A quarter of executives admit they hoped an office mandate would make some employees quit. Chuck’s verdict on that is one word: weak. It is the sharpest moment in an episode about work built on performance and ambiguity — a woman who did no work for a year and was never caught, FirstUp’s finding that nearly half of employees call themselves engaged and nearly half plan to leave inside twelve months, an argument that most culture problems are clarity problems, and the return-to-office data showing only 27% of US companies went fully in person. The hosts also arrive at the better question buried under the RTO fight: what would an office have to be for people to want to come in five days a week?
Jenni opens with a personal essay from Leila Kazim, “I did no work for a year and no one noticed”, written after a good manager was replaced by someone with no management skills and Kazim found herself in a role nobody could define. Rather than raise it, she ran an experiment: stop working entirely and see how long it takes to get caught. The camouflage was spreadsheets, a few padded emails and a PowerPoint assembled minutes before the weekly one-to-one, and she left of her own accord a year later, never found out. The essay leans on David Graeber’s bullshit jobs — roles so pointless the person doing them cannot justify their existence, which Graeber estimated at 20 to 50% of all jobs — alongside a 2015 YouGov poll in which 37% of British workers said their job contributed nothing meaningful. Chuck’s first move is to correct the framing: she did do a little work, just enough, and an engaged manager would have noticed. Asked whether he could do it himself, he refuses the easy no and admits he can rationalize it, then raises a stranger case he found alongside it, of a manager who never reported an employee’s resignation, redirected the paycheck to his own account and hired Fiverr freelancers to keep the work going, complete with a ghost employee joining Zoom calls with a broken camera and a working chat window. Jenni’s answer is about values rather than ethics in the abstract: she once decided to coast in a job she could not do properly, lasted two months, and could not keep it up. Chuck closes with the statistic that reframes everything after it — 88% of remote workers say they go out of their way to look busy, because busy is what gets rewarded, not productive.
The second story is FirstUp’s engagement research, published in March 2026 across more than 3,000 corporate, manager and hourly employees in the UK and North America. Engagement looks healthy and hides a retention problem: nearly half say they are engaged and nearly half plan to leave within twelve months, 60 to 76% have missed an important policy or procedural update despite receiving communications regularly, managers are the most trusted source at every level while 70 to 77% report difficulty communicating with their teams, miscommunication causes stress for around 44%, and one in four say poor communication alone makes them want a new job. Frontline hourly workers are the least well served, and beyond pay the top three asks everywhere are show me you care, improve communication, give me better tools. The regional split is narrower than expected — UK engagement is lower and intent to leave higher, UK managers are marginally more overloaded, and trust in leadership as a communication source runs at 11 to 19% in the UK against 16 to 23% in North America. Chuck’s explanation for why Americans stay is not engagement but healthcare: benefits are tied to employment, so people wait for the next job rather than leave a bad one, and he wonders aloud whether Canadian data would look more like the UK’s. Jenni takes that further, questioning what engagement surveys are measuring at all if safety and health are the real levers, since no amount of tools and channels fixes someone staying resentfully for the insurance. Chuck’s edit is to delete the word between the two findings: not engaged but leaving — engaged and leaving, because engagement was never the sole predictor of who stays.
Startups Magazine’s “The clarity crisis: why your ‘culture’ problem is actually a communication problem” argues that what leaders diagnose as culture is usually a failure of clarity: in the rush to scale, organizations assume people know their role, the rules and the direction of travel, and teams end up drowning in ambiguity that is mistaken for poor work ethic or disengagement. The piece is pointed about flat hierarchies — agile structures are good for speed and often leave a vacuum where operating principles should be — and extends the critique to AI, noting leaders are asking AI to solve problems they never defined clearly for their human teams, a line Jenni says she could talk about all day. Its prescription is clarity on roles, boundaries, decision rights and progression, with a RACI or RASCI as the tool, on the argument that culture is not fixed by a values workshop. Chuck is unconvinced by the chart and goes at the incentive instead: leaders are not ignorant of this, they simply never experience the downstream consequences of their own ambiguity, because the work is delegated and they see only the reports. His answer is accountability, and leaders who own mistakes rather than distribute them. Jenni’s addition connects it back to the first story — hybrid removed the corridor conversations that used to substitute for written clarity, and the biggest complaint she hears from client teams is not knowing their objectives or their development path, just ticking a box without knowing the meaning behind it. Chuck’s illustration is the CEO chant he saw: what do we want? AI. When do we want it? Now. Why do we want it? AI.
