Frequency Podcast By Chuck Gose & Jenni Field cover art

Frequency

Frequency

By: Chuck Gose & Jenni Field
Listen for free

Frequency is where internal comms, HR, leadership and employee experience come together with lively conversation, expert insights, and plenty of friendly debate. Hosted by industry firestarters Chuck Gose and Jenni Field, this podcast tackles the big workplace challenges—from reaching frontline employees to shaping a strong company culture—all with a mix of sharp opinions, candid stories, and discussion.

Chuck and Jenni bring their unique perspectives and personalities to every episode, ensuring you get more than just the usually-tedious industry insights. Whether it’s sparking new ideas or challenging the status quo, Frequency is the conversation you didn’t know you needed.

Tune in for a weekly dose of everything you need to know about leadership, workplace culture and employee engagement.

a3cffaee93e954f93bbedfafc22bc42959cf432bCopyright 2025 All rights reserved.
Economics
Episodes
  • Culture Talk Destroys Trust: 72% Fail, AI Agents, PDFs & Dorsey's 40% Cuts
    Mar 16 2026

    This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose cover four stories dominating the workplace conversation right now — from whether AI is truly transforming organisations or just repeating history's mistakes, to why the more you talk about culture, the less anyone believes you.

    McKinsey is calling AI agents the biggest organisational shift since the Industrial Revolution, with teams of two to five people potentially supervising 50 to 100 AI agents. Jenni draws a direct parallel to the Industrial Revolution itself — arguing we're making the same mistake: doing a straight lift-and-shift of people to agents, rather than fundamentally reimagining what work looks like. The real question isn't how many agents replace how many people. It's what work even means.

    Bruce Daisley, former VP at Twitter EMEA and author of The Joy of Work, presents a provocative thesis backed by a striking number — 72% of formal culture change initiatives produce no meaningful improvement in trust, engagement, or retention. Jenni connects this to the ongoing culture vs. behaviour debate: culture has become a big word without much meaning, and the proof is always in the pudding. If leaders aren't showing up differently, no amount of values posters will cut through.

    The Economist is asking whether the PDF will survive the AI revolution — and the answer is genuinely uncertain. Over 2.5 trillion PDFs exist, LLMs regularly struggle to read them accurately, and one in five email-based cyber attacks are routed through PDF attachments. For comms and HR professionals, this hits close to home — employee handbooks, policies, and benefits guides are often locked inside a format that AI-powered tools can't reliably process. Jenni points out she was having this exact same conversation 15 years ago when digital workplaces first arrived. Nobody owned the problem then. Nobody owns it now.

    Block, the parent of Square, Cash App, and Afterpay, is cutting its workforce from over 10,000 to just under 6,000. CEO Jack Dorsey pointed to AI as the driver and predicted most companies would do the same within a year — a statement that sent the stock up 24%. Chuck and Jenni aren't buying it. They call it AI washing: using AI as cover for a workforce that grew 150% during COVID and never came back down. The profit-per-employee figure tells the real story — quadrupling to north of $2 million means this was already a profitable business. And the entire announcement? Written in lowercase, Chuck is not a fan.

    Want to find out more about Chuck Gose's work and ICology - check out the website and how to become a member here: https://www.joinicology.com/

    Jenni’s a regular speaker and consultant on leadership credibility and internal communication, you can find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/

    Articles mentioned in this episode:

    • The Agentic Organization: Contours of the Next Paradigm for the AI Era
    • The More You Talk About Culture, the Less People Believe You
    • The War Against PDFs Is Heating Up (paywall)
    • Jack Dorsey Cuts 40% of Block's Workforce and Says Most Companies Will Follow Within a Year

