Episodes

Chuck opens with the thing he calls both his favorite and least favorite topic: a group of Minnesota-based CEOs — 3M, Best Buy, General Mills, Medtronic, Target, UnitedHealth Group — signing an open letter calling for immediate de-escalation after the Minneapolis shootings, while their own employees push for something considerably stronger. His verdict is that a row of logos on a letter is not a stand. From there it is four stories about AI and workplace change: Dropbox arguing that AI can rescue meetings, a Pearson study putting trillions of GDP upside behind employee training rather than tool-buying, Amazon’s 16,000 layoffs surfacing through a calendar invite titled “Send Project Dawn Email”, and Anthropic destroying print books to build training data. The through line is the one Chuck borrows from Rebecca Hinds: AI amplifies whatever already exists in an organization, the dysfunction included.

Millennials were asked what drives their disengagement and gave a one-line answer: “my leader doesn’t know me and doesn’t care to know me.” Chuck’s response sets the tone for the whole episode — it does not matter whether leaders privately care, because if that is how employees feel, that is the truth. Jenni breaks her own format and brings five stories instead of four, and they line up into a single argument about the distance between what leadership believes about its own organization and what everybody below them experiences: 60% millennial disengagement, Citigroup’s “we are not graded on effort” memo, a 40-point culture gap between the C-suite and entry level, Gallup’s span of control climbing to 12.1 direct reports, and a satisfaction gap on change communication that has widened from 13% to 30% in four years.

Amazon has a name for employees whose median time in the building is under four hours a day: low-time badgers. Jenni’s response is the argument of the whole episode — as long as the work gets done, who cares what kind of badger you are. Chuck lines up five stories about a workplace quietly tightening its grip: the death of happy hour, Amazon’s prove-it performance reviews and badge tracking, a UKG study of 8,200 frontline workers where 76% reported burnout, McKinsey’s claim that leaders rather than employees are the bottleneck on AI, and the argument that automating busywork removes the only recovery time most people had.

Chuck and Jenni open 2026 with a list of the leadership and comms habits that should have stayed in 2025. A Forbes piece argues employee happiness predicts stock performance — Jenni’s response is that what it actually measures is the baseline of leadership. Her own read of the year’s trends leads to a question about whether “internal communication” still describes the job. A LinkedIn debate asks whether buzzwords are harmful or occasionally useful, and Chuck disagrees with the author. And the research behind the open-plan office finds face-to-face interaction down 70% and the square footage per employee down by roughly the same — which Chuck argues was always the actual point.

Closing out 2025 with 25 hours and 41 minutes of Frequency behind them, Chuck Gose and Jenni Field count down the 10 themes that defined the year in work, leadership, and internal communication, then share five AI-generated predictions for what 2026 might bring.

Chuck Gose and Jenni Field swap festive traditions — Festivus lunches versus Icelandic book-and-hot-chocolate nights — before digging into new research on psychological safety as a strategic resource, a LinkedIn debate on strategy versus plans in internal comms, Leesman’s hybrid work “rhythms” data, and a pointed disagreement over whether AI anxiety is really just ordinary change anxiety.

Chuck Gose plugs the iCology mentorship program and settles the “is Die Hard a Christmas movie” debate before Jenni Field takes the wheel on a report-heavy week: the UK Government’s RESIST framework for misinformation, new wellbeing data from Reward Gateway, a Gallup event on UK disengagement, and a “human work” model from Fauna and CultureCon.

Recorded live on stage at Unily’s Unite25 conference in Nashville — Frequency’s first ever live episode — Chuck Gose and Jenni Field share their keynote takeaways, react to new research on AI trust and courageous leadership, and take questions from the audience on AI-generated content and delivering bad news well.

Chuck Gose celebrates the UK’s first snowfall of the season and Jenni Field’s Business Book Awards shortlist certificate before the pair dig into new Gallup data on the purpose gap at work, Kate O’Neill’s argument that feedback needs shared context, Mita Mallick’s case against “firefighter” leadership, and unsettling new research on AI reading personality from LinkedIn photos.

Chuck Gose vents about the annual arrival of LinkedIn “2026 trends” posts before he and Jenni Field dig into new “culture rot” research showing only 14% of UK professionals feel aligned with their company’s values, data on gossip outpacing HR in layoff announcements, Jenni’s takeaways from the Gallagher Digital Experience Summit, and new research on America’s shifting relationship with work.

Jenni Field shares reflections from Chris Ducker’s Long Haul Leader Summit before she and Chuck Gose dig into a new “Meaningful Productivity” report on workplace exhaustion, MIT Sloan’s case that poor leadership — not hybrid work itself — is the real problem, data on manager engagement and recognition, and the risk of over-specializing in a comms career.