The hidden labour behind a company podcast
Summary
Launching an internal podcast is a bigger bet than it seems. The show must serve a purpose for its audience and stakeholders, maintain a sustainable rhythm, achieve a high production standard, and reach its listeners on the platforms where they lurk.
As part of my role at Thoughtworks, I recently launched a company podcast called cultureCast. The idea is to invite leaders, movers and shakers and unsung heroes to discuss their ideas about the company culture and to shape the conversation as we design our culture in parallel.
In the past, I’ve been a guest on several shows and even dabbled with hosting, but cultureCast has been a massive undertaking. Our team may have even bitten off more than we can chew, but that’s a conversation for another day. This post is a reflection on what it takes to run a company-wide show, so you know what you’re signing up for if you’re keen to launch an internal podcast.
Define your theme, goals and guests
If your podcast must exist, it must do a clear job for your audience. A podcast is a unique content category. Many people enjoy them, but they’re not as consumable as an Instagram Reel. By design, they are better suited to in-depth conversations. People can consume podcasts in the background while they do something else, so length isn’t as much a concern as, say, a video.
The first thing to remember is that a podcast WILL NOT have universal appeal. That’s not the way the internet works, and there’s no reason people will consume corporate content differently. So, it’s important to think through the show's theme and goals. As I noted earlier, we launched cultureCast to make the cultural conversation salient in people’s minds and to help leaders influence the design process by engaging in the conversation. We also have a few other goals in mind.
First, we want to humanise our leadership by engaging them in a fun, in-depth interview that also reveals their personal lives outside work.
Second, we reinforce the “open-door” and “ask me anything” leadership policies when leaders answer tough questions (some from the audience) on the show. Leaders don’t get canned questions or a script with rehearsed answers. The show is raw and uncut.
And third, by being visible and talking about their approach to work, relationships, and culture, leaders can inspire middle managers to behave in culturally aligned ways.
With that goal in mind, we first decided to invite the C-suite as guests. That said, as we publish more episodes, we’re learning that, in the interest of a diverse guest list, we also want to invite other awesome colleagues, regardless of their seniority.
Find a sustainable rhythm for your audience
We’ve released four episodes of cultureCast on a fortnightly rhythm. Frequency is a tricky decision. Most podcasts on the internet follow a weekly posting schedule. Some podcasts even have twice-a-week episodes, with each episode featuring a different theme.
Corporate podcasts, however, are a different kettle of fish. First, your audience is finite. Second, they have a finite appetite for company content. And third, the combination of their time and attention is a zero-sum game. If they pay attention to something new, it’s at the cost of something else. We don’t yet know the right frequency for our show, and we may revisit this decision as we analyse viewership and feedback for our content.
Decide your production level (and pay the price)
Not everyone will listen to a one-hour podcast. Podcast consumption patterns vary by country and culture. And while these patterns may not concern creators with a large addressable market, they should influence corporate creators.
For example, only 31% of podcasters online publish video episodes alongside their audio content. In a corporation, though, we also want to be inclusive of different media consumption patterns, so we don’t just publish an audio file; we publish:
a video version of each episode;
a custom thumbnail for the video;
transcripts and chapter markers for both the audio and the video;
short, vertical format clips that are between a minute and three minutes long;
video segments that are up to five minutes long;
and an episode page that catalogues all episode resources.
As you can imagine, this level of production is no small undertaking. As a host, I spend 8-12 hours each month preparing for the interviews, fine-tuning my virtual and physical studio setup, and doing some episode edits. My teammate, Nieves Muñoz, plays the producer. She sets up interviews, edits the main episodes, shortlists clips and segments and curates all the other assets I listed earlier. I’m glad we have the right tools to simplify this production process.
The right tools make all the difference
Riverside has become one of my favourite tools. It’s an unmatched podcasting platform, and its text-based editing interface simplifies production for novice editors. It has some spectacular time-saving features, such as removing long pauses, enhancing audio quality and creating smart screen layouts, so there’s visual variety in the video content. Some of its AI features are sloppy and amateurish, but that’s true for all AI across all platforms.
The big advantage that Riverside offers over call recordings from video conferencing platforms is that you get dedicated, high-quality audio and video feeds for every participant. That feature gives you the flexibility to edit the episode footage in a more sophisticated tool like Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve, and even with Riverside’s native editor, you get high-quality outputs.
