Finding a topic for a business podcast isn’t difficult. Finding one that gets people talking is.
The best conversations often start with something the audience has actually experienced. People problems give you plenty to work with.
Dave Rigby, Managing Director at MYHR Consultancy, has spent more than 20 years working with organisations facing exactly these sorts of issues. His career has taken him through government, the private sector and consultancy, including restructures, mergers, employee relations cases and supporting growing businesses with their people.
So, if you’re planning a business podcast and want a subject that can lead somewhere interesting, here are ten questions worth asking.
1. Why Do Good Employees Leave Good Businesses?
“We pay well, everyone gets on and we’re a decent company to work for. Why are people leaving?”
It’s a question plenty of business owners eventually ask.
The answer is rarely as simple as salary. People leave managers. They leave jobs where they can’t see what comes next. They leave because expectations have changed, the workload has crept up or another employer has simply made them a better offer at the right time.
There isn’t one neat answer.
A conversation can get into why owners are sometimes surprised when somebody resigns, what employees really want from work and how businesses can spot problems before an exit interview tells them what they should have noticed six months earlier.
2. Why Are Managers So Bad at Difficult Conversations?
A lot of managers know when a conversation needs to happen.
They just don’t always have it.
Everybody can see it, yet the manager waits because they’re worried about making things worse.
Usually, waiting does exactly that.
This is a great podcast conversation because it gets into the human side of management. Why do otherwise capable people freeze when they need to challenge somebody? How direct should a manager be? What happens when a small issue is allowed to become a formal one?
MYHR spends a lot of time helping businesses with employee relations issues, and manager confidence is often part of the picture.
3. What Does a Bad Hire Really Cost a Business?
A bad hire costs far more than the salary you paid while they were there. Someone had to recruit and train them, managers spent time trying to make the appointment work, and other employees may have had to pick up the slack along the way. If the person leaves, the whole process starts again.
For a smaller business, one wrong appointment can have a surprisingly wide impact, which is why this topic can go well beyond the usual recruitment advice. Was the person genuinely a bad hire, or was the role badly defined from the start? Did the business rush the decision? Were managers hiring somebody they liked rather than somebody who could actually do the job?
There’s also a useful question for any podcast host to put to their guest: how quickly should a business admit it has made the wrong hiring decision?
If your audience includes growing businesses, our guide to hiring staff in the UK gives you another angle to explore.
4. What Happens When Workplace Conflict Is Ignored?
Workplace conflict rarely stays between the two people involved. It might start with colleagues who simply don’t get on, but before long they are avoiding each other, emails become sharper and other members of the team start getting pulled into the tension. What looked like a minor personality clash can quickly become a much wider management problem.
That is what makes workplace conflict such a strong podcast topic. Most listeners will have seen it happen, whether as a manager, an employee or the unfortunate colleague stuck somewhere in the middle.
A good discussion can explore when managers should step in, whether colleagues actually need to like each other to work well together, and why putting two people in a room and telling them to “sort it out” is not a strategy.
There is also a more interesting question underneath it all: at what point is a working relationship still repairable, and when has too much damage already been done?
Dave is a trained mediator, so this is an area where the conversation can naturally move into what workplace mediation actually involves, when it can help and why bringing in somebody neutral can sometimes change the tone completely.
5. When Does Sickness Absence Become a Management Problem?
Sickness absence can become difficult for managers surprisingly quickly, especially when the same employee has been off several times and nobody quite knows how to approach it. The manager may be trying to be supportive, but avoiding the conversation altogether can create a different problem, particularly when the rest of the team has started to notice the pattern.
That is what makes absence such a useful podcast topic. How do you support somebody who is genuinely struggling while still keeping the business running? At what point does repeated short-term absence need a proper conversation, and what happens to morale when colleagues feel they are constantly picking up extra work?
There is plenty to explore here without turning the discussion into an employment law lesson.
6. Is Poor Performance Always the Employee’s Fault?
Sometimes an employee simply is not performing at the level the business needs, but it is worth looking at what happened before jumping straight to that conclusion.
