Only 12% of employees read an internal communication in full, and 88% have at some point asked AI to summarize one for them. The finding underneath those numbers is the one that should change how comms teams plan: the single biggest predictor of whether a message gets read is not its quality, its format, its relevance or who sent it, but how many other messages arrived first. Around that, Chuck and Jenni take on Nick Bloom untangling correlation from causation on working from home and mental health, a Harvard Business Review piece on effective leaders who get branded as the problem when they were only exposing one, and Scarlett Abbott’s World Changers report, where employee experience budgets are rising, performance management is the top place they are going, and HR and internal comms cannot agree on whether employees understand the strategy.
Jenni opens with Nick Bloom’s post on telling correlation from causation, a response to a new Science paper reporting a strong correlation between working from home and mental distress. The paper’s authors read it one way — remote work isolates people and isolation harms mental health. Bloom reads it the other way, and the prior research is on his side: people already facing stressful circumstances, from disability to child or elder care to a punishing commute, negotiate or change jobs for more remote work to cope. In the observational data the two stories look identical, so he goes to the two methods that can separate them. Randomized controlled trials show employees assigned to work from home report better work-life balance, and asked directly, people who chose remote work say it improves their mental health. Jenni’s comment on the post, which she reads out, is that the real variable is choice, since autonomy is a large part of human motivation — and her open question is whether anyone has data on people forced to work remotely, because she does agree isolation is bad for humans. Chuck answers from inside the experiment: he has worked remotely since around 2009, finds going into an office genuinely awkward, and still spent this particular week alone at home going stir-crazy and having lengthy conversations with the dog about things he would normally say to his wife. His story from a visit to the Mutual of Omaha comms team sharpens it — one communicator said what she wanted was to just be an employee again, to go to work and work rather than juggling Teams calls, laundry and kids home for the summer. Chuck’s structural point is that autonomy is inseparable from fairness, and that fair and equal are different: a team required in three days a week where everybody is in three days a week is fair, even if the team next door has been told nothing. And even a perk cuts both ways — the gym going into that new headquarters delighted one employee and appalled another, who had no intention of sweating next to colleagues.
The Harvard Business Review piece opens on a high-tech executive told a year into her role that she had a blind spot. Her CEO admired her decisiveness, clarity and confidence, and was simultaneously fielding complaints: she moves too fast, she decides before the rest of us are ready, we’re always in catch-up mode. She took the feedback seriously and adjusted, and nothing changed — because a few stakeholder interviews later the actual finding was that her company had normalized over-consensus, treating speed as recklessness and urgency as inflexibility. Her decisiveness did not create the friction, it exposed it. The article’s frame is that friction has four possible sources — capability, perception, identity or system — and organizations reach for the first three while the fourth is usually the culprit. Jenni has been on both sides of this: she has watched it happen to clients and she has been the leader brought in to move fast whose team hated her for it, with people who still hold it against her. Chuck recognizes it as a performance review he has received, and his objection is to the timeline — blaming someone twelve months in is the mistake, especially when senior leaders are hired precisely for a style that is already formed, and roughly half of them fail inside eighteen months for relational and cultural reasons rather than performance. What he does not like in the story is the routing: complaints went around the leader to the CEO, the CEO relayed them, the leader adjusted, and it made no difference, which makes it a culture problem rather than a manager problem. Jenni’s practical fix is the handover conversation nobody has — this is who was here before you, this is how they operated, this is what the team is used to, and here is the gap you will need to manage. Chuck’s reframe is the useful one to keep: moving too fast usually means not bringing people with you, and that is a skill anyone can develop, present company included.
