The #WeAreCisco talent brand from Cisco Systems has become one of the best examples of using employee-generated content in the social media field to attract recruits. The Snapchat account is well known for its daily employee takeovers. The “Life at Cisco” blog grew out of these accounts, an extension of the Talent Brand team’s goal of creating a connection between employees and the external world of top talent. Now it’s taken first place in the “Blog” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

The blog employs long-form storytelling about how employees live and work at Cisco and what makes the company a great place to work. According to Cisco, “This is where our employees share how a project they worked on impacted the world, and what Cisco means to them beyond 140 characters or one great image.”

The content is sourced from the various social media posts where employees share the #WeAreCisco hashtag. After identifying potential stories from these social media accounts, the team reaches out to employees to get permission to share the photo and story.

The blog receives some 9,000 views per month, with people spending 3–4 minutes on the site, suggesting the team is achieving its “personal connection” goal. It even featured a blog post from a new employee who wrote about wanting to work at Cisco because she read all the blog posts about working at Cisco.

Congratulations to Cisco’s Carmen Collins and Casie Shimansky.

Among those represented by the United Auto Workers union are 56,000 hourly Ford employees and some 75,000 retirees across the U.S. Like many unions, the UAW handles benefits and health-related communication with its members; Ford (typical of this arrangement) maintains a hands-off approach to this kind of communication. However, the enormity of the opioid crisis led the UAW to approach the Ford communications team to help amplify the campaigns the union had undertaken with its Campaign of Hope. The articles which resulted have won first place in the “Article Series” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

While company-union collaborations are rare, Ford enthusiastically welcomed the invitation to tell stories that would trigger emotional reactions. The team worked quickly to identify stories from Ford’s U.S. manufacturing facilities, settling on three employees, each with a unique story to tell.

Austin Wade and Duane Pliska battled addiction at various stages of their lives, while Mark Hart lost his 24-year-old son to an overdose. Each came from different backgrounds and generations, helping convey the idea that anyone can be affected by opioid addiction.

The articles convey raw, gritty, emotionally charged tales that let Ford workers put recognizable faces on addiction. The series debuted in a special report in the 2017 health-focused issue of UAW-Ford Community Magazine, distributed in print and digital format to hourly workers and retirees. Print editions were also distributed in plants and doctors’ offices, Ford dealerships and local government offices.

The series was repurposed on Ford’s intranet, in the printed @Ford Manufacturing magazine, the retiree e-newsletter and the employee mobile app. Each article attracted more than 7,500 views. A number of employees used commenting functionality to show support for their colleagues, and some shared their own experiences. Several expressed their pride in working “for a company that is willing to send those who suffer from this to rehab without judgment or the fear of losing a job,” as one employee put it.

Congratulations to the cross-functional team of Mark Truby, Karen Hampton, Brad Carroll, Jenn Corney, Alice Riley and Chris Kassab (from Ford) and Jerry Carson and Raenell Glenn (from the UAW) for their work.

Dell Digital’s organization was 10,000 employees strong, the result of a merger between Dell and EMC. The marketing and communications team was tasked with developing a multifaceted strategy to keep key stakeholders up to date on the progress the organization was making, and it settled on an annual report as a key piece of collateral. The final product has earned the team first place in the “Annual Report” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

The organization had to integrate 19 global data centers, a number of systems and hundreds of applications. The 10,000 employees of the Dell Digital team were the primary audience; the report would help foster a community and culture that embraced the Dell Way, which the team had embraced as an approach for designing and delivering new products and capabilities. All 145,000 Dell employees were also an audience, as were customers and prospects.

The first challenge faced by the team was creating a focus, given the many achievements Dell Digital had achieved. They opted to center on the Dell Digital Way methodology, summarizing results of each aspect of the approach with colorful infographics and images of team members supplementing the narrative.

The report is visually appealing, using an atypically large font and compelling callouts. The CIO’s blog post about the annual report—which was used to launch it—was the most viewed, with a 65 percent increase in viewership compared to average blog post-consumption.

Congratulations to the team of Micky Baca, Rosemary Cassie, Patrick Cooley, Laurie Curran, Fraser MacMannis, Brooke Sherman-Schmieg and Matt Zytka.

Dow was undergoing change. At the top of the list was a megamerger with DuPont. That wasn’t the only change, however; the company was also undergoing a CEO transition, preparing for a new brand launch, experiencing significant divestitures and acquisitions and more. The internal communication team had to find a way to reach all employees—not just those with access to workstations—with a personalized experience. Its solution has won Dow first place in the “Value to Employees” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

One key goal, as Dow explains, was to “update our internal communication channels in a way that helped to create a holistic and consistent experience across channels and devices.” This goal led to a redesign of the intranet homepage to include customizable widgets featuring content and news feeds from Dow Connect, the company’s branded SocialChorus platform.

The redesign included a featured story section to highlight the most important news; four global news feeds; Corporate News and Discover Dow channels, where employees find information about corporate news and initiatives,  financial news, awards and recognitions and topics from regional sites to product launches and new innovations; People News; and Core Values information.

In addition to attracting new users, employees found value in getting the information they most needed in timeframes convenient to them. The experience of access to localized, relevant content is the same on mobile devices and desktops across the global company’s many locations.

More than 53,000 employees use the network, and the amount of time they stay on the homepage has increased by 40 percent.

Congratulations to the team led by Christine Miller, Jennifer Holzinger, Pam LeVasseur and Liz Israel.

A 2015 survey of employees working for data backup and recovery company Commvault found senior management was not doing enough to keep employees informed. The company’s intranet was little more than a collection of outdated SharePoint sites with no social functionality, no mobile access and a challenging user interface. The overhaul undertaken by the communications team has won first place in the “Social Intranet” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

The effort was focused on providing easier access to the right content, and communication that engaged employees rather than simply pushed out messages, as well as creating a platform to build on the company’s culture. The result was a decision to adopt the Jive platform, which has social functionality built in.

Among the uses to which this functionality was put was a knowledge base and Q&A forums that simplified the process of asking and getting answers to questions; as a result, an average of 250 questions are answered each quarter on the page.

Social elements are also used to promote events. For example, during the company’s global customer conference, employees shared blog posts, photos and social content. During the 20^th anniversary celebration, employees shared their own histories at the company and recognized their peers. The team also developed “People Side of the Business” social spaces on the intranet where employees could share ideas and concepts from beyond their own day-to-day work.

“Commvault Life” is one of these spaces, where employees share photos and write posts about company culture, including volunteer work, holiday parties and personal notes. Jive also enabled the Commvault Women in Technology group to launch a special interest group site on the intranet.

Ninety-eight percent of employees have adopted the new intranet, CONNECT, with active use increasing to 84 percent; average daily views grew 38 percent in CONNECT’s second year, and employee survey feedback has also been positive.

Congratulations to Brittany Lamb, Eliza Mixon, Keeley Sorokti, and Tracy Maurer. 

The intranet at Einstein—a 150-year-old Philadelphia-based nonprofit health care organization—was outdated and hard to use, prompting the organization’s 8,300 employees to identify in a survey the features they most wanted to be improved: a directory, user search, intuitive navigation and accessibility when away from work. Einstein contracted with internal communication consultancy Davis & Company, which has earned first place in the “Design” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

Davis & Company began its work with a thorough audit of the existing intranet, including identifying subject matter experts for each page to solicit feedback on what the pages should include. The design phase kicked off with Davis & Company assembling a team of internal experts from various Einstein departments that would review the various design iterations and provide feedback.

As with all intranets, the effort began with the homepage, which would be the primary news delivery point but also serve as the portal to other pages. The team adopted a two-layer navigation approach designed to decrease the number of clicks required for employees to get what they were looking for.

The top layer included policies and procedures, tools, contacts and a calendar. The second layer included “Working at Einstein,” which housed important employee-focused content like HR and training materials; it also included access to all department pages, along with the Einstein Growth, Professionalism, Services page, each of the organization’s locations and a news archive.

The intranet was launched with a naming contest (the winner: EinsteinConnect) along with a sneak peek of the intranet the week before it was unveiled. A survey revealed 88 percent of employees rated the overall look and feel an eight or higher (out of 10), along with other highly positive results.

Congratulations to the Davis & Company team of Christine Burri, Courtney Kovacs, Casey Gatti, Stacy Weidenmuller, and Einstein’s team of Lisa Tysen and  Ethan Wergelis-Isaacson (no longer with Einstein).

In many organizations, employees subscribe to a health care plan and use it only when they have to, for illness and injury. They don’t take advantage of a variety of plan components that are designed to prevent illness or injury and help them live a long, healthy life. Morley—whose business is business process outsourcing, meetings and incentives, and exhibits and displays—wanted employees to be proactive about their health, which would pay dividends to the company in a variety of ways (including driving down costs). The campaign it developed has won first place in the “Wellness Program” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

The campaign would increase awareness of Morley’s benefits, encourage employees to take advantage of free annual checkups and wellness time off, and spur use of features like the company’s telemedicine program. It was centered around a visual theme presented by a designer that emulated handwriting, a theme the team incorporated into all media, including videos, posters, digital displays, environmental graphics, mirror clings and more.

The months-long campaign featured seasonal programs, such as the company’s wellness program sponsoring the MoOlympics during the winter, challenging people to take five-minute exercise breaks with exercises that corresponded to Winter Olympic sports. During the summer, the company promoted a challenge to walk between the company’s Michigan headquarters and one of its South Carolina locations.

Photos and videos helped promote the campaign, which led more than 25 percent of associates to get physicals during the first six months. Employees have also saved some $10,000 by qualifying for discounts to receive annual physicals and meet requirements for glucose, cholesterol, BMI and smoking cessation. Telemedicine use spiked to 73 percent.

Congratulations to Michelle Morris, Tim Marx, Rachel Stone, Teri Popoff, Jannah Francis, Lindsay Sullivan, Jessica Schliska, Jennie Sajdak and Lisa Bader.

For two years, Whirlpool had presented Get gNARly (for the company’s North America Region) as “a cross between a TED Talk and a rock concert.” The event presented important information to employees in a format that compelled their attention. In 2018, conditions drove the company to make the difficult decision to reduce its workforce. Because gNARly has an important impact on employees, leadership decided to maintain its budget. Its approach to the challenge has won Whirlpool first place in the “Event” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

The challenge for 2018 was to make the event relevant under the challenging circumstances. The solution was to build a special escape room to deliver a unique experience to employees, who could escape only if they knew the company strategy (grounded in the idea of thinking differently and acting quickly).

A two-week teaser campaign ran while the escape room was under construction. The escape experience itself was centered around one-hour sessions in which up to a dozen employees participated. These sessions were held up to six times every day (extended two weeks beyond its original closing date due to popular demand).

Employees were briefed on their assignment: NAR’s president had gone missing; his administrative assistant had to find him for a call with the CEO. The experience required teams to work together to solve puzzles connected to the strategy—but also required them to think differently and act quickly. Upon escape, they saw a video message that showed the call with the CEO. Those completing the challenge on time received commemorative T-shirts.

More than 1,000 employees and 118 teams participated, achieving a 69 percent success rate. Follow-up research found employees were committed to playing a role in the company’s strategy and understood goals and priorities.

Congratulations to the team of Emily Kirchner, Angie Seger, Dave Neidlinger, Cindy Richards, Gretchen Arnt, Dan Velez and Ashlee Stroud.

The Citrix Employee Communications team was challenged by a series of changes precipitated by a major investor who insisted the company refocus its business strategy to drive higher revenues. Addressing this challenge has earned Citrix first place in the “Employee Engagement” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

Over the course of two years, Citrix employees witnessed a restructuring of the workforce, executive turnover, product line adjustments, changes to the composition of the board, a new strategy and a layoff. Despite efforts to maintain stability and help employees navigate all this change, the 2017 Global Employee Survey confirmed that trust in leadership had declined and employees lacked confidence in the company’s new direction, as well as their own ability to contribute to it. Engagement overall had fallen significantly as well.

All this led the communications team to select one overarching goal for 2018: Engage employees around the Citrix story. Two approaches drove the department’s activities: a focus on strategy, storytelling and enterprise engagement; and providing communications and messaging consulting support. These activities centered around “The 2020 Goals”—broad, unifying objectives the company also embedded in its performance, development and rewards programs, ensuring alignment with business priorities.

Most significantly, the team created a Center of Excellence to ensure consistent messaging across the organization’s various communication functions. Messages were cascaded through multiple channels, including employee meetings (which were increased to a bimonthly schedule), the intranet, a Five-Minute Manager Update (designed to provide managers with weekly action items) and other internal programs.

As a result, Citrix saw an 80 percent improvement in its Net Promoter Score, along with significant other improvements in employee perceptions.

Congratulations to the Employee Communications team of Jason Vego, Veronica Nur Valdes, Julie Geer and Emily Lewis.

Two years after Shell Chemicals entered the polymer market, 99 percent of its employees said they had a solid understanding of the new business. That was the result of an orchestrated campaign by J. Walter Thompson INSIDE to raise employees’ business literacy around polymers, and it has earned first place in the “Employee Education Program” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

Shell turned to J. Walter Thompson INSIDE, which focuses on employer branding, employee communications and recruitment advertising. The goal of the program was ambitious: Engage employees in a new marketplace to transform a startup project into a profitable business that would become a growth engine for the entire company. 

The team began with a brand platform rooted in proven strategic models like Doblin’s 10 Types of Innovation and Collins’ Vision Framework, employing them to empower employees to disrupt the status quo. An employer branding program included a complete omnichannel approach to underscore the importance of Shell’s polymers play. It included a series of brand education sessions, leadership fireside chats, employee role-playing experiences and the launch of an influencer program in which staff made personal commitments to uphold company values and promote the external “Start Believing” campaign (fueled by an internal “I Believe” campaign).

The strategy culminated in an internal event, the National Plastics Expo Employee Experience, providing employees with a glimpse at the customer-focused show; the replica of the company’s booth featured 10 interactive stations, including virtual reality fly-throughs, video, sales content and product information.

After the event, 99 percent of attendees indicated they had a better awareness of Shell Polymers, and half signed up to be brand enthusiasts, a winning effort by any measure.

Kudos to the team of Julie Toth, Ian Kaplan, Doug Shonrock, Ariana Rivera Goldberg, Jason Andrews, Natalie White and Denise Bureta.

Employee advocacy—also known as brand ambassadorship—is on the rise as a business tactic. Philips AG has proven its power with its “Health Heroes” videos, designed move awareness of Philips from a TV and home entertainment company to a health technology company. In doing so, it’s won first place in the “Brand Ambassador Program” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

From simply allowing employees to share approved company content on their own social media channels to more sophisticated outreach strategies, companies are recognizing what the Edelman Trust Barometer has shown statistically: People trust front-line employees as spokespeople for their organizations (and how organizations treat their employees is a primary driver of public trust).

Philips employees could share multiple messages to shape and reinforce perceptions both internally and externally. As noted above, they wanted people to see Philips as more than a manufacturer of TV and home entertainment systems and focus more on its health technology business. They also wanted to promote the company’s culture and values, with a focus on diversity and inclusion.

Throughout the year, the communication team produced a series of “Health Heroes” videos for distribution through paid, earned, shared and owned media. The team measured how well employees helped these videos spread through view time (the videos achieved more than 6,000 YouTube views), number of clicks, engagement of colleagues and intranet subscriptions (which grew by 50 percent).

Congratulations to the team led by Suzy Chisholm.

