Internal communication is roughly 150 years old, and Jenni left a conference keynote about it having written two things in her notebook: “this is never going to work” and “nobody wants this.” The reason is that the first company magazines came from employees who wanted to talk to each other, not from leaders who wanted to be heard — which makes a whole profession’s pitch to the C-suite look like an answer to a question nobody asked. Around that, four stories about work designed for the wrong thing: the Economic Times on the collapse of the nine-to-five, the Colorado River as a model for how organizations quietly drain their own talent pipelines, Fast Company’s argument that empowerment is dependence with better branding, and a cold open in which a company reportedly ran up a $500 million AI bill and Microsoft pulled Claude back from its own staff.
The cold open is Chuck’s favorite kind of story, and he is careful to label it unverified: a consultant reports a company that put zero guardrails around employee use of Claude and ran up a bill of $500 million in a single month, which Chuck likens to a house full of teenagers leaving the hot water running for a month straight. He pairs it with Microsoft, which rolled Claude out to its own employee base and is now pulling that back toward Copilot as costs climb. His point is not that the number is credible — even a gross exaggeration would leave a figure no one budgeted for — but that it exposes how immature “go use AI, go figure things out” really is as a policy. Then comes the punchline, which sends him off to look up the origin of the word (vaudeville, where a joke was equated to a physical punch and the line was the script): companies bought AI for efficiency and some are now learning it is cheaper to have people do the work. Jenni’s verdict on all of it is one word, repeated: delicious.
Jenni opens the stories with an Economic Times piece arguing the modern workday looks productive from the outside — packed calendars, constant notifications, permanent availability — while people spend the day in motion without ever reaching depth. Productivity was built around visibility because presence signaled performance in industrial work, and knowledge work was never redesigned around anything else; now AI is stripping out repetitive execution and pushing the advantage toward judgment, creativity and problem-solving. Chuck adjusts her framing before answering: he does not doubt that judgment is the advantage, he doubts leaders can get their heads around measuring it, and the correct leadership response is to notice the person who worked 40 hours and produced more than the person who worked 80. Jenni’s frustration is that none of this is new — it has been her soapbox since COVID — and that organizations lifted and shifted work into a different place instead of reimagining it, exactly as factory design was lifted and shifted in the Industrial Revolution. Six years on, she wants leaders in a room asking what work is actually for, since nothing forces them to keep the nine-to-five construct at all. Chuck’s sharpest line lands on the coordination habit underneath it: the brain cannot multitask, it can only do one task at a time, so anyone wearing the good-multitasker badge is bragging about being less efficient. Jenni’s reading recommendation for that is Tony Crabbe’s book Busy.
Soren Kaplan’s Inc. piece on the Colorado River gives the episode its best metaphor. Lake Powell is about 24% full and Lake Mead about 32%, 2026 is on track to be the driest year in more than a century of records, and the seven affected states still cannot agree on new operating rules — the tragedy of the commons, where every actor optimizes for itself and the shared resource collapses one rational decision at a time. The detail Jenni lingers on is that the Colorado River Compact allocated more water than the river produces, which is precisely what organizations do with talent pipelines, team capacity and market trust: pause hiring through an AI transition, run lean while demand is uncertain, cut development in a hard quarter. Kaplan’s fixes are to name the shared resource and give it a number, build system-level accountability so managers are not rewarded only for their own team’s output, and act before the options run out. Chuck’s first example is his own country, which he offers as a live demonstration of people voting in what they believe is their own interest and creating the problem down the line, and his corporate version is burnout — the shared energy every individual pours in while nobody asks whether the company’s own river is running dry. Jenni’s read is that this is a visibility failure at director level: leaders who are responsible for a function have stopped switching hats to the one that makes them responsible for the whole organization, and she has watched that get noticeably worse over about eight years. Chuck’s suggested first step is almost embarrassingly small — leaders could talk to each other.
The Fast Company argument is that job descriptions promise autonomy and meetings end with “you’ve got this”, while the work still runs through a gauntlet of approvals, sign-offs and second-guessing: the language suggests freedom, the system reinforces control. Their analogy is a rental car — nobody worries about long-term maintenance on something they do not own — and their distinction is between responsibility, which organizations hand out freely, and authorship of the decision-making path, which they keep. The proposed fix is for leaders to behave as system architects: clarity on outcomes instead of instructions, guardrails instead of approval checkpoints, and reversible decisions made with about 70% of the information anyone would like. Chuck answers the harder half of Jenni’s question first — what leaders have to give up is control — and admits he is not sure he has seen it done well, because delegation is a skill most people are weak at. His model is David Rock’s SCARF, where the A is autonomy, a lever that motivates some people and frightens others who do not trust the guardrails, and his example is return to office: people were empowered to work from home only until leaders could take the control back. Jenni pushes past that. Leaders will never give up control outright, because risk, reputation and accountability are real, so the useful question is what sits underneath — a trust deficit running in both directions, and a failure to be clear enough that the how can safely be left alone. Her own example is a leadership session where one executive admitted he did not want to sign off budgets and a peer replied that he had handed that to his team years ago; the man had simply never been told he could.