Scarlett Abbott’s World Changers report, which Paul Bennun tagged Jenni into, surveys 752 senior HR and internal comms leaders across seven employee experience themes. The headline numbers do not agree with each other. 63% say their employee experience budget rose year on year, while 30% name misalignment between employee needs and leadership priorities as the biggest blocker to turning that money into action. The top three investment priorities are performance management at 34%, leadership development at 32% and recognition at 31%. The report declares that the case for employee experience no longer needs to be made, and then reports that only 26% call it strategically embedded and 22% rate their own activity as market leading — which Jenni reads as a profession telling itself things are better than they are. Then the split that stops both hosts: 81% believe employees are clear on the long-term vision, but only 29% are extremely confident their organization knows which behaviors need to change to get there, and within that, 40% of HR respondents say employees are clear against 22% of internal comms respondents. Jenni wants to know what different metrics the two functions are using. Chuck supplies the missing third data point — employee-side research, including work ICology partnered on with Corbett and Reworked, puts the figure nearer 9 or 10%, so it doubles from employees to comms and doubles again to HR, which prompts him to ask whether HR is simply out to lunch on this. On the money, his objection is blunt: he has never met anyone who came out of a performance management system saying that was great, and calling it the number one employee experience investment while engagement continues to fall means more spend is buying a worse outcome. Jenni’s read is that the performance management line is a symptom — organizations are trying to fix employee behavior and accountability problems through the performance system. She also has a complaint for the publisher: the report is entirely digital with no download, so she had to copy and paste every section into a document to share it, which is not accessible.
The closing story is Fresh Intranet’s employee attention recession report, which Mike Klein put on Jenni’s feed: independent research with 1,000 communicators and employees across the UK and US, measuring the distance between what organizations think is landing and what employees actually understand. Only 12% read internal communications in full, making reading in full the least common active response to a message. 88% have used AI to summarize an internal communication at some point and 58% do so regularly, and for any individual message 20% will typically reach for AI — meaning AI summarization is already more common than reading in full. 83% say they receive too much internal content, 35% far too much, while 91% say internal comms feels relevant to them: the problem is volume, not willingness. The finding that reframes the job is that the biggest single predictor of a message being read in full is not format, sender or relevance but how many other messages arrived before it. On the AI side, 92% of IC professionals worry that summaries distort meaning, while employees trust AI to get it right, and only 33% of organizations formally monitor how content is interpreted once it leaves owned channels — measuring reach rather than understanding, which the report argues is producing false confidence. Its three recommendations are to subtract before you add, design content to survive AI mediation, and start governing interpretation rather than just publication. Chuck’s answer is partly to stop pretending: nobody reads anything in full any more unless it affects pay, bonus or benefits, so bring AI into the design and put a TLDR summary at the top with the depth below for whoever wants it. He also cautions that the 88% is a lifetime figure, not a daily habit, and asks the diagnostic question — is it a length problem or an interest problem? Jenni’s answer is upstream of both: ask why you are communicating this at all, and be intentional, because if nobody is going to read it, what is it for. Her practical method from her in-house years is to map which teams are all contacting the same target group, then move what can be moved onto an intranet — not to control the flow but to know it. Chuck closes with the cost: something like 150 emails a day for the average employee, Teams notifications on top, and Staffbase data he recalls showing a twenty-plus percent jump in burnout risk with communication volume, meaning more messages actively damage the thing the messages are meant to build.
How many employees actually read internal communications in full? 12%, according to Fresh Intranet’s employee attention recession report, based on research with 1,000 communicators and employees in the UK and US. Reading in full is now the least common active response to receiving an internal communication.
What is the single biggest factor in whether an internal message gets read? How many other communications arrived before it. Not the format, not the sender, not even whether it is relevant to the person’s role. 83% of employees say they receive too much internal content while 91% say it feels relevant, so the constraint is volume rather than willingness.
Are employees using AI to summarize internal comms? Yes, and more than most comms teams assume. 88% have done it at least once and 58% do it regularly; for any individual message, about 20% will reach for AI. Meanwhile 92% of internal comms professionals worry AI summaries distort meaning, which is the tension at the heart of the report.
Does working from home damage mental health? Nick Bloom’s argument is that the causality mostly runs the other way. People under stress — disability, caring responsibilities, long commutes, difficult colleagues — seek out remote work to cope, which produces the correlation. Randomized trials show better work-life balance for people assigned to work from home, and people who choose it report improved mental health. The variable that matters is choice.
Why do effective leaders get branded as the problem? Because organizations diagnose friction as a capability or personality issue when it is often the system. The Harvard Business Review example is an executive told she moved too fast, whose company had normalized over-consensus: her decisiveness exposed the friction rather than creating it. Adjusting her behavior changed nothing because the behavior was not the problem.
What does the Scarlett Abbott World Changers report say about employee experience budgets? 63% of the 752 HR and internal comms leaders surveyed say their budget increased year on year, with performance management the top investment priority at 34%, ahead of leadership development at 32% and recognition at 31%. Only 26% describe employee experience as strategically embedded in their organization.
