employee newsletter
health wellness newsletter
Health Wellness Newsletter Tips: Understanding the Importance of Distribution, Production, and Frequency of an Employee Wellness and Health Newsletter
Posted Thursday, March 09, 2017 by Daniel Feerst, BSW, MSW, LISW-CP
Your company needs a health wellness newsletter, and it is best to combine it with productivity tips, and as needed internal news about your company. This is the ideal internal communication vehicle. Consumers of this reading material and information range from your housekeeping staff to the board of directors, family members when it is taken home, and teenagers when parents see a relevant article and it ends up being given to them. Troubled workers in your
organization of course, will see your newsletter, no one can argue that the more frequent the better.
A health wellness newsletter, effectively managed, can accomplish all of these objectives with a health wellness newsletter - it's glue for effective internal communication.
You know that you can't produce such a publication on time, predictably, and successfully without having the employee
to whom you assign this chore under constant stress—but we can assure you
that such an employee will eventually consider quitting as a result because it is too much for a collateral duty assignment.
In short, it is impossible to
author a monthly, bimonthly, or quarterly health wellness newsletter while also managing other essential duties in one's position. You may know this because you have tried it already, and
everyone in your office may recall that it didn’t last very long. It just
petered out. Don’t feel bad. We literally know of no company that was ever
successful in publishing its own in-house wellness newsletter very long.
The discipline required to produce a health wellness newsletter is one of the
most underestimated projects in workplace productivity. The chore is so arduous
that almost every company will give up attempting to do one after only a few
issues. And here is a fascinating point: How much you are writing makes no
difference. And how frequently you distribute the newsletter makes no
difference. Two pages or four pages, it makes no difference. Monthly or
quarterly, it will be the same result. It will not work. Why? Tedium—tedium is
rejected by human beings, and the focused required for such a chore is ongoing,
and relentless. Once you finish one issue, the excitement doesn’t last long
before the pressure to produce the next one begins. Then procrastination
manages the deadline, and misery associated with mounting pressure of the chore hangs over the
employee's head. Eventually, the brain simply will not fire off the amount of endorphins
necessary to overcome this distasteful chore, and the deadline will pass.
So, what is the solution? The solution is getting a simple monthly health and
wellness newsletter or content service. They are inexpensive for the amount of
work and drudgery you will save. A good content service will distribute
articles to you monthly. And the best rate for newsletter distribution is
monthly. Don’t count on a four page newsletter being read thoroughly by anyone,
and a 4-page monthly newsletter borders on an absurd level of content. So if
four pages are too much and monthly is best, the compromise is 2-pages for your
health wellness newsletter, distributed monthly. Why monthly, versus bimonthly,
or quarterly? The answer lies in your objective and goal for the
newsletter, and I suggest it include all of the following.
So, what is your goal for the health wellness newsletter? Is it to be entertaining, helpful, and engage with
the organization; allow your program or office to become more integrated with internal allied services like HR
and the medical department; stay top of mind with employees; stay visible so
when problems arise—there you are; improve or increase program utilization; or
show your visibility to management and benefit from this impact to prevent high-level discussions about your program being cut or “farmed” out to
another service provider?
The best answer to the above all the above.
A newsletter will have this impact,
but nothing is more “impactful” than monthly distribution. There is only one
load of BS you want to avoid listening to – the rationale for less frequent
distribution of a health wellness newsletter because “employees already have
too much to read” and being told they won't read it. It’s just the
opposite. They have all the time in the world to read what you are sending. And if articles are short, pithy, relevant, thought provoking, and actionable, then you've got a sweet publication.
And here’s the point. Don’t sheepishly
slip your newsletter into people’s in-baskets at a frequency rate
that is almost apologetic. A quarterly newsletter is exactly this. It says that
your program is not that important. Send that message, and someone will be
thinking about program and budget cuts, and you'll be part of that discussion.