Culture, Communication & Corporate Courage

Jenni: Welcome to Frequency, I’m Jenni Field.

Chuck: And I’m Chuck Gose.

Jenni: Frequency is your go-to for real talk about comms, culture, and employee experience — beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. A few things to kick off with today. First, I’m not very well — this is our first recording with me fighting tonsillitis, so I sound a bit off, though Chuck says he can’t really tell.

Chuck: I really can’t.

Jenni: Good to hear. I’ve got honey and hot water on hand for the duration — I’m on the mend, which is something. Second — I was at a funeral this week. Sounds heavy, I know, but there was a really strong message at the end about the need to enjoy life. We talk so much about how hard and challenging things are — and sure, a lot of it is — but I wanted to share that reminder to actually embrace and enjoy life while you can. But the thing I’m most curious about is the Indy 500 — you were there this weekend, and I was following along, including your wife Kristen’s first experience of it, while I watched Formula One at home in the UK. It felt similar and completely different at once. How was it for her, and for anyone who doesn’t know — what actually is it?

Chuck: Before I get to that — you mentioned hot water and honey. Next time, add lemon and some whiskey or bourbon, and you’ve got a hot toddy, the ultimate cure-all. And on enjoying life — just a reminder that your whole nickname is “Fun Spice,” Jenni.

Jenni: That’s true — I thought you were about to say that back to me.

Chuck: It’s sticking. Yes, we were at the Indy 500, which is a genuinely amazing event, even for non-racing fans — we’re lucky to live less than twenty minutes from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on a non-race day. The scale is remarkable: 350,000 people attend on race day, roughly one in every thousand Americans, packed into a two-and-a-half-mile oval. There’s a real cultural experience around it too, including the infamous “snake pit” infield. There’s a map online showing everything that fits inside the speedway’s infield — the White House, the Vatican, the Rose Bowl, all combined. We had a great time; a bit chilly, which was actually better for a first Indy 500 than 90 degrees and humid. It’s a genuinely different experience from F1 Monaco — think high-end RVs instead of yachts. This year it also landed on the same day as a NASCAR race, so you had F1, IndyCar, and NASCAR all racing the same day — apparently Monaco’s moving off that date next year, which a lot of racing fans aren’t thrilled about, since it made for one big shared racing day for people who love the sport. Overall, a great first experience for her.

Jenni: Good, good. So what have you got for us this week?

Chuck: Before our first story, which comes with a pretty stark headline — we’ve talked before about the power of headlines — let’s set the scene of what’s happening across the workplace landscape. One story that stood out came from Fortune: a major pharmaceutical company just cut nearly half its middle managers, and says it wasn’t about saving money. We’ll see. There’s also an annual trends report from Workshop painting a picture of internal comms trying to do more while staying human — some of it feels achievable, some of it we’ll see. And finally, new Weber Shandwick research shows that at a time of political division and distrust, people are actually looking to business as a source of stability and truth, which I think is worth digging into. But let’s start with the headline: from friendly faces to firing squads — what’s really happening inside today’s corporate culture? The article traces a stark transformation from a culture focused on positivity and inclusion to one driven by fear, surveillance, and relentless performance pressure, suggesting the layoffs and economic pressure of recent years have stripped away — or simply exposed — how thin the “culture-first” veneer really was. One key theme is the performative nature of modern corporate culture: companies invested heavily in DEI statements, onboarding swag, and internal branding, but didn’t communicate with empathy when hard decisions arrived — executing layoffs coldly and impersonally, with “culture” functioning more as a PR strategy than a guiding principle. Another theme is the rise of performance surveillance — productivity tracking, AI-assisted evaluations, stack ranking — turning up pressure on employees and managers alike, and leaving people disengaged and distrustful, especially when feedback disappears until it becomes punitive. “Firing squad” is a harsh term, but for a lot of employees it captures the emotional whiplash of being told they’re “part of a family” right up until the exit email lands. So, Jenni — a lot of this reads like a gap between stated culture and actual behavior. What happens when a company’s values only show up in the good times, and how should communicators prepare for, or push back on, that kind of whiplash?

