This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose work through five stories: why standard engagement surveys keep missing frontline flight risk, a manifesto calling for internal comms to drop the "pomp and circumstance," what work from home really had to do with the business-creation boom, why AI's productivity gains keep getting eaten by the hidden work of fixing what it produces, and a new study on remote, hybrid and office-based wellbeing that doesn't land where the return-to-office argument expects it to.
A pharmaceutical company's patient service team looked fine on paper, but 63% of the group was actively job hunting and the engagement survey never caught it. Structured interviews did. Constance Noonan Hadley of the Institute for Life at Work and BCG's Deborah Lovich argue frontline staff already know what's broken, and propose a six-step process of structured interviews, targeted surveys, collaborative problem-solving and rapid experimentation in its place. Jenni digs into the Gallup data linking low engagement to job hunting, and makes the case that this is the model internal comms should be following: survey, then talk to people, then act. Insight without action, she argues, is the recurring failure.
Next, Gary Grates argues internal comms isn't evolving the way it should, and lays out seven critical success factors that read more like a manifesto than a framework. Jenni and Chuck pick apart where they agree, where his own privilege shows (he's never taken a job without reporting to the CEO or C-suite), and a real contradiction in his logic: he says communication has to flow from the top while also insisting it isn't propaganda but dialogue. Both can't fully be true. They do agree with him on one point: internal comms metrics should be business metrics, not a separate scorecard.
Nick Bloom is back, this time pushing back on a New York Times piece crediting AI for the post-2020 surge in US business creation. Bloom's case is about timing and geography: the surge started before generative AI existed, concentrated in suburbs where remote work took hold, and tracks far more closely with the time and flexibility that working from home handed people. Jenni and Chuck talk through what that means for companies mandating a full return to the office, and where the line sits between a hobby, a side hustle and an accidental business.
The productivity numbers get more complicated from here. 75% of workers say AI has made them more productive, but only 13% say it's meaningfully improved their organization's performance. Rebecca Hinds, writing on Glean's AI index survey, coins the term "bot sitting" for the supervising and error-cleanup work that eats back roughly six of the eleven hours AI saves per week, leaving a net gain of under five. A 2025 METR trial backs up how unreliable our own sense of productivity is: experienced developers using AI took 19% longer to finish tasks while believing they'd been 20% faster. Jenni and Chuck agree this is a trap for internal comms to avoid: coordination is a real cost, but it isn't a comms problem to own or fix.
Closing the episode, a study of 7,700 employees at a large healthcare organization found fully remote workers reported the highest wellbeing, hybrid came second, and fully on-site came last — the opposite of what lead researcher Stephanie Johnson expected going in. Remote workers were also more likely to describe their organization's culture using words like teamwork and inclusion, undercutting the isolation argument so often used to justify return-to-office mandates. Jenni flags the limits of a single-organization study and argues the real answer is a genuinely flexible policy that accounts for tenure, not a blanket stance either way.
Want to find out more about Chuck’s work and ICology - check out the website and how to become a member here: https://www.joinicology.com/
Jenni’s a regular speaker and consultant on leadership credibility and internal communication, you can find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/
Articles mentioned in this episode: Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees https://www.colorado.edu/today/2026/08/12/remote-workers-report-highest-well-being-study-7700-employees AI Is Making Workers More Productive. So Why Aren't Companies Performing Better? https://www.inc.com/rebecca-hinds/ai-is-making-workers-more-productive-so-why-arent-companies-performing-better/91390033 Nick Bloom on the startup boom: it might be WFH, not AI https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nick-bloom-stanford_there-has-been-a-start-up-boom-since-2020-share-7488229790882086912-Zt5U/ Can We Eliminate the "Pomp and Circumstance" of Internal Communications? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-we-eliminate-pomp-circumstance-internal-gary-f-grates-q5c9c Frontline Workers Know How to Solve Your Organization's Biggest Problems https://hbr.org/2026/07/frontline-workers-know-how-to-solve-your-organizations-biggest-problems
[00:00:09] Welcome to Frequency, I'm Jenni Field. And I'm Chuck Gose. Frequency is your go-to for real talk about comms culture and employee experience beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. Jenni, every week you like to do four articles a week. Me, I'm doing five again, but don't worry, it is not a competition. This week we're talking about frontline employees, the pomp and circumstance of internal comms, our old friend Nick Bloom returns, is the math mathing on AI and productivity, and remote workers are winning.
