A well-crafted and consistent newsletter is an excellent tool to help keep employees informed and connected to your company. It can be used to share stories, showcase successes, and reinforce key themes in new and interesting ways. The most important feature of a newsletter is that someone wants to read it. Here are some ways to make sure your employee newsletter makes an impact.
1. Choose a format that fits
If your employees are not at their desks often, or are already overloaded with email, it might be better to consider a printed newsletter. If you do go with an e-newsletter consider how you anticipate employees will want to interact with the information. How short or long should the articles be? What information should appear first? Would video content work? Closely thinking about your audience and their preferences ahead of time will ensure you design something that works for them.
2. Give everyone a chance to shine
Employees like to read about themselves and their co-workers. Use your newsletter to showcase successes and to share personal stories and information about employees. Consider highlighting an employee or two in each edition of the newsletter. It’s also a good idea to tap employees for story ideas and to solicit content from people who are willing to step up and share what they’re working on. The more your newsletter focuses on and reflects employees’ interests, the more successful it will be
3. Balance consistency and creativity A good newsletter template will create some consistency by designating sections for certain types of content. This helps people know what to expect in terms of areas of focus and also ensures you cover your main communication objectives within each edition. The danger lies in becoming too predictable and not leaving enough room for variation. A good way to avoid this is by outlining general categories for each section, but ensuring they’re general enough to fit a variety of topics.
4. Get feedback and adjust
When planning your employee newsletter, consider how you’ll evaluate, gather suggestions, and ultimately improve the newsletter over time. It’s important to measure what you’re doing to make sure that you’re not only getting your message out there, but that it’s getting through to people. You could accomplish this through an annual (or more frequent) readership survey, or even from a focus group or as a point of discussion in an existing meeting.
Consistent and effective communication builds employee engagement. A well-planned employee newsletter is one way to supplement your efforts to make employees feel informed, motivated and appreciated on a regular basis.