Jenni: I love the headline — it genuinely stopped me, and I think it’s frighteningly accurate. There are real legal differences between our two countries in how people are exited from organizations — over here there’s more process, consultancy involvement, and so on, whereas I understand on your side people can more simply be let go. But to your actual question — when you asked what happens when values only show up in the good times, my real reaction was: do they show up in good times either? Do they show up at all? I sometimes think they’re just words on a wall rather than something lived. In a lot of the organizations I work with, when I ask “what are your values,” the answer is often “let me check” — they’re not embodied the way we all believe they should be. For me, values have to guide you through the good, the bad, and the ugly — and honestly, they matter most in a crisis, not in the easy times. I remember a case study years ago from a UK police force involved in a genuinely tragic incident — the chief officer who spoke about it credited their values with guiding the entire crisis response, coming back to them on everything. So I almost don’t mind if values don’t show up in the good times, because they absolutely have to show up in the bad ones — I’m just not convinced most organizations’ values carry that kind of weight. I think what you called the performative nature of corporate culture has become exactly that: “this is what we should say, so we’ll just say it” — and that only holds up for so long before people realize it isn’t genuine. It comes back to credibility — you can only pretend for so long.

Chuck: There’s some salesmanship baked into stated culture, and that becomes the performance. I remember an event years ago where a company had turned its culture into part of its product — you could literally tour the company to see the culture. Someone asked to see inside a building that turned out to be accounting and finance, and was told, “that’s not part of the tour.” So there’s a degree of salesmanship I’m somewhat okay with — but it’s the gap between saying one thing and doing another that’s the problem. That’s when employees start calling it out, and when we see how a company actually behaves, it’s clear they never really believed what they were telling their people.

Jenni: Exactly — and there’s honestly no need to behave that way. If your genuine position is “we don’t really care about our people, they’re an asset, we need people to do the work but we’re not investing in your development, and we expect six months out of you” — fine, own that. Some people would even want that kind of arrangement. But nobody’s willing to say it plainly, because it’s obviously not acceptable. If that’s genuinely how you feel, build a structure and process around it honestly rather than lying and pretending to be something else — because bringing people in under false pretenses isn’t kind, and I don’t understand why anyone thinks that’s okay.

Chuck: It’s almost like companies have a body language — they wouldn’t say those things outright, but how they position themselves says it anyway. Let’s move on. This next one focuses on a major pharmaceutical company eliminating 40% of its middle managers. The company insists it isn’t about cost-cutting, but about “restructuring for speed” and “clearing decision-making bottlenecks.” Executives argue middle managers were slowing innovation and creating distance between leadership and employees — ironic, since that’s arguably the job — and claim flattening the hierarchy lets decisions move faster and employees feel more empowered. There’s a not-so-subtle reframe at work too: it’s not a layoff, it’s a “strategic workforce redesign,” language clearly meant to soften the blow. The company says it’s investing more in frontline roles and digital tools as a result. But for all the strategic gloss, cutting nearly half your middle managers is a massive shift, and the Fortune article gives little insight into how remaining managers feel, how employees are meant to navigate with fewer support layers, how the decision was communicated, or what support was given to those let go. I’m openly skeptical here — this is being sold as agility and empowerment, but losing 40% of your middle managers reads to me as confusion, overload, and distrust. What’s your take, and how should communicators navigate messaging when the business spin doesn’t match the human impact?