Was the person ever told what good performance looks like? Have they received useful feedback, or do they only hear from their manager when something has gone wrong? Has the role changed since they joined, leaving them responsible for work they were never originally hired to do?
Managers can be very quick to say somebody “isn’t quite cutting it”, while being much less clear about what they actually expect instead. That makes performance a particularly good podcast topic because it opens up a wider conversation about accountability on both sides.
Employees need to understand what is expected of them, but managers also need to set clear standards, give feedback and deal with problems.
7. How Do You Know When Your Business Has Outgrown Its Structure?
This is one that will feel familiar to a lot of founders and business owners because growth can happen much faster than the structure around it.
A company that worked perfectly well with ten people can feel very different at thirty or fifty. The owner is still copied into every decision, a manager who once looked after three people now has fifteen, job titles no longer match what people actually do and two teams may both assume the same responsibility belongs to somebody else.
Usually, nobody deliberately designed the business that way. Roles and responsibilities simply accumulated as the company grew.
8. How Should Leaders Handle Change When People’s Jobs Are Affected?
At some point, many businesses will go through a period of change where the decisions being made have a direct impact on people’s jobs. It might be a restructure, a merger, teams being combined or roles disappearing altogether.
These situations are difficult partly because employees usually know something is happening long before management is ready to talk about it. When information is limited, people fill in the gaps themselves, and rumours can travel through a business remarkably quickly.
That gives a podcast host plenty to explore beyond the mechanics of the change itself. When should leaders start communicating? How open can they be while decisions are still being worked through? What happens to the employees who stay after they have watched colleagues leave?
Dave has worked on major change and restructuring projects throughout his HR career, so this is a topic where the conversation can get away from textbook answers and into what actually happens inside a business when leaders are making difficult decisions under pressure.
9. Which HR Basics Do Businesses Ignore Until Something Goes Wrong?
Employee handbooks, contracts and policies never feel urgent when everything is running smoothly, but that changes very quickly when a manager needs an answer and discovers nobody is quite sure what the company’s process actually says.
It might be a grievance, a question about sickness absence, confusion over a contract or two managers realising they have been handling the same issue in completely different ways. What seemed like background admin suddenly becomes something the business needs to rely on.
That is often how HR develops inside a growing SME. A business hires five people, then ten, then twenty, while the informal processes that worked when everyone sat around the same table become harder to manage and much easier to apply inconsistently.
For a podcast audience, that opens up a useful conversation about what growing businesses genuinely need in place, what can reasonably wait and where owners sometimes create avoidable problems by relying on documents that have not been reviewed for years.
10. When Does a Growing Business Actually Need HR?
There is no magic employee number where a business suddenly needs HR. Some companies can manage their people comfortably with a relatively small team and capable managers, while others reach a point much earlier where employee issues are taking hours out of the owner’s week.
The better question for a podcast is probably this: when does handling HR yourself stop being a sensible use of your time?
The answer might have something to do with headcount, but it can just as easily be driven by growth, management complexity or a difficult employee situation that makes the owner realise they need more experienced support.
Needing HR does not necessarily mean recruiting a full-time HR manager either. Options such as fractional HR support allow growing businesses to bring in experienced HR support without building an internal department before the business is ready for one.
Give Your Guest Something Worth Talking About
The best podcast questions are the ones that make a guest stop for a moment before answering, usually because there is no neat, textbook response.
People problems are particularly good for that. They involve judgement, personalities, awkward decisions and plenty of situations where a business owner or manager looks back and thinks, “We should probably have dealt with that sooner.”
They also tend to come with stories, which is always where the best podcast conversations start.
If you are planning a business, leadership or founder podcast, any of the topics above could easily carry an episode of its own. And if you are looking for somebody who can bring practical HR experience into that conversation, you can find out more about Dave Rigby and the subjects he speaks on.
You can also read our guide to what makes a great HR expert podcast guest before planning your next episode.