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Internal communications
We produced two internal podcasts inside The Hershey Company, a global workforce of more than 60,000 — one company-wide, one for a distributed sales force. During the pandemic we built an internal show for a 15,000-person health system and held it to a 24 to 48 hour delivery window, week after week. Internal is a different build from a public show, and most of what decides it happens before anyone records anything.
The problem
The usual assumption is that internal is the easy version — no algorithm to fight, no audience to build, nobody leaving a one-star review. It is the hardest room we work in, for reasons that have nothing to do with production.
An external listener searched for something or followed a link. Your people found your show in a channel they check for other reasons. You get about thirty seconds to prove it is worth their time, and better music will not buy them.
They know whether the reorganization went well and whether the deadline is realistic. Say otherwise and you have not failed to persuade them — you have told them this channel is not a place where true things get said. That judgment is permanent.
Executives are often the most polished communicators in a company and the hardest to record, because years of prepared remarks train a delivery that collapses in headphones. The fix is structural, not coaching.
Reach is not an achievement when everyone is already in the building. The measure becomes concrete: did the night shift find out, did the field team stop asking the same question, did anyone forward it without being told to.
Shape
We ran two shows at the same company at the same time and built them completely differently, because they were speaking to different people about different things.
The hardest brief there is: tens of thousands of people across countries, functions and shifts who share an employer and very little else. A host anchors it and field reporters bring segments in from around the business. A company that size does not have one story, it has dozens happening in places the host will never visit — and a single interview chair cannot reach them.
A distributed sales force, a clinical team, one function. Narrower audience, sharper job: people who need specific, usable knowledge to go and do something with. That is an interview format, because the value is one person knowing a thing and someone drawing it out of them. A magazine structure would only add scaffolding around the conversation that was already the point.
There is no house length either. The right runtime comes from what you need to get across and how your people actually listen — a commute, a changeover, the walk between buildings. The failure mode is inheriting a length from some other show rather than deciding one.
What it takes
This is where internal programs stall, and it is most of what you are actually hiring for.
Crew clearance, visitor escort, and site rules that differ by building. On a corporate campus or inside a hospital this is a lead-time problem rather than a difficult one — it simply cannot be arranged on the morning. We plan around it and we have worked inside enough controlled environments to know what to ask for.
Anything carrying the company mark goes through review, and in a regulated business that may include legal or compliance as well. The right move is to agree the review points up front and build them into the schedule, so approval is a step rather than a surprise. A program that discovers its own approval path in month three usually does not reach month six.
Intranet, direct email, the internal newsletter people read on Monday morning. No app to install and no new habit to build. A lot of internal shows publish to a destination and then promote it, which quietly assumes people will make a trip. Most will not.
A global workforce means coordinating guests and recordings across locations, and a delivery format that survives whichever internal player IT settled on years ago. Remote capture is part of the standard kit rather than a fallback.
We held a health system show to a 24 to 48 hour window while guidance was changing between recording and publishing. That constraint does not just compress the process, it rules some formats out. What works is a conversation with someone who knows the answer, captured cleanly and cut for clarity — designed so the fast version is the good version rather than a degraded one.
The content is the client's job. Recording, editing, art, publishing and delivery are ours. That split is the whole value when the clock is tight — it is the only way the message gets the attention it deserves, because nobody internal is also thinking about file handoffs.
Track record
More than 60,000 employees across countries, functions and shifts. Two programs in production at the same time for the same budget holder, each with its own audience, cadence and review path.
Internal · not publicBuilt during the pandemic and run for as long as it was needed. Not just clinicians — supply chain, operations, and everyone else who had to act on the same information that week. An internal audience is almost never one audience.
Internal · not publicThe question to settle before anything else is not what the show should sound like. It is whether the honest version of it is allowed to exist. If the only questions that can be asked are ones with comfortable answers, you have an announcement with music under it, and your people will know within one episode.
The second question is who inside your organization is actually going to say something. An internal program needs a voice with standing and a willingness to be unscripted. If that person does not exist yet, a single well-made piece is a better use of your budget than a series that dies at episode four.
If both of those are in place, this is work we are good at and genuinely like doing. If they are not, we will tell you.
Next
Thirty minutes, no deck. We'll tell you honestly whether an internal show is the right shape for what you're trying to do.