A digital employee newsletter that engages the workforce to drive productivity.
Background
MedImmune, AstraZeneca’s global research and development division, pioneers innovative healthcare solutions across key therapeutic areas. Their 2,500 employees focus on as many as 120 research projects, so a culture of fluid communication is essential for fostering collaboration.
Challenge
Keeping thousands of employees updated with the latest company developments can be a challenge. An effective digital employee newsletter can make the difference between demotivating staff, or inspiring a productive workforce. It can help avoid duplication of communication and demonstrates that a company is committed to keeping their staff informed.
Solution
For MedImmune, a timely digital employee newsletter fits seamlessly with their global Great Place to Work strategic initiative.
The digital employee newsletter we created for the Global Engineering Division utilises a simple design, helping to focus on the news and information within.
Utilising the company’s colour palette, illustration style and brand guidelines, we created a series of easy to use templates for daily communications and important news bulletins, as well as monthly, quarterly and C-level executive updates.
A consistent engineering design theme runs across the templates, as can be seen in the use of a technical blueprint as a header. The digital employee newsletter also includes slight variations to help signpost content, ensuring each person feels like a part of the global family, but can easily identify the subject of the communication.
Strategic use of colour gives each template its own unique identifier, and using header variations help identify content for different teams. Examples of this include: illustrations of microscopes for lab employees, DNA-inspired graphic devices for the pharma group and hard hats to inspire the idea of employees working together.
The templates were created so that they could easily be updated by MedImmune’s internal team. Each was built using HTML and Inline CSS to ensure compatibility with all of our client’s systems, and the emails used one-column layouts to help keep a consistent display throughout multiple email clients.
