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I work in a very big international company, 33k fix employees and about 15k flex employees.

Now I was thinking how can we improve in break down silos and get a better culture of sharing and cohesion. Not that it is toxic but it can be better.

Now I was wondering how common is it, e.g., in the communications (internal news) department to do interviews with regular employees and publish it on the intranet for entertainment and better getting to know someone? (And when the interviewee would want it, it could be anonymous.)

From from time to time there are some kind of interviews published but those are always on adhoc base and always with higher management.

With interview I mean. "Dear colleague, please share something about yourself? How did you end up at our company? What should everyone within this company know about you? What are your daily challenges? What makes this company great for you? Is there anything else you would like to share? What would you like to ask the next person whom we will interview? Et cetera...

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    I think you are asking the wrong question; do you actually care how often it's done (quite a lot) or how often it is effective (very rarely as far as I can tell)?
    – Philip Kendall
    Commented Aug 28, 2022 at 7:39
  • Yes, because I want to know if I will make a fool out of myself when proposing the idea 😅. But personally I like the idea. If it is effective, not sure indeed, it depends how it is recieved, whether people embrace it and it becomes part of the culture. But I myself would definitely be interested in what regular employee would answer.
    – WG-
    Commented Aug 28, 2022 at 7:45
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    Even if it is well received and becomes part of the culture, I don't think it will necessarily solve the problem. Often the reasons for silos and lack of sharing are more structural than just people don't know their colleagues.
    – matt freake
    Commented Aug 28, 2022 at 7:48
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    I think the obvious question is how interviews are meant to help this situation.
    – Gregory Currie
    Commented Aug 28, 2022 at 8:14
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    I can see this in a slightly smaller company where I could actually meet people in the building or maybe branch office next city, but if I read an interview from employee #27361 from the overseas office of Brastralia that I will never meet or directly work with in my life, I'm not sure that holds any value or improves my work.
    – nvoigt ♦
    Commented Aug 28, 2022 at 9:12

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Now I was wondering how common is it, e.g., in the communications (internal news) department to do interviews with regular employees and publish it on the intranet for entertainment and better getting to know someone?

I've worked in a few large companies where this was done.

It was a waste of time, IMHO. It did nothing at all to improve the "culture of sharing and cohesion."

In the companies where I worked, it made the communications/internal news team feel like they did something. I'm sure they put it on their "what I accomplished this year" list for their annual performance review. Pretty much everyone else thought it was lame.

I remember one colleague who got interviewed. He was asked "What makes [company name] a great place to work?" and he provided a puff piece answer. At the same time, he was interviewing elsewhere and left the company the same week the newsletter was published. Someone posted the article on our bulletin board and wrote "Where in the world is [worker]?" in red marker on it.

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    Thanks for your answer, I gave me a good laugh 👍
    – WG-
    Commented Aug 28, 2022 at 13:47
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The "version" I heard was an email box called "Ask the CEO".

So the CEO promised to read all the serious questions and respond to them.

Apparently there have been some good questions - about many aspects in a very large company and the questions do get a rapid response and the results have been positive for both sides.

Lots of details worked out poor questions, (I want a raise...) but it still exists and works. Some responses have to wait due to market information and commercial "secrecy" but it appears to be a useful tool.

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Now I was wondering how common is it, e.g., in the communications (internal news) department to do interviews with regular employees and publish it on the intranet for entertainment and better getting to know someone? (And when the interviewee would want it, it could be anonymous.)

This is done all the time for both small and large companies. I first saw this back in the 1980's when we received a quarterly newsletter from the company. It continues today, but the interviews are not distributed on paper. Both my current company (~60 people) and a project I am on (~100 people from various companies) do this on a monthly basis.

I think that once the company gets too big the odds of you knowing somebody being interviewed is small. It is likely that you won't even know somebody on their project.

I have no idea if it helps the company in any way. I know I have a tendency to read them (or at least skim them). I know I have never said "I wish my company did more of these". I know I never asked for them in the cases where they weren't done.

If you don't know the person or the project there is no way to judge the comments of the person being interviewed. You can assume that if the person didn't provide answers the company wanted to published, the interview would never be published.

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