One of the best ways to reduce email overload is to consolidate some of your non-urgent company-wide news throughout the week into weekly newsletters. It’s a great way to let employees self-select the news that’s most relevant and exciting to them while not leaving anyone totally out on updates about the business.
When these newsletters are done well, they can be an effective tool to bolster your employer brand, humanize your executives and make superstars out of your frontline employees. When done poorly, they’re just another email to delete. Here are four ways to invest in newsletters so employees can’t wait to read them:
Weekly newsletters are great at bringing important updates about the business to employees who may only be indirectly involved. However, if the communications are only ever about business, and especially if they only touch on certain departments, you might find people losing interest.
Instead, one way to invest in weekly newsletters is to ensure they include fun pieces that highlight the personal stories or lives of your employees across the company in addition to the more formal business content. They could include success stories from a wellness challenge, or employees might simply submit cute pictures of their pets.
If you’re a leader in the company, the newsletter is a great platform to showcase your approachable side. A short article about what a day in your life looks like or sharing about how you got to this place in your career — alongside personal pictures of your family or pets — can earn a lot of goodwill with employees.
Matching the style of the newsletter with the company’s brand guidelines and tone is an important way to make it feel official. However, if the newsletter looks exactly the same week in and week out, it will be extremely easy to tune out.
Invest in weekly newsletters by making design a priority for the employees organizing them. A fresh visual for the feature story each week can communicate to employees that this is something new to look into, while maintaining brand guidelines ensures that the newsletter still fits within the communications ecosystem.
For a weekly newsletter to actually consolidate the flow of news, there has to be a rhythm to it. Otherwise, the cadence of communications won’t be reliable and the managers trying to share their updates won’t rely on this channel to get their messages out.
Do what you can to make sure that, once this communication is established, it’s like clockwork. This does mean that the managers responsible for the newsletter must take extra consideration for what the protocol is on release days that follow holidays, when the cutoff is for content submissions, and who takes over when they’re out of office.
Weekly newsletters are an excellent opportunity to showcase the diversity of your employee base, whether that’s with employees’ individual characteristics or simply with their geography. If your company is global, having the newsletter reflect that gives employees all around the world a chance to feel recognized.
When developing content for newsletters, it’s important that employees from all different locations and levels in your company have a chance to contribute. Ensure that the person coordinating the newsletter has opened up channels to receive news from employees across the entire company and is actively seeking content outside their sphere of influence.
Want to leverage your newsletters to better engage your employees? Tribe can help.
