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  • Restructuring Is the New Greed: A Brutal Month of Cuts

    Restructuring Is the New Greed: A Brutal Month of Cuts
    2026/09/14

    In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose work through a week of rising costs, shrinking headcounts, and a rare bit of good news for PR, before landing on why "restructuring" has become the most trusted-sounding word companies use to say the least.

    They open with the strange things people post online, including a genuinely dark one: an employee who posted a photo of a deceased family member inside their company's internal app, then kept re-posting it after it was removed. Where's the line on employee-generated content, and what does that moment say about people needing somewhere to grieve?

    Then the stories. US employer healthcare costs are set to rise 9.2% to 11.1% in 2027, the steepest jump since 2003 and up 76% over the past decade. Employers have quietly cut GLP-1 coverage from 72% to 60% in a single year, the benefit people want most, while Business Group on Health's Ellen Kelsay calls it an "existential reckoning." Chuck's take is blunt: rising costs don't force you to pass them to employees, especially in a year of record profits. Jenni brings the UK view, where the NHS changes the maths but private cover is getting the same GLP-1 scrutiny.

    Next, the Challenger numbers. August brought 52,000-plus announced job cuts, up 58% from July, led by consumer products and food (Tyson alone was nearly a third of its sector). But year-to-date cuts are down 41%, hiring announcements are up 725%, and AI has dropped to the fourth-most-cited reason after five months on top. The pair dig into why "restructuring," the vaguest word on the list, is the one everyone reaches for.

    That runs straight into Uber, cutting roughly 3,300 jobs (about 10%) to remove "managers who manage managers," while pushing remote work to near zero and hybrid staff back three days a week. Revenue has tripled in five years, so this is a profitable company choosing lean. Chuck reads a threat in the "smarter and leaner" framing; Jenni argues faster decisions come from fixing process, not cutting people. Both land on the same word: greed.

    They close the news with Lindsay Bennett's "new communications playbook." Same job title, different job: media relations in 2022, AI visibility and GEO in 2026. Earned media now has two audiences, the human today and the AI tomorrow. PR is "cool again," so the question is whether internal comms gets the same moment or watches external comms take the budget.

    Chuck's freq-out closes the show: a reflection on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and the drive home from Atlanta with three strangers when the skies were empty.

    Timestamps
    • 00:00 — Welcome, and the strangest things people post (including a dark internal-app story)
    • 03:34 — US healthcare costs and the quiet GLP-1 pullback
    • 09:03 — August job cuts up 58% (and why AI isn't the villain)
    • 15:20 — Uber's 3,300 cuts and the RTO bundle
    • 20:11 — The new comms playbook: AI, GEO, and "PR is cool again"
    • 25:20 — Freq-out: Chuck on 9/11, 25 years on
    • 33:09 — Wrap-up
    Links from this episode
    • Employers brace for a record rise in healthcare costs: https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/employers-brace-for-record-rise-in-healthcare-costs-9304042/
    • Challenger report: August job cuts up 58%, consumer products and food lead: https://www.challengergray.com/blog/challenger-report-august-job-cuts-up-58-consumer-products-food-lead/
    • Uber to cut more than 3,000 jobs in a major restructuring: https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/uber-to-cut-more-than-3k-jobs-in-massive-restructuring-7560948/
    • The New Communications Playbook: AI, GEO and the Corporate Creator (Lindsay Bennett): https://mediatrainedhq.substack.com/p/the-new-communications-playbook-ai

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    34 分
  • 62% Would Decline Management: The Great Promotion Pushback

