SeaWorld adds newsletter, TV show—employee satisfaction jumps

Unlike most office workers, however, those employees had little, if any, access to either media in their jobs.

So after an internal survey revealed that only 28 percent of SeaWorld San Antonio staffers had computer access at all, communicators came up with a two-prong strategy for better reaching employees (many of whom are seasonal).

First, they decided to launch a daily print newsletter; second, they committed to creating a biweekly TV show that would run in the shuttle buses that take employees across the park’s 250 acres from the parking lots to their work stations.

“All good communications vehicles involve discovering the demographics of the audience and looking at targeted ways to reach that audience,” says Fran Stephenson director of communications at SeaWorld San Antonio. “In our case, reaching team members with a daily newspaper was far more cost effective in reaching 3,000 seasonal team members than getting each one a computer workstation.”

The TV show, meanwhile, satisfied “the need to be visual after [communicators came to] the realization that our team members are drawing most of their information from television and the Internet,” she says.