Purpose, Profit & Proper Internal Comms

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, this might not be what matters most, but this is how my day started. I was saying goodbye to my wife this morning and she asked what happened to my hair — turns out I’ve got a full-on Seinfeld “bad haircut” look going on today, completely flattened down. But I also wanted to tell you my name has become a verb — “Chuck ghosting your life” — and not as a compliment. Let me explain: last Sunday, we left the house at 8:30am, drove two hours from Indianapolis to Cincinnati for a Bengals tailgate and game — an embarrassing loss, so we left early — did a parking-lot wardrobe change at a rural Indiana Wendy’s, drove back to Indianapolis, and made it to a 7pm Penn & Teller show. Apparently that’s not how you’re supposed to manage a schedule.

Jenni: That sounds like an amazing day to me. I used to “Chuck ghost” my own life too, until I met my husband, who taught me the “one thing a day” rule. We’ve been together sixteen years, and I’ve genuinely embraced it — the other day I did two things in one day and was exhausted, because he’s trained me that well.

Chuck: Boring — you’ll make me cry. Before we get into your articles, we were bantering before recording about IABC’s World Conference — it’s in Toronto again in 2026, after Vancouver last year and Toronto two years before that. Nothing against Toronto, but we could be looking at better locations.

Jenni: I agree — someone at Unite told me Nashville is now the third most popular US conference city, behind Vegas and Florida, and I don’t think IABC’s ever done a world conference in any of those three. The one thing that gives me pause about Toronto next year is that it overlaps with the World Cup there, which could make travel and accommodation very expensive for attendees and speakers who pay their own way.

Chuck: Vegas in June would be glorious — it’s a dry heat, Jenni.

Jenni: I’ll happily go back to Nashville or come to Vegas. Let’s get into what I’ve picked for today. I want to talk about female entrepreneurship off the back of a new House of Commons report, revisit middle managers thanks to an article a listener sent in, and get into a piece called “How HR Took Over British Business and Got in the Way of Actual Work.” But first, I want to bring something I’m genuinely excited about — a new report on the value of internal communication that I’ve done with Dr. Kevin Ruck as part of our work with the Internal Comms Research Hub. It’s the first report published by the Hub’s European arm. We looked at roughly 60 academic and industry reports from the last 15 years, used AI to help analyze the trends, and introduced the PACEC framework — internal comms drives five critical outcomes: Performance, Alignment, Culture, Engagement, and Change. Organizations with excellent internal communication are 72% more profitable, and moving from “good” to “excellent” can boost engagement scores by 40 points. Poor communication costs about $26,000 per worker annually in lost productivity, and 44% of projects experience delays or failures due to communication barriers. Over half of practitioners still struggle to demonstrate this value through data, though. One part I love is Professor Alan Saks’ distinction: engagement splits into work engagement (tied to someone’s specific role) and organization engagement (tied to belonging to the wider organization) — and most engagement surveys measure work engagement, while internal comms is actually more linked to organization engagement. Does this report help practitioners understand how to show IC’s value? Be honest — I know I was involved in this one.

Chuck: How selfish of you to bring in a report you worked on — I’m kidding. I think it reinforces the “why” clearly for anyone doubting internal comms’ importance, and I love the engagement split — we’ve talked before about the “demonization of engagement,” where we criticize employees who aren’t engaged when really we’re measuring the wrong kind of engagement. I’m a sucker for a good framework, and PACEC gives communicators real places to start thinking about where their focus should be. The “how” is still something no report alone can hand you — that’s the application work our profession still has to do.

Jenni: Agreed, and the thing that struck me talking to clients about measurement since this published is how stuck we get in tactical metrics — open rates, click percentages — instead of asking what we’re actually trying to achieve, like rebuilding trust after something’s happened. We need to come up and out of the tactical weeds more often.