Creating segments and clips, generating transcripts, show notes, and chapter markers is a breeze. Of course, taste and judgment matter, and we still pay attention to the little details, but Riverside’s thoughtful design saves several hours in the production process. We still use traditional tools like Photoshop for small parts of the workflow, but for the most part, Riverside is our end-to-end production workbench.
We’re also developing a house style for editing the episode assets. I didn’t know what that house style would look like, so as a director, I edited the first couple of episodes end-to-end. Based on that experience, I created editing guides and checklists that others can use. Conveying a creative vision is hard, so the checklists aren’t a one-and-done. They’ll continue to improve with time.
Plan for distribution like it’s half the job
Every creator hopes for the “build it, and they will come” myth to come true. It never does. In the last decade, we’ve all experienced a content explosion – there’s more high-quality content out there than we can consume. Between OTT platforms like Netflix, Prime Video and Apple TV, and platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, Substack and whatnot, people have content backlogs and preferred ways of finding new material. Add to that the choice of clients and interfaces to consume content. For example, if you like Pocketcasts to listen to podcasts, you’re unlikely to switch to another app. Similarly, if someone prefers their mobile phone for watching videos on the go, it’s unlikely they’ll pay attention to desktop-only videos. A company podcast isn’t mandatory listening, so it competes with consumer content, clients and interfaces. That competition creates a massive attention barrier.
No one owes us their attention. Breaking through the attention barrier is the first step. Since we can’t make our shows available on public platforms, many of the usual apps, for example, YouTube and Spotify, are out of the question. Instead, we rely on instant messaging, segmented email campaigns and the enterprise social network to get the word out. Promoting an episode takes a lot of effort. While the episodes appear fortnightly, we spend the intervening period on edits, designing comms and identifying the segments that make the upcoming episode appealing. Running promotions for each episode takes about a week, and four episodes in, we’re still figuring out the best way to distribute our content.
A launch checklist for your show
✅ Define the purpose of the show. Who is it for, and what should it change for them?
✅ Clarify 2–3 concrete goals (for example: humanise leadership, reinforce “ask me anything” habits, inspire middle managers).
✅ Find on a realistic publishing cadence (fortnightly, monthly, etc.) that your audience and team can sustain.
✅ Choose your production level: audio only, audio + video, clips, transcripts, chapter markers, episode pages.
✅ Assemble a minimal production stack and workflow, so you’re not reinventing the process every episode.
✅ Plan distribution as seriously as production: which internal channels, how often you’ll promote each episode, and who will amplify it.
A bunch of open questions
It’s been two months since the first cultureCast episode went live, and it’s early days for a show that we’d like to run till the end of the year. Here are a few questions we’re still learning about.
We want a diverse guest list, but people want to hear from the who’s who of the company. Do we front-load the heavy hitters, or spread them out over multiple seasons? It’s hard to tell which is the better long-term decision.
Since people have limited patience for corporate content, should we stick with a fortnightly schedule or switch to a monthly one? cultureCast won’t be the only thing we communicate to our colleagues, so there may be value in spreading the episodes out to make room for other communications.
What’s the right length for such a podcast? An hour feels about right for the content, but should we split an episode into two parts to make it easier to consume? I don’t know yet. The clips, segments and chapter markers should make the episodes feel more approachable, but perhaps a 30-minute episode is less daunting than a one-hour show.
The biggest challenge, however, is staying the course. Being a content creator is a long-haul project. Podcasting is a whole other challenge. Here’s what Riverside says,
“There are no shortcuts to building a podcast audience. Generally, you can expect it to take at least six months to see a significant uptick in your podcast downloads.”
Cultivating a small but loyal audience takes time. Corporations, however, have little patience for long-running internal communication projects. As employees, we mirror some of that impatience. When 70% of my colleagues ignore a podcast episode, it’s easy to feel disheartened. It’s all a matter of perspective, though. If I were to launch a podcast on the internet tomorrow, I’d be lucky to get 500 downloads for my initial episodes, regardless of content quality. In that light, when 30% of a 10,000-person company plays our content, maybe, just maybe, we should motivate ourselves to stay the course.
Well, that’s my internal podcasting experience so far. Give it a few more months, and I’ll have more reflections for you. In the meantime, if you’re thinking of launching an internal podcast, you know what to expect. Have questions or reactions? Drop them in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.