Boost Employee Engagement with an Internal Podcast

[Transcript]

00:03

Welcome to the Finding Gravitas podcast brought to you by Gravitas Detroit. Looking to become a more authentic leader. Finding Gravitas is the podcast for you. gravitas is the ultimate leadership quality that draws people in. It's an irresistible force encompassing all the traits of authentic leadership. Join your podcast host Jan Griffiths that passionate rebellious farmer's daughter from Wales, entrepreneur, leadership coach, keynote speaker, one of the top 100 leading women in the automotive industry as she interviews some of the finest leadership minds in the quest for gravitas.

Jan Griffiths: 00:50

Hello, as you know what closing season two, and we are busy getting ready for season three. In the meantime, I wanted to share with you a quick bonus episode. It's the audio from a webinar that we ran about boosting employee engagement with an internal podcast. I really think that that podcast medium is under estimated and underutilized. In the corporate world. There's so much that you can do to drive and boost employee engagement and inspire teams and yes, further the mission of authentic leadership with a podcast. So take a listen. And I will also drop a link to the slides so that you can use the slides if you need them for your own purposes. And we will also send you a link to the video and we'll be back in mid September with season three.

Jan Griffiths: 01:54

Hello, everyone and welcome to the webinar. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Jan Griffiths. I am indeed that passionate, rebellious farmer's daughter from Wales. And I am the president and founder of Gravitas, Detroit, I spent 35 years in the corporate world in a number of different roles in leadership roles in purchasing materials, manufacturing, supply chain, you name it, I've pretty much covered the gamut, and also program management. And three years ago, I decided to end my corporate career by design and start my own business Gravitas, Detroit, I am on a mission to break the mold of corporate leadership and allow authentic leadership to shine through and now is the time and today I get the opportunity to share with you two of my greatest passions. The first one is authentic leadership. And that of course leads right into employee engagement. And the second is podcasting. Gravitas. Detroit supports the mission in a number of different ways. We provide workshops and accountability lab keynotes speaking, online courses, and we also have our own podcast. It's called Finding Gravitas. And the purpose of the Finding Gravitas podcast, is to really showcase authentic leaders and have them talk about how they practice authentic leadership every single day. In real terms, not copy terms, not PowerPoints, nothing that's too scripted. But we like to hear stories. What does it take to be an authentic leader? We launched the podcast in January of 2019, I think was yes. And we are now celebrating our 50th episode. Now, if you had asked me about podcasting, three or four years ago, I probably wouldn't have known anything about it. And now here today, I am able to share with you my lessons learned all the things that you need to know if you're thinking about starting an internal podcast will really any podcast, but more importantly, how to link that podcast to boost employee engagement and why that's so important. So let's talk about employee engagement. There's a Gallup poll out there, and they serve a 2.7 million people over 112,000 different business teams. And do you know that only one in three employees actually feel this way actually feel this excited and engaged at work? Now there's a real bottom line impact to this. Companies that have engaged Employees have a turnover, reduction of 43% and absenteeism rate reduction of 81%. And productivity and profit, partially a profitability increase of 23%. So there's some hard data behind employee engagement. And we're all struggling with it, right? We're all trying to figure out how do we stop this great resignation? That's happening. We want to retain people. We want to attract people, we know there's a talent shortage, we want to attract Gen Z. It's not only about attracting millennials, now Gen Z are entering the workforce, and we need to talk about how to attract Gen Z. So there's lots of things happening with employee engagement. Right now. It's a huge topic it's on. It's number one on most CEO agendas. The question is, how do you do it? How do you do it effectively? And how do you do it in a low budget? And that's what we're going to talk about today. So before we get into the benefits of a podcast, and why the podcast, please share in the chat, if you would tell me, what are some of your pain points with employee engagement right now? Is it? Is it retention? Is it traction? Is it keeping the hybrid team together, keeping people together? You know, people have told me that they feel adrift from their teams and from their businesses. What's your major challenge that you're facing right now on your business as it relates to employee engagement? Let's open up the chat and take a look. What have we got?

