The Company Broadcast.
I ran the weekly all-company meeting at a 1,200 person company spread across Europe, the US and APAC. It was a top-down rotation of people reading their slides out loud over Zoom when I got it, and a broadcast by the time I was done, with live and prerecorded segments, a rotating cast of speakers, employee recognition in every episode, and the mandatory HR asks turned into their own ad campaigns. That was one piece of a broader internal comms remit and the piece I put the most into.
The work
Leadership rotated through the same strategic pillars every week, which meant somebody was usually presenting mid-cycle with nothing new to say and running out the clock. We were conditioning a broad audience to tune leadership out.
The message still has to repeat, but how you repeat it can change and so can who is doing the repeating. Instead of a lone preacher you get a chorus, everybody singing the same tune in their own slice of the harmony: an interesting finding, the why behind an initiative, what it unlocks if we pull it off, a customer interaction good or bad. Same pillar, nine voices, and now it sticks and it arrives with proof that somebody is actually working on it.
Logistics
About 800 people watched live each week, roughly 150 of them in Europe closing out their day and the rest across three US time zones just starting theirs, with APAC on the rebroadcast, so one show had to land for somebody tired, somebody uncaffeinated, and somebody watching a day later with none of the chat. Every deck got an edit, every run-through got timed, and the CEO's talk track got written, and when a segment ran long I'd record the presenter the day before and trim it down. Senior leaders stayed live, everyone else went prerecorded.
The rest was making it worth watching. Compliance training and the annual survey became short commercials with skits in them. In a remote company you are competing with the dog and the phone and forty unread Slack messages, so strategically introducing noise to capture attention is one of the smartest things you can do. A town hall should feel like flipping channels on a very engaging, noisy station: something selling you, something informing you, something entertaining you, and something making you feel a little love for the people you work with.
Employee recognition
New hires with their photos and where they're from and what they're into. Anniversaries, with chat popping off to thank people for their time. Peer praise pulled from a Slack dashboard we built at a hackathon and run in the pre-show countdown, so you'd watch everything your coworkers had said about each other since the last time you were all together. It costs almost nothing and people need the periodic reminder that they're seen.
Show
HR ran late and the only slot left was the one meeting we shared with our European colleagues, who have socialized medicine and do not need to hear about signing up for private health insurance. So the video ran two channels at once: Americans watched with the left eye and got the enrollment information, Europeans watched with the right eye and got puppies, with occasional reminders not to look at the puppies and to go sign up. Stupid, and people remembered it, which is the whole job.
The annual handbook acknowledgment landed near Valentine's Day, so it became a video about renewing your vows with the company.
Return to office announced at an all-company retreat as a video about breaking into the building.
A character built for the annual engagement survey, a guy in costume who showed up to bug you until you took it. Eventually just posting his picture was enough for everyone to know what it meant, and engagement went up.