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Creating an Employee Newsletter for the Workplaces

Posted by Daniel Feerst on

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 YourselfEmployee 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 IdeasSearch 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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