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, I’m back with two reports, one about employee experience and one about employee attention. We’re also going to be talking about whether work from home helps or hinders your mental health, and why effective leaders get mistaken for problems in organizations.
Chuck: Before we get into this week’s content, Jenni, I just want to share that I am absolutely exhausted this week. And it’s going to be part of my freq-out, so we’re going to come back to that a little bit later. But I am exhausted, and I’m going to bring the energy for this week’s episode. Because when you’re listening to this, Jenni and I will be in Toronto. I have a session at IABC World Conference. Jenni is hosting her Comms Reboot in Toronto. We pitched to do an episode of Frequency live at IABC World Conference, but for some reason the organizers couldn’t quite get their head around what this would actually look like, even though we’ve literally done this now for 60 plus episodes. That being said, we are going to still record in Toronto and get some video from a studio, get some audio from that studio. So the next time we are recording for an episode, Jenni, it’ll be the first time we’re in the room together.
Jenni: Yes, it will be. I’m excited. And the studio looks insane as well, which I’m really excited about.
Chuck: Yeah, it looks really cool. It’ll be fun being there in person. It’ll be great seeing you in Toronto.
Jenni: It’s always lovely to be together. I’m very excited. So let’s kick off with our first story this week, which is about work from home helping or hindering our mental health. So we’re back with Nick Bloom, one of our firm favourites, this week. It’s been a while since we’ve mentioned him here. And he’s been talking about how to tell correlation from causation on the topic of whether work from home helps or hinders mental health. He believes data and research shows that it improves mental health, and here’s why. A new Science paper reports a strong correlation between work from home and mental health. The two interpretations of this though are very different. The first is, work from home causes mental distress. This is the interpretation emphasised by the authors. The story is that work from home isolates people and isolation increases mental distress. The second is that mental distress causes work from home. So the interpretation from surveys and prior research: people facing stressful life circumstances — disabilities, child or elder care, long commutes — negotiate or change job for more work from home to cope with the stress.
Jenni: So in the observational data, these two stories look quite similar. People in work from home occupations report more stress. People with rising work from home show rising stress. But the hard question is causality, so how to tell cause from effect. And I love this because I’m a data nerd. So he talks about randomised control trials, where it shows that in those, work from home employees report better work-life balance when they were randomised into work from home. And then the second is, ask workers directly. So in surveys, people who choose work from home report that it improves their mental health. Now, when I was reading this, I did a little comment to say that it feels like it’s reinforcing the choice element. So if we get to choose and have that flexibility, that’s what’s better for us. And I think that’s true for anything, as autonomy is a big part of human motivation. I also said, is there data about people who are forced to work remotely and that impact? Because I do agree that isolation is not good for humans. So Chuck, what is your take on this?
Chuck: Well, that’s something that I am experiencing this week when we’re recording this — this sense of isolation. Because I have worked remote slash from home since around 2009. So this is how I know to work. It’s actually awkward at times for me to go into an office to work. But I’m also used to travelling and being on the road from time to time. So then it’s nice to have those couple of days in the office where it’s nice and quiet and you can focus on things. But this week I am home all week long, but I’m also home alone all week long. It’s just me and Alan, our dog. And I realized I was getting pretty stir-crazy. This was not the natural state. I was basically having lengthy conversations with the dog about things that I’d normally be talking to my wife about. So I get that it’s a little bit of this chicken and egg conversation, as you pointed out — what’s the real causality of it? And I think it does, as we’ve talked about many times on this show, come down to choice. So for people to choose when they want to work from home or not work from home.
Chuck: A week ago I was in Omaha and I spent time with the Mutual of Omaha comms team. And it was interesting. We were talking about — they’re building a new corporate headquarters there in Omaha, and there’s still this topic of, well, what’s the expectation of people coming in? Is it going to be based on departments? Is it going to be mandatory? Some decisions are still up in the air. And one of the communicators mentioned, she’s like, how great would it be to just be an employee again? Like, when you just go to work, you just go to work. You’re not trying to juggle Teams calls and Zoom calls and also getting laundry done and managing kids home from summer. She’s like, man, you just go to work, you can just work. And so this is where that choice comes in. When people can make the choice that’s best for them, that’s when we see increased motivation and increased wellbeing, because they’ve got that autonomy, they’ve made the choice.
