I attended monthly planning meetings with the People Team to discuss potential themes and stories. In the beginning, the team had no formal way of capturing ideas or planning content, so I created a spreadsheet to focus our discussions. The planner captured content deadlines and publication dates as well as categories of story, to ensure a good balance of newsletter content.

The planner was saved as a shared document and I encouraged the team to add their ideas to it over the course of the month. Over time, this reduced pressure on the team to come up with ideas during the planning meeting, where we focused on story format, ensuring each property was represented, creating video and sourcing appropriate images, and who would be responsible for generating them.   

At each meeting we considered the current employee mindset, notable dates and current business priorities when brainstorming content. Every story ideally would have a link to the company values.  

As well as drafting and building the newsletter, my role included thinking of fun ways to create engagement within the newsletter, which we did using quizzes, competitions, blogs, videos and sharing employee stories. As well as a regular written welcome from the chief executive, I suggested he film a quarterly video message. I also encouraged the team to generate more video-based content to further increase engagement.      

Each month, I collated and shared the results from the previous month and picked out key lessons we could learn from the most and least engaging stories. After working together for six months, I delivered a training session on blogging best practice to help the team with creating interesting, relevant and valuable posts for their audience.