Headphones at Work: Judged for a story you didn't write
Your coworkers aren't reacting to your music. They're reacting to the story they've invented about why you've got the headphones on.
That's the finding from new research in Personnel Psychology, covered by Harvard Business Review, and Jenni and I spent far longer on it in Episode 62 than either of us expected. Across studies of more than 2,700 employees, the pattern held every time. When colleagues read your music as leisure, "just passing the time", they rate you as less engaged, offer less help, and treat you more rudely. When they read it as productivity, the penalty disappears.
Here's the part that should bother every communicator. Being seen as listening "to focus" earns you no extra goodwill. It only protects you from the penalty. And the judgement held even when the person was genuinely focused and doing good work. People weren't judged for what the music did to them. They were judged for the narrative their coworkers wrote on their behalf.
The triggers are almost comically small. Visible leisure cues, head-bobbing, singing along, a bit of dancing in your seat, set off the bad read. A quick "social account", saying out loud that you're heading into a deep-work block, shifts it back. The researchers' advice to managers is to treat this as an attribution problem, not a discipline one, and to default to assuming productivity.
This is where Jenni and I split.
I see zero problem with headphones. Open-plan offices are loud, return-to-office is putting more people back into them, and noise cancellation is often the most considerate thing someone can do. Jenni finds them genuinely odd at work. For her it isn't about output, it's about what the headphones signal to the relationships around you, especially when someone is only in the office two days a week and spends both of them sealed off.
Neither of us is wrong, and that's the uncomfortable bit. The behavior can be entirely good for the employee and entirely good for the company, and the perception can still be that something's off. So the real question isn't whether headphones are rude. It's whether we've built workplaces, remote and hybrid included, that quietly ask people to spend energy managing perceptions that have nothing to do with their actual work. And while we're at it: when did enjoying the thing you're doing become evidence that you're not really working?
Also in this week’s episode:
The internal email benchmark is now 73%. Workshop's 2026 benchmarks report draws on 186 million emails across 580 companies and resets the median open rate to 73%, a recalibration to keep bots and filtered inboxes out of the number rather than a real decline. The findings that matter are the ones that argue with our habits: sends under 500 recipients hit 73% open versus 58% for blasts to 5,000-plus, text-only emails beat image-heavy ones on click-through (19% versus 15%) even though 97% of emails still cram in a graphic, and SMS click rates run nearly three times email. My question was who we're really designing for, the employee or the look of the email. Jenni's sharper one: you can't credit a small list's higher open rate to "relevance" unless you actually know why the list is small.
Comms chiefs stormed the C-suite, and now they're overwhelmed. This Wall Street Journal piece reports that nearly half of chief communications officers now report directly to the CEO, with median base pay of $400,000 to $450,000 and roughly one in seven earning $2 million or more. Yet workload satisfaction cratered from 52% to 34% in a year. Jenni read it the way I did: too many of these roles look like a way for leadership teams to park reputational risk on one person's desk and call it a promotion. "Chief truth teller" sounds noble right up until you're the only one in the room willing to say the difficult thing. Worth noting for our audience that almost all of this is external comms and corporate affairs, with internal comms barely in the frame.
Leaders think work is great. Their employees disagree by 40 points. Culture Amp's Leadership Advantage report analysed 1.7 million employees and found C-suite executives rate their workplace experience up to 40 points higher than individual contributors, with perception of leadership declining every year since 2021. Employees under high-performing leaders are 4.5 times more likely to be high performers themselves. Cause or correlation? We both landed on cause. A good leader nurtures talent, has the hard conversations, and builds the team. The reminder underneath the data is how far one leader's quality travels, up, down, and sideways, through performance, attrition, and trust.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.
The Frequency Podcast
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