[00:00:39] Winning! Before we get into that, I wanted to talk about the benefits of programming, which sounds really boring, but this week I have finally managed to hit a milestone after having my shoulder injury last year of being able to hang on the rig at CrossFit. And I had a little joke with my trainer there about, you know, who knew that programming works? And I also ran my first 10k, so I've been doing quite a lot of stuff.
[00:01:03] And it just got me thinking about how the benefits of programming could probably be applied to other parts of our lives. And I don't know where I'm going with this, but it just made me think there is something about having a set program that you follow to achieve a goal. And I feel like I need to apply that to other parts of my life. And I just wondered if you did any programming of anything, whether it was fitness or like other bits of stuff. I also was wondering where you were going with this when I saw it in the notes.
[00:01:32] And I don't know if this is more of a British term, but I was thinking of more like commitments and systems on it. Yeah. And there's a ton of benefit to it. And I would say I fail on every part of this entirely. Largely because of just not so much the chaos of my life, but the inconsistency of week to week. And where am I and what am I doing? And I think it's really hard. And that's a really poor excuse because you can always come up with ways.
[00:01:57] So maybe it's just the what I'm committing to is maybe the thing that knowing that, hey, you can't commit to doing something because you're not in that physical location all the time. So, no, I think we all agree that that it's the commitment to it that we see every time you see the long term benefits of it. Sort of like whether you prescribe to the 10,000 hours or not, there is something around doing something in a repetitive manner and, you know, over and over building. Yeah. Improving on those ways. Agreed.
[00:02:26] Yeah, totally. And I think that's why when I started running and learning to run, doing the Couch to 5K program, like now I can go for a run wherever I am traveling without having to worry about, is there a gym and is there this? Like I can still just chuck my train in and go for a run, which is quite nice. Well, it's funny you mentioned that. So I'd heard people talk about how, you know, the old adage, you never forget how to ride a bicycle. There is apparently some truth to that, but people do actually forget how to run. And they're talking about as you age, you kind of when you're a kid, you run. Yeah.
[00:02:56] Because that's just what kids do. As you age, you don't run because unless you're like into running. And they've talked about the importance of being able to run. Like we kind of forget how to do those things. Yeah, I definitely forgot, but I've learned now and I can do it. Also, there's some really funny videos of people being challenged to skip. Oh, I keep seeing those. People have forgotten how to skip. When we're next together in person, we are going to skip.
[00:03:25] We're going to put a video out of us skipping and see if we can nail it. That's going to be our challenge. Love it. All right, let's get started in this stuff. 63% of a pharmaceutical company's patient service team was actively looking for another job. And the engagement survey didn't catch it. A round of structured interviews did, along with the phrase employees kept using to describe how they felt about the company. Quote, behind the glass.
[00:03:48] Constance Noonan Hadley from Institute for Life at Work and Deborah Lovitch, main director at BCG, argue that frontline people already know what's broken and the standard survey apparatus is built to miss it. Their alternative is a six-step process, including structured interviews, targeted surveys, collaborative problem solving, and rapid experimentation. In this pharmaceutical case, roughly 100 employees, the fixtures were largely unglamorous.
[00:04:16] Widen the window for patient refill reminder calls. Give managers a clearer coaching framework. Medication adherence held steady and people got control back. So, Jenni, my question to you, is there a link between job hunting and engagement or lack thereof? So I did a little research on this to find out if there was a link between engagement scores and job hunting. And there is. Obviously, Gallup have done the two measures.
[00:04:42] And it shows that you can't say that the less engaged you are, the more likely you are to look for a job. But there's definitely a correlation between low engagement and job hunting. What I thought was interesting about this article from an internal comms perspective was this feels like the textbook of what we want people to do inside organisations when they do any kind of audit around communication or anything around employee experience. Because they followed that methodology. You know, they spoke to people.
