Are Your Employees Listening? Connecting through Podcasts
In today’s world, employees and clients are inundated with news and messages constantly, not to mention juggling remote work, jobsite visits, and interacting with clients. Team members can feel disengaged, disconnected, and uninspired. How can you connect and reach them?
ECS recently launched a podcast to engage with our employees and clients for this reason. We recognized the opportunities to improve internal communication, attract and recruit talent, and to build brand awareness.
- Accessibility. Podcasting lets our team members hear from each other, no matter their physical location. With more than half of our employees being in the field, it’s important to meet our employees where they are. While podcasts are played from a phone, it does not require active reading on a screen once you hit play, so people can listen while they’re on the go, from the car or even on a walk.
- Improve internal communications. ECS is one of the largest and most rapidly growing engineering and consulting companies in the U.S. and, as we continue to grow, our challenge is to keep finding ways to connect with our employees. That is why we started a podcast – to communicate more personally with our employees, like you would at the watercooler. Podcasting allows listeners to get to know employees across different departments and in different locations in a way they may not be able to otherwise. Podcasting is personable, allowing employees to connect voices, names, and faces that they may not directly hear from on a regular basis.
- Recruit talent and increase retention. Topics for a podcast can cover a range of topics, including unique projects, industry trends, work-life balance, safety, and benefits. Sharing more about leadership and mentorship engages current and prospective employees with topics like career journeys, leadership style, and lessons learned along the way. This also gives prospective employees an opportunity to hear about career opportunities and benefits that they may not be aware of, like tuition assistance.
- Build brand awareness. You can build brand awareness through your podcast and showcase your technical expertise. Podcasts also let you share news and go in depth about your services. With show notes available on multiple podcast platforms, you can link to other forms of content such as blogs, websites, and social media.
- Podcasts are engaging for listeners. Podcasts have a listen-through rate of 98 percent for a 30-minute episode. In a technical industry like engineering, podcasting offers a unique advantage. This medium allows podcast guests to go more in-depth on a topic than in other forms of content like an eblast or blog post. It also provides a unique way to engage audiences who are in the consideration stage of brand engagement in your marketing funnel.
- Podcasts are engaging for creators, too. Podcasting is an engagement tool, offering multiple ways of team building with a variety of staff across your organization. Hosting, producing, and marketing the show can provide opportunities for collaboration at every level. One way we engaged team members was in creating the theme music. We learned one of our employees in Austin, Texas, writes music so we asked him to write a song that we use in our intro and outro. We also engaged senior leadership in hosting the podcast as well as some of the training and development team members in helping edit and produce episodes.
Podcasting is a unique, novel way to share the story of your company, from employee spotlights to technical information. It provides an opportunity to reach current and prospective employees as well as current and prospective clients. Consider it as part of your marketing strategy and see where it can take your content.
About the Author: Julie Smith is senior communications manager for ECS Southeast, LLP. She can be reached at jesmith@ecslimited.com.
This article originally appeared in the January 8, 2023, issue of The Zweig Letter. Reprinted with permission.
