Liberation Iannillo

CONTENT MARKETING & CREATIVE DIRECTION

UNEXPECTED: How do you engage the entire workplace to let employees know a big change is coming to the way they work with HR? With respect for the audience and unexpected humor.

When A+E Networks upgraded their human resources software to Workday, the project stakeholders were faced with big challenges. How do we communicate to employees that a major change is coming to their work flow, create positive sentiment around this change, and keep them engaged so they’ll complete the tasks we need them to in order to minimize disruption? I accomplished this by having respect and empathy for my audience.

The Workday project kicked off with a series of short informational videos that aired on monitors located by each of the elevator banks throughout the NY, CT, and LA offices. The creative concept was a series of text exchanges between two fictional A+E employees, a responsible person who relayed high-level information and a hot mess of an employee who provided the comic relief via office gaffes. 

The videos were well received because the humor was unexpected. While conceiving these videos my thought was, if people are forced to watch them all day long while waiting for elevators, don’t annoy them and make the experience fun.

The communications plan I created also included a microsite with task-specific tutorials, an email drip campaign with project milestones and to-dos, and info sessions that employees could attend to get a walkthrough of Workday and have their questions answered. 

This project was a huge success as there was zero disruption in the transition—no small feat considering we had an aggressive four month project deadline.