Chuck: Can I share my favorite part? The “employee-organization relationship,” or EOR, theory — I hadn’t heard of it before and I’m stealing it immediately. It explores the degree to which an organization and its employees trust one another, agree on who has rightful influence, and commit to each other. It maps perfectly onto today’s return-to-office tensions — there’s no sense of mutual exchange in a lot of these mandates.

Jenni: That’s Dr. Rita Men’s work, who leads the Internal Comms Research Hub globally. What I love most about this report is the blend of academic and industry perspective — you need both if you want to genuinely move the profession’s credibility forward. Speaking of credibility questions — my next article has a great headline: “How HR Took Over British Business and Got in the Way of Actual Work,” from The Times. There are now more people working in HR in Britain than doctors or lawyers. The article asks what HR is actually for, referencing a tribunal case and the fact that employment tribunals hit 42,000 last year. It poses the question: are workplaces there to maximize profit and deliver great products, or to improve society and employee wellbeing? What’s your view on what HR is for, and what workplaces are for?

Chuck: I try to imagine an article saying internal comms was ruining productivity — the meltdown in our profession would be enormous. I also question the premise that HR has made workplaces more pleasant at all. I got accused of oversimplifying HR at a recent event with Hebba Yousef, which is fair — we all oversimplify what we don’t fully understand. My honest take: HR should be there to protect against risk and equip managers with real tools to succeed. But like comms, it’s wildly interpreted differently company to company. As for what a workplace is for — I genuinely don’t know; workplaces have existed for a very long time and the term itself means different things depending on who’s asking.

Jenni: I think there’s real discomfort around those two options in the article. The honest answer is the first one — to maximize profit and deliver great products — but I think people have started believing organizations exist to improve society and employee wellbeing instead, which is where the confusion comes from. There’s a real link between looking after your people and better products and profit, but we’ve become almost too scared to just say plainly that we’re here to make money.

Chuck: I want to talk to anyone who genuinely believes workplaces exist for some higher purpose — please tell me what you’re taking, because if a workplace doesn’t make money, it stops existing pretty quickly. There’s nothing wrong with that being the point. For most leaders, that’s the actual job: shareholders, a board, profitability — the unsexy things that are very sexy to some people.

Jenni: Even public sector, nonprofit, and charity organizations still have to operate commercially, which I think we forget. I’m honestly not clear what HR is for either — it’s suffering the same identity confusion internal comms is, since I’ve seen HR teams structured completely differently from company to company.

Chuck: Do they struggle with the same tactics-versus-strategy problem we do? We see HR’s tactics — hiring, firing, training — but do we ever really see HR’s strategy? I don’t think I have.

Jenni: Fair point. Let’s go deep again — my next article is “Bonfire of the Middle Managers” from The Economist, sent to me by listener Chris Rimmel, who connected it to our past conversations about middle-manager layers being cut. A reader comment in the piece pointed back to Michael Hammer’s 1990s business-process re-engineering movement — a radical, blank-sheet-of-paper approach to redesigning organizations that a huge share of Fortune 500 companies adopted at the time. Studies suggest 50-70% of those re-engineering efforts failed, with millions of middle managers losing their jobs and organizations left lacking the institutional knowledge and coordination those managers had provided. Do we ever learn from what’s happened before, or do we always think it’ll be different this time?

Chuck: There’s always a little optimist inside us thinking “this time will be different.” That 50-70% failure range is eerily similar to failure rates we see quoted for change management efforts generally — there’s probably a real correlation there. We’ve talked before about Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Dell all eliminating middle-manager layers — some of these companies have likely done this before, felt the pain, readjusted, and are doing it again. When you eliminate that layer, everyone left reports to someone with a much wider span — twenty-plus direct reports — which eliminates any real personalization or point of care, no matter how caring the manager might want to be.

Jenni: I think it comes down to organizations being too short-term focused and not looking far enough ahead — which is exactly what a director role should be doing, horizon-scanning instead of chasing quick wins. A word of caution to anyone in these conversations right now: share this piece with whoever’s leading that decision, because the human cost is huge and takes a long time to undo.

