Podcasting to Connect During Covid
Like many people around the world, Liberty IT staff have been fortunate enough to have been able to work at home during the pandemic, and from my personal point of view, as a company we’ve adapted well to remote work. Great work still gets done, we’ve onboarded a large amount of new teammates who’ve never even seen our offices and we’re still constantly trying to stay ahead in technology, innovation and more.
I’ve found however that I’ve, of course, met fewer people across the company over the last year; all the in-office serendipitous or planned meetings are long gone. In corporate-speak “I’ve found my internal network not growing as it had been”, what this really means — I’m chatting to less people.
Enter the “Get to Know LIT” podcast – an idea from a colleague and ran with a few more colleagues, it’s an internal video-podcast series where we chat to people from all across the organisation. Just casual 20 to 30 minute chats about their roles, interesting projects they’re working on, technologies they’re interested in, and usually anything else that pops into our heads.
Having been asking people to write blog posts internally for a few years, which is always difficult given the time commitment needed to write a decent post, especially a tech tutorial post, I was surprised how easy it’s been to get people to appear on the podcast.
It’s likely a combination of a few things – it’s just easy, we record the podcast in simple Teams video calls which people are just used to now anyway, and each episode takes less than an hour to record. I also think that people are enjoying talking with other folks that are outside of their immediate team.
I’ve really enjoyed recording the episodes and usually end up chatting almost as much before and after the actual recording. 12 episodes in, we’ve chatted to data scientists, product designers, new starters, consultants, engineers at various levels and from different teams, about 5G, serverless, the future of coding, mental health during lockdown, virtual reality and much more. As much as I love my actual job, getting to spend an hour every week or so chatting to other folks about all sorts of different things has been something I’ve looked forward to and has helped add some variety to my office-in-an-attic experience!
Hopefully the listeners feel the same, and it has been able to shine a light on other folks’ work and lives that they may not have seen otherwise. We’re going to keep recording new episodes, and while they’re currently internal only, I predict it’s only a matter of time before we start publishing them externally aswell.
Of course, the episodes are also great for new starters — to give them insights about the company, so if you really want to hear them … we’re hiring! https://www.liberty-it.ie/careers/opportunities