The last story is Jenni’s own, from the History of Internal Communications Conference at Brunel University in London, organized by Professor Michael Heller, where she spoke about the value of internal communication and later published that speech as an article on LinkedIn. What she actually wrote in her notebook during Heller’s opening keynote was “this is never going to work”, boxed, with “nobody wants this” underneath. The history explains why: the Prudential’s Ibis Magazine in 1878 is the first known company magazine in the UK, Lever Brothers’ Port Sunlight Monthly Journal of 1895 said outright that it was written for and by employees, and the whole thing grew out of sport, social connection and education. By the 1930s virtually every large organization in the UK had a company journal, and the trade was heavily unionized in origin — but at no point did a leader decide they needed to hear from their people. Jenni’s sadness is that the profession now spends its energy convincing leaders of a benefit they never requested. Chuck takes the same facts somewhere warmer. He keeps a newsletter from the late 1940s or early 1950s containing an employee profile of his grandfather, and he thinks the from-the-employees intent should be the whole focus; his manufacturing career was in union environments, which he enjoyed precisely because the union’s subject was the employees. His favorite employee newsletter of all time was typed in Word by a catering company, printed order counts and recognized drivers who spotted a competitor’s van and dropped off a menu — a design every communicator would clutch their pearls at, and exactly what its readers wanted. Jenni’s own version is Crumbs, the magazine she made for a cookie brand and hated at the time for being chaotic, which employees loved because it was about them and cookies. Chuck’s closing point is the one that stings: employees publishing in their own circles is what the profession now calls shadow comms and denigrates, and it is the origin story.
When did internal communication actually start? Roughly 150 years ago. The Prudential Assurance Company’s Ibis Magazine, first published in 1878, is the earliest known company magazine in the UK and one of the first anywhere. Lever Brothers’ Port Sunlight Monthly Journal followed in 1895 and stated that it was written for and by employees. By the 1930s almost every large UK organization had a company journal.
Why does Jenni say “nobody wants this” about internal comms? Because the history shows the discipline came from employees wanting to connect with each other over sport, education and social life, not from leaders deciding they needed to inform their people. Her point is that communicators now spend their working lives selling leaders on a function leaders never asked for, which is a difficult starting position.
What is the Colorado River metaphor for organizations? Lake Powell is about 24% full and Lake Mead about 32%, and the Colorado River Compact allocated more water than the river actually produces. Soren Kaplan’s argument in Inc. is that companies deplete talent pipelines, team capacity and market trust the same way: each individual decision to run lean or pause hiring is defensible, but the shared cost is invisible until the resource is gone.
Why is empowerment called a management lie? The Fast Company argument is that organizations give people responsibility for outcomes while keeping authorship of the decision-making path. When every meaningful decision still needs a sign-off, even high performers hedge and wait, and the language of freedom is doing the work of a control system. The article’s phrase is dependence with better branding.
How should leaders measure performance if hours no longer signal output? Chuck’s answer is to look at the decisions people make and what they produce, not how long they spent producing it — and to treat the person who worked 40 hours and delivered more as the better performer, not the one who logged 80. He also points out the brain cannot multitask, so a culture that rewards visible busyness is rewarding inefficiency.
Is AI actually cheaper than people? Not always, and that is the punchline in this episode. Chuck relays an unverified report of a company running up a $500 million monthly Claude bill with no guardrails on employee use, alongside Microsoft pulling its own staff back toward Copilot as costs rose. His conclusion is that some companies are discovering it is cheaper to have people do the work.
Chuck: Welcome to Frequency, I’m Chuck Gose.
Jenni: And I’m Jenni Field. Frequency is your go-to for real talk about comms, culture and employee experience. Beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. And this week, we’re going to be talking about the history of internal comms. What an education that’s going to be. We’re going to be discussing the word empowerment and what that really means. Some inspiration from the Colorado River and what that’s teaching us about organizations. And also the disappearance of the nine to five. Before we get into that though…
Chuck: Yeah, Jenni, we have both been travelling about. I believe I saw on Instagram you were gallivanting around Amsterdam. Meanwhile, I’ve been back here doing the real work. I was in New York last week. I was in Chicago recently. So I hope you enjoyed your travels while the rest of us have been doing the real work.