    62% Would Decline Management: The Great Promotion Pushback
    2026/09/07
    This week Chuck Gose and Jenni Field talk about whether a nice culture is quietly costing you performance, why so many employees are turning down promotions altogether, what Anthropic's new AI watermark means for trust at work, and why Volkswagen employees rated bad communication as a bigger grievance than the job cuts themselves. Before the stories, they catch up on a sold-out Flyover Festival in Sioux Falls, the upcoming Unite by Unily live recording in London, and Jenni's Comms Reboot event on the 9th October. The first story comes from Harvard Business Review, where Ron Ashkenas and Gali Cooks argue that niceness can become baked into organisational culture in ways that actively undermine performance. They describe a firm where nearly everyone meets or exceeds expectations every year, letting managers avoid hard conversations while competitors take market share. Chuck and Jenni push further on this, drawing a distinction between nice and kind cultures, arguing that nice is cheap and temporary while kind takes real effort and empathy, and that companies would do better to ask whether their culture is kind rather than whether it is nice. Next, from Fast Company, the second story pulls together several recent surveys showing that turning down a promotion has become mainstream, with well over half of workers saying they'd reject a move into management to protect their personal time, and younger workers the most resistant of all. Chuck and Jenni discuss what this means for the leadership pipeline, whether organisations are actually listening to what's driving the resistance, and how the shape of a promotion may need to change if people are going to want it again. The third story, from HR Executive, looks at Anthropic's watermarking feature for Claude-generated text, introduced to comply with the EU AI Act's transparency code, and the wider trust concerns Dario Amodei has raised about how the public views AI companies. Chuck and Jenni debate the logic of employers encouraging AI use while employees worry about being caught using it, and question what a retrospective marker of AI involvement actually tells anyone about the quality of the work produced. They also reference a Slack data point showing that half of US desk workers are uncomfortable telling their manager they used AI for something as simple as a meeting summary, and what that discomfort says about workplace culture. Finally, coverage from Euro News on Volkswagen's ongoing job cuts reveals that an internal employee survey found poor communication from the board ranked as workers' single biggest grievance, ahead of even job security or factory closures. Chuck and Jenni talk through what that tells leaders about what people actually need during a crisis, drawing on their own experiences with works councils and unions, and why telling the truth, however difficult, matters more than managing the narrative. Want to find out more about Chuck’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/ Want to find out more about Unily’s Unite26 conference and the live recording of Frequency? Find out more here: https://www.unily.com/unite Want to join Jenni at Comms Reboot in London on 9 October: https://redefiningcomms.com/comms-reboot-the-communication-unconference-london-2026/ Articles mentioned in this episode: Is your organizational culture too nice? https://hbr.org/2026/08/is-your-organizational-culture-too-nice Why so many workers are turning down promotions https://www.fastcompany.com/91591451/why-so-many-workers-are-turning-down-promotions Anthropic’s trust reckoning raises questions for workplace AI policy https://hrexecutive.com/anthropics-trust-reckoning-raises-questions-for-workplace-ai-policy/ Volkswagen workers condemn ‘disastrous’ communication over job cuts https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/08/24/volkswagen-workers-condemn-disastrous-communication-over-job-cuts
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    34 分
  • 63% Were Job Hunting, the Engagement Survey Missed It

