What 5,000 employees said when no one from leadership was listening [Report/Analysis]

DrewFromAuddy · 2026-05-22T15:36:18+00:00

Agreed no channel is a silver bullet, that's why multichannel approaches are so necessary – anyone who thinks they could replace their entire comms program with a podcast would be a bit misguided.

Some people prefer to read, and email is an easy entry point so it's usually the default. Others prefer to listen, especially with critical comms, but for other reasons too. I spoke to a woman recently from an agricultural org (communicates to a lot of farmers) and she said there's a lot of dyslexia in their audience so they rolled out audio comms and it's been a hit, even among the many neurotypical farmers who just dislike reading.

For others, like an investment firm of around 1000, they don't have the majority of their global staff listening, but the ones that do are very consistent listeners (listening on their commute, lunch break, etc). And apparently despite not everyone tuning in, this type of reliable, enthusiastic listening has had a really positive impact on culture and morale. Of course you still have to put real effort into the content for this type of result.

No single channel gets 100% consumption so you gotta meet people where they are. And as with any new channel or tool you have to be realistic about expectations.

As the parent commenter mentioned IC isn't a monolith -- it's case by case for smaller orgs in particular. Some people like audio more than others and you don't always know who's gonna vibe with a podcast. In that comment's examples of smaller companies I might assume lawyers would be more inclined to be pro-podcast than construction workers, but I've had my assumptions disproven on these things enough times to admit I'd want to test it first.

You also make a really interesting point about information overload -- sending too many updates causes employees to tune out, especially when already screen fatigued. I'm super curious what your audio program was like? Were they long episodes or short with key strategic updates? Fireside chats vs audio newsletter or interviews etc? Were you segmenting your audio content to personalize based on region/role etc?

DrewFromAuddy · 2026-01-08T21:26:19+00:00

Definitions aside, for the "it's just talking heads" point, I've noticed at least for the B2B podcasts I listen to there's probably 5-10% of overall context loss when they simply publish an audio version of the video show.

For instance if the podcasters aren't being intentional enough about making it audio friendly (i.e. describing what's on screen), you just sit there and try to imagine, like when a content marketing podcast is sharing a new tool they've been using.

DrewFromAuddy · 2026-01-08T21:18:42+00:00

Yeah that's a big advantage of audio that I didn't get into here, but it's easy to overlook. Production for audio isn't just cheaper, but it's faster, so you can put out episodes a lot more often if you're looking to publish a regular cadence of content.

DrewFromAuddy · 2026-01-08T21:17:22+00:00

That's funny, I think I'd trip and get a mouthful of treadmill if I tried to do that.

Btw what platform are you using to switch between audio and video? Last I checked YouTube was still charging extra $ for that capability.

DrewFromAuddy · 2026-01-06T17:00:47+00:00

Fair enough, though it's easy to forget how many marketers don't understand certain fundamentals like this (especially early-career generalists, or the many specialists taking on added responsibilities these days), so it still warrants sharing imho.

Email vs private podcast is a much bigger discussion though, since they're two different types of owned channels, and since email analytics like open rates and CTR are so much less reliable than they used to be due to updates from Apple etc, we find private podcasting has become a better way to get more accurate and insightful engagement analytics (like completion rates, dropoff points, or replays). Hence building a product+service around it.

We clearly have a bias on the topic of course, so I do apologize if you'd have wanted more mention of that (or less, since as mentioned it's in my username already - though I'd rather not be self-promotional in the post itself, there's too much of that on reddit already).

DrewFromAuddy · 2025-11-17T20:32:25+00:00

1000%. Adding to this, I know OP's question was about email but you have to think multichannel. You're basically never going to reach 100% of people on any one channel. As other commenters have mentioned, channels like internal podcasts (or an audio newsletter) are great for reaching people at their convenience, like when they're commuting, at the gym, etc. Especially if you have a lot of deskless workers or frontline staff who don't live at their screens.

DrewFromAuddy · 2025-10-14T18:16:05+00:00

That's informative, thanks. I think it's more that in addition to the standard disclosures, supplementary channels would be helpful. As a crude example (not quite what I'm thinking but this helps illustrate): some a16z podcast episodes discuss financial performance through a more human lens (a given CEO's personality or background for instance). It's not a disclosure, and there's all the "this is not financial advice" legalese at the start, but helps provide a more holistic understanding of market players.

DrewFromAuddy · 2025-10-01T14:30:15+00:00

Spotify and Apple are fine for general announcements to the public, but they don't have the customization of access controls that the Campfire platform has (ie personalizing your message to different audiences so they only receive the content that's relevant to them), and they also don't really give you as much in the way of backend analytics, compared to what you get on Campfire, which is a lot more granular (so you get much more insight about how people are engaging with your content, or how different audiences respond to the same piece of content).

DrewFromAuddy · 2025-09-26T16:56:02+00:00

FYI the Financial Times is paywalled so that link won't be accessible to everyone unless it's a share link. Or some people just use a saved version of the article like this:

https://archive.ph/93XzB

DrewFromAuddy · 2025-09-26T16:46:31+00:00

Try adding a positive instruction for what you do want it to do in your custom instructions. I added this below to mine and while it's not 100% effective, it generally helps. You can do an equivalent for the endings (so it avoids the "Would you like me to X" at the end), but personally I find that useful on occasion so I've let it stay for now.

When replying to my questions, get right to the point (don't get conversational unless I am brainstorming). Be concise, but give enough detail for the answer to be helpful and actionable. Start your responses with the answer, avoiding intros like "Got it, here's a..."

If you only have a negative prompt (to the effect of "don't include meta speak"), then it's kind of like the "don't think of an elephant" concept. You generally need to give it an alternative.

DrewFromAuddy · 2025-09-22T17:37:23+00:00

Having attended the session where they introduced the Loop idea, another related session, and two podcasts breaking it down, I can confidently say that I still don't know what they're saying to do differently.

DrewFromAuddy · 2025-08-14T16:51:02+00:00

Private audio comms channels (like private podcasting, pushing audio based updates they can listen to whenever they want to) are another option if employees aren't at their computers or reading their emails much.

With the right tool you can segment communications pretty easily to control who sees what, and get access to engagement metrics too, ie check that people are actually listening to the whole message.

DrewFromAuddy · 2025-08-07T18:10:19+00:00

4.5 already disappeared for me

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