FIR Podcast Network

The history of public relations over the last 30 years is a litany of one failure after another — failures to recognize and embrace technologies that represented seismic shifts in how people and organizations communicate. The internet. The web. Social media. Smartphones. The video shift. And now, with AI, the industry seems poised to do it again. As many organizations explore how AI will reshape them, PR agencies still seem unable to figure out billing models to replace the now-useless hourly rate. In this short midweek episode, Neville looks at a post from Stephen Waddington that laments the industry’s intransigence, and Shel and Neville discuss what PR should be doing. Links from this episode: The future of jobs in PR: will we get the third technology shift wrong too? (by Stephen Waddington) It looks like PR has its head in the sand about AI (by Neville Hobson) Senior practitioner neglect of digital/social skills a huge threat to PR’s future (2015 post by Shel Holtz) Once Again, This Time with AI, the Communications Profession Will Be Late to Embrace a Valuable Technology (2023 post by Shel Holtz) The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected]. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript Shel Holtz: Hi everybody and welcome to episode number five hundred and eighteen of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz. Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. So here’s a question I want to put to you right at the start, and I’d like you to sit with it as Shel and I work through this topic today. Public relations as a profession has faced two seismic technology shifts in the last 30 years. In fact, more than two, but I’m just going to mention these two. The internet arrived in 1995. Social media arrived around 2007. And in both cases, PR largely got it wrong. Not wrong in the sense of ignoring the technology. Wrong in the sense of fundamentally misreading what it meant. In 1995, we thought the internet was a publishing problem. In 2007, we thought social media was just another broadcast channel. And the disciplines that grew out of both—search, content marketing, influencer marketing—were largely built by people who weren’t us, people outside the profession who saw what we missed. So the question is: are we about to do it a third time? We’ll address that question in just a minute. That’s the challenge Stephen Waddington lays down in a piece he’s just written for Influence, the member magazine of the CIPR, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. Stephen is someone whose thinking I respect considerably. He’s been one of the sharper and more honest voices in UK PR for years. And this article comes off the back of a book he’s just co-edited, AI and Public Relations: A How-To Guide for Implementation and Management, published in May. And what he’s arguing in this piece is that this is no longer a theoretical debate, as job reductions are happening now. He gives specific examples. Three account executives doing media monitoring—that’s now one tool. A two-person intranet team—that’s now a fraction of the effort. The UK government has listed public relations professionals among the twenty occupations most exposed to large language models. We’re on the list. Early career employment in those sectors is also in relative decline. Now, Waddington is not a pure pessimist. He sees a plausible optimistic path. The career pyramid becomes a diamond. Firms building roles around insight and risk management rather than billable hours. A rough near-term reduction of perhaps fifteen to twenty percent in entry-level positions, followed by net growth as scope expands and new roles emerge, the way digital did after 2000. He thinks in-house teams especially have an opportunity here. When AI absorbs the routine, it frees space for the work that corporate communication teams have always needed but rarely had capacity for. But he gives serious, genuine weight to the pessimistic case too. And this is where I think the article gets interesting. He references Martin Ford, author of The Rise of the Robots in 2015, and Ford’s argument that previous technology waves hit one tier of the workforce and the tier above absorbed the displaced. This time Ford says there’s no tier above. The advisory work that absorbed previous shifts is itself the target. Waddington doesn’t fully accept that in his article, but he doesn’t dismiss it either. And then there’s the argument that I think should be keeping every agency head and comms director awake at night—the pipeline. He’s hearing a common response from firms right now: freeze your apprenticeship schemes, freeze your graduate intake, let AI cover the production work. And he calls that, bluntly, organizational self-harm. Because in five years, those organizations will have nobody who understands how the systems actually work, why they fail, and crucially when to override them. You cannot run an advisory profession without a pipeline. And you cannot build a pipeline if you spent five years dismantling the entry points. So that’s where I think we should start today’s conversation. Not with the technology, with the choices. Because Waddington’s closing argument, and it’s what I find compelling, is that human agency still exists here. The technology isn’t making decisions. We are. The question is whether we’re making them wisely, or whether for the third time in thirty years, we’re about to hand the future of our profession to people who aren’t us. Shel, what’s your instinct on this? Shel Holtz: Very much what yours and Stephen’s is. I have been saying for decades that the public relations industry is always, always, always late to the game when there is a new technology that is going to shape the way communicators do their jobs. We were late to the internet, for sure. We were late to the World Wide Web. My first book on communicating online—well, actually, my first book was on intranets, but the first one that got any attention was Public Relations on the Net—came out before the World Wide Web, before there was a graphical user interface. So there were plenty of opportunities for PR before the web, based on the capabilities of the internet. Then we missed the web, then we missed social media. In between we missed some other seismic shifts—mobile, being able to communicate with people based on the fact that they now had this computer in their pocket. We missed the pivot to visual communication, we missed the pivot to video communication. And now, yeah, we are poised to miss the pivot to AI. And that’s not to suggest that PR people aren’t using it. I think they are, but I think they’re using it at a very superficial level and are succumbing to a lot of the hype out there about things like job loss and “get rid of your entry-level people.” That’s all mundane drudge work that the partners and senior people don’t want to do—the account execs—so hand that all off to the AI and you don’t need to pay those people anymore. And you’re exactly right. I was listening to a podcast over the weekend where they were talking about the same issue, but they were talking about it in the context of law firms. And they were making the point that the associates that are brought in out of law school do the drudge work that the partners don’t want to do. They write contracts, right? They do things like that. And now that the AI can do that, who needs them? Well, the question becomes: where do the future partners come from when the ones who are already at the partner level retire? There’ll be nobody to take those jobs. We are not rethinking the industry, and we’re not rethinking it from two perspectives. One of those perspectives is the agency. The other perspective is the in-house side of communications. They’re two sides of the same coin. But I think we need to split them apart and look at them in terms of how we need to reinvent the profession. You and I have talked about reinventing how we bill, how we price, because the hourly model makes no sense anymore. But what does an entry-level person do if the AI can handle a lot of that drudge work? And it can. I mean, we’ve talked about on this show that I’ve set up a Hermes instance and it is out there. In fact, I haven’t checked my Telegram account yet, but there should be 10 links to recent news stories that are prime for me to news-check because I set up an agent to do that. I have an agent set up, a skill set up, that I can deploy anytime I want to. It is set up to analyze the websites of twenty-two of our competitors. And all I have to do is tell it what I want it to analyze. Do I want it to look at how they handle their project portfolios? Do I want it to look at how they handle their thought leadership? I can ask it any of those questions and it’ll come back and give me a very nice report. I could absolutely set it up to do media monitoring. I’m starting to question the need for my media monitoring service at work, although the agent that I have set up to do some of this certainly can’t get behind the paywall the way that the media monitoring service can, because they pay the licensing fee for all of those. So if the AI can assume all of this work, it’s not a question of saying we don’t need entry-level people. It’s a question of reimagining what entry-level people should be doing. In terms of AI: What should they be doing with AI, and what new things can we be having them do that we haven’t thought of before, or that we always wished they could do if they didn’t have all of this drudge work that they had to spend their time on? It’s time for a reinvention, and I don’t see anybody talking about that. I haven’t seen a whole lot of ideas about where all this should go. Neville Hobson: Yeah, I’m with you on that a hundred percent. Exactly my sentiment as well, that you don’t see people talking about this in a truly serious way. I see on LinkedIn—if that’s any barometer, I don’t know if it is or not—but I see people mentioning this now and again and “we ought to do something about that.” But there’s no webinars, no seminars, no get-togethers on the topic of reinventing the agency, let’s say. It’s a topic I’ve written about myself, and value-based pricing versus time-based pricing. And it’s interesting how Stephen Waddington addresses that topic in his article. It’s quite a pointed observation he makes that’s worth pushing on. If you’re still selling time rather than value, he says, AI will break your model. That’s a direct challenge to the billable-hour structure that much of agency PR still runs on. So the firms getting this right are building around insight, outcome, and risk management instead. It’s worth asking how many firms are actually making that structural shift versus just talking about it. Not enough. Doesn’t mean to say they’re ignoring it. Far from it. I think it’s largely because they don’t know what to do. How do they address this? So there’s an opportunity for someone with some insights and answers to help educate firms like that. There’s a consulting opportunity, if you like. Shel Holtz: I was thinking exactly the same thing. If