Frequency Podcast Por Chuck Gose & Jenni Field arte de portada

Frequency

Frequency

De: Chuck Gose & Jenni Field
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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. Economía
Episodios
  • Uber CEO Will Push You Out, Cracker Barrel's Leaked Memo Backfires & 67% of HR Pros Have No Career Path

    Uber CEO Will Push You Out, Cracker Barrel's Leaked Memo Backfires & 67% of HR Pros Have No Career Path
    Mar 23 2026
    Jenni Field is away this week, so Chuck Gose goes solo covering four stories that all, in different ways, come back to the same question: what does leadership actually communicate about how much it values its people? Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi went on The Diary of a CEO podcast and said the quiet part loud: he expects immediate responses to weekend emails, doesn't talk about work-life balance at Uber, and will push employees out if they can't keep pace. Chuck isn't entirely unsympathetic — there's something genuinely useful about a leader who names the culture explicitly rather than letting unspoken norms do the damage quietly. The problem is the contradiction. Claiming flexibility while expecting Saturday email responses at 9:30pm is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Chuck draws the contrast with Linear CEO Karri Saarinen, who has deliberately built a 40-hour-week culture around quality over speed. The question isn't which CEO is right. It's whether employees at either company actually know what they're signing up for. Cracker Barrel made headlines when a leaked internal memo instructed employees to eat at Cracker Barrel restaurants for most meals during business travel, with alcohol no longer reimbursable without senior pre-approval. Chuck's take: the policy is largely unremarkable. SAP Concur named this exact trend "travelscrimping" in their 2025 Global Business Travel Survey. What made it a story was the absence of proactive framing — a two-year-old policy became a crisis because it leaked without context. The real communication failure wasn't the policy. It was letting a leaked memo define the narrative first. And in a company still recovering from a $100 million rebrand reversal, that trust deficit made the pile-on predictable. The frontline workforce gets the most substantive treatment of the episode. Chuck walks through a Fortune op-ed by Stacey Zolt Hara of Burson, anchored by former United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz and his framework for operational excellence: focus on the person holding the wrench. Munoz is credited with turning around a deeply disgruntled 85,000-person workforce by making frontline workers the centrepiece of the culture rebuild. The data backing the argument is striking — 87% of frontline workers aren't sure whether company culture applies to them at all, and a 2025 Aspen Institute study found U.S. GDP would be 10% higher if the essential economy had kept pace with white-collar productivity growth. Chuck flags that the article is a Burson op-ed — a comms firm making the case for comms investment — but doesn't let that undermine the substance. And he notes the harder truth behind the How Institute's finding that 94% of employees say moral leadership matters, but only 6% of CEOs deliver it: the problem isn't awareness. It's that incentive structures don't reward it. The episode closes with a story that lands closer to home — a survey from the HR Certification Institute finding that 67% of HR practitioners have no clear or well-defined career path, and 41% are considering leaving the profession entirely. Chuck calls it less an irony than an indictment: the function responsible for career frameworks, succession planning, and leadership pipelines for everyone else hasn't applied any of that to itself. The structural problems are architectural — flat hierarchies, lean teams, subjective promotions — and people analytics as a career differentiator is realistic only for the top 15-20% of practitioners who sit inside data-mature organisations. Chuck closes with a thread that connects back to the Munoz story: HR practitioners are their own version of the guy with the wrench. Essential to the operation. Excluded from conversations about their own futures. 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. Find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/ Articles mentioned in this episode: Uber CEO Says Hard Work Is "the Most Important Skill in Life" — and He'll Push You Out If You Can't Keep Up Cracker Barrel Tells Employees to Eat at Cracker Barrel on Work Trips To Unlock Employee Effort, Don't Overlook the Person Holding the Wrench HR Is Supposed to Design Career Paths. So Why Are Its Own So Unclear?
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    19 m
  • Culture Talk Destroys Trust: 72% Fail, AI Agents, PDFs & Dorsey's 40% Cuts

    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
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    30 m
  • Staples Baddie vs McDonald's CEO: 4 IC Reports & the Authenticity Gap

    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
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    43 m
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