Creating a podcast for employees can help increase employee engagement in an organic and conversational way.
As an internal communicator, you’re competing for your employees’ attention on various fronts. Social media, messaging apps like Slack, and other media all can distract your employees and affect engagement.
As you look for ideas to engage with employees, you may want to consider starting an internal podcast for employees. Podcasts are an innovative and creative way to create engagement, showcase your company culture, and augment your leadership communications.
Since podcasts are a very intimate medium, an employee podcast can help you “humanize” corporate communications and make the relationship between you and your employees more organic and friendly.
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Are you starting a podcast for employees? Gauge interest in your podcast using your employee emails. Using ContactMonkey, you can collect employee feedback about your podcast so you can give your listeners exactly what they want.
How to Create a Podcast for Employees
Plan your episodes in advance
Producing and editing a podcast for company employees will take a significant amount of time—you need to make sure you come up with a publishing cadence that you can stick to.
Whether it’s once a month or once a quarter, consistency in publishing your podcast when your employees expect it is the key to high employee engagement.
In order to stick to a regular cadence, you need to book interviews and plan podcast episodes at least a couple of months in advance to leave room for guests rescheduling and interviews being moved around.
Your goal should be to have a couple of episodes in the pipeline at all times!
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Find the right recording equipment
You don’t need to search for a recording studio or create a professional studio within your company.
However, you want to stay away from using your computer’s built-in microphone. The easiest way to get started is to use a USB microphone.
There are tons of great mics available online that are quite reasonably priced. You may want to look into the Snowball mic or the Yeti.
Both are great for podcasts and you can read the reviews online to see which one is a better fit for you.
Research various editing software
Recording a podcast is quite easy. It’s actually adding in the intro music and editing the entire audio that takes up most of your time. You need to start looking into editing software and figure out which one is right for your needs.
You can start looking into Audacity, GarageBand and SoundStudio. Play around with them to see which one works best for you.
Quick Tip: Instantly generate employee messages directly from your email builder with ContactMonkey’s OpenAI integration.
Analyze which platforms to deploy
You know there are a million platforms out there for distribution and hosting purposes. It can leave one’s head spinning. Make sure you’ve carved out some time for solid research on which distribution platforms to use.
You may want to look into Apple iTunes, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, Stitcher and Spotify for distributing the podcast.
Here’s a quick tutorial on how to get your podcast published on Spotify.
If your podcast will be dealing with private or semi-confidential information, you can create a private podcast with tools like Transistor. In Transistor, you can make any podcast feed private and password-protected.
You can use this tool if you don’t want your episodes to be discoverable on the web or in podcast apps. Only those employees with the password will be able to listen to the podcast!
Consider the format for your podcast for employees
Be sure to consider what kind of style you want to deploy for your podcasts.
Will you be using an interview style format where you invite one specific guest to speak on your podcast? Or will you stick to a solo style podcast, where you simply speak about the latest company events and news? Will there be multiple guests on each podcast episode?
Most podcast follow one of these three formats:
- The One Host Show: hosting the podcast on your own has the obvious benefit that you don’t have to rely on anyone else for interviews and content. Simply hit record, and talk about your company’s news! However, if you’re not an experienced public speaker, this can be a bit intimidating.
- The Co-Hosted Show: unlike the solo show, hosting with a colleague is a great way to fight stage fright and make sure the conversation flows. The one thing to keep in mind is that there should be good chemistry between hosts to ensure a great listening experience.
- The Interview Show: for internal communications purposes, the interview format is the best way to make sure your employees feel included and comfortable enough to share their own stories. Doing an interview also gives you the chance to talk to an employee you’ve always looked up to. The only obstacle with this format is that you need me meticulous and have a couple of plan b’s in case interviews fall through.
Be sure to think about these formats and plan accordingly before diving in. With the above tips in mind though, you’re well on your way to ensuring your podcast for employees is a resounding success!
