A Staples employee films herself showing people what the print counter can actually do and becomes the best spokesperson the company never hired. The CEO of McDonald’s films himself eating a sandwich and becomes a meme. Chuck’s lesson from the pair is one sentence long — go where the authenticity is — and Jenni’s explanation is shorter still: the brain knows instantly when something is not real. That contrast sets up four internal communications reports published in the first quarter of 2026, from the IOIC, Mike Klein and Ambuj Dixit’s nextICshift India study, Gallagher and ContactMonkey, and a question Jenni keeps asking of all of them: what is this actually trying to help us do?
Chuck refuses the phrase employee advocacy — call it employees acting as advocates — and puts two examples side by side. The Staples baddie is a frontline employee who started showing people what you can actually get done in the store, posters, mugs, whatever it is, and who is almost certainly not who Staples would have cast. Chuck’s most interesting question is about the internal conversation nobody sees: somebody in that building had to be talked down from shutting it off, and the right answer was to get out of the way. Against that sits McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski launching the Big Arch in a produced video now being parodied for the way he handles a sandwich, and Chuck cannot believe it cleared as many internal hurdles as it must have. Jenni names the mechanism: it doesn’t feel genuine, it feels staged, like someone told him what to do and say, and the brain’s only real question is whether this is safe and real — when the answer is no, it gives you the ick. There is backlash on the other side too, some of it apparently from Staples employees complaining the store is now busy, which Chuck has no sympathy for. His conclusion is that seniority would predict the opposite result and doesn’t: go where the authenticity is, and the frontline employee wins every time.
The Institute of Internal Communication’s Future of Internal Communication whitepaper makes the case for IC as a strategic powerhouse against AI, geopolitics, the climate crisis and shifting workforce expectations, proposing specialist roles — Chief Trust Officer, Head of Listening, Head of Culture and Community — and a skills uplift in behavioral science, scenario planning and data literacy. Jenni has watched consultants applaud it on LinkedIn for lifting the profession up and out of channels, and that is where she gets uncomfortable. She scribbles on her reports, and what she wrote in the margin was: aren’t these the kind of problems that belong in the boardroom? Her second objection is that a document about communication that builds trust and connection is written in language practitioners would find exhausting — idiosyncratic being the word that stopped her — and she wondered aloud whether AI had a hand in it. Chuck sees more room for growth than she does, arguing that if a problem isn’t being solved in the boardroom, communicators can help solve it before it gets there, but he trips on the whitepaper’s opening moves: the cliche of unprecedented challenges, when people lived through two world wars, and the assumption that anyone believes AI will think for them rather than do work for them. The new titles he reads as temporary, the kind of role that gets cut first in a budget round. Jenni’s memory of employee engagement roles arriving and quietly relieving managers of responsibility for engagement is the sharper version of the same worry — a Chief Trust Officer is a leader’s job, and she doesn’t want to take it away from leaders. Chuck’s closing line is the bluntest thing in the segment: communicators don’t need another document telling them to be strategic, they need the company to resource the function, and sometimes the drive to be strategic gets in the way of getting the work done.
Mike Klein and Ambuj Dixit spent six weeks talking to around 60 practitioners, leaders and academics across five Indian cities for the nextICshift India report, deliberately looking at what is working rather than what is failing. Jenni gives the context she thinks matters for a report on a specific market — Klein has not, as far as she can tell, worked in India or with clients based there, while Dixit has spent a decade as a director at a Mumbai comms agency — and credits the authors for being open about the limits of an English-speaking sample of 60. Her question is the one she asks of all four reports: to what end? The ten key observations, leadership communication readiness, business literacy, channel effectiveness, the multi-generational workforce, are the same observations turning up in every global report. The exception is leapfrogging, the argument that rather than starting with messaging, moving to engagement and slowly building toward strategic positioning, Indian IC could jump straight to decision support and coordination infrastructure. Jenni’s objection is internal to the report: it also describes cultural norms where people hesitate to surface problems or challenge direction, and a fear culture makes that leap very hard. The thing she would have led with is buried — a workshop on business case methodology teaching practitioners to calculate IC’s business value with basic financial arithmetic instead of advanced statistics, which she says would be of enormous value to communicators anywhere. Chuck welcomes research into an underrepresented market and warns against calling any practice the gold standard, given how differently even the UK and US behave; he tells the story of a British-owned employer who thought deciding something after a single meeting made you a cowboy. His better question for a younger profession is what mistakes they get to not repeat. Jenni’s practical follow-on for anyone working globally is David Livermore’s book Cultural Intelligence, or a conversation with specialists like Sarah Black or Ravita Patel.
