Chuck Gose and Jenni Field announce Frequency’s first live episode, at Unite in Nashville this October, before digging into Gallup data on why managers globally are so disengaged, a Harvard Business Review piece questioning whether hybrid work is really working, a Japanese manufacturer’s unusual internal economy for meeting rooms, and a large new Staffbase study on internal communication, trust, and loneliness at work.
Frequency goes live at Unite
Chuck and Jenni open with news that Frequency will record its first live episode at Unite, the Unilever-run event in Nashville on October 7-8. Jenni is speaking alongside Advita Patel on the 7th, and the two co-host a session together on the 8th; listeners can message either host for a discount code.
Jenni introduces a Wall Street Journal piece citing Gallup data showing only 27% of managers globally feel engaged in their work, a record-low figure Chuck says echoes conversations the two have had for a decade about manager support going unaddressed. Chuck argues the deeper problem is that “people manager” used to be a full-time role, and now managers are expected to do their own job on top of leading a team, with little formal training to show for it.
Discussing a Harvard Business Review article (flagged to the hosts by Daniel Paulling) arguing hybrid work is hurting collaboration and weakening culture, Chuck resists the framing that hybrid itself is the culprit, arguing instead that many managers simply haven’t been equipped to lead distributed teams. Jenni references the book Remote Work by Chris Dyer and Kim Shepherd to note how demanding it genuinely is to lead a fully remote organization well.
Jenni shares an Investopedia story on Disco Corp, a Japanese manufacturer that uses an internal currency called “Will,” earned by helping colleagues and spent on things like meeting rooms, coffee machines, or smoking areas. Chuck is unexpectedly drawn to the idea as a way to make the hidden cost of everyone’s time visible, while Jenni suspects employees would simply route around the system.
The hosts close on Staffbase’s 2025 International Employee Communication Impact Study, which finds only 9% of non-desk employees are very satisfied with internal communication, 63% of employees considering leaving cite poor communication, and clear leadership communication correlates with employees being three times happier in their roles. Jenni challenges the study’s framing that workplace loneliness is a communication problem, arguing it sits with management and human connection more broadly, and questions how much of the industry’s data-gathering translates into real organizational action.
Why are managers globally so disengaged, according to Gallup? Only 27% of managers worldwide report feeling engaged in their work, a record-low Gallup figure cited in a Wall Street Journal piece — Chuck points to “people manager” no longer being treated as a full-time role, with managers now expected to do their own job on top of leading a team, and little formal training to show for it.
Is hybrid work itself the problem, or is it a management-skills gap? A management-skills gap, in Chuck’s view — he resists a Harvard Business Review framing that blames hybrid work itself for weakening collaboration and culture, arguing instead that many managers simply haven’t been equipped to lead distributed teams well.
What is Disco Corp’s “Will” system, and could it work anywhere else? Disco Corp, a Japanese manufacturer, uses an internal currency called “Will,” earned by helping colleagues and spent on things like meeting rooms, coffee machines, or smoking areas. Chuck is drawn to it as a way to make the hidden cost of everyone’s time visible, while Jenni suspects employees would simply find ways to route around the system.
What does Staffbase’s 2025 study reveal about trust, turnover, and internal communication? Only 9% of non-desk employees are very satisfied with internal communication, 63% of employees considering leaving cite poor communication as a factor, and clear leadership communication correlates with employees being three times happier in their roles, according to Staffbase’s 2025 International Employee Communication Impact Study.
Is workplace loneliness really a communication problem? Not entirely, Jenni argues — while the Staffbase study frames workplace loneliness as a communication issue, she believes it sits more with management and genuine human connection, and questions how much of the industry’s data-gathering on the topic actually translates into organizational action.
Jenni: Welcome to Frequency, I’m Jenni Field.
Chuck: And I’m Chuck Gose. Frequency is your go-to for real talk about comms, culture, and employee experience — beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. Jenni, I think what matters this week for our listeners is that we’ll be doing a live episode at Unite this fall, the event put on by Unilever.
Jenni: We are — I’m really excited. We’ll be in Nashville on the 7th and 8th of October. I’m speaking on the 7th with Advita Patel, and Chuck and I are speaking together on the 8th. If you’re listening and want to come, get in touch with either of us — we have a code for 30% off your ticket, and you can join online or in person.
Chuck: It’ll be fun doing one of these in person for a change, versus the remote streaming world we’re normally in — which got me thinking about all the tech we rely on. A couple of months back I got roasted on LinkedIn for how I use my calendar — I just look at the day ahead of me rather than a weekly or monthly view. Because of that, I’ve now invested in some very old tech: a giant dry-erase board to my right, tracking commitments and dates. It’s fascinating that in this high-tech world, so much old tech still earns its place.
Jenni: I have a whiteboard next to my desk I haven’t touched in six months because all of that lives in Monday.com for me now. Is yours a chalkboard, or dry-erase?