The closing story is Founder Reports’ return-to-office statistics for 2026, which undercuts the headlines: only 27% of US companies have gone fully in person, 67% still offer some hybrid flexibility, and remote levels have barely moved since the 2024 peak. The numbers underneath are worse for mandate enthusiasts — 64% of employees prefer remote or hybrid and 64% would quit or start job hunting if it were removed, high performers are 16% more likely to have low intent to stay under a mandate, 80% of companies have already lost talent to one, 74% of HR professionals report leadership conflict over them, and required office time has risen 12% while actual attendance has risen 1 to 3%. Chuck’s fury is reserved for the statistic Jenni reads out plainly: 25% of executives and 18% of HR professionals admit they hoped some employees would voluntarily leave because of the policy. Using a mandate as a passive layoff, rather than having the nerve to manage someone out, is what he calls weak, twice. Jenni’s parallel is the open-plan office, adopted for decades against the evidence, which suggests the data was never what decided this — the lease was. Her caution about the hybrid majority is that a three-day mandate enforced by badge data is still a mandate, and the messy middle is not being examined. Chuck’s flip is the constructive one: imagine building a workplace people want to come into five days a week, then run that question past a leadership team and, more importantly, past employees, allowing that five days might mean ten to three rather than nine hours. Jenni’s own answer — a chauffeur-driven car, or a helicopter — turns into the point of the segment, that the executives writing RTO policy have drivers and private elevators and are not experiencing the commute they are mandating.
What are bullshit jobs, and how many jobs are they? The term is David Graeber’s, for roles so pointless that the person doing them cannot justify their existence. Graeber estimated 20 to 50% of all jobs fit the description, and a 2015 YouGov poll found 37% of British workers felt their job contributed nothing meaningful — the framing Leila Kazim uses in her essay about a year of doing no work without being noticed.
How can an employee do no work for a year without being caught? In Kazim’s account, by producing just enough visible output — spreadsheets, occasional padded emails, a PowerPoint made shortly before the weekly one-to-one — inside a role nobody could define, after an effective manager was replaced by one with no management skills. Chuck’s reading is that the story is mostly evidence of a disconnected manager.
Can employees be engaged and still plan to leave? Yes, and FirstUp’s data says roughly half do both at once. Chuck argues engagement was never the sole predictor of retention: a great opportunity elsewhere, or a policy change like a five-day office mandate, will move an engaged employee. His theory for why American employees leave less often is that healthcare is tied to employment.
Why do employees miss important internal communications? FirstUp found 60 to 76% had missed an important policy or procedural update despite receiving communications regularly. Managers are the most trusted channel at every level and also the most overloaded, with 70 to 77% reporting difficulty communicating with their teams, while frontline hourly workers are the least well served by communication systems.
Is a culture problem really a communication problem? The Startups Magazine argument is that most are, and specifically a clarity problem — unclear roles, boundaries, decision rights and progression, made worse by flat structures that leave a vacuum where operating principles belong. Chuck’s caveat is that a RACI chart won’t fix it, because leaders never feel the downstream consequences of the ambiguity they create.
Are companies using return-to-office mandates as layoffs? Some admit it. In the 2026 return-to-office data, 25% of executives and 18% of HR professionals said they hoped some employees would voluntarily leave because of an RTO policy. Chuck calls that weak — a way to avoid managing someone out. The wider picture is that only 27% of US companies went fully in person, and required office time has risen 12% while attendance rose 1 to 3%.
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 we’re talking about the reality that a culture problem is a communication problem. We’re going to talk about some return to office stats, and some employee engagement stats for North America and the UK, and the fact that someone did no work for a year and no one noticed. Before that!
Chuck: Before we get into those — I’m very excited for that last one. I came across this image on Instagram from The Economist, and then I went and wanted to find the original source for it. And I think this gets to the unique nature of our partnership and friendship and working on this podcast together. It talked about how Britain — which I will admit, Jenni, I sometimes get confused, or don’t really pay attention to, what the difference is between England versus UK versus Great Britain, and what everybody means by this, so I’m just going to say you all over there — is rethinking its, quote, special relationship with America. And what was interesting looking at this chart is it goes all the way back to 2000. How the US favorably looks at the UK or Britain is pretty close, pretty steady — it goes up a little bit and then down a little bit. But man, you all have not thought a lot about us for a while. And I’m guessing this might have started around, it looks like around 9/11, which wasn’t our fault, Jenni, but it’s a pretty steady decline. And then it seems to get a little bit better with our Barack years, which we all loved during that time. And then, funny enough, since 2016 it’s been dropping off the counter. So what is this? What are you seeing, hearing, feeling over there that is causing this?