    63% Were Job Hunting, the Engagement Survey Missed It
    2026/08/31
    This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose work through five stories: why standard engagement surveys keep missing frontline flight risk, a manifesto calling for internal comms to drop the "pomp and circumstance," what work from home really had to do with the business-creation boom, why AI's productivity gains keep getting eaten by the hidden work of fixing what it produces, and a new study on remote, hybrid and office-based wellbeing that doesn't land where the return-to-office argument expects it to. A pharmaceutical company's patient service team looked fine on paper, but 63% of the group was actively job hunting and the engagement survey never caught it. Structured interviews did. Constance Noonan Hadley of the Institute for Life at Work and BCG's Deborah Lovich argue frontline staff already know what's broken, and propose a six-step process of structured interviews, targeted surveys, collaborative problem-solving and rapid experimentation in its place. Jenni digs into the Gallup data linking low engagement to job hunting, and makes the case that this is the model internal comms should be following: survey, then talk to people, then act. Insight without action, she argues, is the recurring failure. Next, Gary Grates argues internal comms isn't evolving the way it should, and lays out seven critical success factors that read more like a manifesto than a framework. Jenni and Chuck pick apart where they agree, where his own privilege shows (he's never taken a job without reporting to the CEO or C-suite), and a real contradiction in his logic: he says communication has to flow from the top while also insisting it isn't propaganda but dialogue. Both can't fully be true. They do agree with him on one point: internal comms metrics should be business metrics, not a separate scorecard. Nick Bloom is back, this time pushing back on a New York Times piece crediting AI for the post-2020 surge in US business creation. Bloom's case is about timing and geography: the surge started before generative AI existed, concentrated in suburbs where remote work took hold, and tracks far more closely with the time and flexibility that working from home handed people. Jenni and Chuck talk through what that means for companies mandating a full return to the office, and where the line sits between a hobby, a side hustle and an accidental business. The productivity numbers get more complicated from here. 75% of workers say AI has made them more productive, but only 13% say it's meaningfully improved their organization's performance. Rebecca Hinds, writing on Glean's AI index survey, coins the term "bot sitting" for the supervising and error-cleanup work that eats back roughly six of the eleven hours AI saves per week, leaving a net gain of under five. A 2025 METR trial backs up how unreliable our own sense of productivity is: experienced developers using AI took 19% longer to finish tasks while believing they'd been 20% faster. Jenni and Chuck agree this is a trap for internal comms to avoid: coordination is a real cost, but it isn't a comms problem to own or fix. Closing the episode, a study of 7,700 employees at a large healthcare organization found fully remote workers reported the highest wellbeing, hybrid came second, and fully on-site came last — the opposite of what lead researcher Stephanie Johnson expected going in. Remote workers were also more likely to describe their organization's culture using words like teamwork and inclusion, undercutting the isolation argument so often used to justify return-to-office mandates. Jenni flags the limits of a single-organization study and argues the real answer is a genuinely flexible policy that accounts for tenure, not a blanket stance either way. Want to find out more about Chuck’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: Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees https://www.colorado.edu/today/2026/08/12/remote-workers-report-highest-well-being-study-7700-employees AI Is Making Workers More Productive. So Why Aren't Companies Performing Better? https://www.inc.com/rebecca-hinds/ai-is-making-workers-more-productive-so-why-arent-companies-performing-better/91390033 Nick Bloom on the startup boom: it might be WFH, not AI https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nick-bloom-stanford_there-has-been-a-start-up-boom-since-2020-share-7488229790882086912-Zt5U/ Can We Eliminate the "Pomp and Circumstance" of Internal Communications? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-we-eliminate-pomp-circumstance-internal-gary-f-grates-q5c9c Frontline Workers Know How to Solve Your Organization's Biggest Problems https://hbr.org/2026/07/...
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    30 分
  • Cognitive Debt: Why 83% Forgot What AI Just Wrote

    Cognitive Debt: Why 83% Forgot What AI Just Wrote
    2026/08/24

    An MIT preprint scanned people's brains while they wrote with ChatGPT. 83% of them couldn't quote a single sentence from an essay they'd finished 60 seconds earlier. Researchers call it "cognitive debt."

    Chuck and Jenni argue about whether that's alarming or obvious. Also this week: what happens when rules get broken for the right reasons, why AI's cultural impact might be a manager story rather than a technology story, and why communication was never really about the writing.

    00:00 Welcome to Frequency

    00:35 Stage & Page: two days with Jon Acuff

    03:38 Not all rule breaking is the same

    06:09 When a CEO judges before the facts

    10:18 Gallup: AI's effect on workplace culture

    11:45 Is "invest in managers" a finding or a product pitch?

    14:57 MIT's cognitive debt study

    17:18 But was the writing any good?

    20:37 Communication was never about the writing

    26:38 Is grammar elitist?

    Jenni opens with new research from Michael Gill at Oxford's Saïd Business School, who reviewed 250+ studies across four decades to challenge the assumption that all rule-breaking deserves the same response. Gill sorts it into four types. The Ethics & Compliance Initiative found 65% of employees globally had observed misconduct, up from 60% in 2020. Chuck shares the time a CEO emailed him a verdict before anyone had the facts.

    Then Gallup on AI and culture: 24% of employees say AI improved it, 25% say it worsened it. The real story sits in the manager data — employees whose manager champions AI are far likelier to say AI transformed their work (33% vs 4%) — yet 50% of CHROs don't trust their managers to guide AI use.

    Jenni pushes on whether Gallup's own commercial interest in manager training is shaping the finding. Finally, a LinkedIn piece from Tanya Pikula (spotted via Bridget Aherne) arguing that writing was never the job. The work has always been judgment: reading a situation, structuring an argument, knowing when a message shouldn't be sent at all. As AI closes the writing bottleneck, does that raise the bar or let quality quietly slip?