Gallagher has renamed the State of the Sector as the Employee Communications Report, which Chuck mourns — pour one out for a name that has been in the industry a decade and more. Jenni sets the sample straight first: 36% of respondents come from organizations under 500 people and 64% from larger ones including 20% at 10,000-plus, with Public Health and NGO the largest single sector at 22%, so the lens is broad but still heavily North American and UK. This year’s theme is the readiness gap, the widening space between the risks organizations face and the capability of IC and HR teams to respond, and Jenni’s view is that the gap is not new — the intensity is, with constant change, 81% citing burnout as a significant risk, and volume exposing structural weaknesses that were easier to mask before. Strip out the graphs, the buckets and the segments and the core finding is that maturity of the function is the multiplier: not more channels, not more content, not even AI. The teams coping best are not facing less change, they are structurally sounder — a strategy people understand and use, visibility of what they are accountable for, governance around channels and AI, audience discipline through segmentation, listening and manager enablement, and measurement of outcomes rather than clicks. Chuck’s takeaway is Gallagher’s four team types, vulnerable, untapped, resilient and stable, with vulnerable and untapped making up more than half the respondents, and he wants teams to sit with which one they are. He also names the report’s oldest habit, the yes-but: change comms ranked the number one skill while more than half have no formal change approach, 18% satisfied with their ability to personalize content while roughly three-quarters use no personas or audience profiling. Jenni’s discomfort is different — she asked people what they use the report for and the answer was benchmarking, which she thinks is dangerous given how much culture, size and industry vary. Chuck’s counter to the volume finding is that the fix is not to dial content back but to target it, because information overload drops when people get what they need in a form they can use. Jenni’s closing note is that strategic alignment has been the profession’s stated priority for nine straight years, which ought to prompt a harder question about why nothing has moved.
Jenni’s favorite of the four is the ContactMonkey Global State of Internal Communications 2026, because it is the most practical. Its headline is the culture gap, the distance between what organizations say they want from internal communication and what they have resourced it to deliver: 67% of IC teams have five or fewer people, nearly one in five is a team of one, and while 70% have a communication strategy, 54% say they lack the resources to deliver it. Engagement is steady but stagnant, most organizations sitting at moderate, with employees coping rather than connecting. Leadership scores reasonably on transparency at 65%, but trust is conditional — only 9% of employees trust leadership messaging completely, and a third trust it only somewhat, rarely or not at all. The number Jenni keeps returning to is the feedback loop: 95% of organizations collect employee feedback and 15% clearly communicate what they did with it, 47% say sometimes and 31% say it is inconsistent or delayed, which she thinks explains the trust gap entirely. Behavior change lands in the same place, with 58% saying campaigns only sometimes produce visible change and 2% saying always. Chuck cannot get past the strategy-without-resources finding — why build a strategy you cannot deliver — and takes a small soapbox on the one in five operating solo, arguing there is real power in being the single conduit between leadership and employees and that a bigger team is not automatically an easier job. On the 9%, he is unequivocal: that is a credibility problem with the most important audience the business has, and comms is not the solution to it, because you cannot fix it with better messaging. Both hosts also reject the report’s framing of drafting and summarizing as low-value AI use — for a team of one or a team of few, Chuck says, that is where you start and where you grow from. Jenni’s last point is about the noise itself: absorb every report and every LinkedIn post about how far behind you are, and you will write a strategy you were never resourced to deliver.
Who is the Staples baddie and why do communicators keep citing her? She is a frontline Staples employee who went viral on TikTok showing people what they can actually get done in store, from posters to mugs. Chuck uses her as the clearest example of employees acting as advocates: unscripted, not chosen by the comms team, and far more effective than a produced corporate video. Jenni’s explanation is that it reads as real, and the brain trusts real.
Why did the McDonald’s CEO’s Big Arch video get mocked? Because it feels staged. Chris Kempczinski’s launch video drew parodies for the way he talks about and handles the sandwich, and Jenni’s read is that audiences detect immediately when someone has been told what to say — at which point it gives you the ick. Chuck’s takeaway is that authenticity, not seniority or budget, decides which advocacy works.
What does the IOIC Future of Internal Communication whitepaper propose? It argues internal communication is uniquely placed to respond to AI, geopolitics, the climate crisis and shifting workforce expectations, and proposes specialist roles including a Chief Trust Officer, Head of Listening and Head of Culture and Community, plus a skills uplift in behavioral science, scenario planning and data literacy. Jenni’s objection is that several of the challenges assigned to IC belong in the boardroom, and that a report about clear communication is written in dense, jargon-heavy language.
What is the leapfrogging argument in the nextICshift India report? It suggests Indian IC could skip the Western evolutionary path — messaging, then engagement, then slowly toward strategic positioning — and jump straight to positioning as decision support and coordination infrastructure. Jenni notes the same report describes fear cultures where people hesitate to challenge direction, which makes that leap difficult in practice.
What is the readiness gap in Gallagher’s 2026 Employee Communications Report? It is the widening space between the risks organizations face and the capability of IC and HR teams to respond. The headline number is that 73% of teams want to operate as strategic partners while only 18% believe they do. Jenni calls it an operating model gap rather than a confidence gap, and the report’s core argument is that function maturity — codified strategy, governance, audience discipline, outcome measurement — is the real multiplier.
How many employees actually trust leadership messaging? ContactMonkey’s 2026 report found only 9% trust it completely, with a third trusting it only somewhat, rarely or not at all — even though 65% rate their leaders as transparent. Chuck’s view is that this is a leadership credibility problem, not a comms problem, and that better messaging cannot fix it.
Why don’t employees see anything change after giving feedback? Because the loop is rarely closed. ContactMonkey found 95% of organizations collect employee feedback but only 15% clearly communicate the actions taken as a result, with 47% saying it happens sometimes and 31% saying it is inconsistent or delayed. Both hosts connect that directly to the trust numbers.
