about leaders. This is about leaders recognising, actually, you know what, we need to just go and sit in a room for two days and just figure out what we’re doing. And then we can come out and talk about it. Make the time. Make the time to have that conversation.
Chuck: Actually, I think that’s actually one of the worst things they could do, is go into a room and talk about it. I want them to go out and talk to all the other people. They spend enough time talking to each other. I want them to go out and talk to everybody else.
Jenni: I don’t think they do. No, I disagree. I do not think they do spend anywhere near enough time talking to each other. I think they spend like a quick hour here and a quick hour there, and they don’t spend the time to talk about, what is it we’re really doing? How are we going to talk about that? What’s the impact across the organisation? Yes, by all means, go out and talk to people and bring that back in. But at the moment you need to put some sort of stake in the ground to get people moving, and then test, adapt, iterate, agile — all of these things are there.
But my worry, if you go out and spend the time and go out and talk to everybody and come back, is you’re kicking this down the curb. You’re giving people permission to go, yeah, go out and spend three months and six months and do this and then come back. There is not the time. You have to make that decision, then be agile enough to evolve it and shift it and change it. But you have to do the work to pull this together. Otherwise you’re going to be spending millions, as you’ve pointed out, each year on stuff that you could absolutely save.
Chuck: Next up, Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering and truly one of the brightest minds on how and why humans come together, has been building out a body of work specifically on workplace meetings — everyone’s favorite thing to do. Her core provocation: when teams are remote, hybrid or distributed, meetings aren’t just one tool among many, they’re the primary way people experience the organization.
Parker’s central argument is that most meetings fail before they even start, because the people who call them mistake a category for a purpose. Quote unquote, we’re meeting about the product launch, is a category. A purpose is specific enough to make decisions against. It tells you who should be in the room, what success looks like, and when you’re done. Most gatherings skip this step entirely. Her more recent work on hybrid meetings adds another layer: the format itself now disadvantages certain participants by design, and most organizations aren’t doing anything about it. Connection in a distributed workplace doesn’t happen on its own, it has to be designed. This sits right next to the Microsoft data we talked about earlier on how poorly most organizations are capturing the value of the people they employ.
We’ve talked about meetings in the past, Jenni. If meetings are the primary way distributed employees experience the organization, does that change who owns the meeting design, or does it just mean the current owner — which is sometimes usually no one — needs to actually do the job?
Jenni: So this is interesting. This is about the third time I’ve heard this Art of Gathering book mentioned in the last three weeks. I feel like it’s a sign.
Chuck: Have you not read it yet? Oh, it’s a great read. It’s a great read.
Jenni: No, I haven’t. So it’s going on my list. So I love the premise of this, that meetings are the primary way we experience each other at work, and in an online world as well. And I think that’s so true. And I don’t think that’s really been called out in this way before, in terms of how we interact with each other as that primary thing. So I think it’s huge. We’ve talked about digital body language — you introduced me to Erica Dhawan, who wrote that book — and this is really important. But I think this comes down to culturally how the organisation is doing this. So the meeting design has to be set up by the person that owns it, but sometimes having parameters in place around that are helpful. So I’ve talked before about Chris Dyer and Kim Shepherd, who wrote the book Remote Work. They talk about different meeting types and how you show up for those.
I think there’s just more work in general to be done to make meetings work better, which I talked about a few episodes ago, where I got really cross about people saying meetings are not work. They just need to be better. And I think you have agency to do that as an employee. I think you have the ability to make your meetings better rather than waiting for the organisation to do it. But I think the organisation should be doing that as well.
Chuck: Yeah, I think I misspoke earlier — provocation, not provaction. I don’t know why I invented that word.
Jenni: I know, I really liked your provaction.
