63% were job hunting: the survey saw none of it

Aug 31

Nearly two-thirds of a pharmaceutical company's patient service team was actively looking for another job, and the engagement survey caught none of it.

The story comes from a Harvard Business Review piece by Constance Noonan Hadley and Deborah Lovich, and Jenni and I spent a good amount of Episode 72 on it, because it lands on something internal comms keeps getting wrong.

The team looked fine on paper. It took a round of structured interviews to surface the truth, along with the phrase employees kept using to describe how they felt: "behind the glass." Close enough to see the business, not allowed to touch it. Hadley (Institute for Life at Work) and Lovich (BCG) argue frontline people already know what's broken, and the standard survey apparatus is built to miss it.

Their fix is a six-step process: structured interviews, targeted surveys, collaborative problem solving, rapid experimentation. In the pharma case, roughly 100 employees, the changes were unglamorous. Widen the window for patient refill reminder calls. Give managers a clearer coaching framework. Medication adherence held steady and people got some control back.

Jenni's point is the one worth sitting with. There is a link between low engagement and job hunting, Gallup has the data, but the survey is only the start. Measurement was never the problem. We run the survey, read the results, and skip the part that matters: talking to people and then doing something about it. Insight without action is the recurring failure of our profession, and no amount of dashboard polish fixes it.

The harder question is whether internal comms even owns this. Structured interviews, collaborative problem solving, rapid experimentation is not a channel plan, it is how a business runs. If we say the frontline holds the answers, we also have to admit that surfacing them is messier and slower than sending another pulse survey. The unglamorous fixes are the whole point, and they rarely come with a launch moment.

Also in this episode:

The pomp and circumstance of internal comms. Gary Grates argues internal comms isn't evolving and names what he thinks it really is: critical thinking, not content, motivation, or events. His seven critical success factors read more like a manifesto than a framework. Jenni and I agreed with him that communications metrics should be business metrics rather than a separate scorecard, and pushed back hard on his first factor: he never took a job unless he reported to the CEO or a C-suite leader. Most practitioners don't have that option. There's also a contradiction sitting in his logic, information flows from the top, yet communication is supposed to be dialogue and not propaganda. Both can't be fully true at once.
Nick Bloom on the startup boom. The New York Times credited AI with the post-2020 surge in US business creation. Bloom isn't buying it and points at working from home instead: the surge started two years before generative AI arrived, concentrated in the suburbs where remote work took hold, and working from home is what hands people the time and space to start something. Which raises an awkward question for every company mandating five days back.
The AI productivity math. Seventy-five percent of workers say AI made them more productive. Thirteen percent say it improved their organization's performance. Rebecca Hinds, writing on Glean's Work AI Index, coins "botsitting" for the supervising and error-cleanup that eats 6.4 of the 11 hours AI saves each week. A 2025 METR trial found developers using AI took 19% longer while believing they were 20% faster. Jenni and I landed in the same place: coordination is a real cost, but it isn't a comms problem to own or fix, and taking the blame for it is a trap.
Remote workers are winning. Stefanie Johnson expected hybrid to come out on top. It didn't. Across 7,704 employees at a large healthcare organization, fully remote reported the highest well-being, hybrid second, fully onsite last. Remote workers were also more likely to describe their culture with words like teamwork and inclusion, which undercuts the isolation argument return-to-office mandates lean on. Johnson's own caveat is the useful bit: "Remote works better after you know people." That points at tenure more than policy.

Watch or listen to the full episode on Frequency, with timestamps, links to every story and the full transcript.