Staples Baddie vs McDonald's CEO: 4 IC Reports & the Authenticity Gap
This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose tackle four reports on the state of internal communications — but not before stopping to examine two wildly different examples of what it actually looks like when employees advocate for their organisation.
Chuck opens with what he calls employees acting as advocates. The contrast is stark: the Staples Baddie, a frontline employee who went viral for genuinely showcasing what you can do at Staples, organic, unscripted and probably not who the comms team would have chosen; versus the McDonald’s CEO, deployed to launch a new sandwich in a produced video that somehow made eating a sandwich the most uncomfortable thing on the internet. Jenni puts her finger on exactly why: our brains know immediately when something doesn’t feel real, and when it doesn’t, it gives us the ick. Chuck’s conclusion is simple — go where the authenticity is. The frontline employee wins every time.
The Institute of Internal Communication (IOIC) has published a whitepaper making the case for IC as a strategic powerhouse — proposing new specialist roles including a Chief Trust Officer and Head of Listening, and a significant skills uplift in behavioural science, scenario planning and data literacy. Jenni has two problems with it. First, some of the challenges it assigns to the IC function feel like they belong in the boardroom, Second, and almost ironically, a report about building trust and connection through clear communication is written in dense, jargon-heavy language. Chuck is blunter: communicators don’t need another document telling them to be strategic. What they need is for the organisation to actually resource the function.
Mike Klein and Ambuj Dixit spent six weeks speaking to around 60 practitioners, leaders and academics across five Indian cities for the IC Shift India Report, deliberately focusing on what’s working rather than what’s failing. Jenni’s main question on reading it is the same one she finds herself asking across all four reports this week: what is this trying to help us do? The ten observations — leadership communication, readiness, business literacy, channel effectiveness — read much the same as other global reports. The most interesting idea is “leapfrogging”: the argument that Indian IC could skip Western IC’s evolutionary path and jump straight to strategic positioning. But Jenni notes the same report flags fear cultures and a reluctance to challenge direction, which makes that leap very difficult in practice.
Gallagher has rebranded the State of the Sector as the Employee Communications Report — and this year’s theme is the readiness gap, the widening space between the risks organisations face and the capability of internal comms teams to respond. The data is striking: 73% of teams want to operate as strategic partners, yet only 18% believe they are. The report’s core argument is that function maturity is the real multiplier: not more channels, not more content, not AI — but a strategy people actually use, clear accountability, governance, and measurement focused on outcomes rather than clicks. When those things are in place, engagement improves and trust erodes more slowly. When they’re not, volume fills the vacuum.
The Contact Monkey Global State of Internal Communications 2026 centres on what it calls the culture gap — the distance between what organisations say they want from IC and what they’ve resourced the function to deliver. On trust, only 9% of employees trust leadership messaging completely. The feedback data is perhaps the most revealing: 95% of organisations collect employee feedback, but only 15% clearly communicate what they’ve done with it. Jenni and Chuck both note this explains a great deal about that trust gap — employees are being asked to speak up, and largely hearing nothing back.
Want to find out more about Chuck Gose 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/
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