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 today we’re getting stuck into some reports that have come out in the first quarter of the year. And there are four of them we’re going to talk about today. So we have a white paper from the Institute of Internal Communication, IOIC, about the future of internal communications. We’ve got the Gallagher State of the Sector Report, we’ve got the India Report from Mike Klein and Ambuj Dixit, and we’ve got the Global State of Internal Communications Report from Contact Monkey. It has been a lot of reading this week.
Chuck: It has, and now Jenni, we have now issued our first Frequency limit of number of reports in one episode. But before we get to this tremendous amount of reports, there’s one thing I wanted to talk about, Jenni, and it really shows the key differences in this talk about employees acting as advocates. I do not like to talk about it as employee advocacy, because then we’ve called it the wrong thing. So I’m just going to say employees acting as advocates. There’s these two really amazing polar examples that are out there. The Staples baddie versus the McDonald’s CEO. Jenni, do you know who the Staples baddie is?
Jenni: I do! It has reached its way across the pond.
Chuck: It is to me the true magic of employees acting as advocates. Here’s this employee who just simply took it upon themselves to begin showcasing all the things that you can do at Staples, whether it’s printing posters or mugs or whatever it is. And it was so natural and organic, and it’s probably not who Staples would have picked to be this sort of pseudo spokesperson, but it turns out the Staples baddie is exactly who should have been advocating for Staples. What’s interesting about this is, one, some of the notoriety that they’ve gotten. And I would love to know what conversations have happened inside Staples about this, because I’m sure there were some people that had to be talked down from saying, like, you can’t do this, you’re not the right person, we can’t have a frontline employee telling these stories. There are probably some people that had to be talked down from that and basically get out of the way. So that’s the Staples baddie. Compare that to the CEO of McDonald’s, who they used to launch a new sandwich, and it could not be weirder. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a person, period, let alone who works for a fast food business, who talks that way or talks about eating a sandwich that way, and it just comes off weird. I don’t know, Jenni, did you watch this video?
Jenni: Yeah, yeah, and it is weird. And do you know why I think it’s weird? It’s because it just doesn’t feel genuine. I think it just feels really staged, and it feels like someone said, this is what you need to do and this is what you need to say, and it doesn’t feel genuine. And I think that’s why it makes us feel uncomfortable. Whereas the Staples baddie is so genuine, so that’s why you can connect with that, because from a human perspective you can relate to it, it feels real. Like, I feel safe here. That’s all our brains really worry about. Whereas when it doesn’t feel quite right, we’re a bit like, it’s just giving you the ick.
Chuck: Now let’s talk about the backlash though to both of these. One, on the McDonald’s CEO, there are now people doing parodies mocking him for saying things like, well, I don’t know how to pick up this big of a sandwich. You pick up a sandwich. And he’s convincing people that, I’m going to eat this for lunch later, but I’m just going to take a big bite. I don’t know. It’s just so weird. So that’s the backlash to that. The interesting thing around the Staples baddie — the backlash that I have seen, and I haven’t authenticated that these are actual Staples employees, but some of the videos I’ve seen where they’re now complaining about how busy Staples is. They’re like, I actually enjoyed my job. There might have been one or two customers in the store and they kind of, I don’t know, appreciated the laziness of it. And now they’re actually being bugged to work and all these things that the Staples baddie is telling people to come in and do. They’re like, it takes a lot of work to do these. So I don’t sympathize with that, but there’s still backlash nonetheless from some audiences. So I just thought, we’ve got these two really great examples of different people advocating for the business, and which ones are very authentic and genuine and which ones are clearly not. And I still can’t believe that that video of the McDonald’s CEO cleared so many hurdles to get out. It’s preposterous.
Jenni: Yeah, we should put some links in the show notes to them so people can check them out on Instagram or TikTok or wherever, just in case you haven’t seen it, so you can know what we’re talking about.
Chuck: But I just think about too, the genesis of employees advocating for the business is obviously to drive revenue, drive traffic, whatever. You think of what the Staples baddie did versus what this McDonald’s CEO has done. And you would think, based on the level of those employees, it would be different. So here’s the lesson learned: go where the authenticity is. Go to that frontline employee. That wins every time.
Jenni: Yeah, love it. Right, let’s get stuck into the reports. So we’re going to kick off with the IOIC’s Future of Communication white paper. So they’ve published a substantial paper which is making the case for internal communication as a strategic powerhouse in an increasingly turbulent world of work. So it covers the forces reshaping organisations — AI, geopolitics, the climate crisis, shifting workforce expectations — and it argues that internal comms is uniquely positioned to respond. It proposes some new specialist roles like a chief trust officer, a head of listening, head of culture and community, things like that, and a significant skills uplift across areas like behavioural science, scenario planning and data literacy. The ambition is really strong in this, and I’ve seen so many posts and articles on LinkedIn from consultants — maybe consultants, I think probably some practitioners, but consultants — really applauding this report, talking about how it’s really talking about the strategic direction for internal comms, that it’s lifting it up and out of channels and really saying how great it is from some of that side. That’s where this gets a little bit uncomfortable for me, because there are two issues for me when I was reading the report. As I was reading through it — I scribble on my reports — I was writing, aren’t these the kind of problems that belong in the boardroom? Now I’m not saying that internal communication doesn’t belong in the boardroom, but the conversations it’s suggesting are the responsibility of internal communication feel like they aren’t the responsibility of the internal communication function. So I think there is that. The other thing is that the report talks a lot about communication that builds trust and connection, but it’s written in a way that I felt practitioners would find quite hard to read. There was a lot of jargon in here. There were words like idiosyncratic. There were so many phrases that I was like, has AI kind of written this, or is this really how we’re talking about stuff? Because this isn’t plain English, and I think that’s part of our job, is to make things clear. That felt really uncomfortable for me. So my question for you, having read the report, because I’ve made you read it, is: do you think the role of internal comms can and should expand this much, or are we trying to enter into organizational design territory, and are we kind of straying maybe just too far out of our lane?
