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Frequency

Frequency

By: 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.

Copyright 2026 All rights reserved. Economics
Episodes
  • 26% Trust Their Leaders: Inside Chipotle's High-Stakes Promotion Bet

    26% Trust Their Leaders: Inside Chipotle's High-Stakes Promotion Bet
    Aug 3 2026

    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.

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    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

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    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

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    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 mins
  • Half of AI Job Cuts Reversed by 2027: The Judgment Gap

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

    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.

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    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 mins
  • Fired for Ignoring His Own RTO Mandate: Inside a $30M Leadership Credibility Collapse

    Fired for Ignoring His Own RTO Mandate: Inside a $30M Leadership Credibility Collapse
    Jul 20 2026
    This week Chuck and Jenni dig into what heavy AI use is actually doing to us, why most executive offsites fail before they even start, a co-founder who got fired for breaking the very return-to-office rule he signed off on, whether AI is really to blame for Gen Z's job struggles, and what the latest remote work research says about loneliness at work. Plus Nick Bloom makes another appearance to push back on the doom narrative. Mark Zao-Sanders' third annual AI usage study moves the conversation past adoption and into what heavy use is doing to people, coining the term "think slop" for the growing sense that users are outsourcing their thinking to the machine. Drawing on nearly 13,000 real use cases, the study finds therapy and emotional support has doubled to become the top use case for the second year running, while enterprise ROI remains mostly marginal outside of narrow, specific applications like personalised email campaigns. Chuck and Jenni compare how their own AI habits have shifted, from content generation toward thought partnering, administrative troubleshooting, and call summarisation. Gustavo Razzetti, author of Remote, Not Distant, has run over 300 executive offsites and says most fail for the same reason: treating bonding as the point instead of paying down what he calls "conversational debt," the compounding cost of every real conversation a team keeps avoiding. Jenni and Chuck debate whether leaders can actually handle the discomfort a good offsite requires, and agree the real test isn't the room, it's whether anything changes in the weeks that follow. William Neport, co-founder of the $8 billion investment firm Bramshill, was fired after refusing to comply with the return-to-office mandate he himself signed alongside his two co-founders. His defence is that the policy was written for employees, not owners, and he's now suing for $30 million while arguing the mandate was really a mechanism to force him out of his equity stake. Jenni doesn't hold back on what a "rules for thee, not for me" policy does to leadership credibility, and both hosts question why this apparently wasn't discussed among the three founders in the first place. New research from the St. Louis Fed complicates the popular narrative that AI is eating entry-level jobs. Looking at 18 to 24 year olds, a general shortage of job openings accounts for the bulk of rising youth unemployment, while AI-skilled hiring shifts explain only a small fraction of it. Chuck and Jenni discuss why blaming AI is the easier story to tell, and Jenni raises concerns about which human skills, like relationship building and influence, are getting neglected while everyone focuses on upskilling in AI. A new study from the New York Fed, University of Virginia, and Harvard finds remote work accounts for roughly a third of the rise in mental distress since 2011, hitting people who live alone hardest. Stanford's Nick Bloom pushes back hard, arguing his randomised trials show remote work improving mental health and that the real issue is loneliness, not location. Jenni argues it's a design problem, not a location problem, and that organisations have a role to play in creating connection without needing to justify it with a return on investment. Before getting into the stories, Jenni shares news of a new quarterly LinkedIn newsletter, Frequency Check, launching soon, along with details on Frequency Live in London this September at Unite26 with the folks at Unily (use code FREQUENCY20) and ICology's Flyover Festival in Sioux Falls on August 27. ____________________________ 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 People Are Really Using AI in 2026 https://hbr.org/2026/06/how-people-are-really-using-ai-in-2026 Why Executive Team Offsites Fail (And How to Avoid It) https://think.fearlessculture.design/p/why-executive-team-offsites-fail The Cofounder Fired for Breaking His Own Return-to-Office Rule https://finance.yahoo.com/small-business/articles/investment-firm-cofounder-sues-being-171729024.html Gen Z’s Meager Job Prospects May Not Have AI to Blame https://www.fastcompany.com/91568772/gen-zs-meager-job-prospects-may-not-have-ai-to-blame Too Many Zooms, Too Little Face Time: Is Remote Work Making Us Lonely? https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/06/29/remote-work-from-home-loneliness-epidemic-americans/90651835007/
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    37 mins
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