PECO, an Exelon company · 2024 to present · Channels and planning
How do we reach employees who never sit at a desk?
Email and the intranet reach people at desks. A line crew starts the day in a truck. This is how I run employee channels for a workforce of about 3,000 that includes both.
- Channel strategy
- Manager cascade
- Editorial planning
- Request intake
- The problem
- The channels that are easiest to publish on are the ones field employees see least.
- What I do
- Write and publish across the intranet, email, digital signage and supervisor cascades, and treat the supervisor as a channel with its own format.
- The plan
- Wrote a 2027 employee communications plan with goals for manager communications, field reach and leadership transitions.
On this page
Start with who the channels miss
Before choosing a channel, I ask where each group is when the news goes out and who they already listen to.
Where the workforce is
| Audience | Where they are | What reaches them |
|---|---|---|
| Office employees | At a screen most of the day | Email and the intranet |
| Field crews | In a truck or on a job site | Their supervisor, at the start of the shift |
| Managers and supervisors | Between their team and everyone else | A briefing before their people hear the news |
The testDo field employees get major news the same day as everyone else?
The ruleNo supervisor should learn about a change from the crew.
Give each channel one job
The same announcement is written differently for each channel, because each one is read in a different place.
- SharePointIntranet
The full story: the details, the documents and the place to send people back to.
- HubSpotEmail
What’s changing, what to do and by when.
- ScreensDigital signage
Cut to what a person can read walking past.
- In personSupervisor cascade
Short points a supervisor can say aloud. For field crews, the supervisor is the channel.
- LiveTown halls
Leaders in the room, and employees asking the questions.
- LeadersRemarks and talking points
Drafted for the leader, checked with the experts, reviewed up to the vice president.
Put a front door on requests
I wrote the request guidelines and an intake form that screens employee resource group requests before Communications commits support.
What a request has to answer first
- The objective
- What should be different after people see this?
- The audience
- Who needs it, and where are they when it arrives?
- The evidence
- What data supports the need?
Defined first, so the team’s time goes to the requests that can work.
Plan the year around the gaps
I wrote a 2027 employee communications plan built on one idea: employees are customers first. They pay the same bills, and neighbors ask them about the company.
2027 employee communications plan: three goal areas
Less material, delivered when managers expect it.
Reach crews through the people and places they already rely on.
Give employees a clear first read on a new leader.
The plan’s goal areas, in my words. The plan itself is internal.
The challenge
A utility’s workforce is split between people who read email all day and people who rarely open it at work. One channel plan can’t serve both.
The tools behind it
I built a Microsoft Copilot agent that turns a source document into supervisor talking points, a Q&A and a newsletter item, and another that finds approved wording in the team’s SharePoint library.
Where else I’ve done it
Launched a companywide employee newsletter at Ansell. Built the content strategy and editorial calendar for an internal SharePoint site at Edward Jones. Ran the editorial calendar across digital platforms at EY.