Talking to 2,000 People on the Ground

The brief

A major palm oil operation needed to connect more than 2,000 plantation workers to the company’s business goals — sustainability commitments, safety standards, corporate culture — across sites where a glossy intranet meant nothing and a legal misstep in a safety notice meant real exposure.

The hard part wasn’t producing content. It was producing content that survived the trip from a head office slide deck to a worker standing in a field.

What I did

• Designed a monthly internal campaign built around one human idea per month, not one policy memo per month.
• Reworked corporate updates into simple, human-centred stories — what’s changing, why it matters, and what it means for the person reading it.
• Partnered with safety teams to write field safety and environmental communication that was easy to understand and legally sound — approved language, plain delivery.
• Kept every notice compliant first: no claim or instruction that could create risk, while still sounding like it came from people, not a legal department.
• Built feedback loops so messages that weren’t landing could be fixed the next month.

The outcome

• 2,000+ workers connected to the company’s main business goals through stories they could actually repeat.
• Safety and sustainability messages that frontline teams trusted — because they were written for them, not at them.
• A repeatable monthly rhythm that internal teams could keep running themselves.

The principle

Internal communication fails quietly. Nobody complains about it — they just stop reading. The fix is rarely a better channel. It’s a better story for the person on the other end.