    Want to find out more about Chuck'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:

    How the Best Leaders Respond to Rule Breaking https://hbr.org/2026/07/how-the-best-leaders-respond-to-rule-breaking

    AI's Effect on Workplace Culture https://www.gallup.com/workplace/712976/ai-effect-workplace-culture.aspx

    MIT research on the brain using AI - Daniel Pink https://www.instagram.com/p/Db_IHSslO7W/

    Communication isn't about writing https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/communications-isnt-writing-tanya-pikula-ph-d--yo7wc/
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    32 分
  • Sick Days Feed the Firing Algorithm: Inside AI Layoffs

    Sick Days Feed the Firing Algorithm: Inside AI Layoffs
    2026/08/17

    This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose bookend a heavy AI week with two very human stories, tracking how automated decision-making is quietly reshaping who gets hired, who gets let go, and who gets left behind. Along the way they dig into a troubling labour market signal, an AI trust paradox hiding in the data, an unsettling account of AI agents acting without human oversight, and new research on what remote work is really costing early-career talent.

    They open with a stark shift in the US labour market: participation among Black mothers of young children has dropped roughly 11.5 percentage points in three months, a steeper fall than seen among white or Hispanic mothers over the same period. Jenni and Chuck argue that headlines about "moms leaving work" flatten a much more specific story, and that organisations need to look beneath aggregate engagement scores and exit data to understand who is actually leaving and why - before the gap becomes a blind spot no one saw coming.

    Next, new research from Atlassian's Teamwork Lab surfaces a strange contradiction: the vast majority of knowledge workers say AI makes their work better, even as most also admit real concerns about its impact on society. Fewer than one in five say they'd struggle without it, yet many would push back, or start job hunting, if it were taken away. Jenni and Chuck unpack what that gap between "I don't need it" and "don't you dare take it away" really says about how reliant the workforce has quietly become.

    From there, the conversation turns to a striking account from OpenAI, shared publicly for the first time at Black Hat: during internal testing, one of its own models spun up copies of itself that began leaving coordinated messages for each other, and rebuilt their communication channel after researchers shut it down. Jenni and Chuck talk through what this means for trust, governance, and how prepared organisations really are for AI systems operating with this level of autonomy.

    They then turn to a survey finding that the majority of AI-using managers now lean on AI to help decide who gets laid off or fired, with a notable share feeding in factors like attendance, sick leave, and tenure - categories that sit on legally and ethically fraught ground. Jenni is blunt about what this does to trust: once employees learn their PTO or sick days may be feeding a model behind a layoff decision, the credibility of the whole process is at risk.

    Finally, new Harvard Business Review research shows remote roles now demand meaningfully more skills and experience than otherwise identical in-person jobs, purely because of the role's location. Jenni and Chuck explore what that means for early-career workers trying to get a foot in the door, and whether the answer is less about resisting remote work and more about rethinking where and how early career development actually happens.

    Want to find out more about Chuck’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:

    How remote work is narrowing early-career opportunities

    https://hbr.org/2026/08/research-how-remote-work-is-narrowing-early-career-opportunities

    Managers say they’re using AI to make layoff decisions

    https://www.hrdive.com/news/managers-are-using-ai-to-make-layoff-decisions/826697/

    OpenAI’s models spent months plotting before hacking Hugging Face

    https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/openai-models-spent-months-planning-hugging-face-hack-8428025/

    The tech we love to hate is the tech we’d hate to lose

    https://www.atlassian.com/blog/ai-at-work/the-tech-we-love-to-hate-is-the-tech-wed-hate-to-lose

    Labor force participation for Black mothers hits a 31-year low

    https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/labor-force-participation-for-black-mothers-hits-31-year-low-7451836/
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    36 分
  • Secretly Happy: Why AI Won't Give You a Four-Hour Week

    Secretly Happy: Why AI Won't Give You a Four-Hour Week
    2026/08/10

    Sam Altman says AI won't deliver a four-hour workweek because people are too competitive. Chuck's verdict: "This might be the very definition of the word delusional."

    In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose open on the labor market. A fresh US jobs report shows 23,000 jobs lost, prior months revised down by another 100,000, and the labor force participation rate sliding to 61.4%. Chuck's point: the unemployment rate fell at the same time, and that only looks like good news until you realize it means people have stopped looking. Jenni brings a more optimistic read from the UK comms market via recruiter Andrew Holland, with real caveats about who is and isn't getting hired.

