What happens to culture after a deal is done, and who is really making the decisions when AI is in the room? This week Chuck brings the stories: Slack’s absorption into Salesforce, Microsoft’s huge voluntary exit offer, the growing job description for CHROs, Deloitte’s model of trust, and an Anthropic study on how AI quietly shapes expert judgement.

Johnny Rogers, who spent 11 years building Slack, has published part two of his account of life after Salesforce bought the company for $28 billion. It reads like a field guide to how employee experience falls apart in an acquisition: asking for help in a channel became filing tickets, inboxes came back, and the return to office meant a desk with no keyboard and a tech help desk open one day a week. Stewart Butterfield warned staff that without Slack’s culture making its way into Salesforce, integration was really elimination. Chuck asks whether comms should change the words or fight to change the experience when the two don’t match. Jenni says the job is to close the gap between what leaders say and what employees experience, and that takes leaders, HR, comms and IT working together.

Microsoft is offering voluntary exit packages to around 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of the company, with people deciding in December and leaving on 31 December. Employees have seen this before: an early retirement scheme earlier in the year was followed by thousands of layoffs. The memo from Chief People Officer Amy Coleman says the offer is new and that Microsoft will learn from it. Chuck asks whether that is refreshingly honest or careless. Jenni points out that people’s brains will use past experience to predict what happens next, and wonders how much knowledge can realistically be handed over in a few weeks.

Heidrick & Struggles says only one in four CHROs operate as an “enterprise CHRO” spanning AI, workforce planning, ethics and CEO advice, and CEOs are now asking for nearly twice as many skills as a decade ago. Chuck asks whether this is a real capability gap or CEOs describing a unicorn so they have someone to blame. Jenni thinks the expanded role makes sense at that level, because a C-suite role is a leadership role and not a deep specialist one.

Deloitte’s Simona Spellman says trust comes down to four things: reliability, transparency, capability and humanity. Chuck links it to last week’s Madison Square Garden phishing test and asks how internal comms can build trust through a channel the company tells people not to trust. Jenni says cyber security messages don’t need to be a game, and that creativity is better spent bringing some joy back into work.

Finally, Anthropic gave 50 experienced data analysts a task where a hidden coin flip decided which way the AI agent leaned, and analysts followed its lean 86% of the time without noticing. Chuck asks whether letting AI write the first draft is a bigger problem than people think. Jenni compares it to following a sat nav you know is wrong, and both agree judgement and critical thinking still matter most.

In the Freq Outs, Jenni is worried about how much doom we consume, and Chuck is heading to Madrid for Duran Duran and the Bengals.

To grab the links from this episode and find out more about how you can work with Chuck and Jenni check out the Frequency Podcast: https://thefrequencypodcast.com/

Trust at work is falling, and this week Jenni brings the reports to prove it. Jenni and Chuck look at Edelman’s latest Trust at Work data, companies quietly pulling back on AI, a new study of 7,100 business leaders and professionals, and a provocative question about whether PR is damaging society. Before all that, Chuck shares the Madison Square Garden phishing test that offered staff a fake championship ring, and asks why anyone is surprised that trust inside companies is so low.

Edelman’s Trust at Work report shows the first statistically significant year-on-year drop in trust in employers since August 2024. Trust in CEOs, co-workers and direct managers has each fallen to a record low in Edelman’s data, with the biggest drop among co-workers. Three in four people have been through at least one transformation in the past year, most often AI implementation, and how that change is handled makes a huge difference: trust in the CEO is 33 points lower among those who had a poor experience. Jenni asks what internal communicators can do to win trust back, and Chuck asks whether we can get it back at all, arguing that every organisation needs to find out what these numbers look like for its own people.

Next, a Guardian article on employers dealing with the fallout from adopting AI too fast. Meta has scaled back plans to replace staff with AI agents, is hiring managers again, and has dropped AI usage from performance reviews. Elsewhere, Walmart staff describe AI scheduling tools setting impossible standards, and several large firms are now restricting employee use over cost and data security. Jenni asks what an organisation should tell employees when it reverses course, and Chuck’s answer is simple: admit you got it wrong. Jenni adds that the bigger question is whether leadership teams are taking time out to rethink their strategy, not just their narrative.

