Frontlines, Fusion & Friction

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

Chuck: And I’m Chuck Gose.

Jenni: Frequency is your go-to for real talk about communications, culture, and employee experience, beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. A couple of things on my mind this week, Chuck. First — IKEA. I went at the weekend for a new office chair, because the temporary one I’d had since we moved house four years ago has given me real shoulder pain. There’s this tradition of having Swedish meatballs in the cafeteria every time you go — is that universal, or just a UK thing?

Chuck: Very familiar, very cultured over here too — absolutely a universal tradition.

Jenni: Gravy and jam, or dry? Fries or mash?

Chuck: All of it — fries with that too.

Jenni: Good, good. Critical, important stuff. I should mention I’m not in my usual home studio this week — I’m in the dressing room at the Inspiring Workplaces Awards, hosting this evening, dress hanging over my shoulder, about an hour to go. The other thing on my mind — disagreement and belief. I was listening to a podcast about politics, and they said something like: you can disagree with someone, but at some point you have to believe that’s genuinely what they want. It got me thinking about the title of my book, Nobody Believes You — about wanting to be believed, to be a credible leader people will follow, while still being able to disagree with people and believe them at the same time. It’s come up in several leadership workshops since I heard that line. I think we live in a world that’s forgotten disagreement can coexist with belief — we’ve made disagreement itself really uncomfortable.

Chuck: I see almost the opposite over here — people seem to want to disagree without even really engaging with what the other person believes; they question the belief itself through the act of disagreeing.

Jenni: I think what I’m seeing is people disagreeing, but wanting everyone to ultimately agree with them — we’re just not comfortable with disagreement as a state, even though there’s clearly plenty of it happening.

Chuck: I think we’ve turned it into polarization — a “versus” situation, about winning the disagreement, rather than simply holding different beliefs and being okay with that.

Jenni: Totally. Those were my two things — over to you and what you’ve been reading.

Chuck: And good luck this evening, in case I forget to say it later. Jenni lined up four stories this week that keep connecting the dots on a conversation we keep circling back to. One’s a Gallup study on the paradox of remote workers being both engaged and distressed. One looks at internal comms pros borrowing skills from journalism. One’s a big structural change at Moderna, merging IT and HR in the name of AI. But we’re starting with a group that often gets left out of the transformation conversation entirely: frontline workers. Unily and ScreenCloud just released a report on frontline friction — on average it takes four and a half days for frontline workers to receive important company information, stretching past a week in some industries. From a culture standpoint: 72% say they don’t have a strong grasp of company strategy, 64% don’t understand leadership’s priorities, and only 29% feel a true sense of belonging. One line from the report: “businesses are essentially asking their frontline workers to navigate without a map.” And it’s not just about receiving messages — less than a quarter of frontline employees feel their ideas or feedback are heard by leadership, even though nearly a third believe better information-sharing would improve the customer experience. Jenni, this idea of the frontline holding untapped intelligence stuck with me — are companies too focused on communicating to the frontline and missing the opportunity to listen and learn from them?

Jenni: This report’s genuinely interesting, and it connects to research I did myself with this population in 2019 and 2023. What I’d want to see is this data compared against office-based or knowledge workers on the same questions — strategy clarity, understanding leadership priorities, sense of belonging — because I’m not sure the gap is as frontline-specific as it looks in isolation. I do think there’s a real need to listen more — my own research consistently shows this population doesn’t feel listened to. But the language matters: when the report says it takes 4.5 days to receive “important company information,” that’s not surprising to me, and it depends entirely on what “important” means. If it’s a genuine crisis, that needs its own channel entirely, not a four-and-a-half-day cadence. Frontline workers typically have something like fifteen minutes a week of access to communication — ninety percent of their time is the work itself — so reaching them at all takes real cultural understanding, not just better technology. In one manufacturing organization I audited, the message was clear: “I wish they would listen to me more” — and that’s a bigger, more valuable insight than communications alone can capture; it’s cultural.

Chuck: The 4.5-day number is probably less shocking to either of us than to a lot of leaders — it’s actually a useful number for them to sit with. Just because you’ve sent an update doesn’t mean it’s landed yet, so sending a second update three days later means the first one still hasn’t fully reached people. Sending is instantaneous; receiving isn’t.

Jenni: Exactly — and again, what counts as “important company information” to leadership isn’t necessarily what counts as important to a frontline worker. In my research, we identified different types of workers by how they connect to the organization — task-and-skill-based connection versus brand-based connection — and the information each group actually needs to feel engaged is genuinely different. It’s a good headline number, but the language underneath needs interrogating.

Chuck: Let’s move to the next story, which I found fascinating for thinking about the future of comms. Moderna just restructured, merging two traditionally siloed departments — HR and IT — under a new “Chief Brand and Innovation Officer” role overseeing both people and technology. CEO Stéphane Bancel said the model was designed to “collapse time,” cutting friction between teams that should already be working seamlessly together, and went as far as declaring the traditional HR model dead. The big question for communicators: if this kind of merger can happen to HR, what’s stopping it from happening to comms? Comms is already deeply entangled with platforms, data, and targeting tools — add AI, and the line between “communication” and “digital experience” gets blurrier still. Does this kind of structural shakeup excite you or worry you, and what opportunity does it present for comms?