Jenni: I think you raise a really good point there as well around what people are juggling when they’re at home. And I know people that stopped having childcare, so they were juggling children and working, which I think is against the law — I don’t know that it is, but I feel like it should be, because that’s insane for you to have to juggle all of those things together at home. But I’m wondering if that’s part of what we’re seeing where people are feeling more burnt out, more overwhelmed, more exhausted. Because to that person’s point, it was lovely to just go to work and you weren’t trying to do seven things. Even if I think about being at home today, I was like, I need to get to the post office and I need to collect that delivery from a shop and I need to go to the dry cleaners — and I’ve done none of those things today. But it’s like, where can I squeeze these extra things into my day? And I do think that probably isn’t helpful about being at home as well. But I’m interested if there is this data on you’ve been forced to be at home, because I don’t think that is good for anybody, in my opinion.
Chuck: I think, well, let’s look back at where this all started, with the pandemic, where people were forced to work from home. And that just became the way we worked. And so now there’s this other change that, as we said, clearly organizations are struggling with these decisions. And ultimately, when we talk about autonomy, it also comes back to fairness. Because you’re going to have some parts — and this is what we talked about in Omaha — where part of the organization is saying, nope, your team is in three days a week. You have to be in three days a week. Other ones haven’t been told anything yet. So one person was, well, how is that fair? Well, fair and equity, fair and equal are different things. And so if your boss says, hey, our team’s got to be in three days a week, and everybody is in those three days a week, okay, that’s fair. They might not be equal to other teams, and so it’s worth talking through this at an organizational level. Make sure that it is truly best for your people.
Chuck: And again, going back to a previous episode: imagine creating an office environment where people are choosing to want to be in the office. Imagine creating that environment. And even then — it was so great spending time with the Mutual of Omaha team, because they talked about this new office building, and there’s a gym that’s going in there. And one of the employees was like, that’d be great to either go in early or stay late or get a class in, that would be awesome. This other employee was like, you think I’m going to stand there and sweat next to other coworkers? I’m not doing that. So even something like a gym is very divisive in how people are going to use it or not.
Jenni: Yeah. I feel like the gym is divisive between men and women. I feel like there is a definite difference between men being totally cool with that and women maybe not — but maybe that’s just my own experience. Right, onto our next article, which is why effective leaders get branded as problems. This was a piece in Harvard Business Review, which talked about when a leader creates friction, organizations default to a single explanation: the leader needs to change. Now the opening of this article for me is spot on. So it says a high-tech executive is told she had a blind spot just a year into her role, and her CEO admired her decisiveness, respected her clarity, valued her confidence — but at the same time he began receiving complaints, which he relayed to the individual quickly. A pattern was clear: she moves too fast, she makes decisions before the rest of us are ready, and people felt like they were always in catch-up mode.
Jenni: Now the individual took the feedback seriously. She adjusted her approach, but nothing changed. A few stakeholder interviews later, something became clear. Her decisiveness wasn’t the problem. Her company had normalized over-consensus. Speed wasn’t valued, it was treated as recklessness, and urgency as inflexibility. So her decisiveness didn’t create friction, it exposed it. Now it says the experience isn’t unusual. A leader is told to show up differently, be more strategic or slow down. When they try to adjust, nothing actually changes, and the feedback stays the same. The narrative stays the same. The leader becomes more frustrated while the organization begins to question the fit, and then they start to initiate performance plans, and then they quietly plan a replacement. And then you have to figure out whether or not the organization is actually diagnosing the problem correctly. Now, the article suggests there are actually four different sources for the friction, and these are the capability, perception, the identity or the system that the leader is operating in. Now, I’ve seen this play out with clients and I have been this leader that has had this sort of feedback. I can think very quickly and easily of a time where I’ve gone in as a consultant to lead a team where I was fast, decisive, taking action, and the team hated me. There’s still people that hate me from that team even today, because I was brought in to do a job and the friction was the system. So this feels like a very common problem. So my question is, what can be done to help leaders land better from the off? Because I think it’s often about knowing the culture that you’re going into, which is the system. And I think there is more to be done. So what would your advice be?
