Frequency

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 whitepaper

nextICshift India Report 2026 by Mike Klein and Ambuj Dixit

Gallagher’s State of the Sector Report

ContactMonkey Global State of Internal Communications 2026

Staples Baddie And the McDonalds CEO

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 [email protected] for info!

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In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose dig into four thought-provoking topics shaping the world of work right now — from how old your company is to whether organisational culture actually exists.

Chuck kicks things off with the latest addition to the workplace lexicon — "job hugging." Move over quiet quitting, there's a new phenomenon describing employees who cling to their current roles for stability and comfort, at the potential cost of their own growth and development.

Does Company Age Determine Your WFH Strategy? Drawing on research from Nick Bloom, Jenni unpacks data showing that work from home is 50% higher in firms founded in the last 10 years, and 25% higher in companies led by CEOs under 30. There's a parallel trend in AI adoption too. But is this really a generational divide, or is it something deeper? 

Is Organisational Culture Change Really a Thing? Rob Briner's work and a CIPD review ask a provocative question: can organisational culture actually be changed — and does it even drive performance in the way we assume? Jenni and Chuck unpack why culture might be a description of behaviour rather than a cause of it, and why focusing on behaviour change programmes could be a far more effective (if more uncomfortable) approach than the culture workshops many organisations invest in.

A Substack article by Stephen Waddington references the Ocean Tomo intangible asset market value study, which reveals a striking structural inversion: in 1975, tangible assets made up 83% of S&P 500 market value. By 2025, that figure had fallen to just 8%. So what does this mean for internal comms, HR, and employee experience teams still fighting to prove their value?

An eight-month Harvard Business Review study of a US technology company found that rather than reducing workload, AI tools led employees to work faster, take on more tasks, and extend their working hours — without being asked. The result? Potential workload creep, cognitive fatigue, and burnout. Jenni and Chuck share their own experiences with AI, debate whether governance is the answer, and explore what it means to genuinely use AI versus simply benefit from it.

Freaking Out This Week: Chuck is buzzing about Transform and the ICology event he's running at it on March 23rd in Las Vegas. If you want to join, you'll need to sign up via Chuck's link Jenni's freak out? An organisation being advised to model 60 — yes, 60 — behaviours, complete with physical red cards for anyone not exhibiting them. Mildly terrifying is an understatement.

Articles and links mentioned in this episode:

Does the age of your company determine your WFH strategy?

𝗢rganizational culture change: Is that really a thing?

CIPR 2022 Review mentioned by Rob Briner

If 92% of corporate value is intangible, why is public relations still treated as overhead?

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It

 

Join ICology at Transform's EX Factor Summit!

In this week's episode, Jenni and Chuck unpack the uncomfortable truth behind repeated workplace policies, the widening AI proficiency gap, and why simple acts of appreciation remain the most overlooked retention strategy.

What we're discussing
Home Depot's Groundhog Day RTO Announcement Home Depot just announced corporate employees need to return to office five days a week starting April 6th - except they already announced this exact policy in January 2025. Stanford's Nick Bloom reports 17% of companies are on their third RTO policy. When you have to announce the same thing twice, is it a communication problem or a compliance problem? We explore why employees called leadership's bluff and what this says about credibility and culture.

The AI Proficiency Crisis After three years and hundreds of millions in AI investment, Section's survey of 5,000 knowledge workers reveals: 90% of the workforce doesn't know how to use AI effectively, yet 50% think they're proficient. The gap between perception and reality is the real problem. Meanwhile, 25% don't know what to use AI for, and manager support for AI dropped 11% since May 2025. We discuss the shadow use of AI and whether companies are really this naive.

Chief Communication Officers Hit $1M+ Salaries CCO compensation now reaches $900K-$1M, with nearly half earning seven figures. More than half command $5M+ budgets, and 70% increase in direct CEO reporting lines since 2023. But here's the catch: one-third still haven't defined their AI-driven communications approach. Internal comms is the second most desired trait when hiring, yet it still takes second fiddle to corp comms and media relations in actual focus.

The Retention Crisis Is Here Only 1 in 4 employees feel appreciated at work. 34% are actively job hunting. The talent retention crisis everyone predicted after the pandemic is here—and worse than forecast. The fixes aren't complicated: recognition, appreciation, connection. These cost almost nothing, yet companies aren't doing them. We explore why organizations penny-pinch on what matters while CEOs collect seven-figure packages.

Key takeaways

Repeating announcements signals policy failure, not employee non-compliance

The Dunning-Kruger effect is alive and well in AI adoption

High salaries don't automatically translate to strategic leadership

Simple recognition programs outperform complex retention strategies

Links & Resources

Why Home Depot Keeps Announcing RTO 

The AI Proficiency Report

Korn Ferry Survey Reveals Chief Communications Officers' Rising Influence and Compensation in 2025 

2026 Engagement and Retention Report 

Substack CEO bombs Decoder interview

In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose start with a deceptively simple question: where are all the good industry events? That conversation quickly opens up a wider reflection on whether the internal comms and employee experience space has hit a point of stagnation — and what it would take to bring the right people together for deeper, more meaningful conversations.

The episode moves into weightier territory with a discussion sparked by Shel Holtz’s open letter to PRSA, calling on the organisation to take a stand on ICE operations in Minneapolis. Jenni and Chuck explore the ethics of neutrality, the idea that silence is itself a decision, and the responsibility professional bodies have to model the values they expect communicators to uphold.

From there, Jenni brings in a Harvard Business Review article urging leaders to get off the “transformation treadmill.” Together, they unpack why constant transformation often signals deeper systemic problems, and why addressing root causes, rather than reacting to symptoms, is the real work leaders tend to avoid.

Trust takes centre stage with a frank critique of the Edelman Trust Barometer. While the data highlights growing insularity, grievance and distrust, Jenni and Chuck question whether the proposed solutions offer anything genuinely new, and whether organisations are willing to do the uncomfortable, personal work that trust actually requires.

The episode closes with a look at Gartner’s predicted workplace trends for 2026, including AI, systems thinking and the growing role of HR in risk and readiness. They debate whether these are true trends or hopeful predictions, and why process expertise,  not tech obsession, is likely to matter most.

As always, they end with their Freak Outs of the week, covering everything from wills and “death wishes” to wellness retreats, rebranding Vegas as self-care, and the importance of stepping back to reflect.

Thoughtful, challenging and quietly provocative — this episode asks leaders to slow down, look harder, and stop pretending the answers are new.

 

Articles mentioned in this episode: 

An Open Letter to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) from Shel Holtz on LinkedIn

Get off the transformation treadmill

The danger of insular trust mindset 

9 Trends Shaping Work in 2026 and Beyond

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