Fresh off IABC World Conference in Vancouver and Atomicon in Newcastle, Chuck and Jenni compare notes on what conferences are actually for these days before diving into what Chuck calls “such a positive episode”: a Jim Collins TikTok on why good is the enemy of great, a Slate piece asking whether anyone actually wants team drinks, new HBR research on why people work through illness, and a second HBR study on why women’s complaints of workplace abuse are believed less often than men’s. It closes, unexpectedly, on the Salem witch trials.
Jenni comes back from two days at the Gallagher Summit in London with a notebook full of stats, plus new research on how employee experience shapes behavior, a viral podcast clip questioning whether venting actually helps, and a Forbes piece asking whether AI is about to break the century-old Monday-to-Friday work week. Chuck, for his part, wants help naming a LinkedIn behavior he can’t stand: pointing out everything that’s wrong with no interest in fixing it.
Jenni brings four stories built around one question: whose job is it to fix the things that are broken about how we work? A Times piece on return-to-office tracking gets Chuck talking trust, not compliance. New HBR research says generative AI makes people more productive but less motivated — and Chuck isn’t buying that the AI is the problem. A viral Diary of a CEO clip about “owning your own” work-life balance gets pushed back on hard. And Amazon’s Andy Jassy explains away a flattened management structure in a way Chuck finds a little too convenient. Along the way: time zones, hustle culture, and why Jenni’s new drum lessons are exactly the kind of play that has no ambition attached to it.
Chuck lines up four stories that keep circling the same theme: the people and structures that get left out of the transformation conversation. A new report puts a dollar figure on how badly frontline workers are being served by internal communication, Moderna merges HR and IT into a single “Chief Brand and Innovation Officer” role, a blog post argues comms pros should borrow more from journalism, and a Gallup study finds remote workers are somehow both more engaged and more distressed at the same time. Jenni pushes back hardest on that last one — and by the end, has a working theory for why it isn’t actually a contradiction.
Jenni warns Chuck upfront that this is a soapbox episode, and she means it. She works through whether “satisfaction” is a more honest measure than “employee engagement,” argues the return-to-office debate is really about control dressed up as productivity, questions why internal comms is still stuck relitigating its own value after decades, and makes the case that storytelling — not another framework — is the actual skill worth rebuilding. Chuck matches her energy, quoting Taylor Swift on band-aids and bullet holes, and closes with a genuinely startling stat about how much of the world runs on Meta products every day.
Chuck calls this week’s lineup a “cornucopia,” and it earns the word: a report that frames HR’s challenges as a mountaineering expedition, an essay naming the quiet anxiety everyone’s carrying about work right now, a brand-new leadership buzzword (AQ, adaptability quotient — Chuck immediately invents his own, GQ, “gut quotient”), Nick Bloom’s data showing hybrid work never actually declined, and a LinkedIn post arguing Marketo killed marketing. The through-line is one Jenni keeps circling back to all episode: is any of this actually new, or are we just relabeling challenges that have always been there?
A LinkedIn poll Jenni ran after last episode’s change-fatigue-versus-strategy-fatigue debate came back split almost down the middle — and that’s before Chuck and Jenni get into the week’s real subject: the growing gap between what leaders think they’re communicating and what employees are actually receiving. Marriott’s CEO gives them a case study in values holding steady while language changes around them, a new report puts hard numbers on the leader-employee communication gap, and a Harvard Business Review piece finally puts language to something Jenni’s been hearing from HR teams for months: psychological safety, misunderstood six different ways.
Chuck comes in hot this week with a rant about a McKinsey stat that will not die — the “employees waste nine hours a week searching for information” line that’s been recycled across LinkedIn for over a decade, sourced to a 2012 study that never said what everyone claims it says. From there, he and Jenni work through a research-backed test that shows employees can’t reliably tell a CEO’s words from an AI’s, a Stanford economist’s case for letting people choose where they work, a LinkedIn post accusing internal comms of getting too intellectualized, and the quiet ethics of hitting “record” on a meeting.
It’s a episode about trusting data less and trusting people more — whether that’s the data behind a viral stat, the data behind a return-to-office mandate, or the discomfort of admitting a CEO’s message had help.
Episode two opens with a thank-you: the response to Frequency’s debut had been bigger than Chuck Gose and Jenni Field expected, and they don’t let it pass without saying so. From there, two bits of news — Jenni is bringing Comms Reboot, the communications unconference, to Toronto in June with Contact Monkey, and a running joke about which Spice Girl each of them would be (Fun Spice and Grudge Spice, if you’re wondering) — set a looser tone before the week’s stories.
The real conversation lands on three things: a new McLean & Company report on what’s actually driving disengagement, a LinkedIn debate over whether a departing Chief Communications Officer should be replaced, and a Harvard Business Review piece that has Jenni rethinking whether “change fatigue” is even the right diagnosis.
Chuck Gose spent months DM-ing Jenni Field about starting a podcast together. On the first episode of Frequency, she finally stopped ignoring him — and the two immediately admit they’re not looking for a fight, though if one happens, it happens.
That mix of warmth and willingness to disagree sets the tone for everything that follows. After trading first-car stories (a dark green Ford Fiesta versus a “borrowed” 1967 Pontiac Tempest), Chuck and Jenni get into the state of internal comms after a decade of change, why a third of US managers say they’d rather use AI than hire a Gen Z employee, and why 31% of employees are actively sabotaging their company’s AI efforts.
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