Your Customers Get a Newsletter. How About Sending One for Your Employees, Too?

One of the best ways to engage with your audience, whether they are customers or not, is to send them a regular newsletter. This works to build brand recognition and trust, but also keeps your company at the forefront of your audience’s mind. In this same vein, you should send your employees a regular newsletter, as well. You want your audience to trust you, but you also want your team to trust you, too.

Maintaining an internal newsletter provides a variety of benefits only a newsletter can. So keep reading to learn the reasons why you should send an internal employee newsletter, as well as effective ways to boost employee engagement.

Company Culture

Company culture is the personality of the company. Having a robust and positive company culture is crucial to building a team that is collaborative, dedicated and motivated. As a brand, you should always strive to improve your company culture. It shows your employees you care about them and have their best interests at heart.

While company culture takes time to build, modify and enact, an internal employee newsletter is a great way to get the ball rolling. An internal newsletter provides:

• Regular opportunities to reinforce your company’s personality.
• Build a cooperative and friendly work environment.
• The ability to reflect on the values you strive to uphold as a team.

Use this newsletter as a way to send your employees content they can relate to and will love. All of these little things make it just a little more enjoyable to be a member of your team.

Employee Engagement

The goal of any newsletter, regardless of who it is for, is to drive engagement with the content you are creating. Keeping this in mind, your employee newsletter needs to have content that your employees are going to engage with. An easy way to do this is to highlight an employee in your internal newsletter. Look for someone on your team that’s gone above and beyond and put the spotlight on them.

At the same time, it is also important to acknowledge all employees and departments. Highlight the roles that they play in the company and why you appreciate them. An employee highlight is a great way to help your team learn more about each other. It also encourages them to be more engaged with each other in the workplace.

Milestones

Your company has goals and objectives it is trying to achieve. Be it weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly, you are striving to meet a goal. Managers or executives in the company might be highly aware of what these goals are, but it is fair to say, not everyone in the company may know what you are trying to achieve. 

Adding milestones, achieved or in progress, is a great way to involve your entire team in your plan. It also increases transparency and builds trust with your employees. 

Spruce Up Your Internal Newsletter

The above reasons are all valid and proven reasons why your company needs an internal newsletter. However, creating an internal employee newsletter comes with the same strains as your client-facing newsletter: content. Strategizing on how to make your newsletter enjoyable and engaging should be the main focus of your internal newsletter.

Here are 10 ideas for your internal employee newsletter to garner more engagement from your team:

1. New Hire Spotlights: Introduce your new hires to make them feel welcome. It also gives your team the opportunity to meet them. Work can get busy, and new hires deserve to feel comfortable and welcome in their new environment.
2. Birthday Wishes: Nobody wants to be forgotten on their birthday. By reminding your team about employee birthdays, you create an opportunity for team members to feel appreciated on their big day.
3. Messages from the Executive Team: Messages from the top are important for morale and increase transparency around the workplace. 
4. Job Postings for Upward Mobility: By posting jobs in the company, you show your team how much you value their work. It also encourages them to step up to the plate and become a more involved member of your company.
5. Work Anniversaries: Celebrating your employees time at your company is a great way of saying thanks and showing your appreciation for all they have done for the team in their time there.
6. Employee Recommendations: These recommendations can be anything from places to eat around town, fun things to do or even how to be more efficient at work. The possibilities are endless.
7. Contests: Creating contests for your team is a unique way of combining fun and friendly competition in the workplace. Also, who doesn’t love a good giveaway?
8. Internal and External Events: Sharing events with your team demonstrates how much you want to be more interactive with them. It shows you enjoy their time and company and want to be around them more. This is a great way to tell your employees your relationship goes beyond the 9 to 5 workday.
9. Workplace Advice: Sometimes people can get into a rut and not know the best ways to move forward. Senior members of your company may have great advice on how to overcome difficult situations. Use them to your advantage.
10. Team Wins: Celebrating successes is a huge team-building opportunity. Make sure your team knows about your wins, and celebrate accordingly. It always feels good to meet goals together. 

It can be nerve-wracking to come up with content for anyone on a regular basis. Because of that, there are a lot of anxieties about sending frequent emails or newsletters. Don’t let that be what stops you, though. Your team deserves more, so it’s a worthwhile effort to keep them just as regularly informed as you do for your customers.