From sea to screen: How Seadrill streamlined communications for an ultra-remote workforce
About Seadrill
Seadrill is a leading deepwater drilling contractor, operating in some of the most remote marine environments on the planet. Seadrill is setting the standard in deepwater oil and gas drilling. With its modern fleet, experienced crews, and advanced technologies, Seadrill safely, efficiently, and responsibly unlocks oil and gas resources for national, integrated, and independent oil companies.
In 2021 Seadrill selected Unily's AI-native employee experience platform and ScreenCloud's digital signage solution to deploy an agile communications strategy and expand communications reach to their frontline workers.
The challenge
Crews live and work offshore in high-risk conditions on 3-week rotations, with limited connectivity and little access to personal devices.
From a comms perspective, this poses some major challenges:
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Limited access: Crews often share just two PCs between 150+ people.
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Isolation: Delivering even basic posters or comms equipment is logistically complex.
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High-risk operations: Messages must be accurate, timely, and relevant.
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Comms workload: A small comms team had to duplicate content across multiple tools and channels.
Previously, SharePoint acted as Seadrill’s intranet, but it created bottlenecks. Publishing was slow, rigid, and heavily dependent on the comms team, making it difficult to scale.
The solution
To transform internal communications across one of the most complex working environments in the world, Seadrill have adopted an approach centered on integration and empowerment. The goal is to eliminate duplication, accelerate publishing, and enable a small communications team to operate with enterprise-wide impact.
Spotlight: Integrated digital signage with ScreenCloud
Seadrill took a two-pronged approach to transform how internal communications are delivered. First, they implemented Unily’s AI-native employee experience platform, (the first platform to be named a Leader by all three analysts, Gartner, Forrester, and IDC), integrated with ScreenCloud digital signage.
This gave the Seadrill comms team the ability to publish once and distribute instantly across the SeaNet intranet, SeaNet employee app, and offshore screens.
Seadrill push experiences across the intranet and digital signage screens in the cafeteria - ensuring communications reach Seadrill's ultra remote workforce.
This effective ScreenCloud and Unily integration immediately removed duplication, freeing up time to focus on content quality while also delivering the agility needed in this industry.
Spotlight: Decentralized communications model
Second, Seadrill introduced a decentralized communications model built around departmental Super Users. This empowers a network of over 13 subject matter experts from across the business to contribute content without sacrificing consistency or governance.
Super Users upload documents, links, and departmental updates, while the comms team supports them with page design and widget configuration. This also enables a small communications department to have the scalable impact of a much larger team.
Together, these two solutions helped establish a communications strategy that works for one of the most complex working environments in the world.
Early outcomes and future ambition
Seadrill have delivered a transformational shift in how they engage their 4,000 workers.
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Efficiency gains: Corporate comms can be published in one place and distributed everywhere, saving time and effort.
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Consistency: Messaging is aligned across desktop, mobile, and signage.
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Increased publishing output: The comms team is producing over 300% more corporate content than before, moving from a handful of updates each month on SharePoint to multiple stories every week.
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Scalability: SuperUsers contribute departmental updates, while the comms team ensures quality and governance.
Seadrill recently completed a pilot to generate more localized content sharing – where crews and local offices publish through Unily and onto ScreenCloud. This will create further efficiencies and enable greater value to be achieved from the Seadrill tech stack.
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