I’m working with a company to develop a strategic internal communication plan. Part of the research phase includes a communication-focused survey of employees. One section of the survey asks employees to rate their interest in potential new channels. Podcating is one of the choices.

I’m anxious to see podcasting introduced to the employee communications mix. I’d love to help a company figure out how to do it well.

As with most new technologies, podcasting is earning sneers and eye-rolls from most executives. Even as General Motors launches podcasts, the notion of intranet-based podcasts just isn’t resonating with communication executives. Yet. But benefits of pre-intranet communication coupled with the reality of today’s workplace make podcasting compelling, at least to contemplate if not to rush into production.

Think back to the employee newsletter or magazine you received before company computer networks came along. For every employee who stopped what he was doing to devour every word of the publication, there were a dozen who slipped it into a briefcase and took it home to read at their leisure. The only way to do that with an intranet is to print out every article of interest. Nobody does that. Nobody has the time.

That’s the reality of the workplace today. Focus groups at the company where I’m consulting revealed a situation that I’ve heard at every other company where I’ve consulted over the last decade. The company went through a period of downsizing some years ago. In order to avoid ever having to go through that trauma again, management has settled on a lean staff that can handle the work when times are good but is already cut to the bone and ready to operate when times are bad. The downside of this approach is that most employees who are still with the company have absorbed the work of those who left, in addition to continuing to do the work they did before the layoffs. When business improves, these same employees will get even more work to fulfill customer demands.

So who has time to sit at the computer and read company news? The ability to take that newsletter home improved the odds that employees would read it. Restricting access to the desktop when employees are struggling to finish all their work in days that already well exceed eight hours is guaranteeing that many employees just won’t bother. The consequences of an uninformed employee population can have a significant impact on the company’s bottom line.

Do we go back to print? While I’m an advocate of print for a variety of reasons, its effectiveness is realized only when balanced with other media, including the online media, the channel of choice for current content that is best communicated immediately. (“Weekly newsletter” is an oxymoron.)

Thinking about all this, I’m reminded of a channel many companies used 15 or 20 years ago aimed particularly at the sales force. They produced audio cassettes so employees could catch up on news and information in their cars as they drove from customer to customer. The cassettes weren’t exactly timely. They took time to write, produce, duplicate and distribute. But employees could listen when they had the time and in the location of their choice.

Which brings us back to podcasting. Some critics of podcasting have charged that it’s nothing new, that organizations have been producing audio files for years that can be streamed or downloaded. What makes podcasting different, though, is the delivery method. A podcast shows up without the user taking any action beyond the initial subscription. And it can be transferred with ease to a digital audio device so the user can listen when it’s convenient. Most podcasts are heard in cars, but there’s also the treadmill, walking the dog, sitting on long, tedious flights, and waiting in airport terminals. (I’ve listened to podcasts in all these venues.)

So why not produce a podcast for employees? Companies like Cypress Semiconductor have been making MP3 audio files available for employees for several years now; they even bought inexpensive, low-capacity MP3 players for their employees. Now employees catch up on speeches and meetings and other audio content while jogging at lunch or riding the bus to work. Employees who missed a lot of messages before are now hearing them. The next logical step is to give every employee a podcatcher—the software that facilitates the podcast subscription process—and distribute the files as feeds.

What kind of content could a company offer in a podcast? Off the top of my head, I’ve come up with…

• A rundown of the day’s news
• Executive speeches
• Meetings
• Investor road shows (give employees some insight into what outside audiences are hearing)
• Customer trade shows (ditto above)
• Business updates

I can even see different business units offering their own podcasts, allowing employees to subscribe to those that would be useful and ignore those that aren’t. IT can hard-code those podcasts deemed important to everyone into the podcatcher, just as they can make the intranet home page the browser’s default home page. Access to external podcasts could easily be restricted, protecting the company’s precious internal bandwidth.

Considering the low-to-no-cost entry into podcasting, its acceptance into the internal communication mix should happen sooner rather than later.