We were absolutely thrilled to win this prestigious award with the Rumaila oilfield’s internal communications team. We’ve been working with this extraordinary project for the past seven years and we recently worked on an initiative to boost staff morale.

With Iraq suffering a turbulent political period and an economy in austerity, the state-owned Rumaila oilfield’s capacity to continue producing oil for Iraq could not be compromised, despite deep cuts to its operating budget. The goal was therefore to ensure the 7,000 or so staff members continued to drive Rumaila forward, despite the multiple challenges they faced.

The three-pronged communications strategy involved: publicly recognizing great work achieved by teams and individuals by leaders, disseminated through various communications channels; nurturing self-belief, with staff articulating in their own words how the organisational values helped them to deliver great work; and creating momentum by sharing stories of teams going ‘above and beyond’ expectations, so that other staff members were stimulated to ask, “what can I do?” to help the operation.

As a result, we saw the number of nominations for the internal award process increase 230% in 12 months, we saw more stories submissions from the field, and oil production at the field hit its highest rate for 27 years.