Forget team meetings on Zoom – 2021 could be the year of internal podcasting
It’s been a hell of a 2020 hasn’t it?
The signs are better for 2021, but one thing for certain is that ‘work’ will never quite be the same again.
Sure, some businesses will go back to the office, some will stay remote. Most will probably take a blended approach.
That brings me to the subject of internal podcasting. Put simply, it’s a podcast recorded purely for your own staff to listen to.
Let’s just go back to the prospect of a blended approach of home/office working. It’s great because some people want to carry on working from home, while others are itching to get back to the office.
Now let’s consider communications in that situation. Team meetings on Zoom are alright, but how do you please the person who favours first thing in the morning and those who prefer afternoons?
An email newsletter gives way more flexibility but it’s a bit, y’know, boring, isn’t it?
This is where an internal podcast comes in. You can communicate everything you need to with your teams, on their own terms. They choose when and where to listen – be it at their dining table, or at their desk in the office. Actually, it could be while they’re out for a morning run, or in the car on the way from the school run – it gives them total flexibility to consume it when it best fits in. You might already have people spread all over the place – drivers or field-based sales staff for example.
Plus there’s no better way of getting your ideas and thoughts across than with your voice. It’s the most powerful tool any of us have – you can articulate things exactly as you want them to come across in an internal podcast.
It’s not purely for communicating news either – think about doing audio training courses for new and existing staff, for example; or a way for new members of the team to introduce themselves to everyone else now the ‘quick tour around the office’ is pretty much a thing of the past.
Now, this is all well and good, but of course there is the whole technical side to crack, isn’t there? Recording it isn’t too complex, but how do you deliver the finished product to staff? Sticking it on an intranet or attaching to an email is quite limiting – it erodes some of that flexibility we touched on earlier to make it as easy as possible for your team to listen.
You need to distribute it in the same way you would with any podcast – through platforms such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
This is where a clever little thing called a ‘private feed’ comes into play. This is where you can create a new show which appears on all those podcast apps, but you have total control over who can subscribe to it. It won’t come up in any search results.
Once upon a time, setting up a private feed was pricey and overly complicated. But things have changed.
The podcast hosting platform I use, captivate.fm, recently launched private feeds for every user including at no extra cost, which is pretty damn fine (affiliate link)
Of course, what I’m doing here is a bit like one of those TV ads with the words ‘some steps shortened’ in tiny letters in the corner. Any podcast needs some strategic thought first, and an internal show is no different. It’s worth chatting to someone like me first to make sure it’s geared entirely around your needs and aims. And you’ll probably need a bit of a hand with the tech side too, but I’m always happy to help.
