Internal comms writing from Chuck Gose and the ICology members.
Posts on strategy, tools, leadership, and the frontline. Plus community announcements, events, and the occasional unpopular opinion.
Three-quarters of your people are engaged. A third of them are quietly predicting a toxic culture. Episode 64 of Frequency digs into the engagement fallacy, the ROI of AI layoffs, and companies going quiet on LGBTQ+ support.
Engagement fell to 20% and managers are now no more engaged than their teams. Jenni and Chuck ask the question Gallup won't: what is the number even supposed to be?
The trend reports want you to measure sentiment in real time. Your employees call that being watched. Both are describing the same tool.
The interview is where a video lives or dies. On Lights, Camera, Communicate, filmmaker Rocky Walls broke down how he gets real answers on camera: the pre-interview that kills the talking-points request, the three things he listens for, and how to know if you even need video.
Coworkers don't judge your music. They judge the story they've written about why you're wearing headphones, and the penalty sticks even when you're focused.
More than half of communicators say manager communication is their top focus this year. Only 4% think managers are any good at it. The gap isn't a manager problem.
Those wise LinkedIn leadership posts? Often written by a virtual assistant making $7 an hour, applauded by fake commenters. When authenticity becomes the rarest skill at work.
Your employees are pasting company data into AI tools and guessing whether it's allowed, because nobody told them. That's not a discipline problem. It's a communication vacuum, and it has your name on it.
Gartner found companies cut jobs at the same rate whether AI delivered returns or not. If you're writing the layoff memo, that data is your leverage.
Job descriptions promise autonomy, leaders praise their empowered teams, and every real decision still needs a sign-off. The gap between responsibility and authorship is where ownership quietly dies.
Budget isn't being denied because your intranet lacks features. It's being denied because most IC teams are making the wrong argument to the wrong people. Here's what to do instead.
New research from Axios HQ puts a number on something most internal communicators already suspect: leaders and employees are experiencing the organization differently. 27% of leaders believe their employees are fully aligned with organizational goals. 9% of employees agree. Chuck Gose and Jenni Field dig into what the data means — and whether "improving communication" is still the honest answer.
A culture video won't fix a culture problem. But video, done right, can surface what's real, close the gap between leadership and employees, and show culture in ways that words on a wall never will.
The 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Workplace Experience Applications lives in facilities and IT. But as companies rewrite return-to-office policies, the physical office experience is landing squarely in communicators' laps — and several vendors on this report will already look familiar.
Greg Howe won Internal Engagement Campaign of the Year at the inaugural Strategic Global Awards in Brussels. Judges called it "a masterclass in translating strategic intent into measurable business impact." Here's his full nomination submission, word for word, plus the planning framework he used to pull it off.
Oak Engage surveyed 250 IC and HR professionals. 94% feel respected. Only 30% can prove their work is making a difference. Those numbers don't point to a measurement problem — they point to a positioning one.
The 40-point performance gap between organizations that invested in communication tools and training and those that didn't isn't a culture story. It's an execution story — and it has an org chart problem at its center.
The Korbyt + Reworked research is in: employees aren't overwhelmed by volume, they're disengaged by irrelevance. A live expert panel on June 23 breaks down what the data means and what communicators should do next.
The room block for Flyover Festival is open. Here's where to stay and how to book before the July 27 cutoff.
Culture storytelling is one of the hardest things to get right on camera. Not because it's technically difficult, but because most of us are filming the wrong thing.
A startup called SimpleClosure is helping shuttered companies sell their internal data, including years of Slack messages and email threads, to AI companies. The employees whose conversations are in those archives were never asked. This is already happening.
Four ICology members are on the BrightSide 2026 speaker lineup, covering culture, values, employer branding, and employee listening. Here's what they're bringing to Omaha on September 23.
Firstup's 2026 engagement reports surveyed more than 6,200 employees across North America and the UK. The headline numbers look reassuring. What's underneath them is a different story.
McKinsey paid $1 billion for its role in the opioid crisis. Now they're publishing guidance on trauma-informed leadership. Ellen Griley, who lost her brother to the crisis McKinsey helped accelerate, has thoughts — on the data, the source, and what the Trauma Industrial Complex gets wrong.
A software employee stopped working entirely for a year and nobody noticed. Her story isn't the outlier it looks like — and the data behind it should make every communicator uncomfortable.
Culture isn't what you say it is. It's what your leaders, systems, and incentives reinforce every day. I talked with bink. CEO Ann Melinger about the gap between cultural intent and employee reality — and why knowing about it without acting on it might be the most dangerous move of all.
AI delivered on speed. The coordination fallout is something else. Here's what the State of Teams 2026 means for IC practitioners — and what to do with it.
Someone said internal communications is a cost center, not a revenue driver. The data disagrees -- and the gap between those two beliefs is expensive.
Golin's CEO Impact Index is being read as a guide for PR agencies and corporate affairs teams. Internal communicators should be reading it too. The data is about external communications. The lessons aren't.
Most organizations aren't short on engagement programs. They're short on clear priorities. This week on Frequency, Jenni Field and I dug into why motivation erodes after the hire, what internal comms professionals are getting wrong about access and influence, and why the companies furthest along on AI are quietly changing what they measure.