Alignment between a company’s CSR efforts and its core business is crucial to any campaign’s success. Few efforts were as well aligned as that of The Kroger Co., one of America’s largest grocery store chains, and its goal of eliminating food waste. Its efforts have won Kroger first place in the “Corporate Social Responsibility” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

In the United States alone, more than 40 percent of food produced is thrown away each year. Kroger isn’t merely paying lip service to the issue with its Zero Hunger | Zero Waste effort, which seeks to end hunger in the communities where it operates and eliminate waste across the organization by 2025. External communication has been considerable, but the CSR effort also focuses on associates, who are continuously engaged and informed on the program, with activities including store manager training, a focus on the program in new-hire orientation and ongoing coverage on the intranet and in leadership communication.

Related content has appeared in internal social media, digital signage, the weekly email newsletter and in-store signage. Employees have had opportunities to volunteer at locally-driven community events, and the app encourages employee store associates to engage customers digitally. Employees have also been recognized for their involvement.

The effort has resulted in Kroger ”rescuing” 91.2 million pounds of food and providing 325 million meals to families in need in Kroger’s communities. It’s also noteworthy that 81 percent of employees surveyed responded positively to the question, “Kroger’s Zero Hunger | Zero Waste plan is our commitment to end hunger in our communities and eliminate waste in our company by 2025. By knowing this, does it make you feel proud to work for the company?”

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.

Cisco Systems has created the gold standard for talent acquisition via social media. The “We Are Cisco” talent brand has been one of the most consistently effective and innovative uses of social media to appeal to prospective employees. Now a new program has won Cisco first place in the “Recruitment Campaign” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

On Snapchat in particular, the company has demonstrated the power of trusting employees—in this case, with the account username and password—to convey what it’s like to work at Cisco and share their enthusiasm for their jobs and the company. It wasn’t too big a stretch, then, to pivot the account with the 2018 Summer of Interns.

Designed to highlight the experience of Cisco interns during their summer tenure, the program began by introducing interns to the WeAreCisco brand and getting them to sign the social media policy (including a vow never to share login credentials). Beyond that, though, the content shared was up to the interns who were guided by the slogan, “Be you, with us.”

Interns interested in participating signed up on a cloud-based spreadsheet, each agreeing to take over the account for one day. On July 26—National Intern Day—the team facilitated a coordinated handoff with five interns in 15-minute increments, kicking it off with the question, “What song best describes your Cisco internship? GO.” One intern shared a song, then passed it to the next.

“We pulled this off in a seamless fashion because of the frequent communication and trust we cultivated at the onset of the program,” Cisco explains. It worked: Thirty-two interns produced 239 Snaps with nearly 90,000 total views. Snapchatters watched 12,000 total minutes, and “swipe up to apply” Snaps doubled from June to July.

Congratulations to Carmen Collins and Lauren Grimaldo for leading one of the best talent acquisition social media programs in all of business—and continuing to innovate.

Hitachi Vantara was formed when three Hitachi subsidiaries merged. The company accelerated the pace of transformation in 2017, seeking to fully integrate the three organizations and create a single operating model and business strategy. The communications team undertook Project North Star to establish a shared sense of identity that would drive engagement levels higher. Its success has earned first place in the “Rebranding Campaign” category of Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards.

The change was big enough that some employees left the organization, and morale fell among those who remained. Working with an external agency, the five-person team assessed the legacy cultures of the three subsidiaries, then used that information in developing a strategy of storytelling that featured the voices and faces of Hitachi Vantara employees.

In fact, employees played a vital role in the strategy, with a global grassroots network providing insights—including a new employee value proposition and a set of expected behaviors. The agency hosted design-thinking workshops that brought together employee influencers and key executives. The team relied on other employee inputs as well, undertaking a series of employee photo and video shoots around the world from which it created a 29-page e-book that declares employees are “going to change the way the world works.”

Storytelling drove articles and videos, with employees sharing success stories illustrating the new culture and discussing the company. A survey found 93 percent of employees indicated they were proud to work for the company—up 6 points from the previous year—and the voluntary attrition rate dropped by 52 percent. Meanwhile, Glassdoor reviews reflected improvements in employee views of the company.

Congratulations to the team of Kelly Shelburne, Stella Mikelonis, Michelle Johnson, Brad Whitworth and Steve Fine.