Should I stay or should I go?
Using internal podcasts to keep your best people on board when everyone’s jumping ship.
Okay okay. The world’s upside down, the plague returns for a second holiday season like a pantomime villain while everyone wonders if, when and how we’ll ever get back to normal. And if not, how the new normal will work.
In the UK this week, our glorious leader has just offered ‘guidance’ to work from home, “if you can”, from next Monday. “Maybe I can, maybe I can’t”, thinks the team member who barely remembers office / warehouse / shop / canteen / depot / call centre life.
What about employers? What does this mean? What should we do? Just as we’re starting to rev up the engine again and get things moving at a not quite pre-Covid, but better than this time last year’s pace, we’re back to home working again. And for how long? And for which teams? What parts of the business does this affect? And which clients and customers need reassuring? Aaaargh!
But enough about you. What about your people?
According to an article in Fast Company, “a recent Gallup survey found that 48% of the working population in the United States is actively job searching”. Yes, only a gnat’s whisker off half your workforce looking for a new gig. Actively.
And that’s just the people who are prepared to tell. The same survey claims the price of losing and replacing an employee can end up costing up to twice their annual salary.
But paying attention to what’s happening within an organization is the first step in alleviating this problem. So building successful relationships with your teams and individual employees has never been more important.
At the heart of every positive, productive and committed relationship is good communication. When people are heard, consulted, engaged and included, they feel part of the story. In fact, they may even feel like they are the hero of their own story.
So what kind of stories should you be telling your teams? And how should you tell them?
We know email inboxes are full to bursting, distressing recipients with the ever-increasing to-do’s on their lists. And what about employees who don’t work on computers and rarely read email? Video is great, but about as peaceful/distracting as the top deck of a bus full of rowdy school kids. Face to face is, as we know, facing its own challenges.
The serenity, singularity, intelligence and intimacy of audio.
With pretty much the whole wide world glued to a smart phone for most of the day, podcasts have found their time, place and relevance in so many millions of people’s lives. And the connection to quality earbuds and headphones helps too. To ask your teams to listen and interact with audio is not only accessible and easy, but a welcome break from the screen-based town halls, company-wide emails and the dreaded Z-bomb (you saw the CEO of better.com fire 900 of his team on Zoom last week? Nice work Vishal - there goes that employer of the year award….).
Whether you want to inspire your team/s with motivational guest speakers, explain company culture, provide an oasis of meditative calm, offer additional training or share allegorical stories with them, a private branded podcast that is password protected, accessed from a proprietary app on any device and available to listen to at any time is not only possible but incredibly effective.
If you want to find out more about making and measuring effective internal podcasts to keep your employees connected, motivated and engaged with your own inspirational audio, tell us your story at The Horse’s Mouth - we’re all ears! Contact hello@thehorsesmouth.co
Sources
FAST COMPANY shorturl.at/mpFIZ / GALLUP shorturl.at/iANO9 / CNBC shorturl.at/jpxBI