The average employee is interrupted every two minutes during core working hours. Across a day that adds up to about 275 pings from meetings, emails, and chats, according to Microsoft's 2025 analysis of its own Microsoft 365 usage data (Microsoft Work Trend Index, Breaking down the infinite workday).
The same study found something that should bother anyone who writes company updates for a living: 85% of internal emails are opened and closed in under 15 seconds. Your Monday update is landing in a day that already contains 117 emails and 153 Teams messages, and most of them get a glance and nothing more.
So a fair question for an internal comms team in 2026 is whether the weekly update should keep arriving as text at all, or whether some of it would travel better as something people listen to on a walk or between calls.
This is a guide to the second option. A short internal podcast, recorded once a week, that a distributed team can finish without sitting down. No studio, no producer, no two-hour edit.
Will people actually listen?
The listening habit is already there. Edison Research, which has run the longest continuous survey of American audio behavior since 1998, reported in its Infinite Dial 2026 that 58% of Americans aged 12 and older listened to a podcast in the past month. That is roughly 167 million people and a record high. Among 35-to-54-year-olds, the bracket that holds most of your managers and team leads, the figure was 68% (Edison Research, The Infinite Dial 2026).
A caveat worth stating plainly: people listen to a favorite show because they want to, and they will not give your company update that same loyalty. Internal audio earns attention a different way, by being short and genuinely worth the five minutes. But the format is no longer foreign to anyone. Most of your team already has headphones in on the commute. You are asking for a small slice of time they are spending on audio anyway.
What it is good for, and what it isn't
An internal podcast is worth doing for a narrow set of things and a waste of effort for others. Being clear about which is which is what keeps it from becoming another channel nobody checks.
It fits a weekly leadership update, the cross-team news that usually dies three messages deep in a channel, onboarding context for new hires in their first week, and a recap of the all-hands for the people in other time zones who could not make the live call.
It does not fit anything that needs to be searched and referenced later, so policies, exact numbers, and decisions still belong in writing. It does not fit anything urgent, and it does not fit anything that needs a reply. Audio carries the part of a message that a bullet list strips out, which is tone and reasoning and the sense that a real person is talking to you. Leave the reference material where people can find it again.
A format that works
Keep it between four and seven minutes. That is long enough to cover a week and short enough that someone will reach the end.
Make it weekly and tie it to a fixed day. The value comes from the rhythm, and the rhythm breaks the first time it slips. Friday afternoon and Monday morning both work, for opposite reasons.
One host is easier to sustain than a rotating cast, and a familiar voice does more for trust than production polish does. A loose running order keeps each episode recognizable without making it feel like a script being read aloud:
- A one-line summary of the week, up front, for anyone who only catches the first thirty seconds.
- Two or three things that actually happened and why they matter to the listener, not to the org chart.
- One thing coming next week that needs attention.
- A close that names a person or a team, because specific credit is the part people replay for each other.
Resist the urge to read the written update word for word. Audio that sounds written is the fastest way to lose a listener.
Making one every week
There are two honest paths, and the right one depends on who is doing it.
The first is to record a real voice. A phone in a quiet room is enough. The host talks through the running order in one take, trims the worst thirty seconds, and ships it. This works when there is a person who enjoys it and will protect the time each week. It stops working the week that person is on holiday.
The second is to generate the audio from the written update you are already producing. You write the update, the same one comms is writing anyway, and turn it into a clean audio episode in a few minutes, with a consistent voice that does not depend on anyone's schedule. This is the path most teams of 200 to 2,000 people end up on, because it survives vacations, reorganizations, and the week everything is on fire. It is also where a tool like Internal Cast does the work, taking the update you wrote and returning an episode ready to send.
Whichever path you pick, the discipline is the same. Keep it short, keep it on schedule, and keep it sounding like a person.
Getting it to the team
Put the episode where the written update used to live. If that was an email, the episode goes in the email, as a player at the top, with a two-line written summary underneath for the people who will always prefer to skim. If it was a Slack or Teams channel, it goes there, pinned the same day every week.
A private feed is worth setting up early so people can subscribe in the podcast app they already use and the new episode simply appears. The lower the friction between the update and the listener's ears, the higher the chance it gets finished.
Knowing whether it's working
Plays are a vanity number. The metric that tells you something is the completion rate, the share of listeners who reach the end. A four-minute episode that 70% of people finish is doing more for alignment than a forty-minute one that 90% start and 20% survive.
Watch that number for a month before you change anything. If completion is low, the episode is too long or the first thirty seconds are not earning the rest. If it climbs, you have found a channel that reaches people the Monday email never did.
Internal Cast turns your written company updates into short audio episodes your team can finish on the way to work. internalcast.com
Sources
- Microsoft Work Trend Index, Breaking down the infinite workday (2025). microsoft.com
- Edison Research, The Infinite Dial 2026. edisonresearch.com