Jenni: I was gallivanting, I was. To be fair, all I saw of your real work was I think you out for dinner and, you know, chilling out with your mates. So… I was on holiday, in my defence.
Chuck: That’s — you’re just seeing the selected pieces. You’re just seeing the selected pieces. But the other thing I wanted to talk about was I am absolutely loving this new whiplash on AI. This is unverified, but it seems to be — I guess maybe it is confirmed, but not right from a real source — that apparently there’s a company out there that had zero guardrails around their employee use of Claude, and they racked up a bill of $500 million in a month. It would essentially be like if you had a house full of teenagers and they’re all running the hot water 24 hours a day. It’s just insane to hear that no guardrails. But I think this shows the infancy, the immaturity of companies saying, no, go use AI, go figure things out, and not understanding the financial consequences of that.
Chuck: Also, apparently, Microsoft, which rolled out Claude to its employee base, which I thought was interesting, because you would think Claude might be a competitor to Copilot, but maybe they recognize this better — is now shutting off the use of Claude and requiring them to use Copilot, because the costs were getting so high. And the ultimate punchline to all of this is apparently, Jenni, companies are learning it is actually cheaper to have people do the work than it is to have AI do the work.
Jenni: There’s something just so glorious about that, isn’t it?
Chuck: It’s delicious. It’s absolutely delicious. And as I was thinking about this punchline that’s out there, I looked up — Jenni, do you know the origin of the word punchline? I didn’t either. Apparently, per the internet, and this is a source I’m going to trust on this, it dates back to the vaudeville days where they equated a joke to a physical punch, like an impact. You would have that impact, and then the line being the script. So the joke here, the punchline, is that companies were all about AI efficiency, and in fact it’s doing the opposite of what they think it’s going to do. So that’s the impact.
Jenni: I love that. And really, you said at the beginning of this it’s unverified. Is the bit about the cost verified though?
Chuck: This was from a consultant who’s working with a company and they would not share who the company is, but they said the bill was $500 million. And imagine — let’s say that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, or even a gross exaggeration. I doubt companies have budgeted 100 million or 15 million, but 500 million dollars.
Jenni: Yeah, that’s terrifying. The punchline is just delicious. It’s just delicious. But as we’re talking about work and what’s going on, let’s kick off with the first story, which is about the end of nine to five. So it’s talking about AI and hybrid work and how that’s transforming enterprise culture. It’s a piece in the Economic Times. They’re saying that the modern workday looks very productive from the outside — packed calendars, constant notifications, everyone’s always available. We’ve talked about this a lot. But underneath that busyness is that really uncomfortable reality, which is that people are spending a lot of time kind of in motion, but without ever reaching any meaningful depth. So for decades, productivity was built around visibility. Presence signalled performance, time at a desk implied contribution. And that model has made sense for industrial work and it’s made sense for a number of years, but knowledge work never got redesigned around it. And this has been my soapbox since COVID.
Jenni: So today, this article is saying that value is created through concentration rather than activity. So a product breakthrough may emerge from an hour of uninterrupted thinking. A designer may produce better work after stepping away from constant communication. But the modern workplace is increasingly rewarding responsiveness over reflection. So employees move between meetings, updates, approvals, message threads, all of that at quite high speed, spending more time coordinating work rather than doing it. So the attention starts to fragment, the workday becomes just this chain of reactions, and that’s where this traditional nine to five model begins to kind of lose its relevance. At the same time, AI is accelerating this reckoning. As automation handles repetitive execution faster than ever, the real competitive advantage may shift toward judgment, creativity and problem solving. These are all forms of work that depend heavily on clarity of thought. So my question is: if the competitive advantage is now judgment and creativity rather than output and hours, what does this mean for how leaders should actually be measuring and communicating performance to their people?
Chuck: I’m going to readjust your statement there. Where the competitive advantage is judgment and creativity rather than output and hours — I think it’s leaders that are questioning that. I don’t think they can get their mind around, or their head around, the fact that this is how we should be judging our competitive advantage. Not, are we producing more, being more efficient here, these data signals. What are we doing with this time? So I think that’s the challenge. I believe that the advantage is creativity. I believe that advantage is judgment, and working on the right things at the right time in the right way with the right people. It’s not so much that I put in 80 hours this week. The correct leadership would be to look at employees and say, wow, that person worked 40 and created more, got more done, was more efficient with their time — than saying that person who worked 80. Because I forget what the report was, but there was something about how after 60-some hours, 67 hours or something in a week, it actually starts to decline. So we know that there’s this optimum amount. I never read the book that was the four-hour work week or whatever it was called. That didn’t quite add up to me, I think that’s being a bit liberal with things. But that’s where I would question leaders: look at the decisions your employees are making, what they’re putting out, not necessarily how much and how long they’re spending doing it.