Chuck: Well, I’m glad you mentioned this felt very similar to you, because it felt like a past performance review that I might have had at a job, where it’s not that you’re not doing the wrong things, you’re just doing them at a pace that is different than what other people are comfortable with. And I love that over-consensus term, because I think that then becomes the truth. It’s not actually what’s happening, it’s what they once experienced that then becomes the experience. And so to me, it’s hard to blame someone just 12 months into a role. And I think that’s the biggest mistake that we make so often with leaders, is that we view this failure too quickly. A lot of times, the higher up the leader, the more they already have their style in place. You hired them for a reason to come in. And it sounds like she took that feedback and actually tried to adjust, which is exactly what you want from leaders. But what we see is that nearly half of these senior leaders fail within a year and a half purely for relational, cultural reasons, not performance reasons. So I think this is really tricky. I think we’re too impatient with this stuff. It’s great that they were listening to the feedback — think about that side of it. Now, I don’t necessarily like that they went around the manager. The boss shared that with the supervisor, the supervisor made adjustments, but it didn’t matter. So to me, that’s not a supervisor problem or a manager problem, that is a culture problem.
Jenni: Yeah. And there’s a few things in here. Like you, I like the over-consensus piece, because I do think we now operate in organizations where everybody feels like they have to have a view and everything has to take quite a long time. But if I’m thinking about a team that I’ve been working with, which pops into my head as you were just talking — a head of internal comms joining an organization and not landing well, right, to use this expression. The reason that’s happened is because of the difference between that person and the previous leader. And if I think about the questions like, what would the advice be, what should they do — I don’t think there is enough time and space given to: this was the person before you and this is how they operated, this is what the team are used to, this is how we know you’re going to operate because we can see your style and your approach, so you just need to be aware of this difference and manage that accordingly. Whereas I don’t think that conversation is often had when people come in, or the conversation is had around, yeah, yeah, I know, they were like this and I’m like this, but you know, onwards we go. I don’t think enough is done there to help people bridge that gap, because I do think that is hard. When you’ve gone from a leader who might be one way and then you’ve got one that’s totally different, that is really uncomfortable for people to manage and deal with, I think.
Chuck: I think the phrase moving too fast is interesting to me, and perhaps a little triggering for me as someone who does move fast. Even with ideas that I pitch to you, you’ll be like, hey, should we stop and pause? And I’ll be like, boring. Let’s just go do things.
Jenni: I know, I know. And then you just stop. Because you do — we’ll talk about stuff and I’ll be like, let’s just think about this. And then I sort of come back and go, so I’ve thought about this. By which point you’re like, no, I’m bored of that now, I don’t want to talk about it anymore.
Chuck: Right. But I think when you’re being accused of moving too fast, what it really means is you’re just not bringing people with you. Which I think are different things. Moving too fast just means they aren’t ready yet. And so I think that’s actually a skill that all of us, present company included, can develop.
Jenni: Yes. Absolutely. I agree. Right, the next article — well, now we’re on to report land, which you know is my favourite place to be. So this is a report from Scarlett Abbott. Thanks to Paul Bennun, who tagged me in this on LinkedIn. It’s the World Changers report. It comes out from Scarlett Abbott, I think every year, I’m not sure, but I’m going to go with a regular report. So we had a quick read through ahead of recording this week. And for those that haven’t seen it, it’s a report based on a survey with 752 senior leaders across HR and internal comms. And the report identifies seven themes for organisations to consider when it comes to employee experience. Those seven themes are investment priorities, employee experience maturity, feeling valued and seen, leadership effectiveness, recognition and performance, vision, EVP and strategy, and then the seventh is internal communications.
Jenni: Now I want to pull out some highlights from the report, so stay with me, Chuck. The first is, 63% of people surveyed say their employee experience budget has increased year on year, yet 30% see misalignment between employee needs and leadership priorities as the biggest blocker to converting investment into meaningful action. Where the budget is going is interesting. So the top three priorities are performance management, followed by leadership development, followed by recognition. Now I’m really interested in the fact that the number one is performance management, so we’ll come back to that. The report says the case for employee experience no longer needs to be made. It then goes on to say just over a quarter of those surveyed, 26%, say employee experience is strategically embedded in their organisation. So I’d say there is still a case to be made. I think we’ve got a bit of an issue there. It says that more than one in five, 22% of respondents, consider their employee experience activity to be market leading. So that feels like a real mess of messaging, if I’m honest. You’re kind of saying it no longer needs to have a case, but then only a quarter of people are embedding it. So that doesn’t feel like it’s really very joined up.