Chuck: I want to flag institutional knowledge specifically — it’s something you can’t put a price tag on, but the cost of losing it is very real. My own pet theory, which I need to research properly, is that C-suite turnover is actually higher than turnover at the middle-manager level, meaning leadership itself may not fully appreciate the institutional knowledge concentrated in the layer they’re cutting.

Jenni: I like that theory — I’ll look forward to hearing your research on a future episode. Last article today — female entrepreneurship, shared on LinkedIn by Carolyn Bewick, on a new House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee report. As a female entrepreneur myself with two, arguably three, businesses including Frequency, this immediately caught my attention. The report’s opening line: female entrepreneurs face significant disadvantages accessing finance, investment networks, and support systems, rooted in systemic bias. Key findings: just 2% of all equity investment goes to all-female-founded businesses, female founders start with 53% less capital than male counterparts, support tends to cluster in London, Cambridge, and Oxford, leaving other regions without resources, and the system poorly supports self-employed mothers specifically. This connects to CIPR’s “Missing Women” report from earlier this year too, finding nearly two-thirds of women in PR had experienced gender-based discrimination or harassment. What’s your take, including any differences you see between the US and UK?

Chuck: Disappointing but not surprising, and I don’t think it’s meaningfully different here — probably worse in other parts of the world. I looked up US data: in 2024, just 1% of total venture capital dollars went to female-founding teams — a penny out of every dollar. Women on a founding team (not solo female founders) raised about $39 billion, which sounds like a lot until you realize that’s still only 20% of total VC. This is proof of a genuine systemic issue, not an excuse — you have to recognize your own privilege, and this data shows a lack of it for women founders: not being funded properly, not getting the right networks or exposure.

Jenni: I know dedicated investment groups exist specifically for female-founded businesses, but I’ve never needed to go down that route myself, so I genuinely wouldn’t know where to start with the generic investment world — it just doesn’t feel like it’s built for me to easily enter. I wanted to bring this to the podcast simply to raise awareness, so that anyone in a position to act on it now at least knows the issue exists.

Chuck: Here’s an interesting reframe — if you think of venture capital as debt, since you’re taking money in exchange for being indebted to someone, you could argue women-founded businesses are taking on far less debt than male-founded ones, growing more deliberately rather than mortgaging their future on a gamble.

Jenni: I like that. That’s it for our articles this week. What’s your freak-out?

Chuck: Sometimes we send this podcast out into the world and don’t really know its impact beyond growth numbers we occasionally argue about. But this week someone wrote a lovely LinkedIn post — largely about me, though I’ll give you credit too, Jenni — saying the small nuggets of wisdom we drop here are having a bigger impact than just the two of us talking. That genuinely means a lot and makes me want to pour more into this.

Jenni: That’s lovely, and I feel the same way when someone like Chris emails an article specifically because it made them think of something we discussed — that’s proof of real impact. My freak-out is less positive — I saw a LinkedIn post saying internal comms is the only job where you’re a writer, designer, strategist, counselor, and mind reader, and when people ask what you do, the answer is “magic.” I held my head in my hands, because I am not a designer or a mind reader — I’m a strategist and a writer, and I’m very clear about what I do. Calling our work “magic” just reinforces the “woe is me” feeling and our industry’s struggle to articulate itself clearly.

Chuck: I wish internal comms were actually magic — we just came from Penn & Teller, and those guys are real magicians. Calling our work “magic” undersells the genuine hard work behind it. There’s a trick in their show with something like a one-in-6.5-million chance of working if done randomly, but for them it’s a hundred percent guaranteed because of the craft and choreography behind it — it looks like magic to us, but to them, it’s just work. That’s what good communicators should be to their audience: it should look effortless and organic, even though it’s the result of real craft.

Jenni: Be clear about what you actually do, so people don’t just assume you can pull a rabbit out of a hat, because that doesn’t help anyone. That’s it for this week — thank you for joining us. All the articles and reports 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 — find us on YouTube too. 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 comms and leadership in workplaces today. Keep tuning in and turning up.