Chuck: I do think there’s a lot of room for growth. And here’s where I want to come in. When you talk about IC solving problems that belong in the boardroom, if there are problems that aren’t being solved in the boardroom, that’s not to say that communications can’t help solve those problems before they get to the boardroom. That’s where I like to see communicators as problem solvers. How can we use communication to solve challenges in the organization? When I read the report, there were a couple of things at the very beginning that stood out to me. One, it sort of leaned into the cliche of, quote unquote, unprecedented challenges. I don’t know, man. I feel like people during World War I, World War II — I feel like not everything is unprecedented. I feel like we’ve gone through some of these things before. Maybe the circumstances and the facts are a bit different. So I think it’s setting us up for, well, we’ve never seen anything like this before. Well, I think we have in some regards. And then the other part too, where it said that there’s this thing of people thinking that AI will, quote unquote, think for us. I don’t know that I’ve ever thought that AI would think for me. I’ve thought about AI as doing the work for me. I’ve never thought about it as AI thinking for us. So I think that was a bit odd for me, that it’s taken this assumption around AI that I don’t know is really held. So yeah, not a lot, I would say, stood out to me. Some of the things were around people drowning in executive requests. That’s one of those curses of, do you want to work with executives or do you not? Do you want to sit at the table or do you not? So if you have those and you’re drowning in executive requests, is that what you asked for? And I think the part where you mentioned around some of these roles, like chief trust officer and some of these other things out there — those feel very temporary to me. Those feel like the kind of role that gets laid off pretty easily during budget cuts. So I don’t want to lean into titles too much, but I do think trust is one of those areas that comms can certainly help solve in organizations.
Jenni: So there’s two other things that are thrown up for me, which I think have come from reading all the reports. But one of them is, I remember when employee engagement roles started to come in, because I’m wise beyond my years, so I remember it. But I remember people talking about, if we create a role for employee engagement, does that take away the responsibility of employee engagement from managers and everyone else that has a role to play? And I think that did happen a bit. And I think if you have things like a chief trust officer, they’re the jobs of leaders. So I don’t want to take that away from leaders. The other thing for me that I’ve come to after reading all of these, which I think I’m going to write about a bit, is there are so many problems in organisations that can be solved by communication. That’s a whole part of my first book about influential internal communication, how you can streamline your communication to create an efficient and engaging organisation. That doesn’t mean that all of those solutions are the job of the internal communication function. And I think that might be where I feel a little bit uncomfortable. I feel like we’re compounding the two things of, communication solves a lot of problems in organisations — that doesn’t mean that the internal communication function is where those solutions need to sit. And I think that’s where I’m starting to feel like there’s a tension there that’s not quite sitting with me. But that, I think, has come from reading all of the reports, not just this one. You gave me a little segue in to talk about that, so I did.
Chuck: Well, I think this other point I want to bring about, when you talk about this research as a whole — I don’t think communicators need another document telling them to be strategic. I think they know that. What they need is the company to resource the function properly. That’s really what they need. They don’t need something telling them to be strategic. In fact, I think there are times where we let that driver of being strategic actually get in the way of getting the stuff done.
