Premier Oil - Animation | Ten Thousand Hours

Educating a global workforce with engaging content

Scripting & Storyboarding
Design
Concept Creation
Project Management
Animation Production

Challenge

Established in 1934, Premier Oil is an independent UK oil company, comprising of 1000+ employees across office locations in the UK, Asia and South America.

With a large number of employees, located across the globe, Premier Oil human resources team were keen to engage with the workforce to make them aware of the great personal development initiatives and rewards available, and how they could initiate opportunities to progress.

Traditionally, communications had been through ‘Town Hall’ meeting updates with follow up documentation. Premier Oil challenged Ten Thousand Hours to refresh the communications style and format to educate and encourage the workforce to enquire further into development opportunities locally and globally.

Results

The animation and key messaging has been extremely well received across the global offices.

Indonesia - “This is very informative video, useful and easy to understand… Thanks”.

UK – “This is better than what I’ve seen come out of much bigger companies, with a much bigger budget.”

Asia – “Looks great!! It flows and is easy to understand!! I am really impressed with it.”

“We partnered with Ten Thousand Hours in producing Engagement initiatives which would showcase the way that we work in our company, and to act as engagement vehicle with all of our global employees. Ten Thousand Hours took the time to understand the multi-cultural and multi-geographical aspects of our company, the process we had been through to get to the point where we realised we needed a refresh, and our objectives for the new approach. They proposed a vision, then worked with us to understand what it was possible to deliver based on the limitations of the internal systems.

I would not hesitate to work with Ten Thousand Hours again in the future.”

Senior Commercial Manager, Premier Oil plc

Solution

On day one we were presented with a 49-page text document with all of the human resources processes, practices and procedures which sit behind personal development plans, reward and recognition and personal recompense. There were some great initiatives within the document, but as an employee, they were all hidden within layers and layers of text.

We had multiple levels of workforce to appeal to, multiple languages and cultural diversity to consider.

We needed a solution that made the complex easily understood, was available 24/7 and encouraged the user to engage. Simplicity was going to be the key.

Everyone enjoys a well told story and everyone can find five minutes to sit down and listen or watch something at some point in the day.

So, we decided to make a cartoon animation. Highlighting the global HR effort, explaining the processes and inviting employees to find out how their personal development can contribute to personal success.

We took 49 text heavy pages and constructed a narrative to inform and educate the viewing audience. Alongside the narrative, to make the story relatable, we created a diverse range of characters to represent the workforce around the globe and then our animation team brought the characters to life alongside the narrative.

And we did all of this in 7 minutes of animation.