How does a company with $25B revenue and a global workforce ensure engagement with new company initiatives? With comics!
For a large corporation with a global and diverse workforce, internal communications are a significant challenge. Here’s where comics step in.
Comics are unique in being able to communicate complex messages in an engaging and easy-to-understand format, whilst transcending cultural barriers to appeal to a broad audience. This makes comics an ideal solution for internal comms at large companies.
Our comics showed workers implementing management principles and connecting the “zero loss” philosophy to their day-to-day lives. The communications are being distributed through corporate social media as well as newsletters and print editions at manufacturing sites. This comic series has been hugely successful, and we have expanded to other business units within the organization.
The company were seeing low engagement with internal comms around key initiatives. Management were interested in exploring the potential of comics as an accessible and engaging means of developing company culture and capability.
The considerable amount of information we needed to absorb around a complex management philosophy, company culture – and not least manufacturing processes – meant that there was a steep learning curve at project start.
We undertook a thorough research process to understand the business and how it operates at all levels. This included a visit to a manufacturing site in Europe, as well as consultations with numerous Subject Matter Experts.
We proposed a series of 12 comics, released monthly. Comics explored themes such as loss elimination, leadership culture, health & safety – and many more.
The comics were targeted at both management and plant floor workers, and promoted best practices – developing themes of personal autonomy and empowerment, whilst emphasising the role of the broader corporate community in providing support.
We developed a mascot character, who acts as an extension of the brand “voice”, narrating the comics and guiding the audience along the “journey” to loss elimination.
Each comic was 1-2 pages long – an ideal length in allowing enough space to develop a story, whilst remaining short enough to stay engaging.
After the initial release of the 12 comics, we have expanded to helping new business units within the organisation with communications, as well as continuing and expanding the initial comic series.
Management stressed the importance of depicting a truly global workforce in all its diversity. Health & Safety teams also gave input, ensuring that workers were shown wearing correct PPE.
We developed a friendly and approachable style with clean, relatively simple lines and colours. We paid close attention to the company’s brand guidelines and made use of their existing font base, colour palettes and shapes, whilst bringing our own interpretive flair.
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