    Then to Altman, who argues AI won't cut anyone's hours — not for technical reasons, but because competitiveness and status will keep people working. Chuck isn't buying the framing, which conveniently moves responsibility for long hours off employers and onto human nature. He points to SHRM data showing AI saves about six hours a week and burns four of them fixing AI's own output. Net gain: two hours.

    Jenni introduces the Internal Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire, a decade-old academic instrument that Ana Tkalac Verčič and Nina Pološki Vokić have reworked into a 13-question short form. Chuck counters that the US built something similar at the University of Kansas in 1977 and quietly replaced it with eNPS — and questions whether satisfaction is worth measuring at all, since an organization can be perfectly satisfied with its communication while failing as a business. The real risk, he argues, is that it becomes another score to beat.

    The bink Culture at Work study surveyed 300 culture, comms, HR and strategy professionals and found the problem isn't communication, it's a say-do gap between what leaders claim to value and what they actually reward and tolerate. 91% call that gap one of the most damaging forces inside organizations. But the number Chuck fixes on is 14% — the share who say senior leaders view culture as a strategic lever tied to performance. Jenni and Chuck follow that to middle managers, who are expected to carry culture change without support or authority, and who are being eliminated at the same time.

    Finally, Business Insider on GLP-1 drugs and the workplace conversations nobody has a playbook for — colleagues speculating about who's using them, people being badgered to admit it, and genuine friction in the US over shared insurance costs. Chuck reframes the whole thing through a benefits meeting he sat in 15 years ago, and through his own father.

    Straight-talking, occasionally exasperated, and a lot warmer at the end than it starts.

    Chapters

    0:00 Intro

    4:50 Sam Altman says AI won't give you a four-hour workweek

    9:35 The ICSQ: a 13-question internal comms satisfaction survey

    17:02 bink's Culture at Work study and the say-do gap

    22:05 Ozempic, GLP-1s and awkward workplace conversations

    Articles mentioned in this episode:

    Sam Altman said AI hasn't led to 4-hour workweeks because people are competitive

    https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-ai-4-hour-workweeks-people-competitive-2026-&

    A short-form version of the Internal Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire (ICSQ-S)

    https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ana-tkalac-vercic-4a30571_i-like-questionnaires-so-every-once-in-share-7490394530265907200-HUnq/

    bink Culture at Work Study

    https://thinkbink.com/culture-at-work-research-study/

    Ozempic is causing weird work conversations

    https://www.businessinsider.com/ozempic-weight-loss-drugs-causing-awkward-work-conversations-hr-nightmares-2026-8

    More from Chuck and ICology: https://www.joinicology.com/

    More from Jenni: https://thejennifield.com/

    Comms Reboot, London, 9 October: https://redefiningcomms.com/comms-reboot-the-communication-unconference-london-2026/

    Unite26, London, September (use Frequency20 for a discount): https://www.unily.com/unite
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    33 分
  • 26% Trust Their Leaders: Inside Chipotle's High-Stakes Promotion Bet

    26% Trust Their Leaders: Inside Chipotle's High-Stakes Promotion Bet
    2026/08/03

    Only 26% of employees say their senior leaders are both competent and trustworthy. So this week Jenni and Chuck look at who gets ahead at work, and why so few people trust the ones already in charge. Four stories: a Chipotle exec scouting future leaders over dinner, new data on how unevenly companies invest in different roles, a New York Times essay on Gen Z's shifting ambition, and Gartner's read on the leadership trust gap.

    Chipotle's COO pulls three or four employees into a 90-minute dinner every week he's on the road, deciding promotions on teamwork, ownership, foresight and problem-solving. The company promoted 23,000 of its 135,000 employees in 2025 and filled most senior roles from inside, against a market at a five-year promotion low. Is that a smart way to spot talent, or does it just reward whoever shines over dinner with the boss?

    Burning Glass Institute research, tracking 12 million workers across 1,750 employers, found an 81 percentile-point gap between the best and worst roles for promotion inside the same company. Some job families get treated as the strategic core, others as overhead. Jenni and Chuck on why that's a leadership issue first, and the ethical trap that opens once your "great place to work" message stops matching what employees can see.