Jenni: I’m really enjoying our air-quotes energy today. I’ve now decided — since this is the second time we’ve discussed cutting this exact layer — that it’s officially a trend. I do believe some roles in organizations genuinely don’t need to exist; I’ve felt that myself and heard it from friends still working inside organizations, questioning what their manager actually adds. But it all comes down to how it’s done — did these roles just vanish, or was this a carefully considered transformation that accounted for every stakeholder group and communicated the change and its implications properly? Because without that, it just creates more chaos. I think of an organization I worked with recently where certain people’s hours had shifted for return-to-work reasons, but the organizational ways of working never adjusted to accommodate it — that’s the part that worries me here. It’s not just about how it’s communicated, though that matters, it’s about whether the operational reality has genuinely shifted to support the change, because this is a significant one. I also can’t get past the logic of “people aren’t empowered enough, so we’ll remove this layer, now you’re empowered” — that’s not how it works, and it also conflates “empowered” with “autonomous.” Empowered means having the ability to do what’s being asked of you; autonomy is being trusted to make the decisions yourself — those are different things, and you can’t just remove a layer of people and assume everyone will suddenly feel free to act, skipping through a meadow. There’s a real cultural shift required to make people feel genuinely empowered, and if that hasn’t happened, I’d personally keep my head down, stop volunteering opinions, and just try not to get anything wrong — the opposite of empowered. So on your actual question — it depends entirely on the reality behind the spin. Is it complete spin, or is there a real human impact to reckon with? Whoever’s in the comms seat needs to ask those questions and walk through the actual change process — I’ll link a blog post in the show notes with a couple of change models that might help. But the significance and impact of this kind of change should never be underestimated just because it’s being framed as “removing a layer to make things better.”

Chuck: Building on your first-article point — I just wish companies would be honest and say: we’re moving too slowly, we’re not innovating enough, and we’ve got an expensive layer in the middle we’re removing, which means more work for the rest of you. Instead of that, we get “restructuring for speed” and “empowerment.” My hunch is it comes down to cost-cutting, dressed up because “we’re cutting costs” sounds bad, but “restructuring for speed” sounds like a strategy. It just feels disingenuous — and when you remove that much of the workforce at once, things slow down immediately, at least in the short term. Those people weren’t roadblocks for no reason; now nobody knows quite where to go for things. I think it gets slower before it gets faster, if it gets faster at all.

Jenni: There’s also a real disconnect between executives and middle managers that I’ve seen with clients on both sides of the Atlantic — executives blaming the layer below them for slowing things down, when in my experience the real issue traces back up to the executives themselves: not being clear enough about what’s actually within someone’s control or influence, not coaching people or making it safe to fail. It’s easy to say “cut that layer out”; it’s harder, but more honest, to ask what you as an executive need to do differently to actually enable speed — because that’s the job.

Chuck: Completely agree. Next — Workshop released its 2025 Internal Comms Trends Report, based on a survey of US employees and comms professionals. It covers familiar ground — trust, burnout, hybrid work — but some of the numbers are worth digging into. 60% of employees say they receive too much irrelevant internal communication. Only 31% of communicators feel confident they’re reaching deskless or frontline workers. Nearly 70% say leadership now expects internal comms to be more strategic, but only 22% feel equipped to meet that expectation — a striking disconnect. 59% report being burned out or at risk of it. 74% of employees still say email is their most-used and preferred channel, though that may just reflect how generic and irrelevant everything else feels. Video and mobile are rising for frontline comms, but adoption is patchy due to limited tools or budget. Jenni, that 31% frontline-confidence number stood out most to me — is that a tech problem, a content problem, or something deeper about how we treat non-desk employees?

Jenni: It’s option three — something deeper, based on the research I’ve done with this population myself. That 31% confidence figure is tangled up with content not being right for the audience, channels not being right for the audience, and a lack of genuine respect for the cultural difference between office workers and deskless workers. Ninety percent of a deskless worker’s time — a nurse, someone on a manufacturing line, any public-facing role — is spent doing the job itself. For office workers, ninety percent or more of our time is spent at a computer. It’s a fundamentally different culture and rhythm. The confidence gap exists because this is genuinely hard to measure — you can track anything digital, like email, easily, but if you’re communicating a safety message to deskless workers, your only real mechanism for confidence that it landed is line managers and their communication skills, since 90% of the workday isn’t spent near a phone or screen — sometimes it can’t be. That has to be a human mechanism, not just a technology one, and I don’t think we’ve built that muscle enough. I’d love to touch on the 70%/22% strategic gap too, once you’ve reacted to the deskless point.

