Do you need the employee newsletter tips or ideas how to create employee newsletters with perfection?
Does the thought of using employee newsletter tools for
your job sound a little off-putting? If you are going to do your own
internal company newsletter or employee
newsletter with no help from a software program or simple system, then you are going to face a signficiant burden.
Remove this burden, and please take a seat for the following free advice. You want a newsletter
for your employees to help them produce more, be happier, manage stress, experience improved work-life balance, and establish better relationships at work with
peers and the boss, then get content that has been authored by licensed mental health professionals who have worked with this issues.
If you are excited and to the point of thinking
about what to name your employee
newsletter right now, or perhaps making
some notes about what to include it in—STOP! You are about to fall into a hopeless trap.
There are few truths to hear before your launch, but don’t worry, you are going
to have a lot of fun producing an employee newsletter if you follow these tips. And, here is the first: Creating a workplace internal company newsletter
is I-M-P-O-S-S-I-B-L-E!
That wasn’t so bad to hear was it? Does that sound a bit harsh?
It’s a reality
check to save you the pain of beginning a newsletter and then discovering that
the 3rd maybe, but definitely the 4th…and most assuredly,
the 5th issue never arrives. What you will hear next is, “hey, what
happened to the newsletter?”
If I had to find the perfect metaphor for doing your own newsletter, it would a
toss up between Chinese water torture and water-boarding.
Your brain simply won’t
let this chore continue without procrastination. But there is a solution--employee newsletter tools,
and I would like to recommend you find one that is editable, customiz-able, web
usable, reproducible, re-nameable, and is never late.
Trying googling
these terms (best editable and customizable employee newsletter) to find out what others are using.
Creating a newsletter for your company
without using employee newsletter tools will put you under unforeseeable and
immense strain. But relax, this is good news to hear because you can get a
better newsletter and still have all of the control you want with an editable
employee newsletter that is perfectly written, never late, short, sweet, not to
much not too little, and comes monthly but it ready to edit or amend with
whatever content you want, even cookie recipes from employees. Just search the
net.
So, don’t be discouraged. You don’t want just any newsletter tool, especially
one that will lock you out of editing content and making your own contributions
as needed to the articles. Instead, you
want a workplace wellness, stress management, internal communication, and
productivity tips newsletter. You must find employee newsletter tools that
allow this feature. If you search “editable
employee newsletter” you will find a few options.
Search for a newsletter tool that combines all four of these important goals:
1) The ability to edit content and amend content as needed;
2) The ability to remove articles and use them later;
3) The ability to suggest article ideas in an effort to get
expert content that meets your organization’s needs.
4) The ability to post the newsletter online, and have it
contain no links to any third party vendor that your employees will click and wander
off your Web site and investigate;
5) No copyright marks from your newsletter service provider
that diminish a customized look. Searching for “editable and customizable
employee newsletter” should bring up excellent choices.
You will also need a way to generate
employee newsletter ideas. Have you struggled with this chore? Let’s discuss
six ways to find original content, but the also how author your articles more
quickly.
Generating
Employee Newsletter Ideas
Ask Employees for
Their Suggestions – Ask employees in your organization for ideas via email,
and ask that they take 60 seconds to do it. Get permission to email all
employees or have human resources do it. You will collect a ton of articles
ideas
Capture Thoughts from Yourself – Employee
newsletter ideas are all around you. When you read journals and newsletter
paper articles, periodically ask, what is the issue or story behind this
article. Ask yourself what is not being discussed in this social or wellness
story that people should know more about. Then Google this phrase or idea, and
in own words author an article. Newsletter ideas should go on a piece of paper
you keep you in wallet. Also, ask your spouse or friends to keep track of ideas
for you. You will be surprised how many people respond.
Subscribe to Newswise.com for Feeds for
Fresh Hot Newsletter Articles and Ideas – Go to http://www.newswise.com/search/advanced
and subscribe so you get research in your inbox. We are talking awesome
first-hand social and employee, and workplace news opportunities here.
Sign up free for Twazzup.com to Find Newsletter Content and Ideas– Get a twitter account. It’s free, and then
login in Twazzup.com – Then get employee newsletter ideas by searching a
keyword like “employee” and any article or post associated with employees will
emerge. You can jump to these articles to help you author content. Many will be
posts by people with no useful information, but others will be gold.
While writing this article, I tested the advice I am giving
you right now, and came up with tons of articles published recently on the
web—this is the link, but you need a free account. Simply replace the word
“stress” in this URL with any word you want to find articles recently published
that people are talking about: http://new.twazzup.com/?q=stress
Visit Wikipedia.org
for Newsletter
Article Ideas – Search Wiki for topics and discover an entire universe
of ideas. Start every month with keywords such as workplace, employees,
supervisor, stress, family, and you will produce important Wiki entries that
will provide you with many article ideas.
Internal
Employee Newsletter Templates
Internal newsletter templates can be
found on the Internet but here is how to reduce your stress on template design.
Make it simple. Make it easy to read. And forget about shapes and curves. Make
it consistently about good content.
Don’t get caught up in worrying about an Employee Newsletter Template. You
can use this one I created and have used for 17 years since 2001. This template
is simple, but you to know that your employee newsletter template is not that important.
It just needs to be neat and orderly.
This template that you download by emailing dfapublish@aol.com is in MS
Publisher and MS Word. It is use by the State of Washington for 17 years for
90,000 employees. They love the content. The format of the template to them is
quite secondary. Want more proof, well, the State of New York also uses this
same employee newsletter template for their 160,000 employees. Never a
complaint, not one ever, about the newsletter you see here.
