A company can call an acquisition an integration while the people inside it live through an elimination. Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield said as much to his own staff after Salesforce bought the company, and it sets the tone for Episode 82.
Chuck brings five stories this week: life inside Salesforce after the Slack deal, Microsoft’s voluntary exit offer to roughly 60,000 employees, the ever-growing CHRO job description, Deloitte’s four-part model of trust, and an Anthropic study showing how quietly an AI agent can steer an expert’s judgment. Jenni keeps pulling each one back to the same gap: what organizations say versus what employees actually experience.
Madison Square Garden told staff their championship rings had arrived. The link led to a mandatory cybersecurity course. Chuck opens with it as a fair answer to a question the rest of the episode keeps circling: why is anyone surprised that trust inside companies is at a record low?
It’s a report-heavy week, and Jenni makes no apology for it. Edelman’s Trust at Work study finds trust in CEOs, managers and co-workers at the lowest point in its data. The Guardian reports on companies quietly walking back their AI rush. G-P’s World at Work survey of 7,100 people finds sky-high confidence alongside widespread job fear. And crisis comms specialist Amanda Coleman asks a question designed to annoy the profession: is PR damaging society?
Do your people have what they need to do the job? Korn Ferry looked at listening data from nearly 1.4 million employees and found that question predicts retention and revenue per employee better than whether people feel engaged. Jenni has been waiting a long time for someone to say it. Chuck is annoyed with himself for not making the connection sooner, having worked alongside sales and marketing enablement teams for years.
The rest of the week is about what leaders tell people, and what they leave out. McKinsey research says most of the jobs expected to change because of AI are frontline and support roles, but nobody seems to be telling those workers what to learn. BCG finds that vague AI messaging does more harm than saying nothing. And an alleged bugging case at OpenAI raises a question every company handing AI agents access to calendars and files will need to answer: what can the tools see, and do employees know?
Only half a hand went up when Chuck asked a live London audience who has an AI “employee” on their team. Plenty of people talk about AI as the newest team member. Almost nobody is counting it as one.
Recorded live at Unily’s Unite 26 conference in London, Chuck and Jenni swap news articles for stories straight from two days of sessions. Charlene Li’s call to stop doing pilots. The risk of calling AI a teammate when you need real headcount. Why Jenni can’t get on board with “taste-making.” And whether “do less but better” holds up against a songwriter who says 70% of his work is garbage. Running underneath all of it is Jenni’s question: small teams, no budget, poor HR data, blaming IT. Is any of this new, or has internal comms been making the same excuses for 20 years?
Only 19% of employees say anyone at work has ever talked to them about the data their employer collects on them. Gallup also found that when organizations do have that conversation, trust goes up and so does concern. Jenni frames that as a dilemma for internal comms. Chuck doesn’t see one. Concern isn’t worry, he says. It’s people paying attention.
That idea, the cost of leaving people to guess, runs through all four stories this week. O.C. Tanner’s 2027 Global Culture Report argues that culture amplifies whatever is already there. Zoom found that the biggest theme in 17,000 employee comments was people not understanding why decisions were made. And The Times reports British workers adding ADHD and neurodiversity notes to their email signatures, which leaves Chuck and Jenni asking whether a note at the bottom of an email can do the work of a relationship.
People will shrug when AI summarizes a meeting. They will not shrug when it gets their pay wrong. A new PayrollOrg survey found 46% of employees are uncomfortable with AI in payroll, up from 39% two years ago, and the trend is moving away from trust, not toward it.
Recording in person after Unily’s Unite 26 conference in London, Chuck and Jenni work through five stories that keep circling the same idea: technology and structure only go as far as people trust them. Microsoft moves communications under its legal and policy group while asking employees to become its public voice. A “bait and switch” hiring survey leans on an inflated headline. Gen Z holds back on AI skills. And a study on training budgets sets up a $5,000 argument the hosts don’t quite settle.
A study that tracked every worker and company in Denmark for 25 years found that the gender pay gap at a firm narrowed when a male manager had his first daughter. Chuck thinks the data holds up, and finds that depressing. Jenni doesn’t buy the causation at all.
That argument opens episode 76, recorded with Jenni just back from a week in Boston and Chuck on the road in Omaha ahead of Unite in London. From there, the pair move to a union “watch list” allegation at the maker of Grand Theft Auto, why the CEO shouldn’t be the face of every message, and whether AI really deserves the blame for bland internal comms.
The CEO of an AI company has told his 200-plus employees he’d rather see the D+ version of their thinking than five polished pages of AI fluff, and that every customer email should be written by a human. Chuck likes the rough draft. He does not like the D+.
Jenni brings five stories this week, a first for the show, and they share a theme: the tools got faster and the talking got harder. Patrick Lencioni on overcommunicating clarity. Stephen Waddington’s mid-year report on the state of corporate communications, tested against the US. New Predictive Index data on how ready managers really are for tough conversations. And Priya Parker’s claim that Slack turbocharged workplace conflict, which prompts Jenni’s fair question: why Slack, when Yammer was first?
Uber’s revenue has tripled in five years, and it is cutting 3,300 jobs anyway. Chuck calls it what he thinks it is. By the end of the segment, Jenni agrees: greed, dressed up as restructuring.
Episode 74 looks at a month of cost-cutting from the employee’s side of the desk. US employers are bracing for the steepest healthcare cost rise in two decades and quietly dropping GLP-1 coverage. Challenger’s August job-cut numbers look grim until you read past the headline. And Lindsay Bennett’s new communications playbook says AI has made PR cool again, which leaves Chuck and Jenni asking whether internal comms gets the same moment or gets skipped.
It opens with the strangest internal-app post Chuck has ever heard of and closes with his freq-out on the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
In the US, 62% of workers say they would turn down a move into management to protect their work-life boundaries, and among under-35s the figure reaches 71%. Chuck’s answer is that this is not a signal, it is a symptom — a generation watching what happens to the people above them and declining the offer. Jenni brings four stories that circle the same question of what leadership actually asks of people: whether a nice culture is quietly protecting underperformance, why promotions have stopped feeling like rewards, what Claude’s new watermark means for employees told to use AI and afraid of being caught, and why Volkswagen workers ranked bad communication from the board above job security itself. Before that, a sold-out Flyover Festival, a live Frequency recording at Unite by Unily, and Comms Reboot in London on 9 October.
A pharmaceutical company’s patient service team looked fine on the engagement survey. Nearly two-thirds of them were actively job hunting.
Structured interviews found it. They also surfaced the phrase employees kept reaching for to describe how they felt about the company: “behind the glass.” Close enough to see the business, not allowed to touch it.
Jenni Field and Chuck Gose open Episode 72 there and never really leave the theme, which is the gap between measuring something and doing something about it. Also up: Gary Grates’ manifesto against the “pomp and circumstance” of internal comms, Nick Bloom’s argument that working from home built the startup boom AI keeps getting credit for, the hidden hours of “botsitting” eating most of AI’s weekly time savings, and a study of 7,700 employees where the fully remote group reported the highest well-being.
In an MIT preprint, 83% of the people who wrote an essay with ChatGPT could not quote a single sentence of it 60 seconds after they handed it in. The researchers call the pattern cognitive debt, and it anchors an episode about where thinking actually happens at work. Jenni brings Oxford research on the four kinds of rule breaking and why punishment is usually the wrong first move, Gallup’s split verdict on what AI has done to culture and the manager data underneath it, the brain-scan study itself, and the argument that writing was never the job in communications. Chuck opens with two days in Franklin, Tennessee learning the business of books with Jon Acuff, and closes on the same thing.
We’d love to hear from you.