Jenni: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Right, the next report I’m going to talk about is the nextICshift India report that’s been published by Mike Klein and Ambuj Dixit. Now, they spent six weeks talking to around 60 practitioners, leaders and academics across five Indian cities, deliberately focusing on what’s working rather than what’s failing. Now, from what I can tell — and I’m going to share this now because I think this is important — Mike hasn’t worked in India or with clients based there, and Ambuj has been a director of a comms agency for the last 10 years, based in Mumbai. I think that’s important, because this is a report on a very specific market, and I think that we have to be mindful of our research and interpretation of things in specific markets and our experience in there. And I just want to be clear about that, because I think that’s important. The report is upfront about its limitations. So they talk really openly in there about the fact that they spoke to people who spoke English, so there was a very English-speaking focus, and they spoke to only 60 people, and they kept talking about sort of the same sort of questions, but it was all very positive, which they do talk about. The thing that comes up for me when I was reading the report was, what was the hypothesis? So almost to your point just now of internal communicators don’t need another report telling them to be strategic — as I was reading all of these reports I was like, to what end? Which is my favourite question. What is this report trying to help us do? Because we research, we report, we repeat, we research, we report. I don’t know what the end goal is. And I kind of felt that reading this report. I was like, I’m not sure what it is we’re trying to prove here. I feel like it was trying to prove that there’s a Western view of internal communication and that’s not necessarily the experience of other parts of the world. But if that is the premise of the report — there are 10 key observations in it, and as I was reading them, they felt really similar to all of the other insight we get from some of the global reports that we have. So in terms of the 10 key observations, I won’t share them all, but they talked about leadership communication readiness, business literacy, channel effectiveness and structural constraints, the multi-generational workforce. These are the same things that are coming up in other reports. There’s one piece in it that’s different, where they talk about leapfrogging, where the argument is that rather than following the evolutionary path that’s seen elsewhere — starting with messaging, moving to engagement, slowly building towards strategic positioning — Indian IC could jump directly to positioning as decision support and coordination infrastructure. That’s a direct quote from the report. But at the same time, the report highlights the challenge of leadership communication readiness, and it does talk about cultural norms where people hesitate to surface problems and challenge directions. So I’m not sure the leapfrogging would be possible if those cultural norms exist, in terms of what they call a fear culture. So I’m not really sure what the message is here. I applaud any research and insight into a specific market. I’m just not sure what this is teaching us. There’s one bit in it where it talks about a mention of a workshop that I think Mike and Ambuj hosted, which was on business case methodology, where they said they were teaching practitioners to calculate internal comms business value using basic financial arithmetic rather than requiring advanced statistical analysis. When I read that, I was like, share this. If that’s the bit that was really helpful, then share that, because as an output, we know that the value piece is always a topic people want to talk about. I’ve researched and written about that over the last six months. But that premise of that workshop, that insight and how to do it — that’s the stuff that’s helpful. So for me, there was not enough in this to make me think, gosh, India is so different to the rest of the world and we need to take stock of that difference. It made me just think, this feels very much the same, and insightful, you know, but it feels the same. So I suppose my question for you is, if the report is challenging whether Western IC practice is actually the gold standard — do you think it is?
Chuck: I wonder when we were going to get to a question. Eventually we got there, Jenni.
Jenni: I had a lot to say about this one.
Chuck: You did, you did. One, like you said, I like looking at what I would say is an underrepresented market, when we look at past research when it comes to IC. It’s not UK-based or US-based or something like that. So I think that it’s good to do that investigative work. Whether or not, like you said, having those 60 conversations is good — it’s probably not necessarily fully representative of India as a whole, for whatever it’s worth. I think calling out that saying anything is the gold standard is a risk. We have talked about the cultural differences in communications just between the UK and the US. So I think looking at the way cultures impact things like bureaucracy and decisions and those kinds of things would be equally interesting to see from this. I don’t know that I get a lot out of it. I think your point around the leapfrogging would be interesting to know, but I think again, that points back to the cultural side of things. We’ve talked about how — or I have maybe joked about how — when I worked for a British-based company, they thought that making a decision after one meeting was like we were cowboys. Like, how can you just go and make a decision and do something? We have to meet to talk about meeting to do another meeting to get consensus. So I think there’s these cultural differences that would be curious to see, and I don’t know where India falls in that. So the leapfrogging is, if the profession is relatively new there or less mature — not in a sense of longevity of companies — what are they learning to not repeat, the same mistakes that other people made? I think that’s what I would like to see from the culture side and just the evolution of internal comms: what mistakes are they not making that we all made 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago?
Jenni: Yeah, yeah, I love that. And I should also say, when I was reading the report — like I said, they acknowledge the limitations, they talk about the fact that this is the starting point of a conversation. So they’re open to feedback and challenge, and we’ve embraced that here today. And I would also say that if you’re looking at the sort of cultural intelligence side of things, if you have an organisation that is globally based, then reading the book Cultural Intelligence by David Livermore would be brilliant. Talking to somebody like Sarah Black or Ravita Patel, who are experts in cultural intelligence, would also be the place to go to learn a bit more about that as well.
Chuck: I think the other part too, where it talks about like 90% of the time executing — how do you then find the time for just business literacy? I think that’s the challenge that is across all cultures. If you’re too busy doing the work, when are you taking a step back to better understand and learn the business?
