How RELX’s owned digital storytelling channel transformed its internal communications during the COVID-19 pandemic

Within a few days of the pandemic, 97% of our 33,000 people, based in 265 offices in nearly 40 countries were working from home. The internal communications team faced an unprecedented challenge: how could we help people stay connected, engaged and motivated.

We wanted to put our people first and knew that internal communications had a fundamental role to play. We did this by developing a campaign of stories and content that enabled our people to share their personal experiences and keep up to date with the appropriate resources and information to work from home.

We had recently begun transforming our communications strategy through Shorthand, a powerful digital parallax storytelling platform to tell compelling stories.

As Covid-19 hit, we doubled down and increased our output of compelling stories. One story which stood out was about heroes at RELX. We asked our people across the company to nominate their colleagues who had gone above and beyond during the pandemic. It encouraged open communication, collaboration and more involvement between individuals, enabling employees to feel less alone and isolated. The story achieved over 13,400 reads. Another story which proved greatly popular was a collection of images titled: The last picture before lockdown. As a result, employees felt more engaged and connected despite being separated.

The team also created business stories. Our Ten innovations at RELX: Helping change the world story allowed employees to learn about some things they may have not known about given the sheer scale of our business. The story reached a new record number of reads, achieving over 15,400 reads, enabling employees to feel prouder than ever to work at RELX.

Additionally, the team created a COVID-19 resource hub, where local guidance and communications are provided. Its launch saw huge spikes in intranet traffic. The COVID-19 centre included our series of ‘Seenit’ videos, short user-generated content videos which provide a powerful way to showcase diversity, talent and connections across RELX. A video entitled: Working from Home, featured colleagues sharing their working from home highlights.

As lockdowns began to ease, the team also created a video series titled: ‘Gradually Returning to the Office’. Employees were taken on a virtual tour around their usual everyday office, to see what their new office environment was like. The first one was Helping people back to the office in China

The shorthand effect

Our stories are now consistently averaging over 10,000 reads each. These are numbers that we thought impossible just 12 months ago.

In the middle of the pandemic we completed pulse surveys of employees across three of our divisions and compared the results with 2019 polls. Across all three, we recorded an astonishing 'double digit' increase in advocacy – “Would you recommend working at RELX”. The proportion of hires generated by internal referrals jumped significantly compared with 2018.

Obviously, there are a number of factors impacting such surveys, but we believe the internal communications strategy, using all its tools and platforms at its disposal, has played a big role.

Built with Shorthand.