How the US’s Largest Wine and Spirits Distributor Increased Employee Engagement by Streaming Leadership Podcasts

In this Great Resignation Era, employees are bringing new behavior sets and preferences into the workplace and employers must adapt and respond. Focusing on employee experience and talent development, Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits has implemented uStudio private podcasting to engage and train employees with fantastic results. As such, they’ve begun to evolve and expand their podcast program across their entire 22,000+ employee organization by building the right internal teams to make and govern their podcast shows.

Southern Glazer’s has seen $1.1M gain per year in productivity utilizing podcasts as an internal communication tool. 48% of their employees consume company podcasts outside of formal working hours and 14% of those tune-in on weekends and holidays.

We were fortunate to have Jordan Franklin, Vice President of Change Management and Communication at Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, explain how a private podcast can increase engagement with leadership communications and better align employees to your business objectives, even in a hybrid or remote workplace.

The full transcript is here in the blog and we’ll call out a few highlights:

(3:53) On authentic communication Jordan says: “Imperfection equals connection. You'll find that I'm big on moving away from synthetic communication, that corporate style, and this podcast that I'm about to share with you really was the catalyst to start shifting the culture toward a more authentic look and feel in how we communicate.”

(5:53) Jordan goes on to speak about podcast planning and had this to say: “Who do I want the audience to be? In my head, everybody, from bottom to top, top to bottom, sideways, anybody that's a SouthernGlaze employee will have access to this to keep them connected.”

(10:16)  Talking on engagement Jordan offers: “…the difficulty with engagement. We're at a war for attention, so we have to make everything modern and look hip in my opinion, to try to capture that employee's attention away from other distractions that they naturally have with their smartphones.”

(14:32) Jordan goes on to share engagement numbers: “So back to the numbers: 70x amount of consumption compared to a traditional video series. I mean, that's incredible. That's your company's content being consumed at an exponential rate because you're not only learning about the leader, but you're learning, like I said, the projects, the programs. What's going on in the company? What is their opinion on it? Leadership skills, mentorship; it's just a whole array of teachings within these episodes. And that could be one of the reasons why you see higher engagement.”

As always the entire webinar and transcript are available to watch, listen or read.