Jenni: The next point I want to bring out is that 81% believe employees are clear on the long-term vision — that’s of everybody surveyed — but just 29% are extremely confident the organisation knows which behaviours need to change to get there. What’s interesting in the report is the difference between how HR and internal comms see this. 40% of HR folks agree that employees are clear, but only 22% of internal comms pros agree employees are clear. So I have questions about the different metrics these two functions are using and why there is such a big difference between those two. I’ve got two more points to make. The next one is 96% say building a culture where people feel seen and valued and heard is a priority and the business case is well established, but intent and action are not the same thing, because just under half say this is a strong priority. I mean, there’s just such a misalignment here. And then the last thing is that the survey assessed four core leadership qualities: role modelling values, communicating clearly, managing change and translating strategy into action. Now the net effectiveness across all four sits between 87.5 and 89.5%, which is good numbers on the surface. But when you look underneath them, quite effective is really doing that heavy lifting. So only 39.6% of respondents rate their leaders as very effective at translating strategy into action. On managing change, that figure rises a little bit to 42.4. Well, Chuck, I’ve not covered everything because we would be here all day. But any standout stats for you, or any comments on the things that I have called out?
Chuck: I think, first, talking through those themes — the seven themes are interesting to me. I don’t disagree with them, I’ve just haven’t seen it sliced and diced in that way before. I’m obviously biased, I do like seeing internal comms as one of those key themes. But I feel like I need to sit on those other six a little bit more, because they don’t feel all — not that they all need to be equal, but they don’t feel the same. But I’m going to call out something that you mentioned, about performance management being deemed the number one EX budget priority. Because I don’t know of anyone that has gone through a performance management system and enjoyed it. They’re like, wow, that was really good, that was really great. And yet somehow that is the budget priority, and we’re labelling that as an investment in employee experience. Ooh, I don’t know about that.
Chuck: I also want to call out the fact that this is a report from internal comms and HR and how they are viewing things, which is wildly different from the report that ICology partnered with Corbett and Reworked on, which is from employees and what they viewed. Because where you’ve got 40% say employees are clear on vision from the HR side and 22% from internal comms, I think the number was like nine or ten percent of employees said they were clear. So that’s even a bigger gap. It’s like double that to comms, double that again to HR. So here’s going to get some HR — is HR out of the loop? Are they out to lunch on this?
Jenni: Yeah, I mean, I’m with you on the performance management, because I also think that’s a bigger signal about the challenges inside organizations today. And if I think about the people I talk to a lot, there’s a lot of challenges around employee behaviour and alignment and all of those things. And I feel like the performance management investment in employee experience is linked to poor management of employee behaviour and accountability, and I think we’re trying to deal with that over there. But I’m with you on the disconnect here between HR and the organization, because 40% in agreement — I mean, there’s been no report that you and I have talked to in over 60 episodes that even comes close to that 40% figure. And to your point, ICology partnered on that report. The IC Index for the IoIC is also with employees. There’s enough stuff out there to go, that’s just not true. And if HR do think that’s true, I’m mildly terrified.
Chuck: Yeah. The other part that I think is interesting and worth talking about here is that they’re saying employee experience budgets are up. And I would love to know what is actually in that budget, but they’re saying employee experience budgets are up. And regardless of how you define engagement, engagement is going down in organizations. So we’re spending more money. If we’re spending more money to solve engagement, that’s clearly not working. So why are we spending more money? You’ve got more money with a worse outcome. So what problem are we trying to solve by dropping more money into employee experience? Is it truly just on performance management, which is not going to create engagement? That is actually actively creating disengagement.
Jenni: Yeah, I think — I mean, the top three. Let’s take performance management off the list, because you and I both are slightly dumbfounded by that. But leadership development and recognition, I feel tracks with all the conversations we’ve had on here and the conversations we have with people around that gap between leaders and employees, and dealing with that and developing leaders to be, I would say, more credible, which is obviously what I do.
Chuck: But there again, I would love to know, do leaders feel like they’re being developed? I don’t think they do. I wonder, are companies spending money on things that truly aren’t getting the results? We talk about outputs and outcomes — are we not getting the outcomes that they’re expecting with this investment? It comes back to that employee lever. We’re spending money in leadership development. Do leaders feel like they’re actively being developed? I don’t know.