Jenni: And I still think this is the transition that’s really hard. So when I was reading the article, there’s nothing necessarily new in here, but I think the value piece around concentration rather than activity, the value around judgment and creativity rather than output — all of that has been around for a long time. But there is something about hybrid work that’s going to nudge that, because you can’t do the presenteeism, and AI is going to nudge that because it’s going to take away some of those tasks. I think until leaders are looking at the whole culture of the organisation, and what the organisation is trying to do and achieve in terms of its purpose or meaning, and then how you go about doing that and reimagining that — I think that’s still the issue. And I said this in COVID, where we were just lifting and shifting work into a different place rather than reimagining it. And that’s what they did in the Industrial Revolution. They just lifted and shifted how they would design factories with different mechanisms to do it, rather than thinking, we could do this differently now, we’ve got different technology. And it’s been six years and I sort of feel like, how much longer was it going to take people to go, hang on a minute, what is it we’re really trying to do and what’s the best way of doing it? And I know we talked the other week about leaders getting in a room and having a conversation. Some people are really with me on that on LinkedIn. I would love to see people having this bigger conversation. So not necessarily just the strategy, but reimagining what work needs to be. That’s surely within your gift as an organisation, as the leader of an organisation. You don’t have to have the construct of nine to five. You could tear that up and do something completely different, surely.
Chuck: Let’s be clear about one thing. People are with you on LinkedIn with a list of caveats. It’s like all these asterisks and all these, yeah, and if this and then this and then this. Anyway, but I’ll let that go. Going back to an earlier part that you talked about, with all these things that people are moving between — meetings and approvals and being responsive — I think if you’re one of those individuals who wears the I’m-a-good-multitasker badge on your sleeve, you need to stop. You need to stop. The brain actually can’t multitask. It can only do one task at a time. So what you’re doing is actually being less efficient, less productive, but somehow bragging about it. It’s sort of like that culture of busy. Busy is not productive. Busy is not successful. Multitasking is not successful. So let’s stop parading that around as a badge of honour.
Jenni: Yeah, and if you want to read about that, there’s a really good book called Busy by Tony Crabbe, which I read about 10 years ago and have talked about ever since, where I first came across the data around multitasking and stuff. But it’s excellent if you feel that you struggle with busyness.
Jenni: Now our next story is the Colorado River story. So what happens when you have a week off. This is from Inc.com. So it’s talking about the fact that the Colorado River is running dry, and saying that that’s a perfect metaphor for how organizations quietly hollow themselves out. Lake Powell is currently just 24% full and Lake Mead is 32%, with 2026 on track to be the driest year in over a century of records. Yet the seven affected states still can’t agree on new operating rules. Every state knows the system is failing, but they’re not doing anything collectively to really fix that. Now, the article uses this as a lens on what economists call the tragedy of the commons. Every actor optimises for their own benefit, but the shared cost is invisible and the resource collapses one rational decision at a time.
Jenni: So the Colorado River Compact actually allocated more water than the river produces. States drew on those reserves that were never really there. This feels quite familiar in terms of organizations, because inside organizations, the shared resources being quietly depleted are talent pipelines, team capacity, market trust. The trap isn’t about the negligence, it’s the rationality applied at the wrong scale. So there’s a lot of similarities here about how we can take this analogy and put it into the organisation. The key points in the article about how you would address this, in terms of what leaders need to do, is around naming the shared resource and giving it a number, building system-level accountability so individual managers aren’t just rewarded for their own team’s output, and acting before the options disappear. All of this for me is just around making sure that you’re looking at the whole piece and not your individual piece. And in an individualistic culture, which a lot of the world is, that becomes even more challenging. So my question for you, Chuck, is: when you look at organisations you’ve worked with, what’s the shared resource that gets depleted first? And do leaders ever realise it’s happening before it’s too late?
Chuck: Yeah, I love this concept of the tragedy of the commons. And when I think about where I’ve seen this — Jenni, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this little upstart country called the United States of America.
Jenni: It’s so new! So new!
Chuck: This is exactly what we are going through now. This is why we are in the situation we are in, because people have voted in their own interest without looking at — or actually not even in their own interest sometimes, but they think it’s their own interest — that’s actually causing problems down the line. So this is a situation like capitalism, you could say, is another great example of this, where people are in it for themselves and not really looking at the big picture. The environmental movement, which is part of this Colorado River thing. When I was thinking about this from a company standpoint, you look at that burnout from employees. You look at that energy that every individual is putting in, that shared resource, and people are just exhausted. They’re exhausted. The company isn’t looking down the line to see, what is this causing? Is their own Colorado River going to run out of water at some point? So I think this is a great thing to think about. And when you look at whether it’s individual goals, team goals, company goals — if everyone is focused on that individual goal, is that laddering up to the team goal? Is that then laddering up to the corporate goal, or is it causing a problem somewhere else that people aren’t looking at? They’re not seeing that vision.