Jenni: Do you know, when you said the decline sort of started at 9/11, and this is about the special relationship between the UK and the US, my immediate thought was, is that when Love Actually came out? Because I feel like that was such a massive cultural moment about the special relationship. I think it might be similar timing. What are we seeing and hearing? I think at the moment there is just a sense of, what’s the purpose and the need necessarily for that relationship? What’s it bringing on both sides? And everyone I speak to just doesn’t want to go to the US at the moment. Which is a shame, because there are lots of parts of the US — like you said, there are lots of things going on that are not the fault of the American people. I think there’s a question about what that special relationship is, but it was brought up brilliantly by Hugh Grant in Love Actually many years ago, and I think now it’s just coming to the fore. That’s all I’ve got.
Chuck: I wonder too — as we’re recording this, your King is over in the US, and a lot of Americans have always had this romanticized view of the royal family. I wonder if we just don’t know enough, that we sort of look at that and think, wow, that looks really cool over there. And we’ve romanticized it a bit.
Jenni: Yeah. And I wonder whether there is a media play out here, because I say to people a lot, just because of what you see in the news, that doesn’t necessarily impact people every day on the ground in America. It’s different stuff. Whereas I think you guys might see all the lovely romanticising of the monarchy, whereas we just see the opposite of your leadership over here. I think that’s probably the biggest thing that’s playing a role, really.
Chuck: Could be. Let’s get into the content this week.
Jenni: So the first story is the headline, I did no work for a year and no one noticed. Now, my dad sent me this last week, and it’s a piece from Leila Kazim, a personal essay confessing that she spent an entire year doing no work at a software company and nobody noticed. Disillusioned after a great manager left and was replaced by someone with no real management skills, she found herself in a role that nobody could really define. So rather than raise that, she ran an experiment — I’ve got that in quote marks here. Stop working entirely and see how long it takes to get caught. Her tactics were simple: spreadsheets as camouflage, a few padded emails, the occasional PowerPoint knocked up a few minutes before her weekly one-to-one. And she was never found out. She left of her own accord a year later. Now, the piece draws on David Graeber’s concept of bullshit jobs — roles so pointless that even the person doing them can’t justify their existence. Graeber estimated 20 to 50% of all jobs fit that description, and a 2015 YouGov poll found 37% of British workers felt their job contributed nothing meaningful. Kazim’s conclusion is damning, really: modern work is just theatre, and perceived effort matters more than actual output. I should also say that this article has come up in conversations with a few CEOs this week as well, so it’s definitely done the rounds. But this proves the point that managers are key to motivation and meaningful work. My question for you, Chuck, is what about the personal work ethic here? And also, could you do this?
Chuck: Let’s get into the first part first. The work ethic — when you said she did no work, it sounds like she did a little bit of work, and what you described seemed like some previous colleagues of mine, at places I worked, where it was just enough. Just enough to put in there. And I think, to your point, it does show a connected and engaged manager would notice this, and clearly that is the case here. When you ask if I could ever do this, the easy answer is to be like, no, of course not, Jenni, I have all of this. But I’ve tried to really reflect on it, and I was thinking through some situations where — yeah, but that’s not, I would probably be doing a bunch of other things. But if somebody could just do the bare minimum and still get paid, and that’s all they really care about, I don’t know, maybe they feel like they’ve earned that right. I’m not sure in practice this would actually be something I could do, but I could rationalize it in a way. And when I was looking at this article, there was another one that popped up about a similar instance, where an employee had quit but their manager didn’t say anything to anyone and redirected that person’s paycheck into their own bank deposit, and kept parading around as this other person, even hiring Fiverr freelancers to do the work. It was basically a data entry job, and they went on with this for like a year. So I wonder if it’s a bigger topic of just how out of touch, and the lack of connection, that exists in the workplace. In the story I was just talking about, this person would actually have this fake employee log on to Zoom calls, but say their camera wasn’t working or the microphone wasn’t working, and they’d participate in the chat. So all kinds of shenanigans going on. I think it just speaks to the fact that this goes on, and it goes on for so long at some organizations.
Jenni: I mean, I’m enjoying the use of the word shenanigans here immensely. So it made me reflect that there is an ethical thing for me. There’s no way I would be able to do it, because I’d be absolutely terrified I’d get caught. But I have had a job where I wasn’t able to do the stuff that I really wanted to do, or knew was the right thing to do, because of all the corporate stuff that goes on. And I remember thinking, it’s cool, I’ll just stay here for a year and I’ll just take the paycheque and I’ll just do what I need to do and it’ll be fine. And I did about two months of that and I was like, no, that’s not where my values are. I just can’t do it. It’s just not how I’m built. But the bit in this story that I hadn’t come across before was David Graeber’s concept, this estimation of 20 to 50% of all jobs fitting this description of just being utterly pointless. And I feel like no one’s talked about that forever, in terms of the padding that’s gone into corporate life, and whether any of these jobs are actually making a difference, or are they just different kinds of jobs? I think that’s some of it with knowledge work — you’ve got peaks and troughs and stuff like that. Maybe that makes it harder to make them make sense in that full-time consistent perspective. But there is definitely some ethics here.