Jenni: Yeah, 100%. And I think that’s the challenge — like you said, that’s a challenge for everybody. Right, so next is Gallagher’s State of the Sector report, which they’re calling this year the Employee Communications Report. So the State of the Sector has been in our industry for a very long time, but now, the Employee Communications Report. So this is from Gallagher. It is a global report. So 36% are from organisations under 500 employees. About 64% sit in larger businesses, including 20% in enterprises of 10,000 or more. Public health and NGO is the largest single sector in the report at 22%, but it’s far from dominant. So the lens is quite broad here, but it’s still very heavily North American and UK. Now this year, the report is themed around the readiness gap. And this is the widening space between the risks organisations face and the capability of internal comms and HR teams to respond. Now on the surface, this sounds very new, but in reality, it’s not. So this gap has always existed. What’s changed is the intensity. So the amount of change that we now see in organisations, the rising burnout that’s happening — 81% cite it as a significant risk — as well as escalating volume. They’ve exposed structural weaknesses that were previously easier to mask. So this readiness gap, for me, is a bit of a marketing term for something that’s already been there. In the report, it talks about the fact that strategic ambition remains really high. So 73% want to operate as strategic partners, yet only 18% believe that they’re there. Now the report makes a very strong case that codified, socialised strategy reduces risk and improves engagement, which is important for people that are really pushing for clarity and governance. This piece around risk seems to be a bit of a thread through multiple reports actually that we’ve looked at this year. So this strategic ambition, the gap between that and actually where people are, is kind of the core message of the theme. Once you get past all of the graphs and the buckets and the segments and all of that stuff in the report, what they’re really saying is that maturity of the function is what’s going to have the biggest impact. It’s not about more channels, it’s not about more content, it’s not even about AI. The teams that are coping best with complexity aren’t facing less change, in fact they’re probably facing more, but the difference is structural. So they’ve got a strategy that people understand and use. They have clear visibility of what they’re accountable for. They have governance around their channels and AI. They have audience discipline, so segmentation, listening, manager enablement, and they are measuring outcomes, not just clicks. Now all of that combination is what plays a role in these functions being better equipped to deal with some of that organisational risk. It reduces burnout, overload, the erosion of trust that’s in the organisation. The report shows repeatedly that when strategy is socialised and active, engagement trends improve and this perceived risk goes away. So this stat of 73% want to be seen as strategic partners, only 18% are operating that way — this is what they’re calling the readiness gap. Really, it’s an operating model gap, and that’s the bit that people need to kind of look at. There are a lot of teams we often talk about that are still functioning as this sort of broadcast hub, the sort of reactive service desk. That is nearly always because of structure, capacity or lack of governance. So it’s important to focus on that if you want to get to that 73% of being seen as a strategic partner. The report does also talk about change being a now core skill. I mean, to be honest, for me it’s always been a core skill, but now it’s definitely a core skill. But the other thing that they’re talking about is clarity. So it’s important that if you want to be seen as this strategic partner, you’re anchoring your function in the strategy, governance and audience rigour. Because if you’re not doing that and you’re starting to use AI, AI will just make you faster at being reactive. It won’t help you deal with the challenges that you’ve got. The volume will just continue to erode trust, and that’s not what we want. So we’ve got to do that work to really make a difference. Now, Chuck, this report is always a big report for the industry. Lots of people always talk about it. What were your sort of biggest takeaways from reading it? Because I’m sure you picked up on a few other bits than I did.
Chuck: Man, for one, pour one out for the State of the Sector. I didn’t even know we were getting rid of that name. That’s been a legacy thing in our industry for such a long time. But for me — and this is for the report now formerly known as State of the Sector — it has always been this, like, yes-but type situation. And I remember going back to very early on, it was communicators identified that managers were critical to the success of communications, but nobody was actually doing anything about it. And I don’t know, what’s the plural of paradox? Is it paradoxes? I don’t know. There are multiple of those in this. Again, one of those is around change comms, which you talked about, Jenni. They rank it as the number one skill, but more than half have no formal change comms approach. So you recognize it’s important, but again, not doing anything about it. Another one is only 18% are satisfied with their ability to personalize content to audiences, which the report goes in and talks about how critical that is to the success of communication, but 70% do not regularly use personas or audience profiling. So we know it’s important, but we’re not doing it. So for me, if you’re reading this report, use this as a time for some self-reflection or some team reflection. Because Jenni, you talked about this readiness portion of the report. It recognizes there’s four different types of teams that are out there. There’s vulnerable, untapped, resilient and stable. And if you look at vulnerable and untapped, those are more than half of the respondents. So vulnerable teams are drowning, they’re not tracking what they’re accountable for, they don’t have any visibility. Untapped teams have a false sense of security — low risk perception, but also low capability. I don’t think anybody wants to feel like they’re a part of being vulnerable or untapped teams, but yet half are. So what are we doing to become — even the resilient teams aren’t necessarily there, they’re on the way to getting better, they’re on the way to stronger. And then the stable teams, those are the ones that have cracked the code. They’re strategic, they’re tracking what they’re responsible for. So how do we get those people that are in the vulnerable, untapped teams — how do you start to shift your way? That’s what I want this self-reflection to do for these teams.
Jenni: I think the other thing for me about this report — and I talked about the jargon that was used in the IOIC report, which I felt made it quite hard to really figure out what we’re trying to talk about — this one for me, if I think about State of the Sector when it started, and that used to belong to Gatehouse before they were acquired by Gallagher, it was such a useful report. And I’m not saying that the report is not useful now, but what I am saying is it doesn’t feel as useful. So I was asking some people, what do you use these reports for? Because again, I was reading it thinking, what am I doing with this? How is this helping me? What am I meant to be doing with it? And everybody came back and said — everybody, the people that I spoke to said — I use it to benchmark. That’s generally what I use it for. And I hate benchmarking, because I think it’s really dangerous in terms of, you have your culture, you have your number of people, you have your industry, it’s so different. And I think that makes benchmarking very difficult. They’ve done a good job in this report of trying to break that down with sort of desked and frontline workers and different industries. But I still feel like, if I was working in an internal comms team today, what am I going to take from this report that I can really practically take away and do something with? And I think, to your point, it’s maybe that looking at that risk piece and where you sit in there, but also that capability gap, and actually doing the work that’s going to help you become strategic and making space for that. That’s the takeaway. You almost don’t need to read the report for that. You’ve got to make the time to do the work to enable you to be that strategic function. Otherwise, we’re going to continue to research, report, repeat, research, report, repeat, and we’re not going to see any change.
