‘Communication is King’: especially when it involves keeping 4,000 colleagues at 46 locations up to date – and entertained at the same time. ‘DURCHBLICK’ is Drees & Sommer’s personalized and popular employee magazine – now also an award-winner. A look inside and behind DURCHBLICK.  

Anyone who browses through DURCHBLICK, or reads it on-screen as an e-magazine, sinks quickly into a world that he or she should actually be familiar with: one’s own company cosmos. But that is precisely where there are always stories that hold surprises. Stories that, without the magazine, would have remained untold to a wider audience. 

Get out of the bubble  

That the final phase of a new hospital construction in Luxembourg in 2002 meant the establishment of the site in the small country. And that the team, which originally consisted of a handful of courageous colleagues from Munich, now includes several dozen Dresos. What progress is being made in the logistics strategy for a car manufacturer, or the research project relating to mobility in old age. How we implement sustainability in projects, for example through healthy building materials based on the Cradle to Cradle design principle. If you want to get your mind out of the bubble of your own team or location, you need DURCHBLICK.  

For a topic to make it into the magazine, it must contribute to one of the six defined goals: 

• EXPLAIN OR ENLARGE UPON STRATEGY  

• ASSURE QUALITY  

• SHARE KNOWLEDGE  

• STRENGTHEN ONE COMPANY 

• ACHIEVE INTEGRATION  

• SHOW APPRECIATION  

DURCHBLICK is published four times a year, in German and in English. And it makes use of every possible presentation format: interviews, reports, project reports, features, profiles, photo stories, infographics. In addition to the technical and strategic information that is intended to help with work at the desk and in client meetings, colorful articles are popular. For example, each regular issue has an article showing a Dreso employee during leisure time. Away from the office and construction site. Instead, on a hockey field, in a concert hall, in an ambulance or in a vineyard. 

Everything in-house pays benefits  

By Dresos for Dresos is shown on the cover page. Yet it is not only the magazine where everything revolves around the people who work at Drees & Sommer. All the people who work on the magazine are also Dresos – an editorial team made up of colleagues from Corporate Communications produces the magazine entirely in-house. The team plans the topics, makes phone calls, videoconferences and meets with colleagues, conducts interviews, writes the texts, takes photos, collects visual material and designs the articles. 

And it clearly does all that at a high level. DURCHBLICK cleaned up two categories at the Inkometa Award for successful internal communication in 2020. In the Media category, DURCHBLICK won Best of Class and Best E-Magazine. Drees & Sommer was one of the few companies in the competition not to have its magazine produced by an agency, but to produce it entirely in-house. 

Typical challenges 

Despite all its success, DURCHBLICK has to contend with problems that every editorial team knows. This is because not every topic can be turned effortlessly into a major, fascinating story. Some interviewees do not mince their words in the interview itself. But when they read what they said in black and white, they backtrack and want to qualify what they said.  

Or promising stories come to naught because a client does not want their project to be the subject of a report. Often there is simply a lack of good visual material. In those cases, a mixture of persuasion, perseverance and creativity is required. 

Praise from a professional  

The editorial team was delighted about the blog article by Carsten Rossi entitled Top Employee Magazines & Internal Communications Media 2020, with the cover of the 50th anniversary Drees & Sommer special issue right at the top. The CEO of the Kammann Rossi agency, an expert in content marketing and head of the INKOMETA Awards jury, praised the ‘successful magazine-like implementation’ of DURCHBLICK’s digital edition in his blog. Referring to the distraction-free reading experience, with responsive delivery on all platforms, he even writes: ‘Drees & Sommer does this magnificently, making it a model that not only we aspire to.’ 

DURCHBLICK has also been available as an e-magazine since 2019. Readers can now subscribe to ‘just’ the digital version if they prefer. Employees who opt for the print edition, on the other hand, even get ‘their’ DURCHBLICK personalized with their own first and last names. This ensures that each personal copy actually gets to the right person, and does not just fly around in the office. The print edition of DURCHBLICK has a lot of fans. This is hardly astonishing, as it is designed as a lean-back medium. In other words, for sitting back and immersing yourself in surprisingly familiar worlds. 

Recipe for success  

DURCHBLICK looks good, is informative, entertaining and, thanks to the in-house editorial team, it gets the stories from the company at first hand – as well as the heroines and heroes of these stories, the Dreso staff members themselves.