Tina Dietz (00:00):

What happens when a privately held utility engineering and construction company decides to launch an internal podcast and launch it right before COVID-19 hits? Today, we have a real live case study. Stay tuned, here on Podcast Inc.

Tina Dietz (00:24):

Welcome to the Podcast Inc podcast. I'm Tina Dietz, your host CEO of Twin Flames Studios. I'm thrilled to be part of a cooperation to produce this podcast between myself here at Twin Flame Studios, the Podcast Inc conference, Heartcast Media, Blubrry, and the Pioneering Collective. Today on the show, we're talking with Jon Thurmond, who is the Mid-Atlantic regional human resources manager for Team Fishel, a privately held utility engineering and construction company that launched their internal podcast earlier this year.

Tina Dietz (01:01):

Jon has worked in a variety of industries in roles encompassing recruitment, employee labor relations, HR leadership, and training. He oversees the company's social media recruiting program and produces the company's internal podcast, that we just mentioned, [HR Pro Podcast 00:01:17]. Jon is also the creator, host, and producer of the very successful human resources show, HR Social Hour Half Hour Podcast, very popular in the industry. We're diving in today to talk with Jon about how the internal podcast came about, what he had to do to prepare, what objections he had overcome, and what happened when just weeks after the podcast launched, COVID-19 happened. I know you're curious about what happened next, so let's get right to the interview.

Tina Dietz (01:48):

Hey, John, how's life treating you?

Jon Thurmond (01:51):

All things considered, Tina, doing well. I hope you are too.

Tina Dietz (01:54):

Oh yeah, absolutely. We're finding our way in these very interesting times, as we find. It's an interesting time to be alive, we're all learning a lot. I think you'd agree.

Jon Thurmond (02:08):

As I tell people all the time, none of us have ever dealt with anything like this before. Every day is something new, every day is something new.

Tina Dietz (02:19):

Hopefully we're saying that in a voice like, "Every day is something new!" Not, "Every day is something new."

Jon Thurmond (02:27):

I try to do the former.

Tina Dietz (02:29):

It's all context. It's all a context.

Jon Thurmond (02:31):

For my 17 year old, who is going to be a rising senior in high school, I think he's probably at the latter right now, unfortunately. He's [crosstalk 00:02:39] and he has decided he is trying to grow a virus beard, which, when you're 17 and young man, it's comical, but dad's okay with it. Dad's had a beard forever and that's his form of protest for the coronavirus, I'm okay.

Tina Dietz (02:56):

I think you're getting off easy with ta .

Jon Thurmond (02:59):

I think so, too.

Tina Dietz (02:59):

I think you are.

Jon Thurmond (03:00):

I think so, too.

Tina Dietz (03:00):

I really do. Jon, you have a very successful external podcast, the HR Social Hour Half Hour Podcast, and you also produce an internal podcast, the HR Pro Podcast, for your company that you work with, Team Fishel. this is in the utility engineering and construction industry. Not usually an industry we associate at the top of our minds with podcasting. Could you give me a little bit of an origin story? How did the conversation start? First of all, which podcast came first, the external or the internal?

Jon Thurmond (03:40):

The HR Social Hour actually, I started a little over two years ago. We launched in February of 2018. I've been podcasting for fun with friends since September of, gosh, 2013, I guess?

Tina Dietz (03:52):

Oh, you were an early adopter.

Jon Thurmond (03:55):

I've been a fan of the medium since 2009, 2010. I love the intimacy. I love the idea of putting on my headphones or being in my car by myself. I love the communities that I'm part of, particularly some of the podcasts I've been listening to for multiple years. You develop relationships with other listeners, they have communities. Be it on social, or wherever it may be. I've been to live recordings. I love the medium, personally. Been doing the fun stuff for a while and I started hosting a Twitter chat for HR professionals in June of 2017, got to be fairly successful. I loved what I was doing with the fun stuff. I wanted to do something with HR. My cohost, Wendy Dailey, who's a HR practitioner out in South Dakota, we decided to launch HR Social Hour. Like I said, February of 2018, we launched our first show. Now we've put out over 160 episodes in the last two years, sponsors, live productions. We've attended conventions as social media crew and recorded content. It's gone a lot of places we didn't necessarily expect. I was-

Tina Dietz (05:10):

Congratulations. Before you and I were talking here before the show that you've just gotten your eighth sponsor. Congratulations.