Chuck: I do think that the jobs have changed. I do think that. But there’s this other data point that I think is worth digging into as well, and it really speaks to the fact that so much of the work people do is theater. There’s a little bit of performance to it. 88% of remote workers say they actively go out of their way to look busy. So whether it’s consciously, subconsciously, whatever — this sounds more conscious than anything — of being rewarded for busy, not being rewarded for productive or efficient.
Jenni: Yeah, I’m hoping that that is the shift. We spoke a few episodes ago about that question of how many hours are you spending at work, or whatever it was, and I was like, that’s a stupid question. It’s that same thing of it’s about the time, not the output. I’m really hoping that does shift this year, which would be good. And the piece about meaningful work as well, this sort of lack of meaningful work, keeps coming up. It’s come up several times, I think, for us in recent episodes. Which links me nicely into the next article, which is from FirstUp, who have done some reports into employee engagement. They’ve done a couple of reports looking at employee engagement — this was published in March 2026, and surveyed over 3,000 employees across corporate, manager and hourly worker roles. I looked at the reports that you sent over, which was the UK one and North America. In both of them, engagement scores look really healthy on paper, but they are really covering up this sort of significant and growing retention crisis that’s going across the globe, I think. The core argument is that it’s a communication failure, not a culture failure, and that seems to be going through. So I thought it was worth sharing some of the data that’s in both reports, and then what the differences are in UK versus North America. In terms of both reports, we’ve got consistent data saying that employees say they’re engaged, but nearly half are planning to leave within 12 months. 60 to 76% have missed an important policy or procedural update despite receiving communications regularly. Managers are the most trusted source of information across all roles, but are overloaded and under-equipped to carry that responsibility. 70 to 77% of managers report challenges communicating effectively with their teams. Miscommunication causes stress for around 44% of employees on average across both regions. Around one in four employees say poor communication specifically makes them want to look for a new job. Frontline hourly workers are the most underserved by communication systems. And the top three things employees want beyond pay across every role is: show me you care, improve communication, and give me better tools. Now, when you look at this from the UK and North America, there’s not a huge difference, I don’t think, in some of the stats. Some of them are a bit bigger, but not tons. So engagement is lower in the UK, but the intent to leave is higher. UK managers are even more overloaded — not massive, 77% versus 70%, I don’t think that’s huge. UK workers miss more critical updates. It’s not looking good for us over here. The trust gap in leadership is consistent but stark in both of them. In the UK, only 11 to 19% of employees trust leadership as a communication source. In North America that’s 16 to 23%. The AI access gap is more severe in the UK, and Gen Z stress is called out specifically in the UK report as a problem. So what are your thoughts on these reports, the data, the insights that are coming out from FirstUp?
Chuck: It’s interesting that there is so much similarity, especially after a little kickoff topic about how little you all think of us over here, that there are so many similarities between the two. The one part that stood out to me was that the engagement numbers are about the same, but UK employees are more likely to be planning to leave. I was trying to figure out why they are more likely — or I was thinking more, why is North America, or the US, less likely? And I think it truly comes down to one thing. I have no science or facts behind this, other than this is my gut feeling. It comes down to benefits and healthcare. In the US, your benefits and healthcare are typically tied to your employment. So if you’re switching, it’s not so much that you’re leaving a job — sometimes it’s, I’m not going to leave until I’ve got the next one, no matter how bad it is, because you don’t want to have that gap in healthcare or benefits. And I wonder if just that one thing is enough to make that difference. Are people more likely to stick around, or, phrased another way, less likely to leave, because they simply don’t have benefits backing them up? Whereas in the UK, if you leave your job, you’re still covered for healthcare, you still have all of that. In the US, that is not the case. So just that alone — I wonder, if that coverage was there for North American employees, or maybe this is where Canada, which does have universal healthcare and the US doesn’t, maybe that skews it up more. If they had that, would they be more likely to leave regardless of engagement?