Chuck: Dry-erase — I’d love a chalkboard, honestly, but this works. It’s the at-a-glance thing that’s easy for me, even though I’d never think to use project management software the same way. Brains just work differently. To wrap the intro, there was a LinkedIn conversation this week where you deep down know the “correct” answer, but there’s a more honest answer too — the debate was: would you rather have supportive leadership with no budget, or unlimited budget with an unsupportive leadership team? Almost everyone said they wanted supportive leadership. My answer was different — with unlimited budget, I could hire an internal PR team to win people over, or honestly, just buy the company and fire the unsupportive leaders.
Jenni: I loved that answer. It also got me thinking — does any other profession frame the question this way, like we can’t possibly have both? I’ve had big budget with an unsupportive leadership team, and I got a lot done — more than I did with a supportive team but no budget. It’s a whole Venn diagram of overlap, not a strict either/or.
Chuck: Your odds of getting supportive leadership are far better than getting unlimited budget, though — unlimited budget means you can do literally anything.
Jenni: Onto this week’s articles — recent research from Staffbase on internal comms, a story about a company that charges employees to book meeting rooms, more on return-to-office and the real issue with hybrid work, flagged to us by someone on LinkedIn, and why managers are so miserable. Let’s start there — a recent Wall Street Journal piece linking to Gallup data shows only 27% of managers globally feel involved and enthusiastic about their work, a three-point drop from last year and far below the 50%-plus levels before the pandemic. Overall employee engagement is down to a record-low 21% worldwide. The reasons cited: a workload explosion (managers now oversee nearly three times as many direct reports since 2017), the hybrid leadership challenge, a promotion mismatch (only 44% of managers report any formal leadership training), and steeper engagement declines among younger and female managers. Disengaged managers lead to disengaged teams, costing hundreds of billions in lost productivity. What should comms people do with this?
Chuck: I was wondering when we’d get to a question in there.
Jenni: Fair — I had about six questions bundled into that.
Chuck: There’s no good news in that data. I genuinely think you and I had this conversation about managers a decade ago — the State of the Sector report has said “managers matter” for years running with nobody acting on it. I don’t see companies focusing on what it actually means to be a manager outside of comms specifically. There used to be a role called a “people manager” — managing a team was the whole job. Now managers do their own job plus manage a team on top of it, and that’s a lot to ask of anyone.
Jenni: Is it just that this isn’t seen as enough of a performance issue for organizations to invest in, even though Gallup says it’s costing billions?
Chuck: I don’t think it’s about visible productivity loss — it’s a slow bleed, like the “quiet cracking” we discussed before. The more interesting data point to me is the steeper decline among younger and female managers specifically — that’s a more focused, solvable problem than “managers in general.” But I don’t see communicators or HR positioning themselves as the ones to solve it, and until leadership calls out the problem directly, everyone will keep trying to solve their own piece of it.
Jenni: Sticking with things falling through the cracks — the next one is about hybrid, flagged to me by Daniel Paulling. A Harvard Business Review piece argues hybrid work still isn’t working: it’s hurting collaboration, worsening social isolation, and weakening culture, and there’s growing evidence that hybrid or remote arrangements lower overall performance, even though many companies can’t fully return to office for space or geography reasons. Do you dispute the data?
Chuck: I don’t think we’ve said return-to-office is bad — I’ve said mandatory five-days-a-week is unnecessary. I can see how new management styles required by hybrid or remote work might trip some managers up if they don’t have the tools. But for every piece of research saying remote is bad, I could find research saying remote is good — I half-suspect return-to-office research is funded by commercial real estate interests. What does “going to work” even mean anymore? It used to mean a physical location; now it can mean a lot of things, and we’re applying old labels to a new way of working.
Jenni: I think we’re at a tipping point where the real issue is that if organizations invested in management skills, they might not need to force everyone back to solve performance concerns — they could enable people to lead well in hybrid or fully remote setups instead. There’s a book, Remote Work, by Chris Dyer and Kim Shepherd, that argues it takes a lot more deliberate effort to lead a remote company well. It feels like bringing everyone back to the office is trying to paper over a management-skills issue.
Chuck: My favorite version of this is when companies mandate a return but haven’t actually planned for it — not enough desks, chairs, or parking. One retailer I heard about told everyone to come back for an in-person town hall on a specific day, but IT had quietly turned down office bandwidth while people were remote and never turned it back up — so nobody in the office could even watch the town hall. If you’re bringing people back, you’d better make it a great experience, or else.
Jenni: On the subject of spaces and rooms — an Investopedia piece about a $25 billion company where employees pay to book conference rooms. Disco Corp, a Japanese manufacturer worth about $33 billion, created an internal currency called “Will.” You earn it by helping colleagues or taking on tasks the company needs, and spend it on things that cost the company money — booking meeting rooms, using coffee machines, even smoking areas. Have you seen anything like this, and could it work as a way to make people more considerate of their impact on others?
Chuck: I love the name Disco Corp on its own merits. But I secretly love this idea. At a previous company, I tracked a spreadsheet estimating the true hourly cost of all-employee meetings, broken down by department, just to make visible whether an eight-minute segment was actually worth the cost of everyone’s time. This system does something similar — it puts a visible price on things we usually take for granted, like meeting time.