Jan Griffiths: 06:41

Attraction? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Attraction is a huge issue. Yeah. And I think that I'm sure you would all agree. Branding is an important issue, how your company comes across on social media, because Gen Z, and in fact, not only Gen Z, most people right now, if they're looking at a job, the first thing they do is they'll jump to social media, or they'll jump to your website. And when you say you have an internal podcast, it implies transparency, connection, interaction, very real relatable form of communication. And it conveys this this image of innovation and technology, when you have an internal podcast, which I know all of that sounds great, right? So how do you make it happen? Well, let's take a look in a bit more detail about the benefits of a podcast. And I will share with you that, you know, I've been out of the corporate world now for almost three years. And if I were to ever go back into the corporate world, again, I would launch a podcast immediately. And I would probably be recording episodes every week, is one of the pain points that I experienced in the corporate world was this idea of every time I had to have a global meeting. It was a big deal. It was a big coordination thing with marketing with communications, maybe even HR, trying to coordinate all the different regions around the globe, the Zoom call, what time should we have it? Should we have two of them two meetings, three meetings. And then people were forced to be tethered to their computer. And this is in a pre COVID world for for a Zoom meeting. And it was always this sort of Oh, and then the script, you know, watch, what am I going to be talking about? That's way too much work. And if it was a video, forget it, because you'd have to go through firewalls and problems and how to send it out. It was it was just too much work, quite frankly, I knew that I needed to communicate more as a leader and keep the team together. But the methods that were available before podcasting were too expensive. And they took too much time and too much of bandwidth. So the benefits of the podcast, first and foremost, you know yourself. It's easy to consume and it's self paced, right. It's time efficient. You don't have to listen to all of the episode. You can do it in bite sized chunks, whatever suits your schedule. It's time efficient. It's relatable. It's people talking it's human to human interaction. This is how we build trust in the workplace. Is this human to human interaction. It is not through corporate emails that have been sanitized and cleansed and reworded a million times. And if there's any marketing, communications, people online, those corporate emails, sometimes you're forced to write that really don't tell people anything. It's just a bunch of sort of corporate speak, and you're trying to hide what the real truth is. Yeah, people know what that is. They know they can see through it, and people don't read it. Right. So one of the benefits with pure audio is that it forces you to listen more intently. I And it actually stimulates mental imagery in the brain and it activates dopamine, which is the reward system and the feel good chemical in the brain. When I say it stimulates mental imagery, when you're listening to a podcast, you have you really listen. And as human beings, we listen to all of a conversation. That's part of how we operate. You know, and when we're telling stories, that is the oldest form of communication, we're predisposed to listen to stories to put ourselves in that story. When you switch from text to audio, there is a 500% increase comprehension. Now I had to check that number a couple of times. But if you think about it, it's true, right? Because we listen to entire conversations. You don't you very rarely cut something off in the middle of a conversation, you wait until the end of it, but it's very easy to just speed, read an email and not retain the information. With a podcast, you have great metrics. So whether it's an external podcast, but but really more importantly, for an internal podcast, you have metrics for engagement, you can tell how many people have downloaded it, even who's downloaded it, how long they listened to it. And if they shared it or not, you can get really good engagement metrics. And it's cost effective, it's far more cost effective to do a podcast than it is to create video content. And what I really love about it is people are so burned out right now with Zoom and video, the last thing they want is to be on yet another zoom call. So if you've got executives trying to get their message across in the company, the last thing people want is to be stuck there in front of another zoom call. So with the podcast, they get to listen, they get to engage, they focus more intently. And it's all self paced and people loved. I don't know about you, but I like to listen to podcasts. When I'm walking. When I'm doing housework, that's always a great time to sort of multitask. So many different benefits to podcasting. So tell me, if you would put in the chat, how do you consume your content? Are you more of a written word person? Do you prefer blogs? Do you like video or audio? And the audio, of course, would be podcasting. So let's take a look. podcast. Yeah, well, I would I guess it would be podcast because that's why you're, you're on this call, or you're interested in this call and how to tie audio content to boost employee engagement. Written Word Yes, Laura written word. It's okay. It's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. And I will talk about how we get vlogs from podcast transcripts in a moment. Okay. Yeah, good. And I'm also reading some of the earlier comments about employee engagement. And I see eliminating silos, particularly in a remote environment, and we are definitely going to come back to that one. Okay, so benefits of the podcast, there they are. Now, what you need to know, before you start, and I, what you're going to hear from me is the culmination of, you know, 50 episodes of Making a podcast, right? And my leadership experience all combined, enrolled into this webinar. So the first thing you need to know before you start a podcast is why you're doing it. What's your why, and I love linking it back to an employee engagement survey. So what's your employee engagement survey tell you and don't do one of those surveys that people do every six months? And then it's this arduous task to pull all the data together? Do pulse surveys, and I'm sure you've done a bunch of them lately as we transition into this hybrid work environment. But what are the pain points? What are you as a business trying to achieve with your culture? Where do you need to sort of bolster those communication gaps? And it could be, you know, a number of different things. It could be executives, it could be meet the executive everybody loves during COVID The fact that we saw executives in their home environment with the cat jumping up on them, or the kid running around in the background, why did we like that? It's because it made them more human, more relatable, and yes, it made them more authentic. In all of this comes back to authentic leadership. You will need to be clear on your why why do you want to start a podcast? What are the objectives of the business? And then what is your Episode theme? There's two things there's a show and an episode. So show could be made the executives and then you would have different episodes around that. A show could be meet the salesman should meet the sales department, we talked about silos a moment ago, you could feature a different department every month, every other week, you could feature technology, you could have the engineering teams talking about what they're doing. One particular theme that I love is meet the SO and SO meet so and so. So meet Bob, at the plants in Ohio, you know, meet Susie at the plant in China a day in the life of it brings people to life. You know, you can use podcasts, not only to enhance engagement, but also for recognition, you might have a podcast or a show that's totally focused on recognition. And each episode is something to do with recognition, frequency, and duration.