Jenni: It feels like, if I think about the conversations I’m having with clients talking about communication, culture, leadership behaviours, there seems to be a continuous theme about collaboration, silos, being able to see across the organization. That isn’t necessarily new. I feel like collaboration has been a conversation for a long time. But I do think that it’s harder now to do that, because I do think there is something hard about not all being in an office together, and I think you just hear stuff and you catch stuff that might be going on that you might not have been aware of. But I think everything became so isolated, and you became so focused on yourself during COVID to some degree, that we’ve forgotten about thinking about your stakeholders and the impact and all of those knock-on effects to things.
Jenni: And I don’t think leaders are doing that. I don’t think leaders are going, hang on a minute, I know I’m responsible for this function, but I’m also a director of this organization and that means I’m responsible for all of it. So I don’t think people are shifting that hat. And I think that makes it harder for employees to really understand that, because that’s not necessarily the job of, you know, Fred, who’s an analyst — he’s just cracking on with what he’s doing, but the leaders have to have that visibility. And I’m not sure I’m seeing that as well as I used to see it maybe about eight years ago. It feels like everyone is — not in a malicious way, but just very focused on my task, what I need to do, and not thinking bigger picture and impact.
Chuck: And maybe, Jenni, maybe — I think I heard this on a podcast recently — that if leaders talked to other leaders, then they would know when these things are happening. But they’re not talking to each other. So I think this is where we run into this situation, this tragedy of the commons. Like I said, I’m fascinated by this concept, to see what are all these individual actions that every person is taking that they think is the right thing to do. It’s either their right or it benefits them. We’re not looking at the bigger picture. We’re seeing that play out every single day here in the US with the consequences of it. It is absolutely playing out inside every single company out there.
Jenni: Yeah, and as you were just talking then about the little things, it made me think of the 1% stuff, which we talked about a few episodes ago when I got the 1% diary. And it’s almost like there’s lots of little 1%s going on, but not necessarily the incremental gains.
Chuck: Not in a positive way. Yeah, not in a positive way.
Jenni: No, yeah, we’re just doing 1% things in a weird, different way, and it’s just not helping. Right, the next article is called, Why Empowerment Is a Management Lie. This is from Fast Company. Leaders proudly talk about their empowered teams and meetings end with, you’ve got this. Yet that same work still runs through a gauntlet of approvals, sign-offs and second-guessing. The language suggests freedom, the system reinforces control. And I see this all the time. Just the other week I ended up doing a 10 to 15 minute session with a leadership team on the difference between autonomy and empowerment.
Jenni: The article is saying that empowerment is just dependence with better branding. So the authors of the article use an analogy to explain what actually happens. They talk about how you would treat a rental car. So you don’t worry about the long-term maintenance of that. You don’t take extra care beyond what’s required. And that’s how people behave at work when they don’t feel true ownership. When every meaningful decision still needs approval, even high performers begin to operate within the limits of the system instead of pushing beyond it. They wait, they hedge, they protect themselves. The distinction they draw is between responsibility and authorship. Most organizations give people responsibility — the outcome is theirs to deliver — but they hold onto the authorship of the decision-making path. And that gap is where the ownership is really starting to break down. So their proposed fix is for leaders to act as system architects rather than micromanagers. I’m a big fan of freedom in a framework, like what we’re talking about. Providing clarity on outcomes rather than instructions, replacing approval checkpoints with guardrails, letting people make reversible decisions with roughly 70% of the information that they wish they had. So Chuck, if empowerment is just dependence with better branding, what does real ownership actually look like in the organisations that you’ve seen get it right? And what did the leader have to give up to make it happen? If you’ve ever seen it, in fact.
Chuck: Well, I’m going to go to that second question first. They have to give up control. And that’s what we’ve seen so many leaders simply fail to do. When you see this thing about — like you have mentioned in this article — I empowered my team to do all these things, but then really in action, they have to run it by the team manager, the boss, the director first. That’s not real empowerment, but it is a really good label to put on it.