Jenni: Yeah. And that’s making me think about the overall definition of engagement as well, which is something I’m separately looking at. As you were talking, it was like, well, what are we really measuring then in terms of engagement? Because the things that are going to have a sway on whether you stay, go, engage or not engage — there are so many of those. And some of that is going to be natural human instinct around safety and health and things like that. If that’s part of it, then that’s a very different thing to have to fix, address, look at, than a communication problem, which gets bandied around as the issue for all things, which is what we’re going to talk about a lot today. But that’s a very different way of thinking about engagement, and I think some of these reports and industry stuff don’t think of it that way. I think they’re thinking about it much more, naturally because of what they do, around the tools, the channels, the communication, and how that can address engagement. You could put all the tools and channels in that you like, it’s not going to fix the issue. If the issue is, I’m not going to have any healthcare so I’m just going to stay here resentfully forevermore, you’re never going to address that if that’s your reason for staying.
Chuck: Yeah, I think if the benefits, whether it’s healthcare related, financial related, whatever, are tied to that, that is going to keep people there even if they don’t want to be there. And I think that goes to your very first item, where you said employees say they’re engaged, but nearly half are planning to leave within 12 months. I think we can get rid of the but part. Say they’re engaged, and nearly half are planning to leave. The engagement is not the sole indicator of people sticking around. And you see this all the time in these somewhat ridiculous LinkedIn posts where people like to throw out the word bittersweet, and they’re leaving one job to go to another job. They could have been the most engaged employee, but a new opportunity presents itself. It’s not like, well, you know what, I’m super engaged here, so I’m not going to take this new opportunity. That’s just not how it works.
Jenni: Do you know what made me laugh even more when you just did that bit? How little we use the word engaged in real life outside of work. I don’t think I’ve ever been at dinner and been like, I’m super engaged in this conversation and food right now. It just doesn’t come up in any world other than the corporate world, where it’s really normal to talk in that way. It’s truly strange.
Chuck: Right, we don’t. Though I think I am going to do that now — next time I see you, throw that in more just to make a point of it.
Jenni: It’s going to become our phrase now every time we’re together. But following on from that thread about communication being the solution to all the problems, the next article is from Startups Magazine. It’s called The Clarity Crisis: Why Your Culture Problem is Actually a Communication Problem. The article argues that what leaders diagnose as a culture problem is often, at its root, a communication problem, specifically around clarity. In the rush to scale, many organisations operate on the assumption that people inherently know their role, they know the rules, they know the direction of travel. But they don’t. And teams are frequently drowning in ambiguity. This isn’t a sign of poor work ethic or disengagement, it’s a symptom of leadership complacency around fundamental communication. The piece is particularly pointed about flat hierarchies — it talks about how agile structures are great for speed, but they often create a vacuum where clear operating principles should be. And interestingly, it extends this critique to AI adoption, arguing that leaders are asking AI to solve problems that they haven’t even clearly defined for their human teams. I could talk about that all day. So the fix they’re saying is really to invest in clarity — clarity around roles, boundaries, decision-making, progression. When people understand what they own, who they need to consult, who approves what, you really do unlock that genuine empowerment for people. Empowerment is different to engagement, but I’ll leave that there. They talk about practical tools like a RACI or RASCI framework to help, but the core message is really that culture doesn’t fix itself with a values workshop or something like that. It fixes itself when leaders communicate with precision and consistency. Now, this isn’t new, but I suppose my question for you, Chuck, is how do we help leaders and managers really understand this? Because this is the same stuff, just focused in the startup environment. So how do we really help make this shift?
Chuck: Yeah, I think the gap in those experiences is that it’s not that leaders don’t experience this or know this. They just don’t experience the same things that normal employees do, and so they don’t feel the downstream consequences of their decisions, whether they’re clear or not. They just get the data and the reports, and then hold others accountable for that. So I think it’s those downstream consequences that create that clarity, and they’re actually shielded from that because they’re not the ones doing the work. That work they’ve sort of delegated off their walls, and that person’s not responsible — they’re sort of absolved of it. So I don’t think a RACI chart or anything fixes any of it. It comes down to accountability, and that’s a bit of a personal thing for individuals. We’ve all worked with leaders who are not just held accountable but own that. They admit when mistakes happen, they celebrate those who have stepped in and fixed things. So I think that accountability comes into play, but they’re shielded from it.
Jenni: I also wonder whether we are at that tipping point of this, because of some of the stuff we’ve touched on today around, I did no work for a year and no one noticed type stuff. If we have got a workforce that’s now working more remotely, in a more hybrid way, and then people are thinking, I don’t know what people are doing — and then you haven’t got any of this sort of process or clarity around your role, because that structure isn’t there. And I do feel like there is this question from leaders around, what are you all doing at home? Come back to the office and then we can see you. Rightly or wrongly, which is kind of layered within this. People don’t really know what they’re doing, and I think that’s part of the challenge. If we start to smooth some of that together, there is a clarity element in there that will impact the culture, that I think leaders haven’t taken the time to do in the past, because they didn’t need to. We were all in an office together, we were all doing stuff together, and you could easily navigate priorities and things like that because of the natural conversations that would happen in that environment. Whereas now that’s so much harder. And just thinking about the clients and the teams I’m working with, I would say this is their biggest challenge in any organisation: I don’t really know what my objectives are, I don’t really know what my development plan is here, and I just feel like I’m ticking a box and I don’t really know the meaning behind it.