Jenni: I found this genuinely exciting reading it. HR, comms, and IT have always been these traditionally siloed functions trying to form one working triangle, and I had my best success on digital workplace projects specifically when I was finally paired with a dedicated IT business partner — we could work the technical side and the comms user-need side together properly. What excites me here is that this is the first organizational blend I’ve seen genuinely built around employee experience — which, for me, is culture and communication, tools and process, and environment, together. A lot of organizations have “employee experience” roles today that feel like they’ve just been dropped into the org chart without rethinking what needs to change structurally around them. This feels like the start of taking employee experience seriously as one connected discipline. And it’s a good example of a leadership role that doesn’t require deep expertise in both underlying disciplines — you need organizational knowledge and strong teams under you who hold that expertise, not a unicorn who’s mastered both HR and IT personally.

Chuck: I love that they’re trying something genuinely new — and the title itself, Chief Brand and Innovation Officer, is interesting, because comms reporting into a brand-and-innovation lens rather than a purely tactical one might shift how communicators see their own role: not “what are we limited to doing,” but “what are we actually capable of.”

Jenni: That mindset shift — what are we capable of, rather than what are we tasked with doing — is exactly the shift we need. I’m excited to see where it goes. Next up, a Workvivo blog post arguing internal comms pros should be borrowing skills from the newsroom — headlines, deadlines, clarity — to stay sharp, credible, and effective. What stood out to me was the point underneath all that: communication isn’t just about telling stories, it’s about telling the right ones, at the right time, with real urgency and intent behind them. What do you think is actually holding communicators back from telling bolder, clearer stories — confidence, access, or something else?

Jenni: I thought the piece made some genuinely valid points about that journalistic muscle — headlines especially, which I come back to constantly when reviewing content. I’ve also had the opposite experience, pitching real news and being told by a global comms team, “you can’t put that out today, we’re running another story” — which misunderstands the difference between news and content entirely; news has its own urgency. On what’s holding people back — I had a conversation with a comms professional just this week who’d gotten excited pitching a bigger campaign early in her career, been told by a stakeholder “we don’t need to do that much, we don’t want to blow our own trumpet,” and just stayed small ever since. I think it’s confidence, more than anything — someone needs to say “yes, let’s do this” instead of “just get it out.” Headlines specifically could always be sharper across the board. And no matter how much we talk about AI and change, writing and structuring a story stays a foundational internal comms skill — not copywriting exactly, but the craft underneath it.

Chuck: I’ve seen a real influx of former journalists into internal comms over the last ten to fifteen years, and I think it’s been a genuine net positive — it raises the editing, presentation, and production quality across the board. There’s also a marketing instinct a lot of communicators resist owning: actively pitching and selling your story to get it placed, not just publishing it and hoping it lands.

Jenni: I’ve got a marketing degree, and my career has bounced between media relations and internal comms enough that this blended instinct feels natural to me — but I completely understand why it wouldn’t if you’d come up entirely through HR or pure internal comms roles, where that muscle was never taught. My advice for anyone in that position: find a mentor with that media or marketing background, someone you trust to critique your work with kindness, and treat it as a real professional development opportunity.

Chuck: My own college degree was in journalism — news editorial — so I have a soft spot for this. Good stories take real time to build properly; it’s not a check-the-box exercise. Last story: we’ve talked a lot recently about hybrid, remote, and return-to-office, and Gallup has new research with a genuinely double-take-worthy headline — remote workers are more engaged and more distressed. At first that reads as contradictory, since we usually frame remote work as the healthier option, but remote workers report being more energized, focused, productive, and connected to mission, while also reporting more daily stress, more social isolation, and more emotional strain from unclear expectations. Gallup calls it a paradox. Is this just how work is now — can you genuinely love your work and still feel overwhelmed by how it gets done? To me that’s where comms comes in: not just informing, but clarifying and reducing ambiguity, with real attention to the emotional cost of what’s being shared. Is this actually a paradox, Jenni, or are remote workers playing the martyr card a little?

Jenni: When I first read this, my instinct was that it’s more proof engagement isn’t the right thing to measure — because I genuinely can’t square “more engaged” with “more distressed.” If you’re reporting more daily stress, more isolation, how can you also be engaged? The isolation and stress don’t surprise me on their own — we’re social animals, we need connection, and we don’t always make the best decisions for ourselves even when we think we are. But I can’t make “engaged and distressed” cohere as a single state, especially since real engagement should come with clear expectations, which is a huge part of employee experience success — if expectations aren’t landing, I don’t see how you can call that engagement.

Chuck: Want me to try to make it make sense? Take expectations out of it — that’s a leadership issue, not a paradox. I think about it in terms of a comedian’s bit on the five most annoying words you can hear — there’s something similar here where being engaged means being dialed in, aware, focused, exposed to everything happening around you, including the stressful parts. Ignorance might genuinely be bliss here — if you’re not engaged, you might not be tuned into the pressures at work at all. There’s a risk of hyper-engagement being unhealthy in its own right, because you’re sacrificing other things to stay that dialed in. So maybe the more you know, the more stressful it gets.

