82 | How Podcasting Transforms Internal Communications | BBC Shorts

Hello there. First, a little apology. It's been, uh, probably a month or so since I recorded one of these Building Better Cultures shorts, little episodes between summer holidays and getting the kids back to school. It's just been a mental time. I wanted to talk a little bit today about podcasting, something that has grown massively over the past number of years. Not just as an entertainment medium, which most of us I think probably would associate podcasting with, but also more recently as a way to communicate with people in organizations. The likes of American Airlines, Deloitte, Netflix, Tata Steel, all have internal communications podcasts that they put out to their employees. A little closer to home, brands like Permanent TSB and East Riding County Council in the UK all have the same. September is often seen as a month of new starts. We're all back from our summer holidays and we're raring to go and want to try something new. And I think with the growth in the whole area of hybrid working and companies starting to get back into the office, some and some, then the whole idea of creating new channels that perhaps can reach people who are at home or in work, or in fact, neither, maybe out and about on the beat, if you're in the police force or you're a postman or a bin man, You know, it could be one of those roles where you're just not desk-based, so getting to you is really, really hard. What are some of the benefits of having an internal podcast? Well, the most obvious one, of course, is that we can get hold of people on the go. People don't need to be desk-based. So I think about people in the armed forces, policemen, people that work in bank branches, people that work in supermarkets. They're not necessarily at desks. They're not able to read your emails and your intranet. And that's something that's certainly coming from a banking background, I heard I hear a lot from people who are in bank branches, "Give us access to the stuff so we can listen to it outside of work." Of course, it's not necessarily just about internal communications, has benefits for learning and development, has benefits for onboarding, and allows organizations to maybe onboard people a little bit differently. I think for me, the main difference is that it's great to be able to hear people's voices. It brings a real sense of reality and vibrancy to your comms that just isn't there there in email. The same is true for empathy and authenticity. Two things that often in surveys during the pandemic, people said were missing from the emails from their leaders. We talk often about leadership visibility. So how do we get leaders out there more? Not necessarily in person, although that's good, but maybe just in voice, maybe just to let people hear their voices. Of course, as an audio medium, it's easier to explain complex decisions, or issues that have a lot of detail in behind them, rather than having to read through pages and pages and pages of content. And for me, one of the big things is it's a really easy channel to hand over to your employees to allow them to create and generate content themselves, perhaps that you're going to use then as centralized podcast episodes, or perhaps even handing over the reins completely and saying that if you've got a particular cause or a group of people, perhaps maybe it's LGBT Perhaps it's your sports and social, a group that wants to have a podcast themselves to be able to share information about what they're doing, to be able to share information about what their members are doing. And perhaps that's not a podcast for everybody in your organization, but that's okay. It's for a group just within your organization, and that's fine. Big, big, big draw for me and a benefit for me is the ability on many of the platforms that now host your podcasts is that you can get stats, really detailed stats on how many listened to the end, those stats will tell us that that can be upwards of 80% of employees will listen to an internally generated podcast to the end, which is amazing. I wonder how many emails, A, that we track or track the reading of, and B, how many emails just get read to the end in total in organizations? I don't know. But the one thing I do know is that with podcast platforms, I can know when did they drop off, Did they get to the end? And in knowing those two things, I know how long to make my podcast episodes in future and where to put in the really, really, really important details so that people can hear it, so that people listen to it, so it lands in their heads. What do you need to record a podcast? The answer is not very much. I know that when I started this podcast, I simply had my phone with a mic plugged into the top. Which gave me effectively a mobile recording device. That's all you need. It's cheap. It's a cheap game to get into, even with one of the microphones here that I use, maybe a couple of hundred euros. You're then going to need some editing software to top and tail each episode, something like GarageBand for a Mac or Audacity for a PC, something that allows you to do that topping and tailing, to chop out little bits you don't want, to take away that noise interference in the background. You're going to need a host somewhere to put your podcast episodes up so that your employees can find them and listen to them, to download them to their phones. And people like Podbean or uStudio or Libsyn can provide exactly that functionality. If you look a little further, organizations like Workvivo, who sponsor our main podcast, have a great platform that has podcasting hosting built in already. So if you are a Workvivo customer, then you can have podcasting straight out of out of the box, it's there already. And many other platforms have the same. They've readied themselves for this wave of internal podcasts that are coming. What to watch out for? A couple of big things. Number 1, sound quality. People often say to me, why do you have that big mic? Is it because you do the shipping forecasts? And the answer is no. The answer is because it's the, it's, it's just really, really good resonant quality of sound. And that's what you're looking for. Yes, sometimes you'll go off to people and just say, look, if you're out in the field, record us a few minutes of you telling us a story on your mobile phone and send it in to us. And it's okay occasionally, but you want to have a certain level of sound quality that makes sure that people listen and keep listening. If there's lots of background noise, or it's hard to hear, people are gonna switch off and they're going to leave. Of course, you don't want people, if you're going to hand over the podcasting platform to your employees, you're not going to hand it over with a bunch of rules and regs. You're gonna hand it over with a bunch of guidelines and people are going to know what's right and wrong. And when they don't, then maybe as the owner of the platform, you're gonna step in and perhaps ask them to fix or address what they're doing. We don't want anything slanderous up there on our internal podcasts. We don't want anything that we wouldn't be happy hearing or seeing out in the big wide world. Of course, even if we are keeping that podcast internal, there are, like all communications internally, ways and means for people to get that out into the big wide world. So just one more thinking about How do you make sure that people who are going to use this in your organization are trusted to be able to do that in a way that allows them to get their content out there in a respectful way? So as September comes around, as I said, if you want to try something new, give it a go. It's a really, really low bar to get into and an easy thing to do. Ask your people, is this something they want? And particularly in organizations with distributed workforces, is something which I believe would be a really, really useful addition to your existing internal comms channels. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.