Chuck: Yeah, I think leaders are expecting people to figure it out themselves. And there was this — I guess you want to call it a comic, maybe it was a kind of rallying cheer or whatever — but it said, what do we want? And it shows all these CEOs, like, AI. And when do we want it? Now. And why do we want it? AI. They don’t know. They just feel like it should be there, so go figure it out. But I’m the leader, and I’m telling you this is what needs to happen. The clarity is out the window.
Jenni: Yeah, totally. And it is that we don’t really know what we need, but we just need you to figure it out and do it. I think the task-orientated nature that work has become hasn’t followed suit — suddenly this empowerment has gone. People don’t feel as empowered, but leaders, to your point, are so far away, they’re not feeling that friction, and that’s making it much harder. Now, we touched on that return to office piece in there, which is our next piece, which is our final piece today. It’s a report that you sent over, and there are lots of stats in here. As it was the essential return to office stats and trends for the USA, I thought this is a topic you’re going to want to talk about. So I had a look through it, and it basically says that despite all of the headlines and all the RTO mandates, the data tells a more nuanced story: only 27% of companies have returned to a fully in-person model, while 67% continue to offer some form of hybrid flexibility. Remote work levels have barely shifted since their 2024 peak. A few key data points relevant for you: 64% of US employees would prefer remote or hybrid over full-time office working. 64% would quit or start job hunting if that flexibility was taken away. High performers are the most at risk of leaving — they’re 16% more likely to have low intent to stay if there is an RTO mandate. 80% of companies have already reported losing talent because of their return to office. 25% of executives and 18% of HR workers admit that they hoped some employees would voluntarily leave because of an RTO, effectively using that mandate as passive layoffs. 74% of HR professionals say RTO mandates have led to leadership conflicts. Required office time has increased by 12%, but actual attendance has only increased by about 1 to 3%, meaning that mandates are being ignored. 76% of companies report greater employee retention by allowing remote work. 78% say it improves engagement — probably gets it to about 10%, because it’s not anywhere else. The top reasons companies give for RTO are collaboration, productivity and communication, but the research on whether office working actually delivers those benefits remains pretty mixed. And then the final stat is that 88% of remote workers say they go out of their way to look busy, which is what you were talking about earlier. So, thoughts on your favourite topic of return to office?
Chuck: This goes great with our earlier conversation. I’m going to scroll to find this data point to make sure I have it right, because it was right at the very beginning. We got to say that people are engaged but they’re planning to leave — this is a great example of that. It’s not the engagement that could be deciding whether or not people leave. It could be simply, what is your workplace policy? Are you flexible? Are you not? Is it hybrid? Is it not? Are you mandating workplaces? That employee could be one of your most engaged employees, and if that’s what you value, you are then damaging it by saying, you need to be in the office five days a week, or whatever it is. And it’s interesting to me that, in spite of all these stats — which I applaud them for saying that only 27% of companies have returned fully in person — that just shows that the ones that are doing it are getting a lot more noise out there around it, and it’s not the realistic view of a lot of workplaces. But none of these data points point to the fact that it works. Unless — this stat where 25% of executives and a fifth of HR workers are using RTO to get people to leave. How weak is that? Rather than, you want this person to leave, rather than have the gall, or the nerve, or whatever, to just say, this person’s got to go — if we do this policy, maybe they’ll just leave on their own. How weak is that?
Jenni: Yeah. And also, what kind of culture is that? I don’t think anybody would want to work in that sort of culture anyway. But to the point about the data and what it means, all I could think about then was open plan offices, because open plan offices don’t work, and yet everyone did those for years and years and years, even though all of the data pointed to the fact that this is not a good idea, it’s never going to work. And they still did it, and that’s how people worked for a really long time. So it’s almost like the data doesn’t help anybody make any decisions. It’s almost, to your point several episodes ago, this is about your lease. This is about a financial reason. This has nothing to do with collaboration or communication or productivity. It’s about the financial investment in that building that you want people to come back to. I do still think hybrid is the way forward, and I think that’s basically what this is saying, in that it’s only really about a third that are going back for that fully in person. The majority are doing the hybrid. The issue that probably wasn’t talked about much in this report, that I see from friends, clients, all sorts, is the hybrid policies coming in, but that includes an RTO mandate. So even though it’s saying you need to be in the office three days a week, that’s being enforced. Like, we haven’t seen you tap in this week, so you’re in trouble. And that’s a bigger risk, because this is almost implying that if you’re doing hybrid, people are fine. They’re having the time of their lives, this is all good. Whereas I think the reality is hybrid comes with some of these constraints, and I don’t think that messy middle is necessarily being looked at in enough detail about the impact.