Chuck: I don’t know that I’ve really seen it play out well. I don’t think people are good at empowerment. Just like I don’t think people are really all that strong at delegation a lot of the time. That’s a word we didn’t really bring into this that I think is a part of this empowerment, autonomy, control. One of my talks that I give a lot centres on SCARF, which is a mental model created by this neuroscientist David Rock. And the A in SCARF is autonomy, where that is a reason that people will engage or disengage. But it’s going to have different levers for different individuals. So for some people, autonomy is a big driver. They want that control. They want that responsibility. Other people, autonomy is actually quite scary. They don’t feel like they’ve got the good guardrails in place. So I think we could very easily point to our favourite topic that we talk about so much around Frequency, which is return to office, where during COVID, people were empowered to work from home. Let’s give you this power, because where else are you going to go at that point? But then all of a sudden they lost that autonomy, because leaders weren’t willing to give up the control.
Jenni: So I think there are layers to this. I’m just going to have an asterisk tattooed on my face.
Chuck: Are these more caveats?
Jenni: I just think there are layers to this that ladder up to kind of where we are. So you said, leaders, what do leaders have to give up? They have to give up control. Leaders aren’t going to do that. Let’s be honest, there is an element of risk, reputation, their responsibility, accountability — that just giving up control is never going to happen. But I think part of that comes from a place of not trusting and extending trust to your team. And I think that’s the trust deficit that we’re seeing in organizations at the moment, that leaders don’t trust their team, their team don’t trust leaders. And that’s leading to this inability to delegate or give people that space.
Jenni: I think there’s also a layer to this, which is leaders aren’t being clear about what it is that needs to happen. Whereas if you could say, this is our strategy, these are the five pillars of our strategy, this is what each one of those pillars means, and this is where we want that to go, how you get there is totally up to you — but that’s the goal, right? I don’t think people are articulating things like that to give people that clarity and ability to do it. And I think if they are, I think they are micromanaging that middle bit. But I don’t see a lot of the time, this is the strategy, this is where we’re going, how you get there is up to you. And that is when it works. That’s how we did strategy in an organization I worked in, and we had huge engagement from our frontline colleagues who had the autonomy and empowerment to decide what they were going to do to achieve that goal. And that’s the bit that I think sometimes gets muddled — what are you actually giving people empowerment or autonomy to do? And actually it should be in the how, because these should be subject matter experts. They should have knowledge, understanding, all of these things. And I don’t think that’s clear. Yeah, there’s just lots of layers in this for me about why it’s happening, but also what is it that you want people to be empowered to do.
Chuck: Yeah, and I’m never expecting leaders to give up total control. I’m talking about control over these decisions and control over these things. So it could be something even as benign as, hey, we’re going to try something new with our town halls. Well, if you’re a leader, do you need to approve every step? That’s the control part. If you’ve got a person who has a ton of experience, as you mentioned, whether they’re a labelled subject matter expert or they’re just someone who has put a lot of thought and time into something — maybe it’s a new design on an employee experience, whatever it is. I mean, maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way. Now as I’m thinking about it: when we’ve talked about people not trusting leaders, I think this is a great example of leaders truly not trusting their people.
Jenni: Yeah. But you made me think about the leaders having conversations together and trust and stuff like that. I was facilitating a leadership conversation the other day with about 20 leaders. And they were talking about what decisions directors could make and what decisions the leadership team could make — the distinction between the two. And it was interesting because there was a general consensus of these are the decisions that could be made. And then there was a conversation from one of the people on the leadership team saying, basically, I don’t want to sign off the budget. I feel like my directors can do that. I don’t feel like I need to do that. And it takes up a lot of my time and I don’t really enjoy that. And one of his peers said, well, I don’t do that. I’ve given that to my team for years. And he was like, okay, cool. Didn’t realise I could do that. But it’s even just having the space to have the conversation — of that person being made to feel that they had to do that, but actually they could have given that away a long time ago. It’s all for me about having the conversations and what you can empower, what you can delegate, what you can give away, and being an adult about it and having a conversation about what’s comfortable and what’s not. Or if you’re not comfortable, what needs to happen in order for you to get comfortable? Because I think that has to be the goal.
Chuck: Well, I think too there’s a little bit of just have some faith in your team. Just have a little bit of faith in your team that they’re going to try to do the right thing and do the right thing, especially if they’ve had the experience and have done the right thing in the past. Just have some faith.
Jenni: Yeah, fair. Well, we’re going to go on a little history lesson now with the history of internal comms. Now, I appreciate that if you’re listening to this, you can’t see the notes that are in front of me, but I did do a dump of stuff to Chuck and said, I’m not going to read all this, but here’s some context, which I know you’ve enjoyed reading. But a couple of weeks ago, there was a conference in the UK called the History of Internal Comms Conference. It was hosted at Brunel University in London and it was hosted by Professor Michael Heller, who has been looking at the history of internal comms for the last few years. Now I was talking about the value of internal comms and how that has shifted over the years, and I shared my speech as an article on LinkedIn, so I’ll pop the link to that in the show notes in case anyone’s looking at value.
