Welcome to the first-ever episode of On the Same Page, the new employee communication podcast from communication veterans Shel Holtz and Steve Crescenzo. In this first episode, Shel and Steve tell their origin story, recount how this podcast came to be, what listeners can expect, and riff on how to tap into managers to help support communication to their team members.

We hope you’ll participate in the show by sharing your comments, questions, experiences, and anecdotes by sending an email to fircomments@gmail.com (include an audio clip; we’ll play it), or commenting on this page or on the announcement posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, or BlueSky. As you can see below, you can also watch the YouTube video version of the show.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: If your managers are improvising messages, you don’t have a communication strategy, you have a rumor pipeline.

Steve Crescenzo: Manager communications — one of the most misunderstood and ignored parts of employee communications, but one we need to pay attention to. But before we get there, welcome to the first-ever episode of On the Same Page.

Shel Holtz: Now, factoring managers into communication is the kind of challenge, Steve, you and I are going to be talking about here on this brand spanking new internal comms podcast.

Steve Crescenzo: I prefer to say employee comms podcast show, but we’ll be sure to be talking about that as we go. Yeah, we’ve obviously launched this podcast for communicators primarily, but we’re also hoping some managers listen in, some executives, some leaders, some CEOs — they could all benefit from what we’re going to be talking about, right?

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. This is for anybody who’s engaged in communication inside the organization, whether it’s the formal communication that is the work of we employee communicators, or just people who know that they have to do it, whether that’s senior executives or department managers or whomever. But we’ll cover one dimension of employee comms, internal comms, whatever you want to call it — EC/IC — in each episode.

Steve Crescenzo: Yep, exactly right. And yeah, you know, if you work in an organization, you have to communicate. You may not do it for a living, but you have to communicate. So why don’t we tell the gang where — you and I have known each other for 30 years, 32 years, something like that. And we’ve talked about this before, and we always say we’re going to do it. We never do it. You’re already doing podcasts, and I’m lazy. I’m like, this is extra work. I never give myself extra work. But this is the right time to do it. Why do you think I finally caved and you finally said, you know, we need to carve out time for this. Why now?

Shel Holtz: Well, there’s a couple of reasons. Some are based on what’s going on in the world right now, and some are based on the fact that I’m working on a book that covers all this. And it has the same title as this podcast. The topics we’re going to cover come from the framework from this book. The book is a framework for internal comms — employee… I call it employee communications in the book, by the way. And I do that for a very specific reason. I got some pushback on that from one of the internal communications experts, thought leaders out there, whom I asked to review it. And he said, call it internal comms, don’t call it employee comms because there are other audiences that are internal besides employees. And I said, yeah, but this book is just for communicating with employees because they are, as Roger D’Aprix called them, informed insiders. Those other people, the contractors that come in and are embedded in the organization — yeah, they’re there, they’re getting a lot of that internal messaging, but they’re accountable to the values and the purpose of the company that they work for, the one that pays them.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, they have their own mission and values and everything. Yeah, I’m glad you stuck to your guns on that, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I do think internal communicators need to factor in those audiences, those stakeholders, but not for the purposes of the book that I wrote. That’s really aimed at employees. The framework came when I was an independent consultant. I haven’t been one of those for — it’ll be nine years in October. It really is. The older you get, the faster that time goes by. But when I was doing independent consulting, I found myself sort of reinventing this on every engagement, particularly on internal communication audits. And I said, this is ridiculous. If I just had the framework fleshed out, I could just pull it out and I could do the audit report much more quickly. So I sat down and I came up with it, and I worked with a few other people to get their thoughts. And finally I had it in front of me and I said, it looks like there’s about 28 elements of this. I ought to flesh these out. So I did a blog post for each of them. And about halfway through, somebody said, you are going to turn this into a book, aren’t you? And I said, well, I hadn’t thought about that. But now that I have, yeah, I will. So that took — yeah, all of this has taken 15, 16 years since I first sat down and hammered out the framework. And I mean, I had some great help. Brian O’Mara-Croft actually did the visuals to take my terrible graphic and turn it into something that looked nice.

Steve Crescenzo: Hello, Brian. Hello, Brian. Well, I’m very lucky in that I’m one of the rare people who’ve read the book and really, really love the book. And when you said you wanted to start a podcast to further explore the topics in that book, I was all over it. Now, there’s so much to cover, but we’ve got the rest of our lives, Shel, right? Well, I’m not going anywhere. You got at least five years left, right?

Shel Holtz: My dog has at least five years left and I don’t want to leave her alone.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, when he goes, you go, probably. But we’re gonna try to stick to, what, about 20 minutes? I mean, that’s hard for me and you. I think that’s gonna be hard. That’s gonna be our biggest challenge. I’ll tell you that right now. I got a lot to say, and I want a lot to learn from you, and I got a lot of opinions, so it’ll be tough to stick to 20 minutes, but we can.

Shel Holtz: It will. We’ll try. My view on the length of podcasts — and anybody who’s listened to FIR already knows this — is that they should be as long as it takes to say what you wanted to say, as long as it remains interesting for the people who are listening. If people are going, my God, they’re just droning on and on, I’m going to go listen to something else, then…

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I always get the question in my writing workshops about how long can an online article be? And I said, as short as humanly possible without leaving anything important out. That’s it. Not an extra word after that.

Shel Holtz: I think that’s a great answer. So we’re going to shoot for 20 minutes. If we go over, we’ll go over. If during the editing process I think I can make it shorter without leaving out anything that needed to be said, I’ll edit mercilessly. But the point here is to be entertaining and informative at the same time. And that’s why I wanted to do this with you, Steve — besides your experience with employee communications, all the various companies you’ve worked with, everything you’ve learned. I figure you and I are gonna host an entertaining show.

Steve Crescenzo: Have some fun. We’ll have fun. These things aren’t worth it. We’re not getting paid, Shel. I don’t know if you realize that, but we’re not getting paid. Well, you gotta have fun. We’re love. So we’re gonna do one e...