How To Get Management to Buy Into your Podcast
Now that you know how to create a podcast for your employees, let’s go over what arguments to use to convince your executive team to let you run with this great internal communication podcast idea! Here are some ways to convince them:
Reach remote workers
Global companies often have thousands of employees dispersed all over the world. This can make it difficult to engage with them and ensure they’re updated with the latest company news and information.
Moreover, remote workers can often feel isolated and become disengaged. Ensure you’re coming up with new and innovative ideas to make them feel like they’re an important part of your company.
A podcast is something employees can listen to on their own time, like when they’re driving to work or even while they’re working. So it’s definitely the perfect addition to your internal comms plan!
Tips to reach and engage remote workers:
- Set up interviews with employees from different departments and branches to showcase the humans in different parts of your company. This can help improve collaboration between branches by allowing employees to get to know the humans in different departments in the organization.
- Wondering how to record remote interviews? This article walks you through different applications designed specifically for long-distance podcasting.
Feature your employees
Speaking of creating a podcast for employees, what’s a better idea than asking them to jump on one of your podcast episodes and talk about what they love about their jobs?
By featuring your employees in your internal communications, you will ensure they’re super-engaged. People love talking about themselves! If you feature employees, they’ll feel appreciated and valued, which will drive them to work harder.
It’ll also make them feel that they’re a part of your company’s story. You could even feature different teams on different episodes after doing a whole series on individual employees.
You could interview the Sales team on one episode and then the Product Marketing team on the next one. This is a sure-fire way to ignite team spirit and collaboration, which will help boost employee engagement.
Podcasts can benefit the day-to-day operations of your business as well. You can use podcasting for onboarding employees by introducing new hires. You can use podcasting for internal communications to boost the visibility of certain emails or newsletters.
Use metrics to prove your podcast for employees is engaging
Yes, we all know how important it is to create employee engagement. But how can you actually demonstrate to executive leadership that employees are actually listening to your podcast?
With ContactMonkey, you can collect both qualitative and quantitative employee feedback from your podcast. As a solid company newsletter idea, embed the link to your podcast within an email or newsletter; ContactMonkey’s analytics dashboard with show you who opened your email and who clicked on your podcast link. You can even sort your tracking by different criteria:
In addition to the hard numbers like open rates and click-through rates, you can also gather feedback about what your employees think about the podcast. You can embed employee surveys with anonymous commenting in your emails with ease using ContactMonkey’s email template builder:
You can also track the total number of listens on your podcast by uploading it to audio platforms such as SoundCloud or MixCloud. Take a good look at what the metrics within these platforms are telling you about employee engagement.
Audio-visual content is attention-grabbing
You already know how advantageous it is to use visual content, especially video within your internal comms.
But audio is also enticing and can grab the attention of your employees in a way no other platform can. There’s a reason why some podcasts, such as Serial, have been able to garner a rabid fanbase. It all boils down to good audio storytelling.
A good story on audio can be highly addictive if done right. As new mediums and platforms keep emerging, you need to ensure you’re successfully innovating and using each new platform to tell innovative and authentic stories.
Doing so will enable you to stay ahead of the competition and truly engage with your audience. So, definitely do some research on the power of audio storytelling for internal communications and blow your executive leadership away with your research and statistics.
Check out our list of the best internal communications blogs and stay up to speed with the latest employee engagement trends and best practices.
Start Recording Your Podcast Today
Once you’ve convinced upper management that a podcast for employees is an excellent way to create employee engagement, you’re ready to start recording! Consider employee feedback about the podcast so you can produce content that directly engages your audience.
With ContactMonkey, you can use email metrics to measure the popularity of your podcasts, and gather feedback on your released episodes. The more you know about what your employees want, the more you can boost employee engagement.
Learn how to use an internal communications software to track the engagement on the podcasts and any other content you send via email. ContactMonkey makes tracking your internal podcasts stats easy, book your free demo:
