AECOM turns to external social media to engage employees about wellness

With all employees have on their minds, it’s a challenge to get them to focus on their employer’s wellness program. The best most organizations can hope for is drawing attention to wellness through regular messaging, but sharing a program feature or a positive message rarely grabs employees’ attention away from the more pressing matters of work and activities. AECOM did something different and risky, and as a result has won first place in the “Use of Social Media” category in Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

The company decided to ask employees to participate actively in a campaign to share their reason for being healthy on external social media channels. According to AECOM, “We counted on an important aspect of we know about social media: It is an outlet for people’s passion. People love to share photos, videos and posts about the things they’re passionate about—whether personal or professional. People want to share their families, their friends, their hobbies and activities with the world—or at least with their followers.”

The campaign asked people to post #MyReasonToBeWell and assigned activity points for posting. The communications team created a microsite to aggregate posts sharing the tag. With employees’ permission, some of their posts were used in the company’s wellness communications campaign, including images of children, families, mountains, beaches, farmers markets and more that found their way into mailers, e-cards, posters and other media.

Employees shared 2,026 Instagram post and 843 tweets, many of them good enough to use for other communications—such as the open enrollment campaign.