Jenni: I like the idea of making people mindful of the cost of things, but I think people would just find workarounds — meet at the coffee shop across the street instead.
Chuck: Maybe, but there’s a fun, almost gamified angle too — imagining spending “Will” to get someone off mute, or to skip a meeting altogether.
Jenni: To wrap us up with the bigger story today — Staffbase’s 2025 International Employee Communication Impact Study, looking at how employees in Australia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US perceive internal corporate communications. Only 9% of non-desk-based employees are very satisfied with internal communication, and 38% rate communication quality as only fair or poor. Of the study’s eight key takeaways, three stood out to me: poor communication drives turnover (63% of employees considering leaving cite it as a factor), clear leadership communication correlates with employees being three times happier in their roles, and — this one made me uncomfortable — loneliness at work is framed as a communication issue, with 10% of employees feeling lonely often or always. Is loneliness really a communication problem?
Chuck: On the desk-based versus non-desk-based framing — I wonder if that division is one we’re creating in our own heads more than employees actually experience day to day. The satisfaction numbers are a clear signal to communicators: whatever you’re proud of writing, if people rate it fair or poor, it’s time to change. I’d want to know whether the more satisfied respondents cluster in the same companies or the same levels within companies, rather than assuming it’s purely a desk-based/non-desk-based divide. None of this data is shocking, but it reinforces things we already suspected. I do think it’s a leadership and trust problem as much as a communication one — Firstup research shows some frontline employees don’t even know where their leaders are.
Jenni: I don’t think the desk-based/non-desk-based distinction is one we’re inventing — those groups have genuinely different workplace cultures, and my own research has looked at that directly. I’d also point out that a lot of this research comes from tech platforms with a product to sell, so it’s worth asking what’s driving the specific stats highlighted. My 2021 research on line managers found 42% have to rewrite communication they receive from the center before passing it to their teams — nearly half. None of this is new, and my real question is: where’s the action? If the same findings repeat every year regardless of the technology used, technology alone isn’t the fix.
Chuck: But what if some of the tech genuinely helps? Their crisis-comms example showed people using an employee app rated communication better during a crisis.
Jenni: I agree tech has a role, but it’s not a silver bullet — if it were, we wouldn’t keep seeing the same issues repeat year after year regardless of which platform is in place. When I ran a masterclass on communicating with deskless workers last year, over 500 people registered — that tells me people still need the basics, not necessarily more tech.
Chuck: It comes down to how people actually use the tool — nobody blames PowerPoint for bad presentations; it’s the person using it. I suspect organizations that use these platforms well see better scores than the ones who haven’t invested, can’t invest, or won’t invest.
Jenni: On loneliness specifically — that’s a manager and human-connection issue for me, not a communication one. It made me genuinely uncomfortable to see it framed that way in the report.
Chuck: Agreed — that’s a heavy burden to place on comms or even on a manager. Someone could talk to a colleague every day and never know they’re struggling with loneliness; that’s a much deeper issue than a survey question can capture, and it’s worth asking what the actual survey questions were in the first place.
Jenni: Exactly — that’s always my question with reports like this: what did you actually ask? “How would you rate internal communication here?” means nothing concrete to a normal employee. My sister, a nurse, told me her team has three WhatsApp groups, two noticeboards, and other channels — which one am I even being asked about?
Chuck: That’s it for the articles this week. What’s your freak-out?
Chuck: Mine is exciting news I got to share with the iCology community first: iCology is officially partnering with Transform, the HR and employee experience event held in March in Las Vegas. After attending the last couple of years and feeling like people talked around communications but never about it directly, I pitched leading a day-long summit on the role communications plays in the employee experience — happening at Transform in March 2026. Tickets are available now, though the summit will be limited to around 40 seats.
Jenni: I’m so excited for you — I know those conversations had been going on for a while. My freak-out this week is something I’ve been mulling on walks: why is work bad? I posted about it on LinkedIn — the idea that we’re conditioned to believe work is inherently bad, when it might not be. I’ve enjoyed nearly every job I’ve had, whether in an office, a shop, or a bar, and I’m not sure where the narrative that work itself is bad comes from — I think it’s tangled up in the return-to-office debates.
Chuck: I think it’s really a definition-of-work issue — people might enjoy what they do, they just might not enjoy who they do it for. Maybe people are just more vocal about separating “what I do” from “the workplace” than they used to be.
Jenni: I feel like there’s an undercurrent in a lot of stories that we should want to work less and live more.
Chuck: You need your evenings back, Jenni.
Jenni: I really do. Thank you for joining us this week — all the articles that inspired this conversation are in the show notes. Rate and review after you’ve listened, subscribe so you don’t miss another episode, and pass this along to someone who’d enjoy it — you can find Frequency on YouTube too. Thank you to Poet Ali for contributing the music to the show, and we’ll be back next week with more news, insights and opinions about comms and leadership in workplaces today. 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.