Jenni: Yeah. I mean, the report is packed with stuff. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes. What I will say is it’s an entirely digital report, so when you’re reading it, you can only click through stuff online to read it. And I get why they’ve done that, they did this last time, but for me, it’s wildly inaccessible. For us, we tend to download reports, read them and do that. So I had to literally copy and paste every single section of each of these pages into a document that you and I could read. And so my feedback, should they be listening, is please make it accessible for people, because how it is now is not accessible to everybody. Regardless of anything, it’s just not overly accessible.
Chuck: It’s good though. I can see having both options. You want to walk people through a story, you want to get the narrative, but then by the way, you want to download all the stuff — here’s the link.
Jenni: Absolutely. Yeah, have both. That’s all I’m saying. Right, the next article is about employee attention. So this is the second report, and it is thanks to Mike Klein. He shared this report, which is from Fresh Intranet, and so it popped up on my LinkedIn feed. Fresh Intranet commissioned some independent research with a thousand professionals and employees across the UK and the US, surveying both the people who create internal comms and the people who receive them. So what they found is what they’re calling the intent gap — we do love a gap, don’t we. This is the distance between what organizations think is landing and what employees actually understand. The headline stat is that only 12% of employees read internal communications in full. So reading in full is now the least common active response to receiving an internal communication. A striking 88% of employees have used AI to summarize internal communication at some point, and 58% do so regularly.
Jenni: So when you look at what employees actually do with any individual communication when it lands, 20% are going to reach for AI to summarise it, which means for any message you send, the AI summarisation is already more common than reading in full. 83% of employees say they receive too much internal content, with 35% saying far too much and they can’t keep up. 91% say internal comms feels relevant to them. So the problem is volume, not willingness. The single biggest factor in whether somebody reads something in full is not the format. It’s not who sent it. It’s not even whether it’s relevant. It’s how many other communications arrived before it, which I think is interesting.
Jenni: On the AI side, 92% of IC professionals are concerned that AI summaries distort the meaning. So that tension is really what this report’s talking about. Employees trust AI to get it right, internal comms pros worry it doesn’t. And on measurement, only 33% of organizations have any formal monitoring of how content is being interpreted once it leaves any owned channels. So most are measuring reach — we’ve just talked about outputs and outcomes, that’s the challenge there. The three things the report recommends is: subtract before you add, design content to survive AI mediation, and start governing interpretation, not just publication. Chuck, the report says the single biggest factor in whether somebody reads an internal comms isn’t the quality, the format, or even who sent it, it’s how many other communications arrived before it. So if volume is the enemy, not relevance, what’s the one thing IC folks listening should be doing to address this?
Chuck: The part — and you called it out too — about how many comms arrive before it is interesting to me, because we’re not always in control of that. And we don’t want to be in control of every single piece of communication that goes to every single employee across an entire enterprise. So it’s whose message is it that’s going to drive that. So I wonder if that’s now an extra layer of filtering that is coming in, saying if I have to filter through, even if that person’s important, it might not get read. I think the biggest stat here is something we should know, but maybe the data helps make it real, and that’s the 12% of employees that read it in full. I don’t know that any of us read anything in full anymore. We’re such skimmers. So I don’t think that should surprise anyone. And the data point about the employees who have used AI to summarize at some point — it doesn’t mean they’re doing it all the time, it just means 88% have done it at some point. So if you sent out some big financial report, you sent out your annual report, and they’re like, hey, I’m going to use AI to summarize this, they’re part of that 88%. So we don’t really know how endemic that is, other than that some say they do it regularly.
Chuck: So I’m wondering then, from a comms person, if you know, okay, not everybody’s reading all of this, which is fine, some are — so is it a length problem or is it a lack of interest problem? That’s worth answering. And do we instead just bring AI into the conversation, and we say, hey, here’s your AI summary, and then you go into the full depth? Do you just call that out and say, hey, we know you’re not going to read everything, but here’s a TLDR AI summary right here, and then the depth below for the people who do want to read it in full? Again, unless it’s impacting people’s pay, bonus or benefits, I don’t know that people truly ever read anything in full. So how can we design the content so people pick up the points?
