Viatris is a global healthcare company that bridges the traditional divide between generics and brands, combining the best of both to more holistically address global healthcare needs. With a mission to empower people worldwide to live healthier at every stage of life, we provide access at scale, currently supplying high-quality medicines to approximately 1 billion patients around the world annually and touching all of life's moments.
At Viatris, every employee has a story to tell shaped by the people who inspire them to show up each day as their authentic selves. Our campaign, “Who Drives You?” centers on a simple idea with a profound impact: authentic connections inspire us to grow stronger together as a company, as a brand, and as a workforce. Through the initiative, we asked colleagues to share the backstory of who motivates them in their work. Our objective was to build connections across our global workforce, allowing people to glimpse the hidden figures behind the scenes of our shared mission.
We are submitting the Who Drives You? campaign for the Strategy & Engagement: Internal Communications Award. Our campaign shines a light on the committed and talented people who make our shared work of building access at scale and improving healthcare around the world a reality.
The campaign was built on the premise that people are the center of everything Viatris does, from the patients we serve to the colleagues who serve them.
With a global workforce, our objective with this campaign was to create a sense of authentic camaraderie across time zones, cultures and job functions.
These meaningful connections foster collaboration across teams and encourage people to share fresh perspectives, which in turn drive innovative approaches to achieving our business objectives. At the same time, the campaign helps cultivate a strong sense of community, strengthening connections among colleagues, and reinforcing the culture of support, inclusion and shared purpose that defines our organization.
Campaign Socialization
We solicited stories through our corporate intranet, asking all employees to share, via a submission form, a brief synopsis of their answer to the question “who drives you?”
Concurrently, our team integrated the campaign into team meetings where participants shared their own personal stories, which in turn led to productive conversations that provided both support and fodder for the series.
The results were impressive. People from across the globe, both new to the company and veterans of our legacy brands, shared anecdotes of family members, friends, colleagues and mentors who are top of mind when they begin their work each day. We collected the submissions and curated them to represent a wide range of geographies and job functions.
Kick Off Event
In partnership with the storytelling non-profit The Moth, we kicked off the campaign by inviting the top three submissions to participate in a professionally produced story slam-style event filmed before a live audience and livestreamed companywide. This compelling, novel structure -- centered on a professionally produced live show -- created excitement and encouraged broader participation.
2025 Content Series
For the next 12 months, employees submitted their stories through our intranet. We selected the most compelling for additional treatment through a variety of formats, including audiograms, first-person written narratives and video. Additionally, colleagues from across geographies and job functions uploaded self-authored vignettes and photos to share their own stories, all of which furthered the goal of the campaign - to authentically capture colleagues’ experiences and build a content library that inspires understanding and shared purpose.
Short Film and In-Person Event
The series capped off its first year with a 6-minute film that was shared companywide on Viatris’ fifth anniversary, followed by a live interview and Q&A with the story subjects in front of an employee audience. The film features the dramatic true story of employee Karla McIntyre, whose persistence allowed her husband, a Navy veteran and accomplished triathlete, to emerge from a coma months after suffering a heart attack – a journey that shaped her approach to her work at Viatris.
Colleagues were so deeply invested in the conversation that many lingered well after its conclusion, eager for the chance to speak with the story subjects.
The Who Drives You? campaign was more than just sharing stories; it also strengthened our company’s culture by connecting the unique and differentiated viewpoints and experiences of our colleagues all around the world. Due to the popularity of the campaign, it continues to live on through new submissions, maintaining its traction.
Engagement from the campaign was robust. On average, Viatris considers intranet/internal content to be successful at a benchmark of ~1,000 views, due to factors such as a large segment (roughly one third) of our workforce serving in deskless roles where accessing the intranet during the business day is rare.
Beyond the numbers, these stories generated significant responses (see employee comments below), revealing what can be achieved when we deepen our connections with each other, the company, our mission and the patients we serve.
