Health Wellness Newsletter Tips: Understanding the Importance of Distribution, Production, and Frequency of an Employee Wellness and Health Newsletter

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.