somebody’s looking for a pivot in their career, that sounds like one to me. Neville Hobson: Yeah, yeah. So we are at that place. Again, go back just three years, 2023, when we wrote our pieces about that CIPR survey, and twenty-five percent of the respondents said they’d never ever use AI. It was pretty absolute, the answers. Here we are, three years later, and I bet you that number’s down to five percent, if not less. I can’t imagine anyone—and it causes a very broad question, “would you use AI, yes or no?” It’s a bit like “should we stay in the EU, yes or no?” I mean the Brexit referendum—well, people, what a dumb question. But so that’s where we’re at. But I believe a lot of the landscape is now so polluted with everyone’s opinion that it’s very confusing to zero in on what are the issues I need to be thinking about in an organization. Plus, I see so many people—I saw one just this morning—someone’s got a PDF book on how to move your business to selling value, basically, not time. And it’s not how many hours you did, it’s what did you deliver to the client. So it’s great, but it needs to be more authority than that, I think. And this is where the profession comes in—professional bodies like the CIPR, the PRSA in the US. The CIPR has done a good job in raising awareness about AI in the right way, in context related to public relations. They’ve had this AI panel for some time now with senior practitioners leading it. This book’s come out and it’s got a lot of support from practitioners in the UK and beyond. So maybe now is the time that this is going to get taken a bit more seriously than people do. I think though what Stephen worries about—and I think it’s not a misplaced worry—is the point that people are being laid off. Layoffs are happening all the time and most people believe it’s because AI is going to be more efficient and all that kind of stuff. And there must be some truth in some of that. But he also mentions something quite interesting in his article, because he says that most of the conversation about AI and jobs focuses on redundancy risks from above—leadership cutting roles. We’ve talked about that quite a bit. But Waddington notes a quieter pressure running in the opposite direction. Junior and mid-career practitioners are walking out of organizations they consider too far behind the curve. So firms that move too slowly aren’t just at risk of getting the technology wrong, they’re at risk of losing the people who could help them get it right. The talent drain is bi-directional. Now that’s an interesting element to bring into this discussion, I think—that it’s those folks who are walking away. He doesn’t say, and I hadn’t found anything before we started recording, as to where they’re all going. Are they leaving the profession entirely, or are they just looking for a place that—in a sense they feel it’s worth going to this company because they’ve got it switched on, that they’re clued into this? So maybe that’s the state we’re in. Doesn’t answer the questions, mind you, and they’re coming thick and fast now, I think. I see, again, LinkedIn is a kind of barometer of sentiment, if you will—not in the analytics way, but the feeling you see expressed in some posts from some people who are worth reading about it. And that includes many of the people that I follow and that you would follow as well. So you’re seeing this, but it’s all very random. That’s the thing. And it requires something more than that. And voices like Stephen’s, yours when you were talking about this—we’ve missed about three, four, five times, that sort of thing. What’s going to make people really pay attention to this? Shel Holtz: I hate to say it, but it’s the same thing that has always made the industry pay attention, and that’s when they suffer financial pain. The reason we have not embraced as an industry these technological changes is our billings were fine. We were doing just fine as an industry financially. So why should we make this risky change to something that we don’t quite understand and we’re not convinced is going to have all that much impact or will necessarily stick around all that long? That leaves an opening for other industries—advertising and marketing—to sneak in. It also leaves an opportunity for boutiques that specialize in this to start up and take money off the table that was there for the PR agencies that were already in business. And this seems to be a recurring pattern: if we’re not feeling the financial pain, we’re not gonna make any change. As soon as we start to feel that pain, as soon as we see our clients going to the boutiques and going to the marketing agencies, then we go, “we better change.” And then we’re behind the curve. So I think that’s the big issue and the big challenge—to be proactive rather than reactive when these technologies create these opportunities, or create the requirement, if we wait, that we must change because we’ve already seen these revenues go to somebody else. One thing to keep in mind: absolutely there have been layoffs within the industry and they have been attributed to AI. It is important to keep in mind though—and this was reinforced in that very same podcast I was listening to that I mentioned earlier—that if you look at economic data, there’s no evidence of mass layoffs as a result of AI. The unemployment rate is pretty much where it was before all of this. The number of new jobs that are being reported, at least in the US, has actually been pretty strong. The jobs report the last month was quite encouraging. So we keep hearing about the mass layoffs and they may be coming. They may not. Because frankly, what I see—and I don’t know if this is unique to the construction industry, I doubt it; I think it may be a bigger issue in the construction industry, but I think this is probably true of most jobs—is it’s not the job that gets replaced by AI, it’s tasks within the job. And then there are other tasks that the AI can’t do. The other thing is that there are things that we have wished that we could do, but haven’t had the time to do, from an internal comms standpoint and even, I suspect, a PR standpoint from inside the organization, the client side. I mean, I remember when I was in my first corporate job. This was with Arco. I was there from ’77 to ’83 with some brilliant communicators, but the company believed in it. So they funded the internal comms department. We had 25 employees in internal comms in five cities. And each of us had beats, just like you were a newspaper reporter with a beat. I had two beats. I had Arco Petroleum Products, which was the gas stations and the merchandising of cans of motor oil and things like that, and Arco Marine, which was the oil tankers that transported oil mainly from Alaska down to the refineries along the West Coast. And I spent time—I mean, that was my job, was to go hang out, to spend time, to shadow somebody, to do a ride-along, to ride on a tanker, to spend a day at one of the gas stations and really get a sense, and to be able to report on this a little more intimately than just calling somebody and doing an interview over the phone. And in public relations, I think it’s important to remember that “relations” part of the public relations label. How do you build relations? Well, if AI really does take away a lot of that drudge work that we spend the time doing while we’re sitting at our desk, then we have time to get up from our desks and go out and hang out with the publics that we are dealing with and build those relations. And why wouldn’t we want to do that? AI can’t do that. AI can’t get up, get their car and go to where the public is. Maybe it’s a community relations organization, maybe it’s a division of your business. Maybe it’s a customer base that is gathering—well, let’s say it’s Ford Motor Company and there’s a car club that’s meeting. Whatever it may be, we have the opportunity now to become much more entwined with those publics. And do a much better job of understanding them. Yeah, we still want to do the data, we still want to do the analytics, but there’s nothing like sitting with them and looking them in the eye and talking with them to build an understanding that’s going to help you communicate with them and help you build trust among them. That’s just one idea of what we can do with this freed-up time. And this is an important point—and I saw this in one of the reports that came out just last week, I think it was—the value that we get from saving an hour because AI can do it just leaks out of the bottom of the organization if we don’t know what we’re going to replace that hour with that has value. And we hear about all the savings of time that AI is going to give us. I haven’t heard a whole lot about how organizations are figuring out how to reallocate that time among those employees. Neville Hobson: Yeah, yeah, neither me. No, I agree. And you do hear a lot of talk about the concept of that. I mean there’s lots in this topic, Shel, really, and you’ve thrown some bright light on some of the things we should be doing. I like the idea of going out to meet your publics, as it were. It’s winding the clock back, actually, to how we used to do all this back in the day, before all this tech was there. Shel Holtz: Yeah, it really is. Neville Hobson: We had to go out and find the sources and interview them face to face and, you know, meet down the pub or whatever. So maybe we need to examine what worked in the past and bring it to the fore again. Shel Holtz: When I was a newspaper reporter, before I made the switch to corporate communications, I was with a local community daily newspaper, and I used to go hang out at the bar after work where all of the government workers hung out after work. Got to know them, got to listen in, got some pretty good stories out of that. But also I could pick up the phone and call some of these people because they knew me. I wasn’t just the reporter who called when I needed a quote or needed some information. I was the guy they just had a drink with. Neville Hobson: Yeah, exactly. Lessons to learn there, I think. So yeah, lots of good ideas here. I think Stephen Waddington did a good job in literally describing the landscape and expressing some of his concerns. That’s prompted this conversation. So let’s hope this adds to the topics that people need to be talking about. So listeners, hope this is helpful. Shel Holtz: And listeners, if your organization is actually making some changes and doing some pivots, we’d love to hear about it. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.   The post FIR #518: Is the PR Industry Blowing It Again? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most agency owners think their clients have it easy. But the gap between how you believe your agency operates and how clients and prospects actually experience it is often wider than you’d expect, and it’s usually the small, everyday frictions that do the most damage. In this episode, Chip and Gini ask if you were on the receiving end of your own agency’s processes, would you be happy? The answer, for a lot of agencies, is probably not. Their point isn’t that agencies should cave to every demand, but if you market yourself as a partner, act like one. The friction can start before someone even becomes a client. Contact forms loaded with qualifying questions scare people away. And back-and-forth emails to find a meeting time have no excuse in 2026. Use a scheduling tool, have a link ready, and make it especially easy for prospects. Once someone is ready to talk, the goal is to respond fast and remove every obstacle. When it comes to the handoff from prospect to client, agencies should have a standard proposal template so they can turn paperwork around in 24 hours, not days. Make invoicing and payments as easy on the client as you would want it to be if you were in their shoes. And when it comes to project management tools, if the client already has one they’re using, just use it. The tool matters less than having one. [read the transcript] The post ALP 309: Is your agency easy to work with? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Are employees suffering from survey fatigue? The question is asked often, frequently because someone high up in the organization doesn’t want to hear what employees think. But if employees see change as a result of someone taking their feedback to heart, you can survey them all day long. If you’re sending emails, publishing articles, and posting videos, but not asking employees for their perspectives, you’re not communicating. You’re just messaging. In this episode of On The Same Page, Steve and Shel discuss how to ensure employees’ voices are heard in meaningful ways to drive engagement and business success — and to avoid crises, since employees’ voices can serve as the organization’s smoke alarm. Links from this episode: Return to Office 2025: The Corporate Mandate Wave Reshaping American Workplaces How CEO Satya Nadella Reset Culture at Microsoft Strategy Studio Transcript: Steve Crescenzo: Hey Shel, how are you? Shel Holtz: I’m great, Steve. How’s everything with you? Steve: Awesome. Friday, sunny. Got the boat this weekend. We’re heading out on the boat, so everything is good. We’re about an hour away from happy hour. Shel: Anything to keep your mind off what’s going on with the Cubs, huh? Steve: All right, enough is enough. Dodgers fan. Nothing’s worse than Dodgers fans with all your money. anyway, but you know, before we start, I know we’re gonna talk about the employee voice today and the importance of giving employees a voice. And before we start, you know, I’ve heard you talk about this, I’ve read what you’ve written about this, and I know in your communication model, which I really respect, you’ve got it as one of the four drivers of employee engagement, along with strategic narrative, engaging managers, which we talked about on our first podcast, employee voice and integrity. And I don’t argue with any of that. I agree with ninety five percent of everything you’ve ever written about this or said about this. Employee voice matters, I get that. Employees should be you know, communication should be a conversation, not a broadcast. Employees should be treated as part of the solution, not part of the problem. You know, all of that I get. No argument for me. But do you think maybe employees are getting tired of being asked about shit? And here’s why I ask. I mean, think about it. Surveys, pulse surveys, engagement surveys, stay interviews, focus groups, listening tours, town halls. The average employee’s been asked for their opinion so many times they’re ready to send the company an invoice. I mean, these employees have completed enough surveys to qualify for a minor in organizational psychology. And after all that voicing and talking, employees will still say in every company we work for, nobody listens. Which makes me wonder if we’re solving the wrong problem. Maybe companies don’t have a problem with employee voice. Maybe they have a leadership listening problem. I think most companies, I think, have plenty of ways for employees to speak up. It’s not whether they have a microphone; it’s that nobody on the other end is paying attention. So employees end up feeling like, you know, they’re yelling into a well. Which is why most face to face town halls when there’s Q&A time, nobody says anything. So the question is: Is it about giving employees a voice, or is it more about coaching leaders to listen? And that’s what I’d like to talk about. Shel: Yeah, I would frame that just a little differently. I agree with you a hundred percent. The way I usually talk about this is saying that you know, we constantly hear about survey fatigue. Employees have survey fatigue. And my answer to that is there’s no such thing as survey fatigue. What there is is bullshit fatigue. And that’s being asked for your opinion and then finding that nothing is being done with it once you share it. I once had a senior VP of HR, I reported to him. This was on the client side many years ago. And I wanted to do an environmental survey, find out what employees thought about the environment in which they worked. And he said no. And I said, But Rick, you wrote a book about employee surveys. Why don’t you want to do one? He says, Well, if you read my book, you’ll find that the only time you should do a survey is when the leadership has an appetite to make changes based on what they hear. And the leadership here has no appetite to make changes based on what employees say. So there’s no point in doing a survey. And I think that other companies should take that to heart. Steve: Ha ha. Bingo. You’re exactly right. Once again, I can’t disagree with you, Shel. I think the reason there is survey fatigue I think there is survey fatigue, but it’s not because they hate filling out surveys, it’s because nothing ever happens. Why waste your time? Shel: Right. I think employees will fill out surveys all day long if every time they do they hear about what’s changing as a result of that. Steve: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Shel: Sure Steve: So before we dive back into that, and I can’t wait for that conversation, I got a nice comment from a Carrie Knight on Substack, believe it or not. She put it on my Substack, which I didn’t even post this podcast on my Substack, but I’m going start doing that. It’s about episode two when we talked about this mythical knights of the round table, get-a-seat-at-the-table. And she said, Currently midway through listening to On the Same Page, second episode: There is no table. And she quotes us and says, There’s no table, it’s musical chairs up there. She said, Brilliant. I’ve been on the side of earning a seat at the table, but this conversation is shifting my perspective from what I thought that meant to what I actually believe in real time. Then she quotes us again and says, We don’t need a seat. You know what we need? We need influence. We need access and we need respect. And how do you get those? You earn it. And she says, Carrie says, I don’t disagree with this at all. Perhaps it’s this concept of a table that’s broken. Leaders show up at every level of a business, which I love that line. Leaders show up at every level of a business. That’s brilliant, Carrie. In my honest opinion, leading from within is the biggest flex over having a seat or job title that demands leadership. And then she quotes us again and says, You do it by speaking truth to power, by letting leadership know that you can provide counsel. She said such an insightful episode that expands into the disconnect between leaders and employees’ cons and channel choices. And she closes it with another one of our quotes Leaders choose channels based on convenience, and employees choose channels based on trust. Fabulous episode. Thanks, Steve Crescenzo and Shel Holtz. Keep coming. And we sure will, Carrie. Thanks for the comment. love to hear feedback from our listeners. Shel: Absolutely, Carrie. Thanks for listening. We had a number of comments come in through LinkedIn as well.  one of them from Vincent Bruneau saying the seat at the table conversation has always been a proxy for the real question are you actually shaping decisions or just being informed of them afterwards? Consequential is the better word, and it’s available to more than one person at a time. referencing that notion that only one communicator in a company can have that seat at the table,  regardless of how many. Communicators work there. Louise Thompson said, Hmm, not sure I’m with you guys. Moaning about it? Agree, that needs to stop. We know what we need to do and how, but as someone who has been in the room and out of it, there is no doubt that being an active participant around that table, and yes, it does exist, is going to lead to better outcomes for the organization. And yeah. Steve: Right. I think that I don’t think we should read any comments that disagree with us. Shel: That’s not a good idea, Steve. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That’s true. We’re gonna listen. Communication is a two-way activity. And yeah, I understand what Louise is saying, but again, you know, there are organizations with hundreds of communicators, there are organizations with dozens, there are organizations like mine with a handful. But if there is a communicator at that table, it’s only one. Steve: That’s what most companies do. That’s what today’s all about. Employee voice. Our employee We are gonna listen. Shel: So for every communicator to say, I want that seat at the table, that doesn’t fly. But any communicator can start to wield influence and have consequence. So I think that was our point. Janet Hitchen said, Halle-flippin’-lujah. That was her comment. Love that. Kathleen, yeah, Kathleen Bell said, Ha, so 1990, totally agree. And then Jared Brough, you know Jared, in New Orleans. Steve: Love in Jared Brodkin. Shel: Yeah, he said, I remember that discussion. My response is if you wait for an invitation it never comes. You get your seat by walking in the room and taking it. Steve: I think he sa I think I actually had drinks with him in Orleans and he said, No, you don’t you know you know you kick down the doors, I think is what he said to me, which I was I always remember that. Shel: Yeah. But you have to have built that influence and have developed that consequence or they’re just gonna throw you out of the room or have you escorted out of the room and away from the table. Steve: Exactly. Or you’ll be or you’ll be a token. You’ll they’ll they’ll give you a seat, but you won’t have any influ I mean having a seat doesn’t give you influence. Influence being respected as a counselor gives you influence. You could have a seat at the table. I have a seat at my dinner table and I it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t no nobody listens to me. You can have a seat, but it doesn’t mean they’re gonna listen to you. Shel: Well, you have mostly cats in the house, so they don’t listen to anybody. Steve: Right, that’s true. That’s true. Shel: So today we’re talking about the employee voice,  which is, as you mentioned at the outset, one of the four enablers of engagement. you know, there are people out there who dismiss employee engagement in general, but I’ve I’ve made it one of the four inner circles of of my framework for internal communication. I do yeah if if you just do the Gallup survey and try to get to that final number, then it’s nonsense. But Steve: Yeah, I Shel: If you’re looking at the elements that contribute to engagement and take action b on each of those based on the results of the survey, then it can have a real positive impact. Steve: I think that’s I’m not a I’m not a big engagement guy because of the way it’s practiced with the Gallup stuff and the best friend at work stuff and all that nonsense. Employee engagement’s a very real thing, but it’s sh always shifting, right? If you could be fully engaged on Tuesday, you get a new boss on Wednesday and you’re disengaged. I mean it just shifts. It’s almost a it’s like nailing jelly to a wall, but go ahead. Shel: There’s an organization out of the UK called Engage for Success. It’s a chartered organization by the government or the Crown or whoever does the chartering in the UK. And they say that the employee voice is the smoke alarm in the organization. I kinda like that characterization. that works real well for me. But yeah, bottom line is the communication is a is a two-way thing. if y communication is the act of sharing. Steve: That’s cool. Shel: Knowledge and information. So it’s a two-way street. And a lot of organizational communication is not. It’s one way. We’re sending information to employees. We’re not listening to them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s messaging. That’s not communication. It has to be two way to fulfill that definition of communication. So finding the mechanisms to give employees that voice, I think, is important. Steve: Yeah, I do agree with that, but I don’t think it’s a channel thing. I don’t think it’s a mechanism thing. I think it’s an ego thing more than anything else. I really I think these leaders get into a position of leadership and they think that they’re more plugged in, they think that they’re more knowledgeable, they think that they’re smarter probably, they think that there’s a reason there’s a leader, they’re supposed to lead, they weren’t put in this place to let the employees lead. So you could have town halls and suggestion boxes electronically and slack and w you know, whatever. You can have all the employee voice channels in the world. If leadership has too much ego to listen to it, I mean you think they’d be smart enough to realize that guess what? The people closest to the work might have a good idea on how to improve things. The people closest to the clients, the customers, the products, the people that are creating all those things, you think they might have good advice about the company? Well, of course they do. But I think most leaders are either afraid to listen to employees because they think they’re just gonna bitch, or B, don’t respect their ideas. So I don’t think it’s a matter of setting up the channels as much. I mean, you have to do that, I agree, show. But I think you also have to work closely with leadership to say, you gotta listen to people. You gotta listen to your employees. These people are way closer to the work than you. You may be up here in the stratosphere driving strategy and dealing with Wall Street and numbers and EBITDA and all the other crap that they do, which they’re very good at. But these people are down here doing the work. And A, they might be able to help the company. And B, if you want them to be engaged and have a good culture, then it has to be a two-way street. And I think unfortunately, a lot of especially the older leaders don’t let don’t have don’t don’t let that happen. I think a lot of younger leaders coming up today that grew up with social media, digital natives, so to speak, I think they’re I think things are gonna get better in this area. I think people are gonna start paying attention more to employees. I hope. I mean that’s my not my hope. But I agree. Set up the channels, but work the other end of it as well. Work the leadership end of it because a lot of those people just don’t listen. Shel: Yeah, I think getting them attuned to paying attention to what employees are saying is one thing, but I think where communicators have a role to play here is in presenting what employees are saying in a way that is digestible and understandable for the leader. So they’re not getting hit by messaging of different types from all sides and not understanding what they’re supposed to do with it. I think if we can give them here’s the daily summary or the weekly summary of what we have heard. And put it in categories and make it something that they can actually get through and make decisions based on or factor into discussions that they’re going to have.  that makes it easier for them to do exactly what you’re talking about. But if we’re not there coordinating this as an activity, then it’s just overload for them. Steve: Yeah, yeah. I no, I agree. You know, I in some of my workshops I show a model that says, you know, it’s up to leadership with the help of communications to communicate the what and the why down to employees. And you do it very clearly. Here’s what we’re gonna do, here’s the initiative, here’s what it is, here’s why it’s very important to both us and the company, and then communicate the how up. And you do that through helping managers get the how and you c opening up these channels. Most companies just aren’t willing to do it. They’re more than willing to do the what and the why down and then forget about the how. And that’s the problem. But if you can tap into that how at that work level, at that employee level, I mean you’re unleashing a dragon there. I mean, you are unleashing a lot of power. But let me ask you a question, Shel. And you kind of alluded to this with your HR story to start the podcast. What’s worse? Not asking employees their opinion at all, or asking them and not doing anything about it? Shel: I think asking and not doing anything about it is going to create tremendous cynicism and dissatisfaction. I think if employees understand that the culture is one where leadership makes the decision and you just do your job, I don’t like it. I wouldn’t want to work in that organization. And there may be people who decide that they’re not going to work in that organization, but at least they understand what the deal is. Steve: Yeah. Shel: But to have that say do gap, right? We are interested in your opinion and we’re going to ignore it. I mean, there’s a great example of this. I’m trying to remember the company that did this. I think it might have been Amazon Web Services. it may have been JP Morgan Chase, but they had an employee feedback mechanism. And when they told employees that they had to come back from COVID after telling everybody it was okay to work remote, they shut off. The mechanism that allowed employees to share their opinion. When they said 99% of employees agree that coming back to the office is a good thing, they got a massive petition signed by a huge number of employees saying that’s nonsense. That’s just not true. So there are organizations that say we want to hear from you, and then when they hear from employees, they shut off the channel, they ignore what they’re hearing. It’s not good. Steve: Yeah, no, no, no. No, I agree. I agree. And no th that l that leads me to another thing I was I was thinking about when I was thinking about this topic. You know, there’s an old theory out there that out of a hundred percent employees, you have you have the ten percent of the Kool-Aid drinkers, right? They’re the ones that wear the company windbreaker and the company hat and they love everything about the company.  they love where they’re working, everything’s great. Then you have the ten percent of, you know, the lunatic fringe I call that are very, very discontent. They’re just unhappy. Shel: Cheerleaders. Steve: You they’re just unhappy in mind, no matter what you do. They’re unhappy in life. They’re alcoholics, they go home and kick the dog at night. They’re just not happy people. And the eighty percent is the people we need to communicate to. I do you think that there’s a factor that le with leaders that they’re worried that when they open it up for conversation in a town hall, a Slack, online channel, they’re only gonna hear from the ten percent because the other eighty percent are, you know, they’re fine, they’re just going along doing their job, they’re fine. The ten percent Shel: No matter what. Steve: I love where they’re working, so they’re pr they’re probably not gonna go out there and say how much I love where they work. They’re just happy. So you’re gonna hear from the cry babies, the people that are unhappy, and it’s gonna give make the whole place look naked. Do you think that’s a thing or? Shel: I think that’s a cultural thing. I think there are organizations where the 80% feel just fine about sharing their ideas or their opinions because they’re taken seriously. There’s a history in the organization of listening to those things. I think it’s the organizations that don’t give that shrift to those 80%, where they just shrug and say, What’s the point? Steve: Yeah, yeah. Shel: You know, and the ten percent at the bottom, yeah, they’re the ones who are gonnare gonna whine and that’s why these leaders don’t want to engage with employees at all. Steve: Yep, I agree. I agree, unfortunately. And let me a let me ask Shel: But I mean if you yeah, if if you look at organizations that have made a point of soliciting the employee voice, you get a sense of what you can get out of that. I mean, you know, look at look at Microsoft. When Steve Ballmer left, Satya Nadella was anointed the CEO. he inherited this culture of siloed departments waging internal political battles. Microsoft was falling behind on some pretty important Categories, mobile, gaming, social. And the turnaround was built on employee voice. He solicited honest feedback through surveys and meetings. He made an open show of being ready to listen. He bypassed hierarchy so low-level employees could be heard. He invited junior staff to meetings, brainstorming meetings that previously only senior people went to. And the mechanisms that they implemented, they were they were concrete, they were they were comms adjacent. they created employee hackathons to generate employee input on the culture change. Yeah, you remember that? even the leadership framework of model coach care was developed over two years using employee feedback surveys. And the outcome was improved sentiment scores, better, better customer feedback. And of course the market cap story everybody knows.  it wasn’t a soft initiative running alongside their strategy. I mean, it was the strategy at Microsoft, yeah. Steve: I heard about those, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was as strategic right. Well, you know, let me let me let it brings me to another topic, not another topic, another angle on this thing. Do you do employees really want a voice? And here’s why I ask.  just in the last couple of years, Cindy and I worked for a large, very large healthcare institution, and they were going through hell. They were going through hell. They were losing money after COVID, they were ha gonna have to downsize, they were gonna have to cut funds, they were gonna have to cut funding to certain programs that people loved, people were being shifted into different positions. I mean it was like a you know the big Chop consultants got involved the at the at the big level it’s the business consultants and it was ugly. But they had a fantastic CEO and when he brought us in we got it we h we had him start doing town halls, right? And they were not regular town halls. We said we outlawed PowerPoint. We worked with him and his executive team there was four of them that sat up there as a panel for the town hall And we said it’s gonna be 30 minutes of you guys having a conversation,  talking about what’s happening, what’s what’s being decided, what’s you know, all the good stuff, and then 30 minutes of Q&A, guaranteed. And the town halls were fantastic. And the people that were there and the chat, which I don’t know if they would have the nerve to stand up live and do this. That’s why I love virtual town halls. I don’t even want to do live town halls anymore because virtual, they get to that chat and you can vote questions up and down, and so. We would run that chat and we would feed the leaders the questions and it was a fantastic system. We did two a month for four months. And even then, with all the change that was happening, with all the turmoil, with all the angst, with all the fear, we still got like thirty-five to forty percent of people to show up to these town halls. And it was it wasn’t mandatory, obviously, but anybody could come. All you had to do was log in. Now Granted, it’s healthcare, so a lot of people are working. But even the recordings weren’t weren’t that great. I mean, what do you do when you’re doing everything right and you’re opening up the channels and they did everything right? They begged for the employee voice. They took their they hard dealt with hard questions. They  you know, all they did everything right. And they still had a minority of the people showing up to participate. I mean, what’s that all about? Shel: Well, yeah, I mean I don’t know. my answer would be to ask, to go out to employees and say, hey, you know, we’re giving you this opportunity. Why aren’t you taking advantage of it? And you know, find out. Are they too busy?  are they intimidated? do they not care? there is data that shows that employees increasingly don’t want to be involved in, say, extracurricular stuff at work. I mean, there have always been employees who don’t care, right? They just want to come in. Do their work, get paid and go home. They’re not going to get involved in volunteering for a task force or a committee.  they’re not going to do volunteer activities after work. They’re not going to go out with people for a beer after work. they just they just wanna do their job for eight hours, pull their lever for eight hours and then and then go home. which is fine. You have to respect those people and what they want out of work. But a lot of people, you know, work is their purpose. Steve: Yeah. Shel: Work is what gets them up in the morning. And that’s frankly the majority, from everything I’ve seen. I have seen data that says the number of people who don’t want to do things that are extracurricular is growing. And I don’t know what is behind that. But it I’ll find that. I have that report somewhere saved. But yeah, you have to ask. And again, that’s giving employees a voice, right? Asking them why. Steve: Really, I’d love I’d love to see I’d love to see that. Shel: Don’t you want to take advantage of these opportunities to share your voice? One thing that we do where I work, when there’s going to be a town hall, is about a month before the town hall, because they’re quarterly,  we’ll open up an anonymous comment line. Yeah, it’s it we use a tool, it’s on the web called Free Suggestion Box. It’s absolutely anonymous. It’s a third party thing. So Employees know that it’s anonymous and we’ll get questions through that from people. Maybe they know that they can’t be there at that meeting, but they still want their question asked and they can watch the video later or read the transcript. maybe they’re just not wanting to share their name with the question that they’re asking. But I mean, even having a card on the seat, if people are coming into an actual room that says, write your question down, no need to put your name on it, we’ll collect these. Steve: Yeah, we’d I’ve done that. I’ve done that. Shel: Right. I mean that takes a lot of the intimidation out of asking a question of the senior leaders. I mean, a smaller company, most employees know the leaders. in a bigger company, I mean, you know, if Jamie Dimon is your is your CEO and he’s doing a town hall standing up and asking him a tough question, I th that can intimidate a lot of frontline workers, you know. Steve: Yeah it sure could. It sure could. You know, one of the other things is I think a lot of I think a lot of leaders confuse voice with venting. they think that employees are only going to complain. If we if we open up the channels, they’re gonna complain because employees complain about a lot of stuff. how do I’ve always struggled with this. How do we coach leaders into understanding that voice isn’t e i Well, it’s a venting. I mean some people might vent. Sure, there’s always gonna be people who vent. But voice is more about constructive conversations. And I think if leaders could understand that, that yes, there’s gonna be some venting, don’t let it kill ya. I mean that case study I was talking about, you should have heard some of the questions that came in through the chat. It was pure out venting. Leadership of this company has never demanded accountability from leadership, and that’s why we have a bad culture. I that kind of stuff came in and we fed it to the leaders and they answered it. So there was venting. But I would say 85% of the comments were A, I really appreciate you taking the time to communicate to us this way. And B, here’s what we need to do about this and that and the other thing. Here’s my suggestion. I mean, it was mostly positive. And I think the leaders in that organization, I don’t know if they expected that, but I know they got we got resistance about allowing people to just ask questions like that. So I think leaders are always afraid. Shel: Yeah. I think it’s a I think it’s a matter of tying this to a strategy. rather than, you know, we’re just gonna have this free for all where people can s say whatever they want through these channels that we’ve set up. But yeah, I think there’s a number of ways to approach this. First of all, there are initiatives. You know, we are going to be developing this program, we’re gonna be developing this process. We would like your input to make sure we’re doing something that is going to meet your needs. satisfy your expectations. Please participate in this. There is feedback on things that have been said and done. I mean this is as simple as having a comment section on your intranet for every article that gets posted, things like that. then there’s just the ongoing stuff. I mean there are companies that have had these, companies like Volkswagen for example and Boeing, where you know they said these are channels where you can tell us what’s going on,  so that we can be aware. And then employees at Volkswagen said, Well, you know, this debt on the diesel emissions is not right. This is going to cause problems. Boeing, people said, you know, the safety culture here is really deteriorating. There are problems down here. We need to address these. I think it was Boeing.  I’m not sure, but one of them actually had a process for finding a way. To get rid of these employees. You know, monitor the ones who are raising these concerns. And you know, if we see them coming in two minutes late, we have cause to to terminate them. Yeah. So I mean, you know,  but companies that want to take this seriously can have these mechanisms, and like Engage for Success says, this becomes a smoke alarm for something that could cause you real grief down the line. I mean, look at what happened to Boeing, look at what happened to Volkswagen when Steve: And look and look at Boeing now. Yeah. Shel: The arrogance at the senior level saying this is what we’re doing and yeah. Yeah. I mean, a Boeing, it was all about profit. It was the people who came in and said, you know, we have to cut costs so that we can return greater amounts of money to shareholders. At Volkswagen, it was, well, our emission numbers have to look good, so we’re gonna we’re gonna game those numbers. this if they had listened to what the issues were, they might have taken action and prevented Steve: Right, ego goes back to that. Shel: The consequences of those things. And I and I think this is what we counsel them on. Yeah, there are going to be people who whine. Why don’t we have a larger share in our 401k plan coming from the company match? thing things like that. But I think counseling them to say, look, there are some real issues that might surface that you’re not aware of, or a decision that you made is backfiring. And you need to know that. as the communicator who is going to help you process this two way communication, we’ll we’ll filter all that and give you summaries. Yeah, we if twenty employees are saying the same thing, we’re not gonna make you read twenty comments. We’re gonna give you a summary of what they’re what they’re saying. Make this all something that you can manage. Yeah. Steve: Yeah, we’ll help. And you know what, Shely? You just you stole my idea like you often do because you’re smarter than me. that’s the key, what you just said. Structured voice, structured feedback. You don’t have to open it up and say, Here, if you want to complain that your coworker has body odor, this is the place to do it. If you want to complain that you have to work on Fridays or you gotta come back and then No, you structure the input, you structure the feedback around certain initiatives and that’s A great way, we’ve done that at companies where they didn’t have any feedback, you weren’t allowed to comment on articles on the intranet. The way to kind of break the ice a little bit with leaders who are either you know s suspect or they’re just suspicious about the whole idea of listening to employees, you structure it by tying it to initiatives. Here’s what we’re doing, it’s incredibly important that we do this right, and we’d love to hear your feedback on on this on this particular initiative or this particular project or this particular something. And if you tie it to actual things in the workforce and not just open it up to say, hey, it’s the wild west, say whatever you want about anybody you want and whatever, it’s in you know, I don’t know where you stand on this, but I don’t like anonymous comments on intranets. I love having your anonymous suggestion box. That’s perfect. And you can