Jon Thurmond (05:14):

Thank you. We've been incredibly fortunate. We have sponsors that helped us get better equipment. We've traveled. We literally last year, New York, LA, Orlando. Grand Forks, North Dakota, that's probably the outlier, but a lot of the big cities and going to major conferences to take part in and share what we know, not only about podcasting, but about HR. I've been incredibly fortunate though, Tina, that my boss at Team Fishel started listening to HR Social Hour early on and was a fan, was a supporter. Actually wrote one of my first iTunes reviews and has always given me feedback along the way. Feedback on guests and what he learned. Last year we were in the midst of some conversations about communications and how do we get better at communications, looking at different ways to communicate. A lot of people within the company know that I do Social Hour and that I had that as a very prominent side thing going on.

Jon Thurmond (06:17):

I said to my boss, I said, "Well, would you be interested in maybe I could put together some podcast content for us internally?" focusing on HR to start, but knowing that I've got a lot of newer leaders, less experienced leaders that are huge fans of the medium as well. They've actually been asking me questions about how I do it. Equipment and process had been getting those questions long before we really started talking about HR Pro, but my boss was extremely receptive and said, "Yeah, let's talk about it. How would it work? What would it look like?" so I was going to launch in, I guess, January originally. We pushed back just a little bit, but when we started, we had produced four episodes and we put them all out at once. We did some messaging around it and then COVID-19 hit.

Tina Dietz (07:06):

That was unexpected. Unexpected, for sure. Before we get into how COVID-19 impacted the launch and what happened right after that, I'd love to ask, because I get tons of questions about this, when I'm speaking on podcasting at different events where there's a corporate presence or a medium to large, or enterprise sized business, I get this constant question of how do we get buy in from launching an internal podcast? Now you already had a boss who was a fan, but certainly you had to go through some steps to make sure that your T's were crossed and I's were dotted. How did you deal with that? What advice would you have for folks who need to create that buy in?

Jon Thurmond (07:50):

Again, I was incredibly fortunate, Tina, that working for a VP that oversees human resources and safety, the initial idea with the podcast was to address those topics. It was a fairly easy line in terms of, hey, can we do this? They ultimately said, "Okay, Jon, we want you to start looking at topics and develop a calendar, develop content, knowing we have certain targets." so for example, open enrollment, when it comes to insurance time, we wanted to make sure we had a show ready right at the beginning of open enrollment that would go out that people could listen to when we talk about changes and what have you. For me, the buy-in, I was really fortunate, again, having a fan that he's heard other people talking about non HR podcasts, leadership podcast, different management, and business podcasts that are out there that we have leadership telling their employees to listen to.

Jon Thurmond (08:47):

That helped. It's not a foreign concept to begin with. Often when I'm speaking, particularly to HR practitioners, and I say, "Hey, check out my podcast." I still unfortunately get every so often, "What is that? I don't know what that is." and it's not necessarily those that you would think demographically on the higher end, to put it politely, across the board. My 80 year old mother, I call it my internet radio show. She knows what that is. She understands that. She never listened,

Tina Dietz (09:17):

I hear that too.

Jon Thurmond (09:20):

But that's how I explained it to them, but in all seriousness, I think when it comes to buy in, I think you've got to have your plan together. For me, they knew I had the equipment, they knew I had the ability and the interest and everything was set up. I didn't have to look for a production group. I didn't have to look for a host. again, I didn't have to look for equipment when I travel. If I'm going to be at our corporate office, I'll take my equipment, we'll sit down, we'll record two or three shows at once. I come home and edit, and put on the music, and what have you. Being a business-

Tina Dietz (09:58):

A bit of a one man band in this situation.