Chuck: But part of her book, The Art of Gathering — one of her things to talk about is that sometimes having a meeting or a gathering is about actually excluding people. It’s about who is it for and who is it not for, which can be a very challenging thing to happen in the workplace. But people are so bothered by, I’ve got so many meetings, but they never want to be excluded from one. So which is it? Do you want to be involved? Do you not want to be involved? Do you want to complain? Do you want your calendar full? Because sometimes with her Art of Gathering, it’s about deciding who should be there and who shouldn’t be there. And I think taking that same argument and bringing it into the workplace is very important.
And even giving people ideas around, hey, if it’s this type of meeting, this is how it should be structured. If it’s a one-on-one, maybe this is how it should be structured. If it’s a team meeting, this is how you structure it. Giving people those templates I think is really valuable. For people that haven’t read The Art of Gathering, it is a really good read, where you read things and you’re like, yeah, obviously, but you hadn’t processed it in that way. It really made me rethink, from an ICology standpoint, why and how we bring people together — recognizing that what you’re doing isn’t always for everyone.
Jenni: Yes, and it doesn’t need to be, and I think that’s really important. But I would just reiterate the point that you can do this. I think sometimes people are waiting to be told. You can make meetings better if you’re in them, running them — you are in charge of your behaviour and your actions, so you can be part of that change as well.
Chuck: And lastly, phone pouches have left the concert venue and entered your workplace. Companies including ID.me have been locking employee devices in Yondr-style sealed pouches during shifts, the same technology used at comedy shows, school classrooms and concerts. JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, who I love referencing from time to time, has called phones in meetings quote unquote disrespectful.
The trend is spreading, but the research behind it is shakier than the headlines suggest. University of Southampton researcher Adrian Chatty’s work shows phone bans can help with routine, repetitive work by cutting distractions, but the evidence gets murkier for complex roles that require creativity or judgment. You can lock a phone in a pouch, but you can’t lock out a distracted mind.
There’s also the trust dimension people aren’t talking about. Pouch locking an employee’s personal device says something specific about the employer-employee relationship. Whether it sits on we care about your focus, or we don’t trust you to manage yourself, probably depends on whether anyone has asked employees what they thought about it before rolling it out. Jenni, would you let your company lock up your phone?
Jenni: No. And this is utterly ridiculous. This is the most ridiculous thing I think we might have talked about, because it serves no purpose. So we now live in a world where if I’m at work I’m sat at a hot desk probably, so I don’t have any other phone. I might not even have a work phone. So if I had children, or I cared for a parent or somebody else in my family, or I don’t know, I’m just a bloody grown up and I might want to just have some conversations — taking my phone away doesn’t do that.
It makes sense in a comedy show, right? Because you don’t want people to film that, you don’t want people to take photos, you don’t want that to be shared. It makes sense in a classroom, because you are learning and you’re a child and you are more easily distracted, and you are there to learn for an hour and then go and do something else. At work, I am in charge of my time. I am there for seven hours and I am a grown up, and this is just absolutely mind-boggling to me, that this even — I’ve just got no words. Got no words.
Chuck: It is a bit mind-boggling, but it does happen. And I think you’re right, it’s the context. Why is it being done? Because there are company environments where, because of security concerns — kind of along the lines of the comedy concert — they don’t want data coming out, where you can’t take your phone into certain environments. And also this is, with very few companies not even providing company devices, this is your personal item. This is yours.
And companies have policies around when and when you cannot use your phone sometimes, especially if you’re in retail environments, hospitality, healthcare, they don’t want you using your phone out in front of the public. But it’s also worth looking at those company policies, because I know there was a certain casino that I worked with one time that launched an employee app and wanted employees to use this as a resource with their customers, because there were maps in there, there was instructions, restaurant times, all those things in there. But the employee policy said, do not use your phone in front of customers. So which is it? I’m not allowed to use my phone, except I am allowed to use my phone. So that then puts the employee in an impossible situation. So this is just simple policies.
