Making employee communications a little less...boring

For several years, I ran the employee intranet at Lockheed Martin, writing and editing all kinds of content that ranged from boring to...well, really boring. Human resources and IT updates, facility announcements, security rules and regulations. Really fun to read, right?

WRONG.

But during my time as senior content manager for 100,000+ global employees, I made it my personal mission to write content that employees actually wanted to read and that made coming to work for them just a little bit more fun and exciting. Of course, I occasionally had to write the boring pieces, but I'd make them fun and creative any time I could. For example, around the holidays, I worked with the graphic design team to make the below "blueprint" for how our technologies might assist Santa's Sleigh. Then I wrote a parody news release about how we'd won a contract from the North Pole to optimize Santa's Sleigh for that year. Unfortunately, I didn't grab a copy of that piece before I departed the company. But I did grab the blueprint!

I wrote this article every year for three years around the holidays, updating it with new products and technologies the company had launched that year, and it became one of the most-read recurring content pieces with hundreds of employee comments about how much they loved it every year, and how it was a nice change from the mundane news and updates they usually got on the site before I had taken over.