Jon Thurmond (10:00):

Yes, exactly. Having those things really helped to sell the idea, but I think you have to have that plan in place. I think it's, if anything, and one thing that I've certainly tried to impress upon the folks that I work with, is that podcasting is great and I absolutely love it. It is one form of communication. We got to continue to think of other ways. Also constantly reminding people that the format is there. Hey, make sure that you're listening or have you listened to this? You've got to take those opportunities.

Jon Thurmond (10:31):

It's not a one-off, here's an email, hey, yay podcast. Good luck. If you were marketing your own shows or when you're doing like I do with Social Hour, I'm on social a lot talking about what we're doing and who's on and, "Hey, this podcast came out three weeks ago, check it out if you haven't listened yet." it's that same idea, that constant messaging and making sure that you've got the interest and engagement there as well to know that yes, I can put together the content. I have someplace to put it and then I got a place to share it and continue to communicate it out.

Tina Dietz (11:08):

What did you find was the initial reaction from the workforce and from all the folks in the company? Would I be correct in saying that you've got a largely mobile disperse got to work first, because we're talking about utility engineering and construction? People are out in the field.

Jon Thurmond (11:26):

We do. We have roughly 2,600 teammates working in 30 odd offices, across 15 States, about 85% of those folks are in the field. Literally doing work in the field [inaudible 00:11:39] some type of construction. I think the initial response was, "Hey, cool, this is different." and I got that a lot, particularly, like I said, I've got listeners of the Social Hour within not just HR people that listen to the show. I think when the initial messaging went out that, "Hey, we've got this new thing." I got a lot of questions about, "Hey, how'd you have time to do this?" or, "How does this work?" but I think the fact that it's out there and then once the pandemic came to pass, we decided to start looking at shorter content, different content that I could piece together and then post not only to our LMS, our learning management system, where we host the show, but also our employee portal where they're going in to learn about benefits, information, what have you. Now we have a podcast page there, where people can either download or listen directly from the portal as well.

Tina Dietz (12:31):

What I'm hearing is there is a lot of integration inside of the existing structure. Your employee portal, your email, other kinds of internal communications you're piggybacking on all of those systems, is that correct?

Jon Thurmond (12:47):

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Not only the electronic messaging but also we have a quarterly newsletter that's been going out for many, many years. We're a family-owned business that's been around for 85 years at this point that that paper newsletter still goes out. I'm going to assume there's a story probably in this next quarter about the show and I love it. Again, any time we can put that out in front of people in a different way. We know in marketing, have to hear somebody's name eight times to remember it. I think if I can get that eight times that pro HR Pro is out there and here's how to get to it, I think it helps to make sure that we get more people listening and paying attention to what's going on there.

Tina Dietz (13:34):

Have you had any particular feedback so far on the podcast as all of this has been happening? First, the initial launch, and then of course having to do a bit of the P-word that's out there right now, pivot, to different kinds of content. You mentioned shorter content. What's been the response so far.

Jon Thurmond (13:52):

I will say that the shorter, the pandemic content, I've gotten more immediate feedback with that. We are in construction. Safety is tantamount to us. It's the first thing you hear, any meeting you go to, we talk about safety. We are an essential business and so we have continued to work throughout all the situations that are going on and we've had to make some rather drastic changes to certain things, because of the pandemic and putting out a messaging that would typically go out, maybe in a print, on a newsletter somewhere or on a poster board somewhere. Now, all of a sudden, not only is it necessarily going to be there, I'm repackaging it as a brief podcast, basically a reminder, here's what's going on.

Jon Thurmond (14:44):

People again, with 85% of the people that are in the field, the majority of my office is working from home. They're very apt to go to that portal. The first day that we posted things to the portal and we announced it that initial day, I was shocked at the number of downloads that I had across the board of all the different episodes that were there, which was great. Again, I was very pleased and I'm glad we made the decision to add it there. Again, I think it was that initial surprise or, hey, this is cool, but now with some of the COVID content, it's been much more, "Hey, really appreciate you putting this out. This is really helpful. I'm sharing it with this person, that person and the other person."

