Employee newsletters bring down communication barriers

By: Robert F. Abbott, author of A Manager's Guide to Newsletters: Communicating for Results

Employee newsletters have been, and continue to be, the workhorses of internal communication. And, there are good reasons for that stature: flexibility, low cost, and ease of use (among others). Now, let's look at a few ways to use them to overcome communication barriers in the workplace:

Developing communication tools: All the managers I know have more demands on their time than time to communicate with everyone, as often as they would like. One manager I work with overcomes this communication barrier with a newsletter, a 'write-once, deliver-to-many' tactic. She spends a few hours, once a month, writing the newsletter, which is far less time than she would need to discuss these non-critical issues with her team members.

Employment-jobs-opportunities: Where I work at my day job, we have trouble recruiting enough new people, and so we ask existing employees to let their friends and family know about employment and job opportunities in our company. This allows the company to reach prospective employees it would not otherwise reach. In addition, an employee newsletter advises employees of opportunities for promotions and lateral opportunities; the rationale is that we'd rather lose a good employee to another part of the company than to lose them to another company altogether.

Issues at work: We all have problems and opportunities that we'd like to let our staff know about; for example, one of my newsletter clients operated a manufacturing plant and our newsletters frequently included articles that dealt with some aspect of health and safety. In this case, think of the communication barrier as a lack of critical mass in communicating safe workplace habits and procedures.

Compensation articles: I know that no one likes to deal with specifics when it comes to wages, but we do like to write about benefits in employee newsletters. I've had newsletter clients focus their internal communication on awareness of benefits, proper procedures for claiming benefits, and how to choose among benefit packages.

Internal customers: Front-line employees who deal directly with customers (as I've done myself), need all the knowledge and strategies they can get. An internal communication process that delivers that information will overcome many barriers, especially for non-critical issues that deserve some attention, but don't have enough priority to get heard otherwise. Again, it's a write-once, deliver-to-many tactic.

Communication barriers inevitably arise in any company that grows beyond a few people; but by using an employee newsletter both strategically (for the right reasons) and tactically (the right content, design, and so on), you can overcome these barriers. So, don't give up on overcoming communication barriers in your workplace; instead think in terms of simple newsletters that will help you get the message out, to the right people at the right time.

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