Jan Griffiths: 15:55

Right now, the Finding Gravitas podcast and and we've, you know, we've learned some things along the way. We have in depth interviews, we do 45 minutes to an hour of really in depth interviews. And we publish every two weeks. And then so we'll do an interview for one episode. And then the next episode will be a solo episode where I'll be talking about something related to the business or authentic leadership. I will warn you that a 45 minute interview is a lot of work. And I would suggest that starting out, you keep them short to get engagement, I would suggest no more than 15 or 20 minutes, every other week, until you start to build more adoption. And then of course, the the important thing to remember with a podcast is the cadence and to stay consistent. Do you know that most podcasts fizzle out after seven episodes? And when you realize how much works involved, I want to scare you. But you realize that that's why right, you got to be committed. So that's why there has to be a business imperative around the podcasts, what is the business mission? What are you trying to achieve? And you can hook it back to employee engagement, retention, attraction, all of those things. What's your budget, you can launch a podcast right now, right after this webinar, with very little budget. You don't need a lot of equipment, you can launch it on something like anchor for free. and off you go. I would caution you against that approach. The other reason that podcasts fail is because of audio quality. Without great audio quality, people will turn off and I had no idea what this thing called audio quality meant until I entered the world of podcasting. Now I understand more about it than I ever thought humanly possible. So you need a budget. And that depends on what you're trying to accomplish and the audio quality that you're looking for, and how much bandwidth you've got within your company to make this happen. If you've got some people that you can throw with this great, but you may need to work with somebody on the outside or outsource part of it. So that needs to be in the budget as well. Have a target launch date. be crystal clear. If you don't have a launch date, it won't happen. This is just like any other business initiative must have a launch date milestones, a team around it and a plan. And then be clear on the metrics. I outlined some of the metrics already, you'll be able to tell who's downloading it, how long they're listening to it, you'll be able to see how the adoption rate is building and then you might need to tweak you know, you might see that the podcasts in the sales department are taken off like gangbusters and why is that you know, what is their formula, and then you'll need stakeholder buy in. So I would, again I'll bring this back to a business imperative, it has to be a business imperative. So stakeholder buy in normally, in our business, what we see is either HR or marketing and communications lead the charge.