filter out the nut cases and the nut jobs and everything else and take the real ones. But when you allow anonymous comments on the intranet, not sure how you stand, I think it opens up it’s a bad it’s a bad I think it sets a bad precedent. Shel: Yeah, I agree with a caveat. my general view is you should have the strength of your conviction when you say something. And if you’re not going to stand behind it and be identified, don’t say it. in organizations where there where the culture has been one where people are not comfortable sharing and you’re trying to change that culture, I think having an anonymous intranet input. Steve: Right. Shel: Functionality can be a temporary benefit to the organization. People say, look, they listened to that comment. maybe next time I’ll put my name on it. So yeah, I think as a transition thing, it might be helpful. Yeah, but generally, no, I agree with you. I don’t I don’t like it. I think people should stand behind their you know, the interesting thing is that Zoom, if you’re doing your webinars or your feedback sessions on Zoom, there is the ability to share a Steve: Yeah, could be, could be. Shel: A question anonymously if you if you’ve got the q and i’m pretty sure it’s the default i may be wrong about that but i notice a lot of employees are anonymous and i don’t think they mean to be it’s just the way it’s set up but let me share two stories with you real quick you know the first one this was when i was consulting i had a client it was a big company in the consumer package goods space Steve: Is it really? I didn’t know that. Shel: And they brought me in because employees weren’t paying any attention to the intranet. Their analytics sucked. And I took a look at their intranet before I came out and met with them. And you know, by God, the intranet was great. I mean, this was a great intranet. The articles were short and concise and relevant and useful and aligned with strategy and values. They did a lot of short videos that were very consumable. I was really impressed. So why weren’t employees paying attention to this? I really wanted to know. And we started off by interviewing the executives and they said, the intranet is great. We really want employees paying attention to it. This is the official source of truth in the organization. And then we did focus groups. And the focus groups from the middle managers and the focus groups from the frontline employees told us the same thing. The frontline employees say, I can’t be looking at the intranet. My boss is gonna see me doing that and give me a hard time. And the middle managers say if my employees are looking at a video on the intranet, they don’t have enough work to do. So that’s where the problem was. And you know, if you didn’t go out and surface that employee voice, the leaders would have never known that middle managers were undermining their approach to getting the word out to employees. Yeah. But where I work,  we have an annual survey. This is nothing that my department Steve: Yeah, I heard that. Happens all the time. Happens all the time. Shel: Is responsible for. We do the communication on it, but this comes out of HR. And it’s a leadership survey. And you will get the survey specifically, will identify the leader you’re being asked to evaluate. It’s the person who runs your project or your department or your team. We’re not talking about the senior leadership unless you report to somebody in senior leadership. And every leader gets the results of that survey and has a meeting with an HR business partner to develop a plan. To make things better based on the results of the survey. And I did an article for the intranet with one of those people who was the subject of the survey. And he said, were one of the lowest rated projects last year. My light went off. We were one of the Lowest rated projects last year. did the survey. I got the results. I made some changes. This year were the top-rated project. So employees notice this when they give feedback and things change. You know, they do notice that. And I think that leads that leads to engagement, that leads to commitment, that leads to all good things from employees in the organization. Steve: Yeah, without a doubt. I couldn’t agree more. I just don’t think it happens very often where leaders actually listen. My close would be: I think you need three things. And I think very few companies have all three things. One, you have to have the channels and the mechanisms to listen. you have to have those set up. Two, you have to have leaders who actually give a damn, who will actually listen to constructive feedback. And three, you have to have employees who feel enough trust in leadership that they feel trusted enough to speak up and they feel engaged enough to speak up. So if you have engaged, responsible, professional employees, leadership who can check the ego at the door and actually listen to those employees, and the communications people have set up easy to manage channels, it would be nirvana. But getting all three of those things lined up is very, very hard. Shel: And that’s where our counsel comes in. I think we need to explain to leaders and we share examples, right? And if you can share examples from the same industry that you’re in, so much the better of what happens when leaders listen to employees, what happens when they don’t. And you know, take baby steps. try something that is not that consequential initially. Steve: Exactly. Yep, yep. Yep, try to hook it to an initiative. Yeah. Yeah, I’m a big fan of taking baby steps. They need the baby steps. They’re not gonna run into this thing. So start small, let it build, let it but realize that, my God, the sky’s not falling because we let people talk and offer opinions and ideas and surface problems. The sky didn’t fall. And once they realize that then it can kind of build and build and then you get to the kind of culture where people feel empowered to use a really bad buzzword. They feel confident that they can be heard and they will speak up. Shel: And then we get two way communication. Steve: Which is the end goal. Shel: Yeah, praise be. See you next time, Steve. Steve: All right, Shel, I’m off to happy hour. The post Episode 3: If It’s Not Two-Way, It’s Not Communication appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

First, they were told to use AI. Experiment! Add it to your workflows! Go wild! Then the bills started piling up, and companies realized the cost was not tenable. Now the walk-backs are happening. Usage caps! Caution! Slow down! Among the issues communicators need to address is employees questioning leadership’s judgment. In this short midweek episode, Shel and Neville explore approaches communicators can take to help employees understand the pivot while maintaining the perception of leader competence. Links from this episode: AI can cost more than human workers now Microsoft reports are exposing AI’s real cost problem: Using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees When AI Costs More Than the Worker It Replaced AI isn’t paying off in the way companies think. Layoffs driven by automation are failing to generate returns, study finds AI layoffs may be backfiring on companies Uber, Microsoft, and Others Burning Through AI Budgets. Now What? Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it’s worth it Uber Burns Its 2026 AI Budget In Four Months On Claude Code Sam Altman says OpenAI’s top token spender uses 100 billion tokens a month — and they’re not even the world leader OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits AI token costs are becoming ‘a huge issue’ — company seeks improved value as overspending becomes a meme Token Billing Exposes AI’s Missing ROI And Puts Billion-Dollar Bets At Risk AI savings misses should make executives uncomfortable AI saves workers a day a week, but they don’t know what to do with it The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected]. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript Neville Hobson: Hi everyone and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 517. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: I’m Shel Holtz. In some companies right now, that AI that was supposed to replace expensive humans is costing more than the humans it replaced. The numbers are kind of breathtaking. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. In fact, I just heard today that they’re introducing a monthly AI spending cap of $1,500 per employee. One unnamed company, a real one though, spent half a billion dollars on AI in a single month because nobody had bothered to set a spending limit. An NVIDIA executive flat out admitted that for his team, compute now costs more than the engineers using it. A lot of these companies didn’t just overspend, they made decisions on the strength of what they thought AI could do. And in plenty of cases, those decisions cost people their jobs. The pitch was that AI can do this work for a fraction of the cost. Then Bain and Company studied a thousand companies and finds that most aren’t getting those savings. Gartner found the layoffs delivered no better returns than not laying anyone off at all. In its study, Bain looked at the books and saw money leaking out of the top, companies spending the budget without the savings showing up. And Boston Consulting Group went and asked employees and found that the leak runs from the bottom too. Over 40% of regular AI users say they’re saving a full workday every week. But Boston Consulting Group’s point is that saved time doesn’t automatically become value. If nobody tells an employee where to redirect those reclaimed hours, that value just evaporates. So two consultancies looking at two completely different ends of the organization landed on the same diagnosis. This is a management failure. It’s not a technology failure. So put yourself in the shoes of employees who are still there. They watched colleagues walked out the door because they were told the machine could do it cheaper. And now they’re watching leadership start to walk it back. In most cases, walk it back really quietly. What does that do to employees who see their leaders’ judgment, their competence? Because that is where this becomes a communication story. It’s about trust, credibility, and what we as communicators are supposed to do when leaders make a big public painful bet that doesn’t pay off. We’ll share our thoughts about that right after this. Now there’s a lot we can talk about with this story, like communicating a suddenly altered governance model. But let’s start here. The bet companies made was about people, that AI could replace human labor at a fraction of the cost. When that turns out to be wrong, employees don’t just see a line item on a P&L. They see leaders who either didn’t understand the technology they bet the company on, or who used the AI story as cover for cuts they were going to make anyway, what we’ve come to call AI washing. Both of these readings are poison. The second one travels fastest. A communicator’s first job is to make sure that the accurate story is the one that gets out there. And to add a little context to that idea, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, just recently said that this cost discussion is new. It started early this year. Before that, nobody was talking about it. And that’s probably because before early this year, most employees were prompting AI chatbots, and that didn’t blow up budgets. What changed early this year? Agents. Now employees have agents running complex tasks in an endless loop, and that burns tokens like nobody’s business. I heard about one employee who burned through a billion tokens in a month. That means costs are exploding. It’s not something anybody really anticipated, and a lot of CEOs were caught unaware. You know, they paid for the subscription cost to say Anthropic, now they’re paying the subscription, but they’re also paying for tokens. So Neville, if you were leading a comms department in a company that laid off a bunch of people because AI could do their jobs, and now it’s either costing more for the AI to do those jobs, or the AI isn’t doing it as well as the people did, how do you communicate that without making leadership look like fools? Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s a good question, isn’t it, Shel? I mean, you’ve painted a picture that’s pretty dire, it seems to me. And I like to think that this is a kind of outlier territory we’re in. This is not the mainstream. But I’m willing to be proven wrong. You know, I don’t recognize this in the UK, so it could not yet be a big deal over here. But I’m thinking you mentioned that the original AI narrative, if I can describe it that way, was sold to people as we’re replacing you with robots or we’re replacing you with tech. I wonder, is that the case everywhere? Because I would have thought it was, many would have sold it as additive. It’s AI plus you, not AI instead of you. And that’s a wholly different kind of message if that were the case. Either way, they’re walking it back. And I think there’s a handful of things the communication leader should do. And that person would also be the counselor and the advisor to the leadership of the organization. So I think one of the first things, if not the first thing, is that you mustn’t let the leadership hide behind euphemisms. You know, restructuring, right sizing, optimizing for the future, that kind of stuff. Employees see through all of that, particularly in this example. And it makes things even worse, I think. The communicator’s job is to push for plain language, even when that’s uncomfortable. So that’s one thing. The second, and again, this may well be the first. I’m just putting these out there as bullet points effectively without saying which is the most significant. Acknowledge the whiplash directly. Acknowledge it. Don’t pretend that the earlier message just didn’t happen. All those lovely messages about this rosy future’s coming when we’re introducing AI. You could say, we told you AI would be a productivity multiplier for everyone. We believe that. The reality has turned out differently, and you deserve an honest explanation of why. Of course, your next bit is so what are you going to say? But that’s the framing you need to do. Separate the human cost from the technology story. The people losing jobs are not a line item. Communication that treats them as a budget adjustment will destroy trust with everyone who remains behind. And the people who remain are watching very carefully. Give the survivors something real, not platitudes about the future, concrete information about what the new operating model looks like, what’s expected of them, and what support they’re getting. And there’s a harder truth for communicators, it seems to me, and this kind of popped out of the woodwork sideways when I was looking into this. If you’re the comms person in a situation like this, and leadership won’t let you be honest, won’t acknowledge the contradiction, they won’t speak plainly to people losing their jobs, then you have a professional and ethical problem, not a communication problem. And that’s a different ball game. And if you’re in that situation, I would say, easy to say this naturally, is get your resume brushed up and start looking around someplace else. You don’t want to be in that kind of environment. So the best communication advice in the world can’t fix a leadership team that wants to paper over a broken promise. And that’s worth saying out loud. And I think these are the things that should be on the communicator’s to-do list in a situation like this that could, I suppose, go some way towards restoring or maintaining some level of trust in the leadership, where we do, we hate what you did, we’re angry at you, but we believe that you are willing to fix it in some form. And even saying like, yeah, I’m with you on that, you thought this would work and it didn’t. So there’s other questions that will arise too. But either way it’s going to be an uncomfortable journey to get to an outcome that you like. Shel Holtz: Yeah, to your first point, no, I don’t think every organization is going through this. I think it’s the ones that are actually providing employees with a budget to use tokens. I mean, we heard the stories about the leaderboards that were encouraging people to rise to the top of the leaderboard for the number of tokens they were burning, because that would indicate, it would signal that they’re using AI, which the companies wanted them to do. But you know, the models, the frontier labs were not really forthright with their pricing structures on the tokens. This was something new. They introduced it. It’s not very transparent. Not all of them even have the ability to show you how many tokens you’ve burned through. A couple of them do, but it’s not clear what that means in terms of your costs or what you have left available. But you know, from the communication standpoint, yeah, the trap I see here is that the original decisions were announced really loudly. Shel Holtz: They issued press releases. They had all hands meetings. It was discussed on earnings calls. The correction here is happening more like a whisper. Spend caps are being added quietly to governance language. I know Uber is out there talking about it, but not everybody. The leaderboards for those token maxing exercises are just vanishing without explanation. Contractors are appearing in company offices to do the work that the AI was supposed to do. Some of them are the employees who were laid off in the first place. So, you know, when you boast loudly and walk back quietly, employees are going to fill that silence, right? Information abhors a vacuum. And they’re going to fill it with the worst possible interpretation. But, you know, leaders do have this instinct to either double down, you know, this is what we said we were going to do, and by God, we’re going to do it. Or they go quiet, and both those approaches are wrong. I think what actually rebuilds credibility isn’t a groveling apology. It’s a clear here’s what we expected, here’s what the data actually showed, and here’s what we’re changing in response. I think that reframes what looked like a wrong bet into a process that we employed to arrive at the best outcome. And it’s a continuum, and we’re here at the continuum. We’re not at the end game. We’re still learning and adapting and adjusting, and we still believe in the promise of AI, which by the way, I do. Look, employees don’t lose respect for leaders who update their thinking. They lose respect for leaders who pretend they were right all along when they weren’t. So we should counsel leaders to stop measuring AI adoption and hours saved, and start measuring whether that saved time is actually being reinvested into something that matters. We should never have been celebrating who can burn through the most tokens the fastest. In communication terms, that’s like focusing on which communicator can produce the most articles for the intranet and ignoring whether people are modifying their behaviors or reinforcing their support for company goals or whatever other outcomes you had determined that those articles were supposed to produce. Deciding what an organization celebrates, what it puts on the scoreboard, that’s partly our job. Neville Hobson: Yeah, I’d say you’re right. It’s interesting. I think there’s a kind of an underlying question behind all this, it seems to me, that I was mulling over when I was looking at this. The real question is, can communications actually repair the damage that’s been caused by this? Can it? I think the honest answer is partially. So good communication can reduce the damage, preserve some trust with the people who stay and give the organization a chance to rebuild its credibility over time. But it can’t undo the promise. It can only help people understand what happened and why. Now that may sound like, well, in that case, this is doomed. No, not at all. Because if you get to that point, help people understand what happened and why, you’ve then got a foundation where you can build from, it seems to me. And that’s connected directly to your point you just made, that you have to, you know, grasp the nettle as it were, take the bull by the horns, etc., think of the metaphors, and be honest and truthful, fess up. It’s not like, yeah, we screwed up, not at all. We made the bet, we had all the research, everyone was convinced this would work, and indeed our vendors who persuaded us to sign up for all those tokens were saying the same thing. There’s also another element. I’ve been reading about this in, I’ve forgotten, one of the US papers that I subscribe to, about this supposed huge AI backlash in the US that isn’t happening here. Yeah, it’s not happening here, although it’s a whole different landscape here in that context. Not on the scale that you have in the States. But I’ve been reading a bit about that. Maybe that needs to be factored into this as well, because that would fuel people’s anger, I think, at the outcome that they’re experiencing, particularly if there’s kind of iffy communication somewhere in there that doesn’t resonate with employees. So it’s a complex picture. But I think the real question is, can communications actually repair the damage? And I think the answer is precisely that, partially. Shel Holtz: Yeah, you raise a really interesting point. If 70% of the population is feeling negative about AI, you have to figure that that is reflected in your employee population. And now you’ve got this piled on top of that. That’s just fueling those views. So you have to factor that into the approach that you’re taking to communication and maybe even into the employee profiles that you’re using to craft those communications on that whiplash that you were talking about. Important to remember that for, you know, like a year, employees were pushed. Yeah, there were mandates, those leaderboards I mentioned. They were pushed to use it as much as humanly possible, and now they’re being told, oops, use it carefully. Yeah, and I think communications does set the narrative that connects those two poles. You know, without it, the reversal