Chuck: Well, I think work comes with all kinds of constraints by the nature of it. But the challenge I would put to leaders out there who are setting up a hybrid work policy but really wanted five days a week — let’s say that’s what you really wanted, but you’re actually pretty emotionally intelligent, you didn’t want to lose engagement, you wanted your best people to stick around, you weren’t doing this to try to get your people to leave. You want people there, but it’s not best for everyone, so let’s do hybrid. Imagine if you created a workplace where people wanted to come in five days a week. That should be the goal. Create that environment, create that culture where people want to come in. Then imagine what these data points would look like at that point.
Jenni: Yeah, you’re right. It’s actually a good flip, isn’t it? I wonder if you did an exercise with a leadership team to say, what would that look like? If this was an environment where people wanted to come, what would this office need to become, or be like? And they probably don’t know, because no one’s asked that question. And I’m not sure that employees would know either. Do you know what I mean? It’s a bit like the Henry Ford example — when you say to people what they want, they’d say a faster horse. They wouldn’t have said a car. So I don’t know that people know what they want. But I would imagine there’s some element of cleanliness, tech that works, a decent environment that’s not broken chairs, all those sorts of things. I just think we’ve accepted a bit of sloppiness sometimes, I think, in places — and when you’re at home and you’ve got those comforts, why would you then want to go somewhere else? So that’s a really great question, and I think that is one that’s going to stay with me. What would this workplace need to look like if people wanted to come to this office? What would it look like?
Chuck: I was going to zip it, but then you brought up one of my least favorite quotes of all time, which is the Henry Ford thing. Man, I hate that quote so much.
Jenni: Okay. I mean, it serves a purpose. I don’t adore it, it’s not on my wall.
Chuck: But here’s why I don’t like that quote. It’s assuming that people aren’t creative — that they would have just wanted what they had but a little bit better. Imagine what this road would be like if we hadn’t had cars the way they’re built now. We wouldn’t have all this crazy pollution and all this other nonsense going on. Maybe they’d have said, hey, you know what, instead of a faster horse, let’s build an airplane. We don’t know. So anyway, that’s why I don’t like that quote, because it’s saying that people have simplistic thoughts. But I do think the point you raised about asking people — asking a leadership team, if they don’t know, that says a lot. If they don’t know what it would take to bring people in. But let’s say they did have some ideas. Let’s then go to your employees. Because in a lot of industries there’s not an option to not come in. If you’re in manufacturing, you’re in five days a week. If you’re in healthcare, you’re in five days a week. Retail, whatever, you’re in there. What would it be? I would love to know from employees: what would a workplace be like where, if you had the option to come in, you would want to come in five days a week? Is it something like, I don’t want to be there from eight to five, I want to come in from 10 to three, five days a week. I want to make sure that I’m home for my kids to get off the bus. Whatever that is. What if the five days a week isn’t nine hours a day? It would be a really interesting conversation to have with an employee group.
Jenni: Yeah. And I reckon, as I’m thinking about what would I need, thinking about when I used to work in an office — it’s a chauffeur-driven car that’s going to take me from my front door. And that’s not within the gift of the company necessarily, but actually that would be much nicer than having to figure out the commute and stuff like that. Or a helicopter, actually, because you don’t have to deal with the traffic. I mean, you could go really extreme with it. But I think, what’s the friction that’s stopping it, that would make it a more enjoyable experience? And I wonder if some of it is that infrastructure around it that is part of the challenge.
Chuck: You’ve nailed it, Jenni. You figured it out. This is because the people who are oftentimes deciding these RTO policies, they have drivers. Do you think the CEO of Chase is driving himself into work every day? No. All these people who are making — not all of them, but a lot of these — they have drivers. They aren’t experiencing what you just described. They truly are out of touch with it.
Jenni: Yeah, that was my life goal when I used to see the CEO with the car at the back waiting for her to go downstairs, and I was like, man, that is a goal, isn’t it? Just to be driven everywhere. That was lovely.
Chuck: But imagine what that work experience is then. It’s so different. I remember watching a documentary about the financial crisis — I can’t remember what the documentary was called now, maybe it was Inside Job. It was about the financial crisis in 2008, 2009 in the US, and they talked about how some of these bank executives thought so highly of themselves that they built private elevators for these individuals, so they could go straight to their floor, straight to their office, not have to hang around with the common folk and wait a few floors to get up there. That’s the mentality of some of these leaders.
