Internal Podcasts
Dear leaders,
I have had a number of conversations with business owners, founders and leaders about how they gain more cut through with their teams and how to be more open, more transparent, help everyone understand what they are trying to achieve.
There are a number of businesses that offer AMA’s, I am a huge advocate of AMA’s and opening up, there are many ways you can gain more feedback and answer questions, but enabling open conversations and allowing people to relax podcasts are often the way many professionals open up.
So much so, there are specific media training courses covering podcasts alongside TV interviews.
A trend that is appearing in the hybrid office movement and I am a huge believer in is the internal podcast.
According to many interviews podcasts (my source of the best inspiration and repurposing ideas) and having conversations with friends at Facebook, Amazon and many other tech giants have specific internal podcasts for the business, even for the S-Teams (aka ELT, leadership teams) have dedicated internal podcasts (via private RSS feeds).
I wanted to break down why internal podcasts might be an option for you and your department especially if you are redesigning your office as a hybrid office or if you are in the position to, roll out company-wide.
- Low cost – only time is cost and microphone can be raw and unedited but higher production = better cut through
- Low bandwidth – low amount of effort and time required.
- New communication
- It’s not another long email
- Not another instant message
- It is different, so many firms have created the same information flow and there are fatigue in reading another long message
- Recorded in person and remotely – it is very simple to record in person or record remotely via Zoom or via third-party tools like Riverside, StreamYard or squadcast. These are well worth the small investment required for better quality audio.
- Insightful – Podcasts are naturally Q&A or conversation based so far more related than video interviews or long emails. Podcasts encourage natural conversation which is much easier to understand
- Deliberate – With podcasts you can liaise before the recording and organise and arrange talking points and agreed on questions before hand. Preparation is essential for many personality types.
Being able to articulate the company bets and explain their beliefs around company strategy - Personality – argubalily most important podcasts enable people to be themselves and show off their personality. This opens up access to leaderships teams and improve visbilities of those who appear on the podcasts.
- Stats and insights – one great thing about podcast is the insights you can gain from feeds, plays, downloads etc is better than hoping a message was read and understood.
A hint, consider inviting external partners and external mentors and coaches to help share their insights and help to raise awareness of different ways of approaching work and processes.
Something I would recommend is asking for questions, for topics and insights from the company, if you are looking to roll out with your department first, consider how you can introduce other business leads and colleagues your team interact with most and least to improve communication flow and improve connections between teams.
If you are looking for a podcast to listen to and share this week, my the future state of work podcast is well worth the listen.
Have a great week and consider rolling out an internal podcast.
Thanks,
Danny Denhard
PS Hire me to help your professional growth: executive coach or professional mentor