Chuck: I think it’s genuinely all three, even if that sounds wishy-washy — tech can be a huge enabler, reaching employees who traditionally had no access at all, though we’ve talked before about how managers can become overburdened as the sole channel when everything routes through them. And “irrelevant” is partly a content problem too — do we actually know what a frontline employee considers relevant versus irrelevant? A safety message should register as relevant, but something a communicator or leader considers important might land as noise to the person receiving it. There’s also, I think, a lingering culture of looking down on frontline employees — which I hope we can help shift over time, especially coming from my own manufacturing comms background, where a lot of frontline workers are skilled tradespeople who can do things I have zero idea how to do. There’s real intelligence at that level that gets overlooked, and we’ve talked before about frontline employees not feeling like their ideas are heard. Technology doesn’t fix that — it can create visibility into it — but culture is what actually makes someone feel like part of the solution.

Jenni: We could talk about deskless workers all day, but you’re right that these numbers are interlinked — the 60% who say communication is irrelevant and the 31% who don’t feel confident reaching the frontline are really the same problem from two angles. Irrelevance is noise, and 60% saying they receive too much of it points to stakeholders pushing out content without asking the golden rule of comms: it’s not about you, it’s about your audience. On the strategic gap — 70% of communicators say leadership wants them to be more strategic, but only 22% feel equipped for it — I did a podcast a while back on the Calm Edged Rebels show specifically about what “being strategic” even means in practice; I’ll link it in the show notes, since we kept circling back to that definitional gap. I’d genuinely love to hear from communications professionals themselves about what’s missing for them to close that gap.

Chuck: Something just clicked for me on the irrelevance point — this is the fun part of doing this show, watching the puzzle pieces connect. We talked in an earlier episode about a Unily and ScreenCloud report finding it can take four to seven days for content to reach frontline employees in some organizations. That delay could be exactly why content reads as irrelevant — by the time it arrives, something’s already moved on. So “irrelevant” may be as much about timeliness as topic.

Jenni: Genuinely interesting — it makes me think it’d be worth doing a monthly or quarterly roundup once we’ve built up enough episodes, pulling together what all these different reports are actually telling us collectively, since there’s a lot of research out there that only makes sense in combination. This particular report, for instance, says 74% still prefer email as a channel, even after fifteen years of people predicting email’s death — so, still work to do there.

Chuck: Last one — very US-centric, but I want your UK perspective on it. Weber Shandwick’s “Business Is a New Stabilizer in a Divided Nation,” surveyed just after the first hundred days of Trump’s return to the presidency, exploring how Americans feel about the role of business in society. It surfaces real tension: 68% believe companies should address important societal issues, but 40% think they should only do so if it directly affects the business, and 21% think companies should stay out of it entirely. 79% want business leaders to use their platform to weigh in on presidential executive actions. 63% of Democrats and 74% of Republicans — one of the few things both sides agree on — think the workplace should stay politically neutral, and 72% of employees say they’d rather avoid sensitive topics at work altogether. Despite all that tension, most employees remain optimistic about their job and their company. And across the political spectrum, over 80% agree businesses should prioritize employee health and safety, fair pay and pay equity, mental health and work-life balance, and promoting prosperity and stability. So Jenni — this paints a picture of a delicate balance in the US: people want business to lead on issues like democracy and wellbeing, but also want workplaces to stay politically neutral. Are you seeing anything similar play out in the UK, or is it shaping up differently there?

Jenni: I can only speak to the conversations I’ve had this year, but yes, I think this is starting to play out here too. Chief people officers, comms teams, and transformation leads I’m talking to are actively working out how to communicate on more political or societal issues — how to handle them, how to respond. It’s on the agenda, but everyone’s still in a genuine question stage: do we, should we, how do we? And we’ve been in that question stage for a long time — even going back to the murder of George Floyd, we were asking “do we, should we, how do we,” and five years later we’re still asking the same questions, which comes back to where we started this episode, about values and what an organization actually stands for. I’d love to see comms professionals feel more equipped to navigate this, and I think that’s a real gap — people are understandably scared of getting it wrong. That 40% figure, saying companies should only weigh in if it directly affects the business, feels important — not necessarily “does it affect the business,” but figuring out what’s appropriate for your specific organization, because you genuinely cannot comment on everything, everywhere, all the time. At some point you need the courage to make a decision and build some governance — more air quotes today — around what you will and won’t address, and then actually follow it. I think we talk about this a lot without doing it, and the real blocker is the lack of a safe space for communicators to compare notes — what’s everyone else doing, what should we do. Maybe that’s something a community like ICology could help facilitate.