Chuck: Yeah, I think the other big takeaway for me was around — it talked a lot about volume and how much content comms teams are sending out there. And I want to go back to this audience thing around the segmentation and tone, and are you sending content or delivering content in ways that mean something to the audience. And one of the things they cited was you can reduce information overload and burnout by just simply targeting content, by just simply giving people the information that they need in ways they can use it. Where we tend to say, information overload is, nope, dial it back. No, it’s actually target it, personalize it for them. I think again, it’s what are these lessons that communicators and those who communicate can learn — that it’s not just about stop doing something, it’s how do we then do it better?
Jenni: Yeah, 100%. Right, the final report you’ll be glad to know is the Contact Monkey Global State of Internal Communications 2026. Now this report comes at a very interesting time for the profession. I’ve talked about that a lot already this year, about the sort of crossroads we’re at. The headline finding in this report is what they’re calling the culture gap. So the distance between what organisations say they want from internal communications and what they’ve actually resourced that function to deliver. The data on team size tells a bit of a story. 67% of internal comms teams have five or fewer people. Nearly one in five operates as a single-person function. And while 70% of organisations have a communication strategy in place, 54% say that they don’t have the resources to deliver it. Now that gap between intent and capability runs through the entire report, and I think tracks to what we’ve talked about already today. On engagement, the picture is steady but stagnant. So most organisations are sitting at moderate, so employees are kind of coping rather than fully connecting. Leadership communication is earning reasonable confidence — 65% rate their leaders as transparent — but trust is conditional. Only 9% trust leadership messaging completely. 9%. While a third trust it only somewhat, rarely or not at all. And feedback collection is near universal at 95%, which when you read that, you think this is great, 95%. But the follow-through is only about 15%. So 15% say their organisation clearly communicates actions taken as a result of feedback. 47% say it happens sometimes. 31% say it’s inconsistent or delayed. I wonder why that trust gap exists. Employees are being asked to speak up, but obviously not seeing anything as a result. Now there is some interesting insight around behaviour change in the report. 58% of respondents say internal communication campaigns only sometimes lead to visible changes in employee behaviour. Just 2% say always. Now this report is really practical. So there’s lots of practical implications you can look at as you go through here. It talks about clarity, consistency, credible follow-through, all of these things to close the culture gap. Again, not volume. I’m not going to lie, when Chuck and I were talking about the reports, this was my favourite one that I read over the weekend, just because it felt the most practical and the most meaningful for practitioners. But my question really is that the report talks about leadership recognition of internal comms being at an all-time high, 82%, but that recognition isn’t translating into that real influence or resources. So what do you think it’s going to take to turn that around, in terms of the we-value-comms message turning into something that’s actually more meaningful?
Chuck: I know you said you weren’t going to lie, Jenni. I hope you’ve never lied on Frequency, actually. I hope that hasn’t happened. The thing that stood out to me here was that 70% of companies that were surveyed have a comms strategy, but more than half don’t have the resources to deliver the strategy. Why are you building a strategy that you can’t deliver on? I don’t understand that. And maybe that’s where the misvaluation comes into play here. Why go through the effort? You should only put a strategy around something you can actively resource. The other thing I want to call out here, when it talks about the one in five of the respondents operating solo — I think people view this as a negative, and maybe this is going to be a soapbox a little bit. I think there’s a lot of power in being a solo internal communicator. You get to do this job. You are that conduit for leadership, for employees. You are that role. I’m not saying it’s an easy job to do, but being a part of a bigger team doesn’t necessarily always mean it’s easier. So I wouldn’t view that as, it’s better to be a part of a big team or it’s worse to be a solo communicator. Every unique situation is going to be different. As you know, Jenni, throughout Frequency, I love nothing more than holding leaders accountable for things. When you shared that only 9% trust leadership messaging completely — I don’t know if there’s anything more damning than that. And then when a third only trusted it somewhat, rarely or not at all, which to me kind of feels like the same, like you don’t know if they’re going to trust it or not. Man, that’s the gap. That’s the role. If the people that are leading your organization aren’t trusted in what they say, comms isn’t the solution to that. It’s more, I guess, a symptom of, how can you fix that? I don’t have that answer. You can’t fix that with just better messaging. That is a credibility problem facing the business, with the lack of credibility with the most important audience in the business.
Jenni: Yeah. And I think this is why I liked this report so much, because I felt like it had stuff I could take away and apply to my strategy. Like, the trust gap is huge. So what can we do in comms to really address that and have really practical conversations on the back of it? Yes, that is part of the leadership role, but comms has such a huge role in that, that’s so important to get right. So there was a lot in here that I just thought was really helpful. And I think thinking about your role and thinking about your strategy and actually what you can deliver is really important. To echo your point of being a team of one — I was often a team of one, but I ran my function like a consultancy. So I had people that were freelancers that would help with content, with projects, with graphic design. It was great, because I was able to operate in that consultancy model. So that’s always been how I’ve run things. It’s how I run Redefining Communications today. And it gives you that flexibility and agility. So to your point, it’s not a bad thing. It’s just, you need that structure and governance and all the stuff we’ve talked about today in order for that to really work and actually have an impact, I think.