Jenni: But the reason I wanted to talk about it was because as I was sitting in the opening keynote where Professor Heller was talking through the history of internal comms and all these things — I’m going to get my notebook out that I had on the day. So I’m scribbling away. He’s talking about, you know, internal comms developed due to a change in organizations, changes in the environment, changes in management thinking. There’s some really interesting stuff about the first time the first magazine came out, which was 1878 — that was the first internal comms magazine. But everything came from workers. So it all came from this need to connect over sport or share information. It came from employees. That was the point, really. Lots of links to education. But as I was sitting in the audience, I wrote in big letters, this is never going to work, and put a box around it. And then I wrote, nobody wants this, underneath. And I had a conversation with someone else in one of the breaks and I said, I actually left the opening keynote with a realisation that when you look at the history of internal comms, so much of it is coming from employees, and so much of the work that I’m doing and we talk about is trying to convince leaders of the benefit of internal comms. But nobody asked for it. At no point did a leader say, we need to do this. It all came from employees wanting to talk to each other. It came from this need for social connection. It came from the sport. It came from being able to show you were doing your duty as a civilian, all of those things.
Jenni: And there are lots of changes. I’ll put a link to the History of Internal Comms website in the show notes, because if you are interested in it, there’s quite a lot of stuff documented about what happened, the impact of the First World War, the Second World War, digital. There’s loads of stuff in here. But everything that I came back to was that the history of internal comms is very clearly about magazines, editorial channels — very heavily union-based in there as well. But there’s nothing that says really that a leader decided that, you know, I really need to talk to my people. I need to hear from my people. I need to connect my people. That doesn’t feel like that ever really came up. And that’s why I left the beginning feeling a little bit sad. Now I didn’t stay for all the sessions because I had to head home and do some client work, but I wanted to talk about it here because I think it’s an interesting topic. And I’m also interested in your perspective around — this research is showing that internal comms goes back about 150 years. Is that helpful to know? Does knowing our history help us? Does it hold us back not knowing it? And if we know that we come from social connection and publishing, does it change anything about what we’re doing?
Chuck: I think this should change everything, based on your perspective. I’m loving this, Jenni. One of my — I would say it’s a prize possession, I guess. I got this from my mom. It’s a newsletter from a company that my grandfather worked at, where it’s an employee profile about him. I’m going to say it’s probably from the late 40s, early 1950s, somewhere around there. But I love this intention that it was from the employees, for the employees. I think that’s the focus that we should have. That’s the thinking we should have. At no point did the company say, historically speaking, that we know of, hey, we should make sure employees stay informed. No, it was employees wanting to connect. It was employees wanting to learn from each other, know what’s going on, all of those things.
Chuck: I mean, some of the notes you had in here were especially a lot of this during the war, which — I love this one title. Was it Khakis and Comrades? Comrades in Khaki, sorry. And it’s funny you should mention the union side, because there’s a lot of, I would say, typically anti-union sentiment out there that I hear from just people in general, but also a lot of communicators. My manufacturing comms background was in union environments. I actually quite enjoyed working in those environments, because guess who the union is really all about? The employees. That’s the focus. That’s what they’re there for. It’s not for the company leaders and the CEO or the plant manager or whoever it is. So I love this historical aspect to it. In fact, it should give some legacy to the work that we’re all doing. And perhaps it might just get you to shift your focus a little bit to saying, who is this for? And why is it for this group of people?
Jenni: Yeah, and I think that was the realisation for me — that it all kind of comes back to the social piece really. It does say in the research that by the 1930s nearly every large-scale organisation had some sort of company journal, but it served very operational roles. It was communication, education, entertainment. And it did have some element of that corporate identity, that culture piece that we often talk about, but it was such a big part of the community element, which is ultimately what magazines should be. I remember doing magazines when I was in house, and I did a magazine for a cookie brand that I worked for and it was called Crumbs. And I hated this magazine because it just felt really chaotic and it was quite messy, but it was exactly the right thing for employees. And all we talked about was who was designing what cookies and what they were. There was nothing in there about corporate stuff. And people loved it, because it was just about them and cookies, which was great. But I think we get stuck in internal comms of trying to make things very polished and very together. And I fell into that trap in my junior career of being the brand police — it has to look like this and it has to be like this. And I just think it feels a bit scrappy. It feels like there were a group of people that just got together and did this on the side of their job and then just emailed it round. And now it has become a professional profession, and that’s lovely. But I think it’s lost something along the way in terms of the point of it and what it was here to actually do. And it’s become so corporatised — not a word — that it’s lost that real people feel to it.