Tina Dietz (15:27):

It's kind of amazing that the timing of it, you basically had a ready-made resource when things hit the fan, so to speak, to be able to communicate more effectively right out of the gate, so that's a huge benefit.

Jon Thurmond (15:40):

Timing can often be everything. Tina, I think you and I both know that. We had just launched our employee portal, gosh, I think in February. A month, six weeks at a time, refreshed it, relaunched it, cleaned it up, made it really nice. Again, timing is everything and it was great to be able to hang that out there as quickly as we can. I can now put together a show and post it within minutes. Once show's done, clean it up, put the music on, and I can have it on on the portal in a matter of no time. I think that's been a great thing too, the immediacy. I think so often, you package things and it takes a while to get the message out. Talked about the Quarterly Mailer, that's going to take time. This is just as immediate as an email, to some extent. I can do it fairly quickly.

Tina Dietz (16:31):

That's a very good point. if it's that immediate and that consumable. I also really like that, in some sense, it seems like you had the opportunity to almost internally cross-market the launch of the new and improved employee portal within the content from the podcast. It's that here's a resource and now here's, keep them keeping, coming back, keep it fresh, keep it novel. Did that seem to be the case as well?

Jon Thurmond (16:59):

Definitely. We've definitely had several episodes where the portal comes up. You say, "Hey, if you're listening to this, make sure you check out the portal for this, that information." it definitely yes, any cross promotion I can do like that. Again, continuing the messaging as well when it comes to the emails or even on our LMS having a note about, "Hey, you can listen to it here. You can also always go to the portal and what have you." so definitely try to make sure that we get that name out in front as often as we can and as in many different ways as we can.

Tina Dietz (17:34):

I'm really curious to hear your take on external podcasting and internal podcasting. What do you think that internal podcasting can learn from the lessons of external podcasting, because your show is over 50,000 downloads, which, if folks out there don't have a context for that, for a niche show like HR, that's a lot of downloads in a two year period. This is a business-focused, industry-focused podcasts. Those are some really nice numbers. For somebody who wants to start an internal podcast, what do you need to know about external podcasting that would inform you for your internal podcast to be successful?

Jon Thurmond (18:20):

I will say, Tina, I'm very cognizant of I want it to sound good. I say that thinking of it from an external perspective. I'll give a podcast a couple listens. If I like the content, but it's kind of rough, I'll give it one more, but if it's not listenable, I go onto the next thing. I think I wanted it to be as professional from the outset as I could. Of course, I had roughly two years of experience doing this before I ever tried to put the HR Pro together. I think if you're looking from the outside, obviously we want the messaging to be very specific to Team Fishel, but I want it to be as, from a production perspective, again, sound content.

Jon Thurmond (19:07):

I want it to sound and be as good as anything I put out to the public, because if you put a gun to my head and said, "Jon, you got to put this out, would you be embarrassed by it?" no, I'd be happy to put the things out that I've done. To me, that's what's really been important, I think is to how can I translate what I have done there that. I appreciate the kind words about the downloads and yes, we've been extremely fortunate to resonate with the community that we have. How do I translate that and have an effective platform that people, when they see a new shows out, "Hey, I want to go listen to it. What is HR Pro talking about?"

Jon Thurmond (19:51):

I'm not on every show which I like too. I'm going to produce it, I'm going to edit it, and what have you, but I'm not the main voice. That's something I've really enjoyed watching some of my coworkers get more comfortable on the mic and really develop some of their speaking skills and presentation skills, because it's such a different format.

Tina Dietz (20:10):

That's very satisfying.