Chuck: And don’t create a strategy that you don’t have the resources to build on. And maybe this is where AI can help. One of the things they talked about was around AI adoption, and they were saying that, I think it was like 80% give or take somewhere on there, are using AI tools mostly at this drafting and summarizing stage — what they described as low-value stuff. I don’t think that’s low value at all. I think that if you are a team of one or a team of few, that’s actually quite valuable. And people have to start somewhere with using AI. And if that’s where you start, then that’s where you grow from. In the grand scheme of business, yes, AI has been around for a long time, but it’s accessible to people like communicators, HR leaders — let’s say it’s been in the last three years. Only a few, of course, are going to be using this for things like strategy and insights, but they also started at the drafting and summarizing in those areas too. So don’t feel like you’re behind, just feel like you’re growing. And if you’re a team of one or a team of few, AI can help. This is where it can accelerate that work, even if it is just starting with that drafting stage.
Jenni: But I think there’s also a point here about that gap between creating a strategy and then your ability to deliver that. If I look at the sort of shaming around, you’re only using AI for this, God, you know, you’re so behind — that’s where people then go, God, let’s put more in our strategy, but we can’t actually deliver it. Do you see what I mean? There is this element of people — and not everybody’s on LinkedIn and all of that — but if you’re listening to all of that noise and you’re not focusing your attention into the right places that align for you, in terms of where you are, or they’re helpful for you, and you’re just absorbing all of it, you’re going to feel very quickly like you need to put all of these things into your strategy which you’re not going to be able to do. And I think that’s really important. I think that is probably part of that challenge as well. Now, that does finish our reports. So I will never do four again in an episode, and I will take on board our rule now of two at a time. But what are you freq-ing out about this week?
Chuck: I’ve been self-reflecting a bit on my screen usage and where I get the most value out of screens. In the sense that we have now, I think for the first time since I was eight, we do not have what I would describe as a cable package, a TV package. As part of that resist and unsubscribe, we’ve cancelled YouTube TV. So we don’t have what I would describe as that TV package anymore. So I don’t just watch random television anymore. What I’ve learned is that transition has now gone to, I am learning from TikTok, which I don’t think I would have ever thought of as a learning source. It’s absolutely an entertainment source. Nobody loves a good rescue dog video like me and my partner in my house. So that content is out there. But when I think about the ways that I am now learning from TikTok, especially around Claude and Claude Code and how to use those things, even learning about fitness and health — and yes, you have to get beyond the headlines, it’s going to talk about try this new workout routine or here’s some good core exercises — it’s amazing when I thought about, yes, I’m absorbing it, but it’s more like I’m actually learning from this. And I remember probably two or three years ago, TikTok ran a campaign that I thought was genius, this is before I was really even using TikTok, where the whole campaign was, I watched it on TikTok, or I learned it from TikTok. I forget what the tagline was. That’s now me. And it’s from people who are doing the work. It’s from people like the Staples baddie. It’s the people that are out there doing it. That’s who I’m learning from. And it’s been this interesting reflection of, one, where I’m spending my time, but also where am I learning the most?
Jenni: Yeah, I like that. It’s just that evolution of that platform, isn’t it, I suppose? YouTube would have started very differently to where it is today. So my freq-out is AI drawing robots. And that’s because this morning I was at an event in London in the UK, which was for the launch of Hubworks, which is a new digital platform. I’ll pop a link in the show notes for them, because they were kind enough to invite me to their launch. But they had AI drawing robots. So you could stand in front of a screen, it took your photo, and then these little robot arms drew you as a sort of caricature of yourself. And for those that are watching us on YouTube, you can see my drawing of me, I think. I don’t think it’s too bad, but some of them were questionable. But I just loved it. It was really cool. I’m going to look at it for some other events that I’ve got, but I just thought it was a good bit of fun. There were loads of them sort of scattered about and I just thought it was good fun. I’ve not seen those before, so it brought me some joy.
Chuck: So is this an example — are our caricature artists now going to be writing posts about how AI is coming for their job?
Jenni: Yeah, that’s it. Caricature artists are now being replaced by robot arms. I mean, it’s still technology that’s evolving, but it was a nice bit of fun. And I think seeing the joy on people’s faces, watching it sort of draw their face and then seeing what it came out like — and sometimes the not-so-much joy about what it came out like — it made a nice conversation point. So it was good.
Chuck: So I’m going to take some of the fun away from it, which I’m glad you enjoyed it. I think this is where we talk about AI and its impact on comms or HR or leadership. It’s that judgment factor. That’s the role that we play. That AI robot joining that is not judging the success, like your responses, whereas a caricature artist is going to know what’s going to look good or not look good and how to accentuate certain things, whereas your AI robot friend there probably didn’t as much. And so it is fun, so I’m not completely crapping on it, but I think it’s that judgment factor of, like you said, the people that were kind of cringing watching it.
Jenni: Some people were like — somebody said, this has done nothing for my self-esteem, which really made me laugh. And she was like, yours looks great. And I was like, just because I’ve got a big mouth. The only thing it’s done is just given me massive teeth, which is what I would always get from a caricature. Anyway, thank you for joining us this week. All of the articles that have inspired this conversation are in the show notes. And don’t forget to rate and review after you’ve listened. Subscribe so that you don’t miss another episode, and pass this along to someone that you think would enjoy listening or watching, because you can also find us on YouTube. Thank you to Poet Ali for contributing the music to the show. We’re back every Monday with more news, insights and opinions about everything 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.