Jan Griffiths: 19:19

Okay, so that's before you start there has to be a good plan. You have to know your why the equipment, I had no idea that having a USB plug in microphone was so important and I had no idea that there were so many different types. You have to use. Here's the key with the equipment. You have to produce two separate audio files, one for you or the person interviewing and then another for the guest and if you have more than one guest they will all need separate audio files. Why? Because the audio engineer will We'll need to pull all of these together to master the audio to produce the finest quality audio that is pleasing to the listener. And there is a science behind this. And there are many different audio editing options available to you out there. I'll talk about them in just a moment. So get a USB plug in microphone, I have an equipment list that I'll be glad to send you if you want to email me at. For some recommendations, we like to recommend for our podcast guests a middle of the road. It's a $99 podcast mic, so that they have nice good quality audio. If you can't see my microphone right now I'm speaking out of a Shure SM seven B. And that is a high end microphone. Obviously, I'm a podcaster. That's about $400. And it is the same microphone that Joe Rogan uses, actually is the same microphone that Michael Jackson recorded thriller on. So there's a piece of information you may never use ever again. And you need headphones, you have to have closed back headphones, you can't have like the little headset, because again, you're trying to create two separate very clean audio files. And if if you don't have the headphones on, then the sound coming out of your computer will go back into your microphone, so then you won't have to clean audio files. The room. Oh my gosh, so much to know about the room that you're in, do not ever record in a room with a hard floor and hard walls. You need soft furnishings around you. Otherwise, you get Echo and the sound bounces off the walls. I recorded well, maybe I can tell you who it is I recorded and Carter Carter who's a senior procurement leader in the automotive space. And she we couldn't find the right room for her I ended up recording her in her closet in her bedroom. Because it's great for audio quality, right? There's a lot of clothes around there. So these are things that you'll you'll need to think about. Then there's the process to what does this process look like? Well, just like any other business project, you will need a project owner, somebody has to own this. Somebody has to be responsible either for bringing all the pieces together internally or for managing the outsource parts of it. You'll need to decide who's going to do the interviewing? Are you going to do the interviewing a different people going to do the interviewing, and who are the guests going to be? I would always recommend that you get at least seven or eight episodes in the pipeline before you start releasing. Because once you start releasing, you have to keep that cadence if you if you say you're gonna release every two weeks, you have to do that otherwise you will lose the listenership. So making sure that you know what that cadence is, and you have episodes in the pipeline, because people will not show up for interviews, they'll delay they'll have other priorities. So don't put that crazy pressure on yourself. Trust me, I've been there. I've done it. recording software. A lot of people produce podcasts on Zoom. Please don't do that. You can do it with the audio and we have done it. But the audio quality coming out of zoom is not great even when you separate the audio files which you can do in zoom. Don't do that. Use a recording use the proper recording software, we use Zen caster. There are several others out there, the squad cast is a whole bunch of them. Audacity is a good one. That's a free one. But we like to use Zen caster because it allows us to see the person on video and record the audio on two separate files which we then pull in for editing and mastering.

Jan Griffiths: 24:04

So that takes us to audio editing. Now this thing called audio editing. The picture that you see there is actually a wave form. And I didn't realize it was such an art and really a science to audio editing. Have you ever listened to a podcast where you get those upper upper per plosives they call plosives. Or that those S's that drive you crazy? A good audio editor will be able to pull those out, smooth out the audio. Mix the volumes balanced the volume so you have a nice smooth, seamless audio experience. There may be background noises that come in that you didn't want in your podcast. A good audio editor will be able to take those out some content, some people will be on our own. Right. It's not going to create great audio. And people sometimes don't even know that they're doing it. So you will need to pull that out because you don't want your CEO sounding like a bumbling idiot. And we have edited all of our podcasts or edited, we edited a podcast interview, once with and we made 1300 edits 1300 That's taking out words that maybe there's some content that the person didn't want in there that you need to very carefully cut out, and then pulling out all those ANDs and ORs. And there really is a science behind it. And I would absolutely not skimp on podcast editing on audio editing because you want the best quality that you can possibly get. The next item is the hosting platform. Now this might be terminology that you're not familiar with, if you're not familiar with podcasting, but don't worry, it's easy. If I can figure it out. Anybody can we use a hosting platform called Lipson, there's many others out there. There's anchor, there's Captivate, and when you producing a public podcast, such as my podcast, Finding Gravitas, and it pushed out to Spotify, iTunes, Ghana, in India, a number of different places. This hosting platform does all of that for you. So you produce the audio file, you upload it to the hosting platform, you figure out where you want to send it and off it goes. If you're talking about it, internal podcast, obviously, you don't want to do that. You don't want to share it with the world. You want to keep it internal. There are different podcast hosting platforms that you need for that type of that type of control to control it internally. And we, right now we are working with a company called Captivate and we love Captivate because they're they're a mission driven company. They actually have public and private platforms and I'm going to switch my Finding Gravitas over to captivate, there's, there's a vast difference in cost with these different private podcast hosting platforms. They're anywhere from $2,000 a year to $80,000 a year. And they've all got different levels of security and different bells and whistles. You know, quite frankly, I like Captivate. It's basic, it's simple, it does the job. Security is often you know, it's a question I'm asked people say, oh, you know, we don't want anybody sharing this. Look, if you're really that worried about somebody sharing an internal podcast, then I wouldn't, I wouldn't even bother doing it. Right? authentic leadership is all about transparency, I get that you don't want to publish it to the world, I completely understand that. But if you're afraid that somebody is going to share it with another person outside of the company, they probably are, you know, they might do that. No matter there's no security in the world, that will stop somebody from having another recording device, recording the audio and sending it to somebody else if they really, really want to. So either you're in this and you want to be transparent and share it or you're not. And we can lock it down by certain email addresses. But that's getting a little bit too technical right now. But there's often a lot of questions around security. So basically, you produce an RSS feed, and you can push that out on your internet or a different different website. There's many different ways of doing an internal podcast.