Jenni: Yeah. Not my world. Not my world at all. Right, that’s the end of the articles this week. What are you freq-ing out about?
Chuck: Everything, Jenni. I was going to say that I should flip a coin over what to talk about, but there’s not an eight-sided coin, because there are like eight different things I feel like I could go into. I was going to do one, but I’m actually going to save it for the next episode, because it’s a really — not good — a really horrible thing happening that I want us to talk about. Yes, you should be excited, because there’ll be a lot of opinions on it.
Jenni: Okay, good. I’m really excited about that now.
Chuck: I’m going to go back to a campfire discussion we had inside ICology this weekend. It was about dashboards — how are you telling the story, how are you telling the story through data, what’s the pull, what’s the push of dashboards. Hopefully a really helpful conversation for the people who were in there. But there was one thing a member said that I couldn’t let go of. And for those listening, if you’re in the world of internal comms, I want you to really think about this. This person said — I’m not going to say who — she said, well, internal comms doesn’t drive revenue. So, dot, dot, dot. And went on this big long story. I’m minimizing her long story a lot; she made a lot of great points around what internal comms should be doing. But I came back to this point: do we really believe that internal comms doesn’t drive revenue? Do we really believe that? I believe that it does. I believe that great internal comms does drive revenue. But if there are people out there who don’t, no wonder we’re minimizing our efforts. So it’s got me spinning a bit, thinking this is going to be a new thing I’m going to be challenging communicators on — showing the work that you’re doing and connecting it to driving revenue, because that’s what leaders care about.
Jenni: Yeah. And you’ve made me think about the Value of Internal Communication report that we talked about, that Dr Kevin Ruck and I wrote, which talks about the value ladder and how it can actually prove the value it brings in that commercial way. So let’s send her a copy of that report, because that might be helpful if she’s looking at how to prove the value. We’ve got similar freq-outs this week. So I had my senior internal comms round table — I’ve got two tables, a virtual table and a London table — and it was the London table last week, and we were talking about how to stay relevant in internal comms. And I had a bit of a lightbulb moment that stayed with me about the profession of internal comms, and really how, as an industry for the last 10, 15 years, we’ve talked about how we need to go from being a tick-box function — so, can you do a poster? Yes, sure, I’ll go and do that — to an outcome-based function, so we’re asking the question, can you do a poster? What is it you’re really trying to achieve? What is it you want to do? That’s been our industry world for years, where we’ve talked about doing that. I don’t think we’ve done enough work to take the organisations on the journey with us, which is why we’re seeing AI come in to do that tick-box work. Because if you say to AI, can you do me a poster for this event, that’s not going to ask the questions about why, what are you trying to achieve, is that really the right tool, blah blah blah. It’s just going to do the task that you want it to do, and you don’t have to worry about any of that stuff, because you can just tick the box and move on. And I think that’s the reason why people are going to AI, those stakeholders inside organisations, because it’s doing the thing that the internal comms function were doing but are now being more impactful, commercial, outcome-focused about. And people don’t really understand the benefit of that. So that’s staying with me and swimming around in my head a little bit, about how do we address that in terms of the change element we need to do inside our organisations to take our stakeholders with us. So that’s swimming in there for me at the moment.
Chuck: Yeah, because you can’t have any outcomes without outputs, without action. Their work does need to happen for that to occur. But yeah, it’s in a similar vein of, how are we connecting the work that comms is doing to the big top-level items that leaders truly care about? Is it revenue? Is it retention? Is it stock price? Is it safety? Whatever those items are, we need to make very clear connections. And what’s so interesting to me on this conversation was somebody saying, well, I know I’m contributing to it, but I don’t really know the impact it’s having on that, but it’s driving it. And I’m like, well, if you’re not taking credit for it, somebody else is. Somebody else is glad to take credit for the work that you’re contributing. So I do think there’s this connection that needs to happen, and whether that’s through a dashboard approach or something, we’ve got to do a much better job of aligning and demonstrating that connection between what we do and those company goals on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual basis.
Jenni: Yeah, 100%. We could talk about this even more, but I’m aware we’ve come to the end of this week. So thank you for joining us this week. All of the articles that have inspired this conversation are in the show notes, and please don’t forget to rate and review after you’ve listened. Subscribe as well so that you don’t miss another episode. And if you’ve got a friend, relative, colleague who you think might want to listen or watch, please make sure you share it with them as well. Thank you to Poet Ali for contributing the music to the show. And we’re back every Monday with more news, insights and opinions about everything comms and leadership in workplaces today. So keep tuning in and turning up.
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.