Jenni: That connects to our conversation last week about satisfaction rather than engagement — that to feel satisfied, you have to have worked hard enough to sacrifice something for it. So if engagement works the same way, then working hard enough to feel truly engaged comes bundled with some suffering by definition — you can’t get the good part without the difficult part attached. Okay, that actually helps me make sense of it, thank you.

Chuck: I’ll be honest, that’s not quite how I originally framed it in my head — I was thinking about it politically. People who are deeply engaged with what’s happening in the world right now are exceptionally stressed; people who aren’t checking the news constantly are probably not as stressed. That was my read.

Jenni: That’s a really good interpretation too, and I’ll keep sitting with it — my first reaction was “this proves engagement’s the wrong measure,” but there’s clearly more depth here. A lot of what we’re covering these days isn’t a clean this-or-that, it’s a messy middle we’re all just living in.

Chuck: And that’s why we do this podcast, Jenni — to pick apart the messy middle. What are you freaking out about this week?

Jenni: Why I keep falling into a Netflix series on Sundays that I can’t climb back out of. This Sunday it was Ransom Canyon — ten episodes, watched them all in one sitting, ate far more snacks than I needed, and then got annoyed at myself for not doing more useful things with the day. It was very good, though — trashy ranch drama, thoroughly enjoyable.

Chuck: Haven’t watched it, probably won’t make the cut. But I do think those escape moments are healthy — if you’re dialed in to everything all the time, your brain genuinely needs the breaks.

Jenni: It does, and I still haven’t watched The Pit, which you said was excellent — still on my list. What’s yours?

Chuck: Two things this week. First — the em dash discourse on LinkedIn. There’s been a wave of criticism that em dashes in content are a tell for ChatGPT-generated writing, and now there’s a backlash of “em dash apologists” insisting they’ve always loved the em dash and you can’t assume AI just because you see one. It reminds me of when an obscure musician most people have never heard of passes away and suddenly everyone’s a lifelong fan — people feeling oddly seen and exposed, writing posts defending a punctuation mark. I’m a little suspicious of it, honestly — there’s no em dash key on a standard keyboard, so I’d bet most people typing one genuinely don’t know how they got there.

Jenni: I use em dashes and hyphens constantly and have never once felt the need to write a post defending it.

Chuck: Right — there’s a hyphen key, but no em dash key; there’s an en dash (shorter) and an em dash (longer), and typing an em dash takes a deliberate keystroke combination. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong to use one, it’s grammatically fine — it’s just a strange, very personal-feeling defense of a punctuation mark.

Jenni: Maybe they’re not real people defending themselves — maybe it’s AI bots pushing back.

Chuck: Honestly, I halfway believe that. The other thing I’m freaking out about — and I wanted to verify this story before bringing it up — is news that Barclays is supporting a UK Supreme Court decision restricting bathroom usage for trans employees. I’d assumed this kind of fight was mostly a US phenomenon; apparently not. In the US, this kind of policy debate has mostly stayed focused on trans athletes in sports — a genuinely tiny population, even at the high school level — but it still gets treated as some outsized threat to competitive fairness. Reading this story, my honest reaction is that being a trans person navigating this right now must be genuinely difficult, and a large employer choosing to restrict something as basic as restroom access, rather than support the people affected, feels like targeting your own employees without offering anything in its place.

Jenni: I haven’t read the full Barclays story, but I remember a similar story here about a year ago, before the UK Supreme Court ruling — shared on Instagram with a deliberately inflammatory headline. When I actually read the underlying article, it was describing the introduction of a third, gender-neutral toilet option alongside men’s and women’s — which I’ve genuinely seen becoming more common, including at Waterloo Station in London: men’s, women’s, and gender-neutral. I remember watching Ally McBeal years ago, where the office had one shared restroom everyone used — which felt unusual at the time and has since become fairly normal in a lot of places. I think there’s more nuance here than an inflammatory headline suggests, and I’d hope a brand like Barclays would be doing more to be inclusive of its own employees.

Chuck: I wanted to verify it precisely because we talked last week about the risk of drawing conclusions from short-form content. Reading through people’s actual comments on the story, plenty of it echoed common, ordinary bathroom-line behavior — women using a men’s room to skip a long queue, family restrooms at airports that most parents use without a second thought. It just seems like an unnecessary stance for a large employer to take, dictating restroom usage rather than supporting the employees affected by it, when there are clearly bigger problems for an organization that size to focus on.

Jenni: I agree. Thank you all for joining us this week. All the articles that inspired this conversation are in the show notes, so please don’t forget to check those out, and don’t forget to rate and review after you’ve listened. Subscribe so you don’t miss another episode, and pass this along to someone you think would enjoy listening or watching, since you can now find Frequency and our clips 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 everything comms and leadership in the workplace today. Keep tuning in and turning up.