[00:05:10] They then did a survey to go a bit deeper. Then they spoke to people again. Then they had a working group. It's the action that was important in this. And I think that's always what's missing in so many of the things that we do in internal comms is we can go out and find all this data and insight that isn't necessarily a comms problem to solve. But there's no action taken. But I think for me, what this highlights is the need to have that conversation. You can't just do things based on a survey. There's not rich enough in terms of the nuance of human language.
[00:05:40] There has to be conversation. And I think if you took anything away from reading this article, I'd hope people would think, oh, OK, we've done the survey. Now let's have the conversations and let's see what's really going on. And I think what people do is they go straight from the survey results and try to figure out what needs to be done. What I liked about this was a reminder to all of us that the nuggets of wisdom and insights that exist at the front line.
[00:06:03] The people that are doing the job on a minute by minute, hour by hour, week by week basis, they have insights that you're not going to have sitting on a leadership team. You're going to have different insights for the business. And so often there's not a way for those ideas and insights to level up or bubble up throughout an organization. This is a reminder of that. And like it says, the fixes, these aren't glamorous fixes and they're rarely expensive fixes. But ultimately, these are where businesses make a difference. This is where problems get solved. Yeah.
[00:06:32] And I think it's I think the thing for me, like you said, is that it's it's like the basic stuff. And I think sometimes we want it to be something shiny and new and it's AI and it's this. And it's it's sometimes it's the really mundane, boring things like giving people more than a week to do an automatic chaser to patients in this example. And that's not glamorous or exciting or something revolutionary, but it's really important. And I think we we often lose sight of that, like just do the simple things really well. It doesn't have to be something shiny and new.
[00:07:01] Next up, Gary Great says internal comms isn't evolving the way it should and the names what he thinks that actually is critical thinking, not content, not motivation, events, stunts or research. He lists seven critical success factors, and it reads a bit less like a framework and more like a manifesto from someone who's run out of patients. The one that will start the argument is number four. Internal comms metrics are the same as the business metrics, and there are no separate ones.
[00:07:30] That's either liberating for some of you or a great way to have nothing to point at in budget season. Number one is nearly as critical. Great says he has never accepted an assignment in-house or agency unless he reported to the CEO or a C-suite leader. Most people recently are reading this aren't not going to have that option. There's also a bit of a contradiction in the middle we're chatting about. Well, factor two says that information flows from executive leadership and the board.
[00:08:00] Factor six says internal comms is not propaganda. It's dialogue, discussion and debate. Both can't be true. Both true at the same time. If the flow only runs one way, the debate is decorative at best. Jenni, the thing that stood out to me in this, he said he wouldn't take a job unless he reported to the CEO or a C-suite.
[00:08:21] So if you're three layers down inside HR and marketing, is this whole model unusable or is the thing that we've heard, the quote-unquote, I don't have the access, the excuse that keeps internal comms where it is? I have lots of thoughts on this one. I enjoy the privilege that he has of saying I'm not going to take a job unless I report to the C-suite. Right. I'm just, there's bits of this I really like and there's bits of it that I'm just a bit confused about.
[00:08:51] So the title is Can We Eliminate the Pomp and Circumstance of Internal Communications, which is then not referred to anywhere else in terms of what that pomp, I don't really know what that pomp and circumstance is. Also, I think he's wrong in his assertion that internal comms is not about content, motivation, events, and it's about critical thinking.
[00:09:11] Not just the critical thinking, but he goes on to list loads of other things which are much more aligned to broader organisational communication, employee experience, culture, bigger things that a lot of internal comms functions aren't doing. Because they are doing the tactical channels, the content, the intranets, the digital workplace, all those other important things. And I don't think it's fair to say that internal comms is not that. I think that's just a bit too flippant. You can see I've taken notes because I've printed it out. I've been taking it very seriously this week.
[00:09:41] I also think his list of things is talking about organisational balance. That's not the same as internal communication. So I'm not sure, again, what we're talking about here. Organisational balance is one thing and has certain elements. Internal communications is something else. But I do agree with the point that I see metrics are the same as the business.