just looks like leadership didn’t know what they’re doing. Shel Holtz: And again, that reads as incompetent. So I think we do have to build the bridge. We learned something on the road. Here’s what’s changed and why. It doesn’t mean that the promise of AI isn’t still there. It’s just the road that we are taking to get there is a little more winding than we expected. And by the way, speaking of the whiplash, according to that Boston Consulting Group survey, nearly half of workers, 47%, say they spend more time managing and directing AI than doing the actual work they were originally hired to do. Think about that against what leaders promised, because the pitch was that this was going to be a labor-reducing thing, a productivity improver. And what employees are actually living is the labor didn’t get easier, it just got transformed from doing the work to supervising the AI that does the work. Boston Consulting Group found that four in ten reported an increased cognitive load, which is, I have to say, exactly what I have been experiencing. I’m not spending less time, I’m spending more time, and AI is part of the reason for that. So when the lived experience doesn’t match what was said in the announcement, the gap is where leaders’ credibility can go to die, right? It’s the communicator’s job to close that gap. Make sure that the story leadership is telling matches the work that people are actually doing and the experience they’re actually having. Neville Hobson: Yeah, I would subscribe to that view. I’m also thinking, Shel, that, you know, the way this has been presented, let’s say, is as if, you know, lots of communication when this started, big promises from leadership, and then silence. And now there’s this, we’ve got to rethink all this and you’re not going to be able to do that. So there was no effective communication in the meantime, there was no updates on what’s going on and this is what people are doing and these are the benefits they’re having. So I feel there was a lack of continuity in the communication. Otherwise this wouldn’t have landed as a big surprise, or as big a surprise as it has to many. There would have been signs that might have prompted some to say, whoa, hang on a second. I’m getting this little note here saying I’ve used so many tokens. I mean it could even be, what are these tokens it keeps talking about? How was that communicated? That every time you do this, this is going to happen. And I’m thinking of my own experience as an individual and the experiments I’m running with Claude, for instance, that when I was experimenting with Claude Cowork, it would, or it might have been the project, I can’t remember which one it was now, but there was a little script I could put into the model that told me how many tokens I used. And it didn’t tell me that and then some kind of tech gobbledygook that I wouldn’t have a clue what the hell does that mean. It actually told me this project you’ve done used so many tokens, which is nought point one two percent of your total allowance until the next reset. Now that makes me think, that’s okay. So, did they have anything like that in the organization that enabled people to just keep a running total on what they’re doing? You know, it’s kind of like the average MPG in your car kind of thing. Everyone knows that kind of thing. That’s helpful, even though it’s not very scientific or detailed, but it would be enough. And maybe I haven’t encountered it myself. I see people talking about this on LinkedIn quite a bit, where they are getting fed up with this tool telling me I’ve reached my token limit, and I’m thinking, okay, they’re obviously doing the kind of work that not everyone is doing that burns through tokens like this. And it’s quite tech oriented, those kind of comments. So you’ve got to take that into account. But I think it does come back to, from a comms point of view, that you told people this is what was going to happen, this is why we were doing this, and there’s this lovely rosy future for all of us. Did you explain the detail about how things were going to actually happen? Probably not, I would say. So otherwise there wouldn’t have been the backlash at the end. The backlash would have started earlier and you might have been able to head it off. You might have been able to make a difference. So these are all, you know, what-ifs perhaps, but nevertheless, it comes back to that underlying question, that can communicators actually repair this? The answer is partially, it seems to me. Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I could definitely see myself burning through a lot of tokens without a tech rationale for it. If I set up ten agents to scan the media environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week, each with a different area of focus, and they’re just constantly running, that’s tokens being burned. That’s like the car never being turned off and going through the gas. So, by the way, imagine the message that companies can send to their employees if the company was more deliberate and slower about the implementation of AI. They know it’s coming. They’ve given Copilot to employees, but in terms of everybody going out and building agents and things like that, well, we’re still remediating our internal data to make it useful for an AI model. And we haven’t launched our training yet. No, they can rub their hands and say, you know, being slow and deliberate paid off. Look what’s happening to all these other organizations. We’re pretty smart leaders here in this company. By the way, one other communication opportunity I want to address before we wrap up, and that’s around governance, because there’s, you know, a remarkable detail in this story. The companies that overspent mostly already had the tools to prevent it. You know, spend limits like you set up in the agent that you had that told you how many tokens you’d gone through. Routing simpler tasks to cheaper models. I just heard this morning on a podcast that there’s something you can sign up for if you use their tools, it’s automatically going to route you to the right model for the task. So you’re not always using the high-end model, the reasoning model, the thinking model, that costs a lot. Budget caps, all of these rules have always existed as capabilities inside the platforms, the companies just never switched them on. So for a communicator, that’s a gift because it lets leadership say we’re putting real discipline in place without it sounding like punishing employees for using too many tokens, like they were initially told to do. The framing here is everything. The governance change needs to be framed as here’s how we make sure this actually pays off for us. And it lets employees know the company’s approach to AI is maturing. If you frame it as AI use is now restricted, well, that signals panic and confirms the exact incompetence story you’re trying to tamp down in the first place. Neville Hobson: Yeah. Again, what was communicated, how was it communicated, to what depth was it communicated, and how did you know that people absorbed it well? So what kind of feedback mechanism did you have to see if people understood the message? But I think there’s also another element, this is an organizational one, which is, you know, you’ve got a hundred and fifty employees, let’s say you’ve got five hundred employees in your company, did every single one of those five hundred need unlimited token access to do anything they wanted? No, they shouldn’t have done. So the example you mentioned, a tech person or enabling someone to be monitoring something twenty-four seven, not everyone would need to have that. And in fact, you’d need to structure it so that only these guys who need to do that. And I would imagine you’ve done a comparison to say this is definitely going to be cheaper than doing it that way, which you’ve always been doing it. So that would make sense. I wonder how many didn’t even do those kind of, you know. Shel Holtz: Many, if not most. Yeah. Neville Hobson: Right, I wouldn’t be surprised. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at this outcome that we’re discussing here. And again, that is now the fifth time I think I’ve mentioned this, that communications can only repair this damage partially. And I think the bits it can repair are going to have some good outcomes, I would say. Shel Holtz: One other thing that communications can do here is to set the stage. It’s, this is not the end game. We have not reached the place where, now we get it, everything’s right. The message is anticipate more change from this. I mean, the frontier model companies, Anthropic, OpenAI, you know, they’re going to change their pricing models because they know that people are dissatisfied. They know that it’s opaque. They know that it’s costing more than people and companies can afford. So you can look for this to get changed. I just recently heard somebody suggesting an outcome-based pricing model as opposed to a token-based model. I don’t know how that would work, but it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with. But you need to prepare employees for more change. You can’t let them be surprised again. Look at what agents did to the way this has pivoted. There’s going to be more of this on the horizon. You know, prepare yourself, but in the meantime, we are still on the right path of figuring out how to apply this to the organization’s best advantage. And that’ll be a thirty for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #517: How to Communicate AI Whiplash to Employees appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most owner-led agencies know they should be doing more than media relations. One barrier has always been capability: you can’t execute paid media if nobody on your team knows paid media. AI is removing that barrier, and Chip and Gini dig into exactly how. Gini built a PESO model operating system AI that prompts you instead of you prompting it. Many agencies are strong in one or two media types and need scaffolding to think through the rest. The tool can be used to help agencies execute unfamiliar disciplines step by step. Chip frames this as an opportunity to do things that were theoretically possible two years ago but practically out of reach. A paid campaign to amplify a blog post no longer requires hiring a specialist. Beyond drafting, both hosts made a case for AI as a learning tool instead of merely a content machine. Gini tested this directly by vibe-coding a PESO model diagnostic, working through multiple versions with AI troubleshooting each step. The practical upshot is that you can use AI to build separate knowledge-rich agents for each media type, loaded with client messaging and context, and treat them as thought partners for areas where your team lacks depth. It won’t eliminate the need for people or strategic thinking, but capability is no longer a credible excuse for staying stuck at one letter of PESO. [read the transcript] The post ALP 308: Using AI to extend your agency’s PESO Model expertise appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.