SUMMER OF SAFETY
Helping one of the Big Five transform safety updates into an engaging communication campaign
— 1 million frontline safety conversations
— 30% less incidents
The Background:
When one of the world’s largest warehousing and logistics companies partnered with Everyday Massive to deliver a communications campaign during a global pandemic, we knew that safety messaging was not only about keeping people safe, but also providing care, connection, and comfort.
As one of the world’s largest warehousing and logistics companies, our collaborator delivers millions of products to customers across the globe every day, including essentials like food and medical supplies. As COVID-19 gripped the globe, their WHS and Operations teams faced a new challenge — responding to unprecedented customer demand, while also keep their 800,000-strong workforce safe, and supporting their physical and mental wellbeing during uncertain times. Our collaborator needed a communication campaign for the frontline that would deliver consistent and clear messages about injury prevention, COVID safety, and wellness activities, and make a global impact.
The Situation:
How do we keep workers around the world safe, and support their mental health while dealing with increased customer demand and unprecedented growth?
As concerns for health and safety grew, so too did our collaborator’s business, with increased customer demand meaning they were growing at a rapid rate. They needed to engage their employees in safety conversations, raise awareness of health and safety issues, break old safety habits and communicate new procedures — and cut through the day-to-day operational noise to achieve it all.
We explained the importance of communication campaigns to engage (or re-engage) our collaborator’s teams in important WHS messaging, and we set to work designing a campaign designed to reach everyone in this global company, and deliver moments of delight that would cut through.
Once we had an understanding of our audience we could create a needs analysis to ensure our visuals and messaging would hit the
right note.
What did we learn?
While the core safety messages remained the same, we altered the messaging to be region-appropriate regarding COVID guidelines, some of the safety messaging (staying safe in the heat, rather than the cold), and of course the design, to suit the season and the audience.
Although based in the US, our collaborator has sites all over the world, so our communications campaign had to take these geographical and seasonal differences into account in order to be topical and appropriate.
To help with this, we divided our audience into two distinct groups:
The Shift:
Creating an engaging message that would cut through to shift behaviours and create a feeling of reassurance. We wanted to convey safety messaging in a reassuring and constructive way, that would have employees coming to work with a smile, even during uncertainty.
We wanted them to know that our collaborator genuinely cares for not just their physical safety, but also their mental health, and the health and wellness of their families.
Beyond that, it was also important for our collaborator to be able to shift behaviours to ensure their sites were operating as safely as possible, that COVID-safe practices were understood and universally adopted, and that the mental health support services that were in place were widely known and used.
Our targeted communications campaign aligned with our collaborator’s existing annual 12-week Summer of Safety campaign, but we adapted the content to focus on what really mattered to our collaborator in 2020, in a way that would affect real change.
The Solution:
A health and safety campaign for an uncertain world.
Our 2020 Summer of Safety/Winter of Wellness campaign was executed at all our collaborator’s sites around the world, across nearly all of their operational lines. Although there were some content and design variations to allow for seasonal and cultural differences, the teams worked from a centralised engagement toolkit to ensure they were supporting injury prevention, COVID safety education, and wellness activities.
Messages were delivered via:
stickers
safety tips delivered at meetings
weekly content shared via internal electronic communications (including push notifications)
bathroom posters
a weekly brief for leaders
internal electronic billboards
Instagram
activation ideas for managers for team activities.
We used techniques, such as piquing curiosity and fun design, to make our campaigns stand out, break the habituation of constant corporate-speak and message bombardment, to deliver a stand-out moment of delight for employees in the busy-ness of their everyday work.
Our campaign was all about:
driving focused safety conversations
raising awareness of important issues
providing specific calls to action to change behaviour
breaking habituation
delivering moments of delight
cutting through operational ‘noise’ with our messaging
driving re-engagement with existing safety messages.
To support on-site safety engagements, we created a broad range of swag and assets that sites could use to align with weekly themes and calls to action during the 12-week campaign. This ensured team members were going to be exposed to the messaging somehow, and more often than not, that messaging was going to be repeated in various ways, for maximum reinforcement and recall.