[00:10:02] And I do think that we get caught up in trying to find measures of success outside of that when actually if the business objective is reduce accidents by 60%, then that is your measure as an internal communicator to make sure you're having that impact. I do think that that is true. Yes, I agree with you. We have to connect what we're doing, though, to those business measures. We can't just say, oh, we're part of the business and therefore we get to contribute to this.
[00:10:27] What stood out to me about this, and I'm glad you mentioned it, was this pomp and circumstance phrase. I think you talk about the events and what do you call stunts? I don't know. I would love to do a stunt at work. Motivation. I actually think we need more pomp and circumstance in what we're doing. Like things are so vanilla and basic sometimes. Why not throw in a little pomp and circumstance to get people's attention?
[00:10:50] I think employees would actually like to have a little pomp and circumstance into the world of internal comms and what their employee experience looks like on a day-to-day basis. I think we're missing out by not coming up with those moments. All I can think about when we see a pomp and circumstance is like sort of the royal parades that we get over here in the UK when it's like the trooping of the colour and there's sort of all of that stuff. People love it. I feel like we have none of that in what we do at all. I do think as well... I think it speaks to a bit of rituals.
[00:11:20] Like what are the fun rituals? That could be seen as pomp and circumstance inside a business. Yeah, I think I agree with you. I do also think that the contradiction is fair that you call out around you're saying it has to come from the top, but you're also saying there's discussion and like which is it? Because you can't have... You can't say, oh, it has to come from the top. But then it's also about conversation and discussion. It's not so sort of clinical or an or situation.
[00:11:48] You can have both of those things and you can have them. But there's just some absolutes in here that I think are just probably a little bit misguided. Up next, Nick Bloom returns, one of our favourite guests, though we may not know that he's guested so often. The New York Times has credited AI with the post-2020 surge in US business creation, citing a Gusto survey where 60% of founders said they use AI. A little bit shocking, I will say that it's only 60%.
[00:12:15] However, Nick Bloom isn't buying the casual leap and offers a different suspect working from home. His case is timing, geography, and mechanism. The surge started in 2020, two years before Genre of AI made its way into our lives, good or bad. Much of it happened in suburbs where work from home concentrated and work from home hands people the time, flexibility, and physical space to start something.
[00:12:41] In the comments of his post, he extends the point to negative attribution where AI gets blamed for the brutal graduate job market. But lockdown, work from home, and tech hiring slowdown are all plausibly also in the mix. My question, Jenni, though, is if work from home really did drive a decade's worth of business formation, what does that suggest about the companies currently mandating five days back in the office?
[00:13:10] I have two thoughts here. The first is that I think Nick's right in terms of the other factors that have played a role here. I don't think we ever really disagree with him, do we? But I also think that the barrier to entry in terms of starting a business is lower and has been lower probably over that time period. I think people have got more access to things like social media. There's different businesses now that didn't exist before in terms of people being able to run businesses through TikTok.
[00:13:39] And do you know what I mean? Like it's just a very different world to what it was 10 years ago. And I think that that barrier entry is also part of this conversation. In terms of the people going back to the office, I've always had the view of people will people can be doing other things wherever they are. Like just because you're sat at a desk in an office and on a work computer doesn't mean that you're doing the work that you're meant to be doing. If you've got a side hustle going on and you're doing that, then you can be doing that at the same time. Like I don't think it matters where you are.
[00:14:08] But I do wonder what's going to happen to some of that maybe entrepreneurial spirit that people have if their free time is taken away again. Maybe they use the commute. Maybe they don't. Maybe they really want to do it and they'll make the time. I don't know. But I think where you work shouldn't be a hindrance if you've really got something you think is worth starting. Yeah, I think that's how do you channel this entrepreneurial spirit, which again is a word we talked about last week that I struggle with the number of E's in it. So thank you for bringing that back in, Jenny.
