AllVoices Experts: Building Company Culture & Community in a Remote First World, with the Spokn Team

What makes remote company culture work: lessons from Spokn

AllVoices sat down with the team at Spokn, a workplace podcasting platform built for remote-first companies. Spokn was acquired by GoCo.io in 2023, integrating its internal communications and culture-building tools into GoCo's broader HR platform. At the time of this conversation, Spokn was working with companies like Udemy, Robinhood, Cedar, Podium, and Snyk to rethink how culture gets built when most employees will never share an office.

Their answers below cover the elements of great company culture, how internal podcasting builds belonging at scale, and how to measure whether your internal communications are actually working.

What the key elements of great company culture are

According to the Spokn team, there's no single recipe. But one thing separates good culture from great culture: community.

There's no single recipe for a great company culture, especially now as companies work to lay plans for permanent remote or hybrid models. But one thing is certain: to succeed long-term, companies need a fundamentally different approach than the piecemeal, often reactive measures they've taken since COVID began. Zoom workshops, virtual craft sessions and Donut matches, all useful stop-gaps, are no longer sufficient. For companies to retain or build a great culture, they need to begin with a different mindset, one that acknowledges that as they grow, the vast majority of employees will never experience ongoing, in-office culture.

The companies Spokn worked with that led on culture shared five traits regardless of their specific approach:

• Connection programs that help employees feel connected to each other and to the company mission, regardless of location or schedule.
• Transparent communication from leaders who tell the story behind decisions, building trust through context rather than directives.
• Diverse talent that thrives, not just exists: DEI as a strategic lens applied to decisions across the business, not a standalone initiative.
• Intentional remote and hybrid policies that prevent in-group and out-group dynamics from forming between office and remote employees or tenure cohorts.
• Shared vision and values reinforced consistently through onboarding and year-round communication, not just at annual kickoffs.

How internal podcasting builds company culture

Spokn's core insight is that voice carries meaning that text cannot. When employees hear a leader tell their story, or a colleague explain how they solved a hard problem, the connection is more personal than any Slack message or email thread. The Spokn team described how their customers applied this across a wide range of use cases:

It's a long list. Companies use internal podcasting to support a huge range of business priorities. The common denominator: companies are trying to build community, connection and belonging for employees in a remote world. Most of our customers have felt the intimacy of voice and storytelling listening to podcasts in their personal lives. They realize that the format provides a perfect balance: the richness of voice carries far more meaning than an email or Slack message, and at the same time it avoids the Zoom and scheduling fatigue that leads to burnout.

What the most-used podcast formats look like

Spokn's customers built a consistent set of formats that addressed different cultural needs:

• Grow series: leaders share career paths and what excites them about the company, building rapport and demonstrating career pathways.
• Kudos: employees submit brief audio recordings of thanks; the top recordings are compiled into a monthly episode shared by leadership.
• Watercooler Wednesday: a storytelling series capturing diverse employee voices around a monthly theme, replacing what used to happen organically in office hallways.
• Performance Pods: experienced managers share recommendations on coaching, feedback, and goal-setting before performance cycles.
• Strategy Snacks: internal leaders and external experts cover key initiatives, with examples like a board member discussion on company strategy evolution.
• Pod-boarding: onboarding podcasts that introduce new hires to company values, department leaders, and strategic priorities before their first day.

Why asynchronous voice outperforms synchronous video for culture building

Remote-first teams need communication tools that work across time zones and personal schedules. Synchronous video calls create scheduling pressure and fatigue. Asynchronous podcasts let employees absorb leadership communication, team stories, and strategic context on their own time, without adding more meetings to their calendar.

Remote-first models require companies to tackle culture building and interpersonal connectedness in fundamentally different ways. Existing means of internal communication are great for synchronous events such as kick-offs or town halls, but not as great for leaders to tell their personal stories and show vulnerability to help build rapport and trust with their teams. Spokn helps them do that in an authentic and personal way.

The scheduling flexibility is practical, but the cultural argument is stronger: employees in different time zones, with caregiving responsibilities, or in parts of the business that rarely interact with leadership, get consistent access to the voices and stories that shape culture at headquarters. This is directly connected to how inclusive practices affect remote employees from their first days at the company.

How internal podcasting improves employee engagement

Spokn described the employee journey through podcasting in terms that connect directly to the engagement lifecycle:

Podcasts on Spokn humanize and enrich almost every part of an employee's experience, even before their first day. Pre-boarding podcasts with welcoming messages from the hiring manager and teammates create a warm bond and excitement in the lead-up to Day One. In their first weeks, onboarding podcasts introduce new hires to the company's origin story, its values, department leaders, strategic initiatives, and company lore. The result? New hires ramp faster and feel like insiders, even if they've never stepped inside the office.

The engagement impact extends well past onboarding. Learning and development podcasts let employees learn from internal experts. Recognition-based podcasts surface diverse voices and affirm top performers. Recorded live events give employees who couldn't attend synchronously a way to stay current without missing out. Each of these elements contributes to the sense of belonging that determines whether employees stay or leave. Employee engagement survey questions that track belonging and connection are measuring the same dimension that internal podcasting directly addresses.

How to measure the success of internal communications

Measurement is the part of internal communications that most organizations underprioritize. The Spokn team offered a concrete starting framework:

A great place to begin is to measure trust and transparency within the organization and retention. A company could easily run a survey through a platform like AllVoices or Culture Amp to ask questions such as: I feel like I can trust leaders at my company. I feel the company operates in a transparent way with employees. I feel like I can be myself at work.

For organizations using internal podcasting, Spokn recommended a longitudinal measurement approach: baseline survey before launch, then follow-ups at three months, six months, and one year. Their platform analytics track engagement by topic and department, which can be mapped against survey data to identify what content is actually driving the trust and belonging metrics that matter.

Because Spokn has its own suite of analytics, customers are able to map their engagement survey data against the data we provide on areas like popular podcast topics and most and least active departments.

That combination of qualitative survey data and platform engagement analytics is a practical model for any internal communications measurement program, with or without podcasting as the delivery mechanism. The principle is the same: connect your communication investment to outcomes you actually care about, and track them over time rather than in a single snapshot.

Where internal communications and culture building stand in 2025 and 2026

This conversation with Spokn happened at a specific inflection point: COVID had forced the remote experiment, and companies were only beginning to understand what it would take to build culture without shared physical space. Four years later, the experiment is permanent for many organizations, and the tools have matured significantly.

The hybrid challenge replaced the remote challenge

The in-group and out-group dynamic Spokn identified, between remote and in-office employees, became one of the defining HR challenges of 2023-2025. Research from Gallup's 2025 State of the Workplace consistently shows that fully remote and fully in-office employees report similar engagement levels, while hybrid employees, particularly those with less flexibility than their peers, show the most significant belonging gaps. Internal communications programs that don't deliberately include all employees regardless of location continue to widen that gap rather than close it.

Asynchronous communication investment is now standard at high-performing organizations

The insight Spokn applied in 2021 has become mainstream practice. Most organizations scaling beyond 500 employees now have some form of asynchronous internal communication program, whether through audio, video, or written storytelling formats. The differentiation has moved from do you do this to how well do you connect it to culture outcomes. Building a culture of listening is the organizational prerequisite for any of these programs to work. AllVoices is a leading employee relations platform that helps HR teams maintain the feedback channels and reporting infrastructure that make employees feel heard alongside, not instead of, the storytelling tools that make them feel connected. See how it works.