Jenni: Yeah, but it’s also linked to having an employee app on a phone. Do you know what I mean? It’s all the work we’ve done in our respective careers of introducing technology to frontline workspaces, manufacturing, retail — nearly all the policies are, you can’t have your phone in that environment. And if there’s a reason, it makes sense. I’ve been into places that are secure and you have to put all of your personal belongings into a locker before you’re allowed to go through, right? That’s quite normal in places that are government related and security related. And I’m totally fine with that in those environments, and that’s what’s expected. It’s sort of part of the contract, you know that.
But if I’m just going to work, and someone at JP Morgan is now going to say, oh, we’re just going to take everyone’s phones away — have the, let me say bloody, have the bloody conversation about the fact that you need to put your phone away when you’re in a meeting. You’re just not having the difficult conversation, because it’s easier to say, actually, just everyone put it in a locker. Have a conversation. Hey, Jamie, put your phone away, I’m in a meeting. It’s not that hard.
Chuck: All right, well, and to be fair, I’m not aware that JP Morgan Chase is doing this. It’s their CEO, who I love referencing, Jamie Dimon. He is saying that phones in meetings are disrespectful. But let’s say they are, and I work at JP Morgan Chase. I would lock my phone up if Jamie Dimon locked his phone up. Do you think he’s locking his phone up? Not a chance. Not a chance. So if you want to say, hey, when we’re in meetings, put the phones away — fine. But locking it up, because that to me, going back to the thing, we care about your focus versus we don’t trust you to manage yourself — come on, let’s be real here. Let’s be real.
Well, that wraps up our stories for this week. Let’s move on to our freq-outs. Jenni, what are you freq-ing out about?
Jenni: So I am freq-ing out about the fact that I’m just not really at home very much. We’ve talked in the past about when you sort of pack loads of travel in and you’re out and about and doing stuff. And I suppose I just feel a little bit like, gosh, I’m just not in the office. I’m either speaking at events, or I’m running client workshops, or I’m travelling. And a friend was saying to me the other day, oh, when are you next free for dinner? And I was like, hmm, 25th of June. Which is mad, right? But that’s just kind of where I am.
And there’s some non-work stuff in there. I’ve got some nice things going on with sort of bachelorette hen party things and family birthdays. But I just am living out of a suitcase. And I know sometimes when we’re not on air we’re both going, I just need a day, I just need a day, I just need a day. So you can hear my freq-out a little bit in that. I just need a day. So that’s what I’m freq-ing out about. Literally freq-ing out about the fact that I’m not home.
Chuck: Yeah. My freq-out is, I’ve now lived in Indianapolis, including college, a little more than 30 years now. And there’s something really special about the month of May in Indianapolis, and it all centers around the Indy 500. The buzzing of the track — we’re fortunate, we live probably, without track activities going on, about a 10, 15 minute drive from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. During track activities that 10 or 15 minutes could turn into hours. If anybody’s been to IMS, it is all city streets, so it’s easy to get to and from, but there’s a volume problem.
But it’s really cool to just be in a city where the entire culture revolves around this racing moment. And it happens every single year and it’s family traditions for people, it’s work traditions. Some people go to the track every single day because there’s qualifications or there’s practice or there’s a race going on, or they get to go to the garages and the pits. It very much becomes a culture of this city during the month of May to celebrate that. It’s really fun. We’ve gone out to the track a couple of times this May. We didn’t go to the race, but we did go to the US Grand Prix, which is the road course that happens here. But yeah, just a really cool time to be in Indianapolis this time of year.
Jenni: Yeah, it’s nice. We like a little bit of local community culture. I think it’s nice.
Chuck: Of course. And that’s what we’re freq-ing out about this week. The show notes have all the articles and links from today’s conversation. If Frequency is a part of your week, a quick review goes a long way. Subscribe wherever you’re listening and share this with just one person who’s interested in what we talked about. Thanks to my friend Poet Ali for the music. We’re back every Monday. See you next week.
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.