[00:14:38] The bringing that spirit into work and is that enough to then satisfy that craving that people have if they do have side hustles or work on the side? But if they also work on the side, that doesn't mean they're not doing the work. I just think we tend to give AI so much credit for things that this is where like Nick Bloom was like, no, wait a minute, let's pause here. Like it's clearly there's a contributing factor that has a play in this.
[00:15:03] And there is probably an accelerant to some degree where you can do things so much more quickly or have reach and access into things. But again, it shows the value that work from home deliver. Like when you've got an environment where so many people are now having the surge of startup businesses or building their own thing, that's really only a good thing. The bad thing is when people feel handcuffed or stuck in a job or stuck at a business instead of channeling that entrepreneurial spirit that they have. Yeah.
[00:15:33] And I know quite a lot of people through my various entrepreneur networks that are still doing a side hustle, that still work full time, but have got various different side hustles. There are a significant number of people that seem to be travel agents on the side of a full time job, which I don't know if it's the same in the US, but certainly in the UK, there seem to be loads of people doing that as a side business. And I think it's finding the stuff that's going to kind of maybe be a hobby that you're going to then turn into something else. And I think that's probably where it's come from. It's I've got this hobby and interest.
[00:16:03] How can I monetize it? And I think that gets harder to do when your time is crunched. But if you really do love it, I think it does become easier because I think you make the time. I think there is now this expectation of people that a hobby can't just be a hobby. Yeah, I know. That if you're not making money or getting some kind of tax advantage out of it or something, it's got to be a business. Yeah.
[00:16:26] There's probably a lot to that about the death of just the hobby of people just doing something on the side that they enjoyed without this pressure of it being deemed a success or not. Yeah. But also just having a hobby that can be a hobby. I remember about two, three years ago, putting a photo up on Instagram at the driving range with my dad playing golf and immediately got messages from people saying, Oh, my God, did you know this? Like a women's club and you could join this and you could do this. And I was like, I don't want to do any of those things. I literally came down to have a bucket of balls with my dad for an afternoon and a drink in the bar.
[00:16:56] And I don't ever need to come again unless I go with it. Do you know what I mean? But it was like this immediate need to make it a skill and develop it, not even monetize it. It was just you could learn this and be brilliant at it. I'm OK being really bad at this and just having a nice time. Did you write a LinkedIn post about the five things you learned? I should have done. I should have done the five things I learned at the driving range. I think that there's just so much wealth in that knowledge to share. Moving along.
[00:17:22] 75% of workers say AI has made them more productive and 13% say it has meaningfully improved their organization's performance. Rebecca Hines, drawing on some of Glean's Work AI Index Survey of 6,000 digital workers, says AI is now automating around 11 hours a week per person and then takes back 6.4 of them on what she calls, quote unquote, bot sitting. It's another buzzword for us to add to our list, Jenny.
[00:17:49] This is supervising the output and cleaning up the errors that land in the resulting work. So the net gain is a little under five hours. She pins a loss on something called coordination neglect, a term from Heath and Stadenmeyer's 2000 paper describing our chronic habit of underestimating the grunt work of fitting the pieces back together.
[00:18:11] A key data point in here is a 2025 meter trial where experienced developers using AI took 19% longer to finish while believing they were 20% faster. People are unreliable witnesses to their own productivity, which should make anyone nervous about self-reported AI ROI numbers, including, awkwardly, the survey this article opens with. Hines says the problem is coordination, not the tool, and coordination is largely a comms problem.
[00:18:41] So, Jenny, I'm curious, is that the strongest business case internal comms has or is it a trap? Once again, a trap where we take ownership of something we can't fix. It's a trap. So I was reading it and I thought 100% it's a trap because coordination is so much bigger than just internal communication unless you're looking at organizational communication and the broader stuff about how things happen and get done and all those kind of things.
[00:19:07] But this is not something internal comms can fix, but it's absolutely something that everybody will think they can fix and help. But it's not. It's an operational challenge and it needs to be fixed by somebody who's in charge of that. And I think the important thing here, which I think we do forget, is the point about the fact that people are unreliable witnesses to their own productivity.