Jon Thurmond (20:11):

It's not like getting up in front of a hundred people and speaking, let's face it. We're spitting in the wind here, to some extent! It was really funny the first time I got up to our corporate office and had all my mics, and my Zoom recorder, and everything laid out, and they walked in and were like, "Oh, you're serious." yes. This is a serious proposition.

Tina Dietz (20:33):

This is not a drill.

Jon Thurmond (20:35):

We're going to do it as well as we can.

Tina Dietz (20:37):

That's perfect. If a company wants to start, or someone inside of a company wants to start an internal podcast and they don't necessarily have the two years of experience, of external podcasting that you have, do you have any recommendations on how they might broach that conversation? What about external resources?

Jon Thurmond (20:59):

There are a lot of great people that offer a lot of free, I don't know if I can mention my name, Dave Jackson's School of Podcasting.

Tina Dietz (21:09):

Dave is awesome.

Jon Thurmond (21:10):

That's a tremendous show. I've heard Dave speak at DC PodFest. I listen to that show all the time. I'm always learning something new. I would say if you're a novice, if you've just never done this at all, you got to do your homework. People, ask me a lot. A lot of other HR professionals come to me and say, "Jon, I would love to start a podcast. What do I need to do? How do I do it?" and I always tell them, "Look, it's really easy to start, but it's hard to start well and it's hard to maintain." and so if you're going to try to put together something internally and that's got to be one of the questions is, if you're doing it yourself, I can tell you that I've had other people ask me with other organizations.

Jon Thurmond (21:49):

They're concerned that maybe that person leaves, then what? What do we do? That's a fair question. You've got to determine.

Tina Dietz (21:54):

It is a fair question.

Jon Thurmond (21:56):

How would you handle it? I know some companies that use outside resources to put together their content and they're great, but I think you've got to have your plan. Wat is the reason, what's your why, what's driving it. Again, for me, it was, hey, I've been doing this. I really enjoy it. I feel like this is another way for us to communicate with our teammates in a different way. Like you said, at the outset, most people are not thinking about construction companies having podcasts. I know that, because I have a lot of people ask me like, "How in the world?" it just happened to be that it was something I'm passionate about and was able to translate that passion into my day job even more. I fully recognize I'm very fortunate to be able to do that.

Tina Dietz (22:40):

Well, we're very fortunate to have you here.

Jon Thurmond (22:42):

Thank you.

Tina Dietz (22:42):

And sharing your expertise and your experience of both sides of the coin, the internal podcast, the external podcasting and the journey forth. In addition to launching an internal podcast, seemingly moments before the pandemic. We really appreciate you sharing your experience with us. I know I, for one, am looking forward to hearing more from you at the Podcast Inc conference this coming fall, as we're going to be diving into some of these topics even more deeply. Whether it's going to be virtual or it's going to be live, I know that I'm looking forward to hearing more about your experience and, by then, seeing how this internal podcast has developed over, say, the next six months.

Jon Thurmond (23:26):

I'm very excited about that too. Tina, I had told Jennifer, when we first started talking about the move in dates, I said, "For me it, selfishly, it was great." because I felt like it gave me many more months, not necessarily know what was going to happen, creating different content to address some of the pandemic issues, but definitely gave us time to continue to develop and more and more about what's working and what doesn't.

Tina Dietz (23:50):

Well, there's nothing more interesting than a cliffhanger. What will happen next to our intrepid heroes? Find out in our next episode, so we will definitely be finding out this fall at the conference. Thank you, Jon, again for joining me here today. Thank you all for joining us here today and Podcast Inc, as we lead up to the Podcast Inc conference this fall of 2020 live in Washington, DC or virtual, we'll be finding out. It's another cliffhanger, but we'll be letting you know by July either way, make sure you go to podcastinc.co to find out all of the information and sign up for updates. You can also email us questions directly to the organizer, Jennifer Crawford at [email protected]. Stay tuned for more information, for more case studies, and all kinds of experience from our experts here at Podcast Inc. I'm Tina Dietz from Twin Flame Studios. Signing off for today. We'll see you next time.