Chuck: Yeah. I used to carry this around with me, and I think I’ve lost it over the years, but it was my favourite example of an employee newsletter. And I can’t even remember the name. I can’t remember the company, but I do remember they were a catering company. This newsletter was typed out in Word, basically. It gave financial summaries — this is how many orders we had last week, this is how many orders we did this week, this is what last month, this month, last year — just quick charts for people to look at. And one of the things that it would highlight was recognizing employees who were basically drivers who were driving catering orders around. If they spotted a competitor’s van outside of a business, they were then instructed to go in and drop off a menu and a business card, because clearly that customer is buying catering, so they should buy from us. It was just this very simple — every communicator was just clutching their pearls at the design, or lack thereof, of this thing. But if you’re that employee, it delivered exactly what you wanted. It gave you exactly what you needed, and it gave the recognition of saying, hey, we just got this business because Jenni dropped this menu off at this thing. It just told a very basic story to people. But I love this fact that employees started it, and what we would now probably call shadow comms. We’re now dumping on this thing, and this is actually the history of our profession — of employees doing it in their own circle, which is now something that we denigrate.
Jenni: Yeah, maybe we are the shadow comms. But yeah, I could talk about this quite a lot, and I am very interested in it. It’s really good work in terms of the history, and hearing a conference that was a blend of academics and professionals — there was something quite lovely about those two parts of what we do kind of coming together.
Chuck: And I think it’s easy to focus on the channels, which is interesting, but I also think it’s limiting. I think it’s more important to focus on the intent. Because yes, back in the late 1800s, you’re not going to email anything. You’re not going to post anything on an intranet, right? It’s going to be print. But that’s the history. So let’s learn from that. In fact, it would be interesting to know, for communicators at companies who have been around since this time — do you have any kind of archives? A lot of these companies do have some element of that. Go see what you can find out, and then republish some of that stuff, because I think that’s the stuff that your employees would be really interested in seeing.
Jenni: Yeah, I’ve still got my old company magazines from when I was doing them in places, and I had a little trip down memory lane reading them the other day. I think the last one we did, I just did the that’s-all-folks on the front cover, which was sort of the last one before, you know, digital came over and took it all away. Anyway, that’s the end of all of our articles this week. What are you freq-ing out about?
Chuck: Well, as I mentioned when we started out, I was in New York supporting Workvivo at their Engage New York City event. I was also in Chicago supporting Blink at their Breakfast Club event. So it’s always great to be at those events because I get to be in the room with communicators for the day. But being in those two places, that’s just a reminder to me, and it’s something my wife Chris and I talk about all the time: we love cities. We love cities. I don’t know if it’s the pavement, the noise, the energy, whatever it is. When I was in New York, I did like a two-mile walk to dinner. Had my AirPods in, put in some great 80s new wave as I’m walking through the city. I felt like I was in a movie, Jenni. There’s just something about these cities. The weather was great. It’s basically something we’ve decided as a couple, that when the birds have left the nest, which is just a couple of years away from that, we’re going to just sell everything and just live downtown somewhere. Just be walkable, be a part of this fabric of a city instead of out in the suburbs. It’s just something I’ve been thinking more and more about, is how much I enjoy being in a city.
Jenni: Yeah, I agree. In fact, I was walking through London the other week, had my AirPods on, and I was almost doing a little dance to the music as I was walking along, because I was just having such a lovely time. It’s lovely. So my freq-out this week is that we are just a few weeks away from Comms Reboot in Toronto, which seems to be creeping up on me very quickly, and so I’m very excited. I get to see you in person, which will be a joy, as well as a few other friends over in Toronto. So that’s what I’m freq-ing out about, which is Comms Reboot on the 17th of June. So if you are in Toronto or nearby and want to come along to the communications unconference, I shall pop a little link in the show notes for you, and even a little secret code for you to get a little discount as well.
Chuck: Yeah, thanks for adding some stress, because I was trying to keep my freq-out very positive, Jenni. And now you’ve reminded me of, like, I’ve got this coming up and then this coming up and then Toronto after that and then World Conference…
Jenni: Oh, you’re going to have to get that whiteboard back out, because you’re going to have to have it. I can see it now. You’re going to have to get it sorted with all your plans. Well, thank you for joining us this week. We hope that the articles and insights will help you think about how to improve comms, leadership and culture in your organisation. And if you don’t yet subscribe or follow, please do, as it helps make sure you won’t miss an episode. All the links to all the articles we’ve mentioned today are in the show notes so you can grab those to read if you want to explore anything further. We’ll be back with you on Monday with more news, insights and opinions about everything comms and leadership in workplaces today. Appreciate you being here with us.
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.