[00:19:30] I remember writing about productivity in the pandemic because I found a study when it was all the work from home stuff and it was showing about how people felt like they were much more productive at home. But actually, when you looked at proper productivity in terms of things that happened, it was much worse. So we're not very good at that. We do it all the time. It's a part of being a human being. And I think we have to remember that. But please, if you work in internal comms, don't feel that you can come in and fix this issue. It's an operational leadership issue to fix.
[00:19:59] Yeah, was it Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars? It's like, it's a trap. Like, I think this is exactly what it is. I think it's just more important to self-reflect. Like, this is that reminder of we always, just because we think we're more productive doesn't mean that we are. And I think this, even in the developer side of things, they felt like there were. Which maybe that matters. Maybe that's not a bad thing. But it's also worth recognizing that the numbers aren't mapping on this for everyone.
[00:20:27] But for me, with any kind of productivity conversation, there has to be intention. Like, I can have a really busy, productive day, you know, going through my emails and applying to it. Does that mean I've been productive? Well, to a sense, probably yes. But does it mean that I've achieved the things that maybe I needed to achieve to move things forward? Probably not. So I think you've kind of got to define that as well. It would be interesting to know because you hear a lot of people, and maybe you're in this camp or not, where they talk about using AI as sort of like the first draft.
[00:20:56] Well, it helps me get like the first draft out of my ideas. And then they go back and do all the re-edits and all that kind of stuff. Versus if you had just done it your way the first time. Is this an effort where we feel like we're more productive because the first draft is there quicker, but the resulting work, where does that time fit? I would love to see some data or research around that.
[00:21:17] I will send you something on that because I was reading something earlier today, which Ben Verinder shared on LinkedIn, which was a piece from somebody who was talking about the fact they'd had to edit and rewrite some AI content in the PR world. And how they had to, it took so long to do it because there were so many sort of the essence of the human writing that was missing that it just took so long. So I'll send you that because I might bring it to the podcast in sort of a future episode. Because I think, again, it's like this false belief of, I've been so productive.
[00:21:46] I've got all these drafts, but it's going to take you three days to unpick it. Last discussion, Jenny. Stephanie Johnson expected hybrid work to win. It did not. Across 7,700 employees at a large healthcare organization, fully remote workers reported the highest well-being, hybrid landed second, and fully on site came last. The study co-authored by Alyssa Lascano, Stephanie Zajac, and Courtney Holiday of the MD Anderson Leadership Institute.
[00:22:15] This ran in frontiers in psychology in July, 2026. The finding that should trouble all the RTO advocates out there is about connection. When asked to describe their organization's culture in a handful of words, remote workers were slightly more than likely than on site peers to say things like teamwork, inclusion, and support. Isolation is the excuse of nearly every return-to-office case, and this data doesn't hold it up.
[00:22:43] Johnson's summary is, quote, leaders are not making decisions based on data. I think they're just returning to what they are used to. The setup here matters a bit. This is, of course, just one organization, one sector. Survey data from 2023 matched against turnover records a year later. The study didn't test why remote workers fared better. Johnson still believes that FaceTime helps early career employees, and this is useful. Quote, remote work better after you know people.
[00:23:12] Location itself wasn't a strong predictor of turnover. Well-being was with remote work feeding into it. Jenni, my question with this quote, remote works better after you know people, is a bit of a tenure-based answer. And we've talked about tenure recently in the podcast, not so much a policy-based one. So what would a genuinely differentiated flexibility policy look like for an organization like this?