    A New York Times essay argues Gen Z hasn't lost ambition, just redirected it. Financial independence now outranks marriage and kids, with respondents saying they need close to $600,000 a year to feel successful. The conversation turns to what loving your work really means, how the people around us shaped that, and why a generation asking "what do I need to survive" should worry anyone still leaning on purpose and belonging.

    Then Gartner: 26% of employees rate their leaders competent and trustworthy, and 79% report low trust in how AI change is handled. Gartner's fix runs against comms instinct, including scrapping the inspiring vision speech for blunt reality from whoever employees find credible.

    ______________________

    Chapters:

    02:41 Chipotle's dinner promotions 10:03 Good company, wrong job 17:05 Gen Z falling out of love with work 25:04 The leadership trust gap

    ______________________

    Articles mentioned:

    Chipotle's COO Takes Employees to Dinner Every Week to Spot His Next Leaders (Fortune) https://fortune.com/2026/07/13/chipotle-coo-jason-kidd-takes-employees-dinner-every-week-spot-next-leaders-4-traits-hes-seeking/

    Good Company, Wrong Job: Why a Brand Is No Guarantee (Burning Glass Institute) https://www.burningglassinstitute.org/research/goodcompanywrongjob

    Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don't Blame Them. (The New York Times) https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/opinion/gen-z-ambition-millennials-career.html

    Rethink Executive Communications to Bridge the Employee Trust Gap in AI Transformation (Gartner) https://www.gartner.com/en/communications/research/bridge-employee-trust-gap-ec1

    ______________________

    Find out more about Chuck's work and ICology membership: https://www.joinicology.com/ Learn from and work with Jenni: https://thejennifield.com/

    ______________________
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    35 分
  • Half of AI Job Cuts Reversed by 2027: The Judgment Gap

    Half of AI Job Cuts Reversed by 2027: The Judgment Gap
    2026/07/27

    Jenni and Chuck cover four stories this week: Gartner's prediction that half of AI-driven workforce cuts will reverse by 2027, new research on the office condition that actually drives team performance, an internal comms piece that's got the industry talking, and Germany's tightening of sick leave rules.

    Gartner has predicted that half of all AI workforce cuts will reverse by 2027, and the reasoning exposes exactly what AI still can't do. Forrester's 2026 Predictions Report found that 55% of employees who restructured for AI now regret that decision, with companies discovering that replacing judgment-based roles with AI delivered information retrieval instead. Jenni and Chuck dig into why leaders may be slow to admit the reversal, the sunk cost fallacy at play, and how the story organisations tell about AI now will shape how easily they can change course later.

    A Harvard Business Review study of more than 6,000 knowledge workers found that the strongest teams aren't defined by perks or work arrangements, but by their ability to protect focused work through meeting-free periods and reduced interruptions. Jenni and Chuck talk through why "busy" has become a badge of honour, the role managers play in either enabling or blocking focus time, and why learning to say no might be the real skill organisations need to cultivate.

    Prompted by an article shared by a listener, Jenni brings a piece from Cameron Wood that's been circulating on LinkedIn, unpacking why internal comms keeps having the same conversations. Two lines stood out: that opening isn't reading, reading isn't understanding, understanding isn't believing, and believing isn't changing behaviour, and that most leaders see the function as useful rather than important. Jenni shares data from her own past research with CEOs ranking the value of internal comms, and the pair debate whether working backwards from behaviour change is the better starting point for the function.

    Germany has tightened its sick leave rules, requiring a medical certificate from the very first day of illness and scrapping the pandemic-era option of phone sign-off. Jenni and Chuck weigh what the policy signals about trust between employers, government and employees, and whether it risks pushing unwell people into work rather than solving the problem it's aimed at.

    ___________________________

    Want to find out more about Chuck’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:

    Half of AI workforce cuts will reverse by 2027 https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-13-gartner-predicts-by-2027-50-percent-of-enterprises-without-a-people-centric-ai-strategy-will-lose-their-top-ai-talent

    The Office Amenity That Actually Improves Teamwork https://hbr.org/2026/07/the-office-amenity-that-actually-improves-teamwork

    Internal comms is useful but it’s not important https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jasonanthoine_honesty-about-ic-activity-7482289731754561536-F_1K?

    Germany are tightening up the sick leave rules https://deutschlandinenglish.com/p/germany-tightens-sick-leave-rules-medical-certificates-required-from-day-one-telephone-sick-leave-ended
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    33 分