Through process governance and a data-driven editorial strategy, a global automotive manufacturer achieved thousands more clicks per story on its intranet, driving higher engagement among its 50,000 global employees.
The Situation
One of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers prides itself on being “one team.” As part of its employee engagement strategy, it consistently maintains an intranet filled with leadership messages, company news, useful links, and other resources for its 50,000+ salaried and hourly employees. This news site is the main way that company news is shared with global employees – and therefore, highly impactful in shaping employee sentiment and engagement.
Yet what looked beautiful to employees was a bit of a mess behind the scenes. The content calendar was stored locally by the intranet editor, inaccessible to the rest of the employee communications team. Files were shared via email, creating version control chaos. And while the engagement metrics were reviewed, no actionable insights were drawn to guide future editorial strategy.
As a result, employee engagement with news on the platform was dropping, resulting in fewer impressions per story. It was time for a new strategy and a focused execution to regain readership numbers and, ultimately, restore employee engagement with the company’s main source of news.
The Approach
It was clear that we could no longer just retain the status quo. It was time for a new system, one that calmed the behind the scenes chaos, used data to drive editorial strategy, and produced content that captured the hearts and minds of employees again.
- I built a shared, transparent, and real-time editorial calendar that was visible to all members of the employee comms team. Appropriate access rights were given based on team member type, to strike the right balance of visibility and security.
- I instituted a shared file storage system with consistent naming conventions to reduce email clutter, enhance version control and ensure every edit was accounted for.
- I designed training sessions and resources to enable adoption of the new editorial calendar and file governance system.
- I created an operating cadence that allowed for more data-driven decisions – including weekly engagement metric reviews, weekly content and strategy brainstorms, and daily standup meetings to ensure alignment.
The Results
Employee engagement with company news improved: By publishing more focused news tailored to what was proven to drive employee engagement, we produced less content with more readership, increasing average impressions by hundreds per story.
Behind the scenes ran like a well-oil machine: The days of searching for a file were over. With a clear system providing governance, transparency and accountability, I handed the reigns over to the new intranet editor, without any impact to editorial operations.
There was margin to pursue creative, strategic initiatives: Once operations were stabilized and impressions were growing, the team had margin to execute on creative ideas that had previously been sidelined. For example, the employee communications team explored new ways to integrate employee advocacy tools into the news site, and it also began streamlining news from individual office sites to reduce redundancy.