Chuck: This connects to something we’ve said before about internal comms borrowing more from journalism — bringing a genuine newsroom mentality that asks “does our audience actually care about this,” and reporting the news of it without necessarily attaching an opinion. So much of news now defaults to opinion instead of just reporting facts, and I think the more organizations lean on the facts, the better off they are. What stood out most to me, though, were those last data points — the near-universal agreement across the board on health and safety, fair pay and equity, mental health and work-life balance, and prosperity and stability, all north of 80%. If a business just focused there, that’s what employees are actually asking for. The rest of the political weather, which shifts by the day, will always be a harder call — but when 80%-plus of any group agrees on something, that’s about as close to consensus as you get.

Jenni: That’s genuinely good advice, because it’s so easy to get pulled into noise or a conversation you don’t actually need to be having. If those are the things people want addressed, the real question is whether your campaigns, communications, and leadership are actually showing up in those spaces — getting the basics right, almost like Maslow’s hierarchy for organizations, before reaching for anything higher up.

Chuck: That’s what I had this week, Jenni. Let’s get into our freq-out moments — what’s freq-ing you out?

Jenni: I’m building a running list of these for us each week. Mine this time is a marketing message I keep seeing on Instagram — “get your evenings back” through meal-delivery or ready-meal services. Your evening back to do what, exactly? I get it if you’re juggling kids and clubs and genuinely stretched for time — that’s real. But I don’t think everyone needs to hear that cooking, a fundamental part of being a human being, is something to outsource so you can sit and watch four hours of Netflix instead. We’re being conditioned into thinking we need our evenings “back,” when honestly, my evenings are good as they are — cooking, going for a walk. I don’t need them back. Back from where, exactly?

Chuck: Where did people’s evenings go? I love that rant. I’ve got two. First — and you sent me this one, so no offense taken — a headline reading “white men in a ‘pit of worry’ over doing or saying the wrong thing at work.” Before even reading past the headline, I knew I’d hate the excuses inside it — it reads as pure privilege: after decades, centuries, of saying or doing whatever with zero repercussions, now you have to simply be a decent, kind human being, and that’s framed as some unbearable burden. It’s genuinely easy to be a decent person. Sure, you’ll occasionally get something wrong by accident — I once used the wrong pronoun for someone at a company I worked at, felt bad, they corrected me kindly, I adjusted, done — that’s not a “pit of worry,” that’s just being a person who can take a correction. It reads like wanting to be the victim after being the one doing the victimizing for a long time. I have zero patience for that framing.

Jenni: [laughs]

Chuck: The other thing I’m freq-ing out about, and I’m genuinely delighted by this one — Turkish Airlines is reportedly proposing fines for passengers who stand up too early on the plane before it’s actually parked. You know the routine: plane lands, seatbelt sign goes off, and it’s an instant unnecessary scrum in the aisle, blocking the one path off the plane, especially annoying when it’s finally your row’s turn and someone’s standing exactly where you need to get your bag. I applaud this. While we’re rewriting airline rules, I’d also love gate agents to get to use those field-marking sprays soccer referees use, to keep zone-six passengers from crowding the gate when only zone two’s been called.

Jenni: I do stand up sometimes, but I always take an aisle seat so I’m essentially standing in my own spot, ready to go.

Chuck: If you’re standing in your own seat’s spot, that’s fine — the issue is when people crowd out into the aisle itself and block others, especially when crew calls for passengers with tight connections to get off first, and nobody sits back down to let them through.

Jenni: Fair — if I knew someone needed to get off urgently, I’d sit right back down and wave them through. Thank you, Turkish Airlines, for trying to teach people how to fly. And thank you all for joining us this week — the articles and resources that inspired this conversation are in the show notes, so do check those out, and please don’t forget to rate and review after listening. Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode, and pass this along to anyone who’d enjoy watching or listening — you can now find Frequency on YouTube too. Thank you to Poet Ali for contributing the music to the show. We’ll be back next week with more news, insights, and opinions about comms and leadership in the workplace today. Keep tuning in and turning up.