The World at Work report surveyed 7,100 people across the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany and Singapore. Confidence is high, with 91% believing their organisation can handle tech innovation over the next year, yet 64% of organisations expect to rely more on freelancers, contractors and fractional workers. Jenni asks who internal comms is actually for if the workforce looks like that. Chuck talks about the long-running problem of contractors not getting the same access as employees, and Jenni questions how such high confidence sits alongside so much fear about job security.

Finally, Amanda Coleman’s article in Influence magazine asks whether PR is damaging society by putting reputation ahead of reality. Jenni asks where comms people’s responsibility sits when they are handed partial information to share. Chuck says partial is not the same as dishonest, as long as you are clear there is more to come. Jenni argues that internal communicators have a responsibility to ask more questions and dig into what is really going on before they share it.

In the Freq Outs, Chuck thinks he brought a ghost home from London, and Jenni is gearing up for the festive season.

To grab the links from this episode and find out more about how you can work with Chuck and Jenni check out the Frequency Podcast: https://thefrequencypodcast.com/

Jenni and Chuck are back in their home studios after three episodes recorded together. They open with a debrief on Comms Reboot and a debate about conference swag, then move into a week of research on who has to reinvent their job because of AI, why vague AI messaging holds back adoption, and why enablement may be a better measure than engagement. The episode closes with a workplace spy story from OpenAI.

The first story starts with a LinkedIn post by Stephanie Hills built around McKinsey Global Institute research. The research says more than 70% of workers may need to reinvent how they work by 2035, and 11 million US workers may need to change occupations. Most of the roles expected to change are frontline and support jobs: customer service, retail, office assistants, cashiers and warehouse workers. These are the people internal communication tends to reach last. The post tells professionals not to wait for their employer to tell them what to learn, and Chuck asks who is actually telling them that. Jenni says nobody is, and argues that without some structure from employers, people freeze rather than act. Chuck questions the claim that demand for AI fluency is up 11 times since 2022, and makes the case that people have to own their own development.

Next is BCG research, published in Harvard Business Review, on how leaders talk about AI. Employees told that AI use is now part of their job reported the most daily use. Messages about productivity or competitive threat did very little. Unclear communication was the biggest problem, linked to less use than saying nothing at all. Chuck points out the limits: the data is self-reported and measures use, not whether the work got better. Jenni explains how leaders can be clear without being certain, by saying what they don’t know, setting a direction and promising to come back with updates. The conversation moves on to jargon in layoff announcements, and George Carlin’s point about how softer language takes the meaning out of serious situations.

Korn Ferry’s listening data from nearly 1.4 million employees at more than 60 organisations found that enablement predicts retention and revenue per employee better than engagement does. Enablement means having the tools, resources, information, processes and support to do the job. A 10-point higher enablement score went with about 234 more people retained per 10,000 employees. The manager behaviours most closely linked to strong performance were fair performance reviews and valuing employees’ ideas. Jenni welcomes a measure that is more concrete than engagement. Chuck suggests communicators think about what enablement means for each audience: leaders, managers and frontline teams.

The final story covers former OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan, held without bail on a Wiretap Act charge for allegedly hiding an audio recorder in an executive conference room. Court documents say he asked an internal AI tool which rooms held high-level meetings. Jenni asks why this is headline news when corporate espionage is nothing new, and whether employees really believe their work messages are private. Chuck says most people simply aren’t thinking about it, and suggests security might be the most honest argument yet for return to office.

In the Freq Outs, Jenni spots a facilities manager rebranded as a workplace experience specialist and decides she is mostly mocking it. Chuck defends the title. He then shares the story of The Gund Company in St. Louis, which has never laid off an employee, and wonders why the executives who visit to learn its approach keep deciding it is too hard to copy.

To grab the links from this episode and find out more about how you can work with Chuck and Jenni check out the Frequency Podcast: https://thefrequencypodcast.com/