Jenni: Yeah, I think for me it brings the bigger question about why are you communicating this. What’s the end goal? And I don’t think we ask that enough. And I think that’s a big piece of internal comms, where there’s just so much stuff going out, that being very intentional about why you’re communicating it I still think is important, because you’re asking people to read it. And if they’re not going to read the whole thing, then why are you doing it? So I think that’s still important. And to your point about the — you can’t ever control, and nor should you want to, how many things are going to hit people in a day, which determines whether someone reads it. I agree with that. But what I will say is, when I was head of internal comms and setting up functions inside organizations, I would always be looking at who are the different groups or teams that are contacting a specific target group, which for me was store managers. So actually, who are the people that are talking to them, so I can see whether I can take that away from there and I can put it on an intranet — how do I manage that flow for the target group that everyone’s trying to talk to? And I do think that that should be part of what internal comms is looking at, if you’re looking at more organisational communication than just your channels. But I do think you need to know this sort of flow of information that’s going across the organisation. I do think you should have an awareness of that, not to control it. But I think if you don’t know that, then you don’t know how you can move content into a place that’s more helpful for the audience. And I think that’s important.
Chuck: Yeah, and give or take these numbers, but it’s something like the average employee gets around 150 emails a day. So average means some are getting less, also means some are getting more. That’s a lot. It’s the same with Teams notifications. So you’re looking at content in two different buckets, plus perhaps an intranet. And I think it was Staffbase that had some data that talked about the volume in internal comms. I think it was like a 24%, like 20-plus percent jump in burnout risk and also a drop in leadership trust. So more messages does actively cost the things you’re trying to build or prevent. So I guess maybe this is where that coaching or that awareness comes in. Start to understand: what are our employees experiencing? And is there a way that Copilot can give you some insights and data, if you’re a Microsoft shop, to say, hey, this is how many average emails people are getting, how many Teams notifications are going out or whatever, and actually start to look for ways to reduce those things, because we know that there’s a cost to that.
Jenni: Yes. And I think you’ve only got so much attention, and I think that that’s still part of the problem. You can’t expect people to be paying attention to every single thing. It’s just not going to happen. Right, that brings us to the end of our articles this week. What are you freq-ing out about?
Chuck: So, Jenni, I mentioned at the beginning I’m exhausted. And so I was trying to listen — I use this one sleep app to play brown noise, pink noise, all that, when I travel, to kind of block out other sounds. And so I was pretty desperate last night. And basically what I learned, Jenni, is I can never visit Sweden. Because this app played — it was this playlist called The Summer Sounds of Sweden. And I’m like, huh, I wonder what that sounds like. A horror movie, Jenni. That’s what it sounds like. There’s these weird birds going off. There’s water bubbling. There’s some knocking sounds in this. I’m like, is this really what Sweden sounds like in the summer? Because I would be terrified if I was there. So it just added to my exhaustion, because now I’m thinking, what are people in Sweden dealing with in the summers?
Jenni: So you need to send that to my husband, because he travels to Sweden all the time for work. So you can send it to him and say, hey, Martin, is this for real?
Chuck: I’m going to see if I can somehow record the sound that is coming through and just ask him to verify this, because it is horrifying. It’s like, what bird is that? I’ve never heard a bird like that.
Jenni: I’m so enjoying this. So my freq-out this week is the message that I sent you, which just made me laugh. So I sent you a message this week or last week saying, I’ve had a mild cock-up on my side and I need to change the timing of this recording. And you replied and went, I don’t know what a cock-up is, but we can move the timing. And it just makes me laugh. Because there’s a few things over the year plus we’ve been doing this where I say something and you’re like, I don’t know what that is.
Chuck: I know it’s not good, right? It doesn’t sound good, right?
Jenni: It just must sound so weird to you seeing me saying, I’ve had a mild cock-up. You must be like, what?
Chuck: Because I want to know what is a severe cock-up versus a mild one.
Jenni: Well, so to be fair, I’ve given it a rating. I feel like most normal people would be like, this is just a cock-up, like, we’ve messed up. For anyone that’s listening, that’s what it means — I’ve messed up. So to me it was like, it’s just a little mess-up, so it’s a mild one. But I don’t know that other people would talk about that. I’m a little bit strange, so that’s fine. But it just made me laugh. And I always enjoy moments where I send you something and you’re like, I don’t really know what that means, but sure, we’ll do that. It makes me laugh.
Chuck: We can move the time anyway.
Jenni: I’m grateful to you. Well, thank you for joining us this week. We hope that the articles and insights will help you think about how to improve internal comms, leadership and culture in your organization. If you don’t yet subscribe or follow, please do, as it helps make sure you won’t miss an episode. And all of 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. So appreciate you all for being here.
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.