Jan Griffiths: 28:45

Let's talk about promotion. Now, Laura, you said that you like blogs, and you'd like the written word. Here's the one of the greatest benefits of a podcast. It is a content creation machine. I am drowning in content from my podcast. And you will be too if you decide to do your own internal podcast. First of all, you produce a transcript, which is really easy to do. The transcript you can use you can take quotes from the transcript and use them for social media if you want internally or externally. You can create blogs from the transcripts. You can create audio grams from the podcast from the podcast itself. And those are those little snippets of audio that you see sometimes on social and you can video. In fact, I have a client this week that I'm working with where we're going to be producing a podcast episode, and we're going to be videotaping it so they can do a number of different things. And let's not forget that voice search is the next evolution of SEO. So really getting into podcasting and producing audio is the right thing to do right now. But You want people to, you know, you want people to feel good about your company, right? You want to feel transparent. You want people to feel excited and engaged. And how you promote the podcast internally will be a major factor to determine its success. Both in the launch, you can build a buzz and excitement before you launch during the episodes. And then after you produce each episode, there's so much that you can do on so much content that you will get. So I've given you you know, a very quick overview of podcasting, what it's about and how it it can link right back to employee engagement. I am a firm believer in podcasting as the medium to drive employee engagement. So what are the next steps for you, if you're contemplating doing your own internal podcast, if you hit that QR code on the screen right now, that takes you to my calendar link, you can schedule some time with me, it's at no charge, I will be more than happy to help you build your business case, and your plan for your internal podcast. Take advantage of my experience, both in leadership and in podcasts to help you on your journey. So at this point, we're going to take a couple of minutes to ask any questions that you might have. So fire away, please put them in the chat. Who is the best person to forward this to in my company, I would suggest both HR, Marketing and Communications, I see it very much as a joint effort. And we have seen it both ways. We've seen HR take the lead, and we've seen Marketing and Communications, take the lead. And you can email me you know, you'll be getting the video. And we're also going to produce a podcast audio for you as well. But I also stay tuned, don't jump off just yet, because I want to give you a little sneak peek as to what's coming up in the world of Gravitas, Detroit. So if let's take a sneak peek if we would please on the next slide. September one, we got two things coming out September one, we have got our first mini course, which is all about how to be a great podcast guest and I have taken all the research that you'll need to do to figure out how to prepare your guests and all my experience and we've crammed it into a course that bite size in less than 20 minutes. Your Podcast guests will know everything they need to know the tech the process everything and they will be ready to deliver a superb performance. So that's coming up, we're going to release that September 1. And we're also going to release our new coaching packages. So we will we can help you we can do as little or as much as you want. And these coaching packages go from just supporting you and helping you and coach you through the process all the way to doing absolutely everything for you and delivering a podcast to you. And because you participated in this webinar, you will be the first to know you will have a heads up on those courses that are coming up. But please, you know one step at a time I would love to talk to you book time with me. Let's talk in more detail about your podcast needs. And happy podcasting and have a wonderful day

33:35

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast and you found something of value that will help you on your quest for your gravitas then please share with your friends and colleagues and subscribe. Visit us at gravitasdetroit.com To find out more