[00:23:38] So first of all, it is, as you have pointed out, one organization. So again, the absolute belief that this is going to be the same everywhere, I think, needs to be taken with a little pinch of salt. Because this could be a phenomenal organization in terms of how they communicate, how they've invested in that remote, all of those things. And I think that's important. But I think the flexibility piece is at the core of this, again, which is what we keep coming back to with the return to office,
[00:24:04] is it's not necessarily about forcing everybody to work remotely because they'll feel better. It's about letting people have that flexibility. And I think that's where it gets difficult because of the tenure-based issue of remote works better when you've already gotten to know people. So if all of the people who have been at work for five years decide they're all going to work fully remote, but then all the new people want to come in the office because they want to get to know stuff,
[00:24:31] that's where it doesn't work because you haven't got the right people together to share, which is how you end up with the policies of come in the office two days a week, because it's about being a collective group in an organization, not your individualistic nature. And I think that's probably the crux of this issue, is if you really want to build a flexible policy that is considering all of the different elements to this, there has to be some compromise and there has to be some of this coming together a few days a week
[00:24:57] for the greater good of the broader organization and the younger people in society at large. My ask on all this is, I agree with you, as I called out, this is one organization. Find out what it is for your organization. Yeah. Find out, get these numbers, get this data for your organization, because I'm going to go back to read the quote where she talked about that leaders are not making decisions based on data, they're just returning to what they are used to. So they are used to command and control. That is where they are comfortable.
[00:25:26] But we know out of, we don't get better out of comfort. And so find the data for your organization, find out how on-site employees are doing, or remote, or hybrid, or all the different classifications, and learn from that data instead of just going by what they know they think is best, basically. Yeah. And I think the other point that sort of was sort of just towards the end of what you were saying was the well-being piece. And I think in all the stuff we've talked about from Gallup and engagement,
[00:25:54] the well-being piece is almost, I mean, I know they'll talk about the manager a lot, and that is very important. But in terms of the well-being piece, that was like the biggest driver of the engagement was people feeling like their well-being was being considered and cared for at work. That was the biggest thing. So actually, is it just a byproduct of that? And that's what links to it. So there's, to your point, always find out what's going on inside your organization. But it could be that this is linked to the well-being piece, and that's actually what's driving that as part of a bigger piece.
[00:26:23] And going all the way back to our very first story, don't just do a survey. Talk to people. Have the conversation with them. Yes, please. That wraps up our discussion for this week, Jenni. Let's move along to freakouts. What are you freaking out about? So I am freaking out this week about women's health, because I've been, rabbit hole is my favorite phrase this week, it seems. But I've been investing some time in listening to Dr. Stacey Sims,
[00:26:53] who's an expert in women's health. And I've been listening to her on podcasts. And I bought her book last week, because I decided that it was time for me to learn a bit more about women. She has the tagline that women are not small men, and therefore talks a lot about the science that hasn't been done on women in how we respond to nutrition and how we need to train differently and all this kind of stuff. So I'm kind of just generally freaking out about stuff that I'm learning around don't train without food,
[00:27:19] and that men's metabolism keeps going for 18 hours, I think, after you exercise, and women's is only three. And I feel that's really unfair. So I'm going to have loads more freak outs about it as I go. But I'm on a little education journey at the moment on that, which is good. I was at a Las Vegas bar this weekend, sitting between a friend on my right side and my wife on my left side. And he made somewhat of a flippant comment about, I don't know why women blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, different than men.
[00:27:48] And my wife was like, huh, it's almost like our bodies are different. Huh. Who would have thought? Who knew? Who knew? Who knew? Who knew? Yeah. It's good. My freak out is not important as women's health, Jenny. My freak out is I'm just really bothered. And I don't know why it is. I actually, I do know why it is. I'm bothered by this word follower.
[00:28:16] And I use, I see this where people do these posts on LinkedIn celebrating some random number of followers, 5,000, 10,000, 50, whatever the number is. And it just feels very culty to me. I'm going to use like C-U-L-T-Y, not, not the other word. Culty to me. Celebrating that because what does that even mean?
[00:28:42] We know in our life that vanity metrics, that's why they're called vanity metrics. They don't really mean anything. That is a definition of a vanity metric. Yet it's being oddly celebrated when it really has zero meaning whatsoever. You could have, you could go out and initiate 20,000 LinkedIn connections that have people accept it. And now they're followers, even though you are more connected with them or following them. I just don't like it.
[00:29:11] I wish people, no one's going to change because of this. It just feels culty and unnecessary. And it just bugs me every time I see it. That is what we are freaking out about this week. Thank you for joining us. The show notes have all the articles and links from today's conversation. If frequency is a regular 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 this week. Thank you to my friend, Poet Ali, for the music. We're back every Monday. See you next week.