    Show more Show less
    30 mins
  • Staples Baddie vs McDonald's CEO: 4 IC Reports & the Authenticity Gap
    Mar 9 2026
    Staples Baddie vs McDonald's CEO: 4 IC Reports & the Authenticity Gap This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose tackle four reports on the state of internal communications — but not before stopping to examine two wildly different examples of what it actually looks like when employees advocate for their organisation. Chuck opens with what he calls employees acting as advocates. The contrast is stark: the Staples Baddie, a frontline employee who went viral for genuinely showcasing what you can do at Staples, organic, unscripted and probably not who the comms team would have chosen; versus the McDonald’s CEO, deployed to launch a new sandwich in a produced video that somehow made eating a sandwich the most uncomfortable thing on the internet. Jenni puts her finger on exactly why: our brains know immediately when something doesn’t feel real, and when it doesn’t, it gives us the ick. Chuck’s conclusion is simple — go where the authenticity is. The frontline employee wins every time. The Institute of Internal Communication (IOIC) has published a whitepaper making the case for IC as a strategic powerhouse — proposing new specialist roles including a Chief Trust Officer and Head of Listening, and a significant skills uplift in behavioural science, scenario planning and data literacy. Jenni has two problems with it. First, some of the challenges it assigns to the IC function feel like they belong in the boardroom, Second, and almost ironically, a report about building trust and connection through clear communication is written in dense, jargon-heavy language. Chuck is blunter: communicators don’t need another document telling them to be strategic. What they need is for the organisation to actually resource the function. Mike Klein and Ambuj Dixit spent six weeks speaking to around 60 practitioners, leaders and academics across five Indian cities for the IC Shift India Report, deliberately focusing on what’s working rather than what’s failing. Jenni’s main question on reading it is the same one she finds herself asking across all four reports this week: what is this trying to help us do? The ten observations — leadership communication, readiness, business literacy, channel effectiveness — read much the same as other global reports. The most interesting idea is “leapfrogging”: the argument that Indian IC could skip Western IC’s evolutionary path and jump straight to strategic positioning. But Jenni notes the same report flags fear cultures and a reluctance to challenge direction, which makes that leap very difficult in practice. Gallagher has rebranded the State of the Sector as the Employee Communications Report — and this year’s theme is the readiness gap, the widening space between the risks organisations face and the capability of internal comms teams to respond. The data is striking: 73% of teams want to operate as strategic partners, yet only 18% believe they are. The report’s core argument is that function maturity is the real multiplier: not more channels, not more content, not AI — but a strategy people actually use, clear accountability, governance, and measurement focused on outcomes rather than clicks. When those things are in place, engagement improves and trust erodes more slowly. When they’re not, volume fills the vacuum. The Contact Monkey Global State of Internal Communications 2026 centres on what it calls the culture gap — the distance between what organisations say they want from IC and what they’ve resourced the function to deliver. On trust, only 9% of employees trust leadership messaging completely. The feedback data is perhaps the most revealing: 95% of organisations collect employee feedback, but only 15% clearly communicate what they’ve done with it. Jenni and Chuck both note this explains a great deal about that trust gap — employees are being asked to speak up, and largely hearing nothing back. Want to find out more about Chuck Gose and ICology - check out the website and how to become a member here: https://www.joinicology.com/ Jenni’s a regular speaker and consultant on leadership credibility and internal communication, you can find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/ Articles mentioned in this episode: IOIC Future of Communication whitepapernextICshift India Report 2026 by Mike Klein and Ambuj Dixit Gallagher’s State of the Sector ReportContactMonkey Global State of Internal Communications 2026Staples Baddie And the McDonalds CEO
    Show more Show less
    43 mins
  • 49% Have Never Used AI at Work: IBM's Counter-Bet and Gartner's 2028 Chatbot Prediction
    Mar 2 2026

    In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose dig into the growing gap between AI ambition and workplace reality — from a company quietly doing the opposite of everyone else, to predictions that stretch credibility, to Friday office attendance figures that tell their own story.

    IBM Is Tripling Entry-Level Hiring Because of AI — We’ve heard the warnings that AI will gut entry-level jobs but IBM is going in the opposite direction. They shared that rather than cutting junior roles, they rewrote them. Skip entry-level hiring now and in three to five years, you're poaching mid-level talent from competitors at a 30% premium. Dropbox is making a similar bet, expanding its new graduate programme by 25%. Jenni and Chuck explore what this says about the kind of leadership that thinks beyond the short term, and why nurturing talent will always beat lift-and-shift thinking.

    Nearly half of US workers say they have never used AI at work . Daily users sit at just 12% and frequent users at 26%. Overall adoption has flatlined; the growth is coming entirely from people who already use it, using it more. The top barrier to adoption is that people simply can't see how AI applies to what they actually do. Jenni and Chuck explore what that means for training, leadership, and the distinction between using AI and benefiting from it.

    Gartner's top communications predictions for 2026 include a headline claim that by 2028, three quarters of employees will rely on chatbots for internal communications — effectively spelling the end of the all-staff email, the town hall, and the intranet banner. Jenni is sceptical, to put it mildly. When she's still talking to organisations wrestling with 15 different SharePoint sites that can't communicate with each other, a two-year timeline to chatbot-dependent internal comms doesn't feel grounded in reality. The prediction that comms teams will use employee digital footprints to personalise messaging also raised eyebrows — not because it's wrong, but because the best organisations have been trying to do exactly that for a decade. Jenni and Chuck also pull out a data point that perhaps deserved more attention: for the second year running, misinformation and disinformation ranked as the top global risk by the World Economic Forum. A skills gap worth taking seriously.

    KornFerry data from Placer.ai shows that Friday in-office attendance sits at just 12.4%, compared to 24.3% on Tuesdays and 23.7% on Wednesdays — and this is happening even at companies that have issued five-day return to office mandates. KornFerry calls it an engagement problem. Chuck pushes back: this isn't an employee engagement problem, it's a leadership engagement problem. Jenni adds that without data from before the pandemic, nobody can actually say whether 12.4% on a Friday is good, bad, or completely normal.

    Freaking Out This Week Jenni has a big announcement — Comms Reboot is coming to Toronto in June, following a successful first outing with the team at ContactMonkey last year. Tickets for the London event in October are already a third sold. Chuck's freak out is Flyover Festival — the employee comms and culture event in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on August 27th. Registration is now open and tickets are already selling.

    Articles and links mentioned in this episode:

    • IBM Plans to Triple Entry-Level Hiring Because of AI
    • Frequent Use of AI in the Workplace Continued to Rise in Q4
    • Gartner’s Top Communications Predictions for 2026
    • It’s Friday: Hello, Anyone There?
    • ICology's Employee Comms & Culture Flyover Festival
    • Comms Reboot in Toronto: Email us at info@redefiningcomms.com for info!

    Music by Poet Ali. New episodes every Monday. Subscribe, rate, and review — and share with someone who needs to hear this.

    Show more Show less
    30 mins
No reviews yet