Sunday, November 16, 2025
Sunday, November 16, 2025
Mike Klein:
What is the biggest change in the nature of work that’s emerging in the “Age of AI”?
It’s not automation itself – automation has been with us for centuries.
It’s that those who remain in the workforce will be getting paid not for the volume of output they produce, but for the quality and efficiency of the decisions they make.
So what does this “Big Shift” mean for organizations and the way they communicate?
It means we need to pivot from trying to increase “discretionary effort” and instead actually increase “effective discretion”.
Less focus on increasing employee “productivity”.
And much more on improving employee decision-making.
Internal communication has been obsessed with discretionary effort for decades.
It reached a new level around the “turn of the century” when Gallup started selling “employee engagement” surveys with the promise that higher engagement scores meant more “productivity” and higher profits.
But AI-driven automation means that much of the burden of “productivity” will shift away from employees.
The employees who remain will be there because they do things that AI is not yet capable of – initiating tasks, making decisions, and nurturing relationships.
And that is a fundamentally different ballgame than trying to juice employee engagement.
Here’s the reality most business leaders miss or want to ignore: employees already have massive discretion in their daily work, and AI is expanding that discretion by the minute.
Employees are the ones who choose what information to trust, which colleagues to consult, how to interpret policy, when to give customers a break, and when to escalate versus handling situations independently.
These aren’t small choices.
They happen hundreds, thousands or even millions of times daily, and compound into enormous organizational impact.
The customer service rep deciding how flexibly to interpret return policies.
The project manager choosing which stakeholders to keep informed.
The team lead determining how to frame a problem for senior leadership to assess.
AI can handle the routine stuff – data entry, standard correspondence, basic analysis.
What’s left? Pure judgment calls.
And judgment calls without context are organizational Russian roulette.
When employees understand organizational priorities clearly, their discretionary decisions align naturally.
When they’re operating blindly, even well-intentioned people can find themselves working against organizational objectives.
And when priorities conflict, they’re often either left to twist in the wind, or question their own judgment to the point of burnout.
The discretionary effort obsession treats people like production units that need motivation injections and attitude adjustments.
This thinking dominated our profession from the early 2000s onward. That’s when employee engagement frameworks started promising productivity gains if communication and management made people feel better about their organizations and more enthusiastic about their roles.
That entire framework is now obsolete.
When AI handles routine tasks, the real employee contribution comes from judgment, not raw effort or pure sentiment.
And judgment requires context about priorities, not hectoring about corporate virtues or performative values.
The gap between what organizations desperately need (aligned decision-making) and what we’ve been delivering (engagement-flavored noise and pressurization) explains why many leaders still see internal communication as overhead rather than as a catalyst of strategy and driver of performance.
This requires a mindset shift – and communication pros can’t wait until their leaders suddenly get it. It’s up to us.
“Effective discretion” means giving employees the context they need to make choices that serve both their interests and organizational objectives.
This isn’t about making people feel better about their companies. It’s about making them more effective in their jobs.
Instead of measuring engagement scores, we need to start tracking whether people’s daily focus areas align with organizational priorities.
The diagnostic questions are simple. Start with these two:
What are your company’s top three priorities?
What are the top three things you’re working on right now?
When those answers align, thousands of daily discretionary decisions reinforce organizational objectives.
When they don’t align, you get well-intentioned chaos – people working hard on the wrong things while believing they’re doing exactly what the organization needs.
Effective discretion is measurable. Effective discretion is strategic. It is also systemic and tactical at the same time.
And it gives organizations a much bigger lever than employee engagement ever did.
AI is accelerating the shift from engagement to discretion, whether we adapt or not.
As automation handles more of the basic knowledge work, human work becomes increasingly judgment-dependent. That judgment needs to align with organizational priorities or it creates organizational dysfunction at scale.
This makes internal communication exponentially more valuable, not less, if it’s realigned towards decisions rather than emotions.
Rather than be a noisy overhead or a dismissible nuisance, internal comms is poised to become the primary mechanism ensuring thousands of daily discretionary decisions work in coordination rather than at cross-purposes.
Organizations are making decisions right now about how much they automate their communication functions.
This means that organizations and communication pros need to adapt to this new reality quickly.
The stakes are massive. And the consequences will be high.
For organizations that decide to use AI to reduce comms headcounts, thinking that it’s better and cheaper to let stakeholders produce and distribute unlimited amounts of AI-generated content, they risk undermining their current decision-framing with a tsunami of conflicting agendas and anodyne content. The result will be decision-making chaos disguised as efficiency.
For practitioners who decide that they want to focus on generating output or on how employees feel, they risk being seen as superfluous, or even oppositional to organizational ambitions and realities. They’ll be competing with AI for their jobs – and losing.
But the ones who can demonstrate impact on organizational coordination and decision-making effectiveness? They’re positioning themselves as essential to resilience and performance – and as capable of making “at the table”-level contributions to strategy and prioritization.
Communication professionals who understand effective discretion are positioning themselves as being the source of clear competitive advantages.
Those who don’t are essentially obsolete before they know it.
This transition doesn’t require massive program overhauls. It requires shifting focus from motivation to coordination, from engagement to alignment, from effort extraction to decision optimization.
And for communication pros, it means being able to speak and lead this transition.
We need to talk much less about “How do we get people to care more?”
We need to start demonstrating how we help people make better choices within the discretion they already have.
The shift from trying to juice discretionary effort to harnessing effective discretion isn’t just better strategy. It’s a survival strategy and a resilience strategy.
As AI handles routine communication tasks, helping employees use their discretion in alignment with organizational objectives becomes the primary remaining source of their continuing value.
And that’s why the pivot we need to drive is so crucial. If comms pros can get ahead of this realization – get organizations to see that they need to start harnessing effective discretion rather than push engagement or automate for the sake of automation, we may end up playing a key role in the overall transformation AI is driving.
But if we aren’t ready to drive this, not only will likely we be heading for the sidelines, but our organizations could be heading for the rocks.
The choice is ours. And we need to make that choice now.
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Want to get ready for what’s about to happen? Then let’s talk. Schedule a conversation with Mike at http://changingtheterms.youcanbook.me
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Mike Klein is Editor-in-chief of Strategic Magazine, an IABC Fellow, and a communication consultant focused on the factors that enable employees to make aligned and effective decisions.
Written by: Editor
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After 25 years of managing IT for F500 companies, I entered the consulting business, specifically focused on earnings improvement using ONLY employee input. The issues you describe here are leadership issues; leadership is not an altruistic endeavor. Therefore, something must be done so that the employees see it’s possible to change upward. The only way to do that is for the CEO to participate using a third-party to push relevant employee suggestions through the leadership gauntlet. For 25 years, the second leg of my career, I used this approach, offering CEOs a 10% reduction in operating expenses in ten weeks. Now you have the CEO’s attention. The fees are based on the impact employees have on the income statement.
If you can’t challenge the leaders, you have no chance of making meaningful change. Not a single executive challenged us at the CEO’s staff meeting to debate an issue. The risk of doing a weak debate in front of the CEO and one’s peers is just too much of a career risk. You (HR) can’t push a string up a hill. This isn’t a sales pitch; I retired a decade ago.
Take a look at what a simple 9-word survey can do in the hands of the CEO and a third party.
https://chiefexecutive.net/employee-engagement-ceos-actually-listening/