Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index found that only 9% of employees believe they're fully aligned with their organisation's goals. Their leaders? 27% think they are. On AI direction specifically, one in four workers say leadership is clearly aligned. Only 13% say their employer actually rewards reinventing work with AI — even as companies are sitting on 15x year-over-year growth in active AI agents and wondering why they're not seeing the returns.
Then there's the vibe coding story: 380,000 publicly accessible apps built by employees on platforms most IT departments don't know about, many of them leaking corporate data their creators had no idea was exposed. The same theme. The organisation didn't know what was happening inside it.
Priya Parker makes the case that meetings — the thing nobody owns and everybody resents — are now the primary way distributed employees experience the organisation. And some companies have decided the answer to distracted employees is to lock their phones in sealed pouches during work shifts, which raises a question nobody's really asking: did anyone ask the employees first?
Chuck and Jenni get into all of it.
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Stories from this episode:
The AI Paradox: Employees Are Ready, Organisations Are Not
https://news.microsoft.com/annual-work-trend-index-2026/
Vibe Coding Built 380,000 Publicly Accessible Apps — Many With Your Company's Data Inside
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/07/loveable-replit-vibe-coding-privacy
The Gap Between What Leaders Think and What Employees Experience
https://views.axioshq.com/assets/69f949ec4014f26b13471fef
Meetings Are Now the Primary Way We Experience Each Other at Work
https://www.priyaparker.com/art-of-gathering-newsletter/meetings
Yondr at Work: Phone Bans Are Spreading — and the Evidence Is Mixed
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/phone-bans-us-workplace-employee-distractions-b2968582.html
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Frequency is hosted by Chuck Gose and Jenni Field. New episodes every Monday.
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Music by Poet Ali.