Your content is king. So, consider
articles that will fit this template for your employee newsletter and you will
do great.
Internal
Communications Newsletter
What you are producing for your company is an internal communications
newsletter, and for that reason, I want to strongly recommend that you make the
issuance of the newsletter monthly. Your main goal is bond employees to each
other and this cannot have effectively with frequently communication. Go easy
on yourself with less quantity and more frequency, however. You will achieve
much more visibility, top of mind awareness, and help more employees who will
read your internal communications newsletters and tell others about them. Be
practical—make it two pages. Your newsletter will have little or no impact if
it is quarterly or bimonthly. A friend once described this as, “Do not issue a quarterly newsletter. It
appears too apologetic as it is sheepishly slipped into employees’ inboxes
every three months. Most of the time this decision to have a quarterly or bimonthly newsletter is based on
avoiding the amount of work newsletters entail, or fear the employees already
have too much to read. Don’t buy this excuse. It’s not true. Employees will
want to read what you are writing as their #1 priority for the work pile that
is on their desk”.
Internal Newsletter Design
Internal newsletter design is a dicey topic, but the more people in your
organization you have stirring and contributing to this broth, the more
difficult will be to get your employee newsletter off the ground. No one is
going to agree. Start immediately. Don’t lose momentum, and make changes you
need to your internal newsletter design as you go along. Make your headlines on
articles with 30 pt type and your article body text 10 pt. Use Arial for the
font on the body and you will discover it easier on your employees eyes thereby
better ensuring your employees read the complete newsletter. I hope you have
convinced yourself that having a monthly newsletter of two pages is the best
way go. Did you know that a monthly
newsletter of two pages is 50% more content than a quarterly newsletter which
has four pages, but the two page internally designed newsletter is more likely
to be completely read when it is only two pages? It’s true.
Internal
Newsletter Examples
You can locate internal newsletter examples if you go to google.com, then click
on images, the search “internal newsletters”. You will find easy examples of
newsletter and you can pick one to mimic for your own organization. Let us know
when you need additional help. What’s advantageous for any company is that
FrontLine Employee can now offer the text you need, on time, no fail, to
support any company newsletter. We send the text in MS Word and it is yours to
paste into your own internal newsletter. We send eight articles, and they can
be used each month, or they can be used future months. Then can also be amended
or edited in any way. So content is king with your newsletters, So be sure to line up that content, and use our content
suggestion hotline at http://workexcel.net/hotline.html to suggest articles that you
would link in future issues of your internal newsletter. Do you need examples of our customers’ internal newsletters? Just
ask. We will send you several copies as examples that you use to consider what
would be perfect for you.
Seven
Creative Ideas for Your Newsletter
It’s your newsletter, but here are recommendations to make employees pick it up
and read it, and if you are ever late, knock on your door to ask you when it’s
coming. Don’t panic at the notion of employee’s harassing you or beating your
door down, because your employee newsletter will never come late if you are
subscribing to Frontline Employee.
Make all your newsletter topics fall under one of these broad categories. Use
this “Seven Creative Ideas” list for
your newsletter to help you consider the topics and keep your newsletter
interesting.
#1: Workplace Relationships Ideas
#2: Worker Productivity Ideas
#3: Family, Home, and Community Ideas
#4: Personal Fitness and Effectiveness, Safety Ideas
#5: Team Building and Productivity Ideas
#6: Hot Health Topics Ideas
#7: Customer Service Issues for Employees
As you can see from above, there are no cookie recipes or
jokes. Of course, this does not mean that you can’t include them in your
newsletter, but I would like to recommend instead that you create a link to any
recipe you would like to include rather than use your newsletter’s precious
space for this purpose. Employee are more interested in personal change,
reducing stress, how to make their lives easier, and manage the commute or the
problems at the daycare center, rather then cook a chocolate chip cookie.
Following this guidance with these Seven Creative Ideas for Your Newsletter
will keep you newsletter fresh. I also recommend that you make ten sub-topics
that fall under each of these headings. Then once per year, do a brainstorming
day or two at coming up with the article titles that will match those
sub-categories.
Employee
Newsletter Names
For some reason, I have more requests for information about how to create
employee newsletter names than any other aspect of employee newsletter
management. I have never quite figured out why this is so, other than the
excitement of deciding upon a newsletter which naturally leads to the next
thought of, “what do we call it?”
To create a great name for a newsletter, send out a memo to all employees and
tell them you are having a contest to decide upon the name for the company
employee newsletter. Ask everyone to consider the work culture, products, the
look of the Web site and its colors, and what name will fit with these
parameters. You will get a tone of input.
I believe part of this interest in names is related to making sure everyone in
the organization likes it, and that it fits your work culture, and has
something to do with your business. The newsletter naming committee reviews all
the suggestions. A final five or so
are put on a ballot. And then everyone votes. You are sure
to get great employee newsletter names from this process.
Best
Employee Newsletters
The best employee newsletters you might guess are the one’s that win
the most awards. Really? I would like to offer a different understanding of
what constitutes the best employee newsletter. That is one that is easy to read
and remembered, with information that is
practical, put to use, and helps the employer reduce risk and get better
employees. No other criteria for employee newsletters should be used. The
bottom line is that employers pay for the newsletter, and the newsletter should
benefit them. And, of course, this automatically means that employees are
reading and using the information offer in them. For me, that has always been
short content, fewer words, and content then delves deeper to give employees
information that have never considered, except in the backs of their minds.
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