A closer look at the winners of Ragan’s Employee Communications Awards

Just because there are many ways to reach your employees doesn’t mean you can cobble together any message on any platform and find success. The best employee communicators use a varied selection of channels and a deep audience insight to ensure employee messaging is impactful.

We’ve tabbed several organizations that innovated and executed expert employee comms strategies to earn an award at Ragan Employee Communications Award last year. To apply to this year’s edition of the Ragan Employee Communications Awards, remember to enter by the September 20 deadline.

Campbell’s internal email campaign answers the call when employees ask “What the Tech?”

The background:  What’s more satisfying to an internal communicator than a nice bowl of hot, tasty soup? The knowledge that your internal email campaign is a winner, for starters. By using short, attention-grabbing emails that tell readers what they need to know in quick blasts, canned food brand Campbell’s “What the Tech” email campaign helps guide employees with tech questions down the path to answers. This innovative work earned Campbell’s the Ragan Employee Communications Award for Best Internal Email Campaign.

“What the Tech” divides its email templates into three sections:

•  “Know IT”, which provides answers about tech that employees seek.
•  “Do IT”, which offers pathways for employees to upgrade their devices.
• “Watch IT”, which gives employees the knowledge they need to protect themselves against email phishing scams. Links in each of these emails take employees to written and video resources that give a deeper knowledge of the issues at hand.

These specialized emails reached 450,000 recipients over the first five months of the “What the Tech” campaign. To track the campaign’s success Campbell’s digital workplace team reviews the open and download rates of all email blasts.

The takeaway: Employees are always going to have questions. But the best internal communicators understand that effectively educating a busy workforce requires easy-to-navigate, innovative pathways to the answers.

3M’s virtual fairs an insider’s view into the critical work of the company’s scientists and engineers

The background: Scientists at 3M tackle some of the biggest challenges in our modern world. However, with a globally dispersed workforce working on highly varied schedules, the company needed a way to showcase how its scientists were innovating in a way that reached employees on a wide array of digital channels. That’s where the “3M Forward Virtual Fairs” came into play. This campaign earned 3M the Ragan Employee Communications award for

3M held three of these virtual fairs a month in the summer of ‘23, covering a total of 19 different topics. Each featured subject matter experts sharing their knowledge and the company’s approach to solving the problems of our modern world. June covered climate issues and sustainability in packaging, July focused on industrial safety and automation in the workplace, and August’s fairs discussed electric vehicles and innovation in the digital world.

The comms team used all tools at its disposal to promote these virtual fairs. This included email blasts to 3M’s 90,000 employees, a landing page for employees to participate in individual fairs, and a post-event catch-up in case employees missed the proceedings live. In addition, 3M’s scientists and engineers held a Q&A session to allow for more direct employee involvement.

The fair series was impactful enough to buck the trend of lower intranet participation over the summer months, with 3,700 participants in 49 countries joining the knowledge-sharing sessions.

The takeaway: Just because your organization is far-flung doesn’t mean you can’t share critical knowledge with everyone. The use of technology and intranet platforms can help maximize participation when people can’t make an event live.

Optus’ internal comms podcast lets employees hear leaders in their own words

The background: An employee who knows the perspectives of their leaders is more likely to have deeply rooted trust in their organization, thus sowing the seeds for a stronger, more unified work culture. But what if there was a better way to develop that trust than the occasional update at a town hall meeting? For finding the solution to this problem through audio, Australian telecommunications company Optus earned the Ragan Employee Communications Award for Best Podcast.

One of the largest mobile phone service providers in Australia, for Optus, innovation took the form of the audio waves of the podcasting world. The company released bi-weekly podcast episodes of the show “Conversation with Kelly” that featured then-CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin. Hosted by the employee app LifeatOptus, the episodes aimed to inspire leaders and employees to find their best paths to growth at work.

Beyond the value of these conversations, listening to each episode earned employees credits toward the company’s learning and development initiative, Optus 12 Hours of Learning.

From launch through July 2023, the podcast earned over 9,000 plays and high ratings for content, length, and ease of listener access.

The takeaway: Incentivizing employee engagement by tying it back to benefits and upskilling is a great way to reward your employees for their investment in the organization. Bringing that conversation directly to them through a podcast helps foster a closer connection.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.