The company newsletter has long been a staple in the internal communications toolkit. And rightfully so!
Organizations that want to keep employees connected, informed, and engaged need a consistent way to communicate company news and content.
One of the most common and traditionally easy ways to achieve that goal was with a company newsletter. Until now.
More and more companies are modernizing and streamlining the way employees stay connected and informed. Which means, many organizations are now tapping into the power of employee advocacy, as their company newsletter alternative.
We aren’t suggesting to eliminate the company newsletter from your internal communications strategy altogether; it’s still important to keep communication flowing up, down, and across the business. But it’s time for a change.
Let’s dive in to better understand why the time is right to transform your company newsletter.
Why Have Company Newsletters Been Important?
Research shows that employees feel they are out of the loop on the latest updates at work. 74% of employees feel they are missing out on company information and news. (Trade Press Services)
Company newsletters attempt to solve that challenge. In their simplest form, they provide an easily accessible platform for all employees to stay on top of company updates.
They are the greatest hits compilations of internal brand communications. All of the best content from previous announcements, press releases, employee highlights, and intranet updates synthesized into one easy to digest email.
Company newsletters enhance corporate culture and bring people together. Because let’s face it: employees at large organizations don’t always find it easy to connect with those on other teams — especially in remote work environments
If co-workers aren’t collaborating on the same projects or in the same location, they may not have a clue about what’s happening in a different department.
Company newsletters attempt to build relationships across siloed departments and motivate employees to see themselves as part of a larger community at work.
By including contributions from all departments, they can set the stage for organization-wide employee recognition and celebrations of success. Many teams and departments that have less visible functions can stand in the spotlight for a change.
With businesses rapidly transforming and changing directions, it’s easy to get tunnel vision. Always on to the next goal.
Teams need reminders to take a step back and look at the many accomplishments achieved across the organization. The employee newsletter often provides a necessary nudge to recognize past milestones.
Celebrating the wins is an important component for team morale! Why not embrace that more in an enterprise-wide conversation?
Another purpose for the company-wide newsletter is to share examples of the company’s mission and values. Impact and social responsibility initiatives are key to highlight here. They can share community service or volunteer events that show how the organization gives back to local communities.
Promoting these efforts in a company newsletter can grow support internally and engage employees to amplify these messages outside of their organization.
Is It Time to Upgrade Your Company Newsletter?
With more teams working remotely and distributed, your company should adapt and improvise to improve internal communications.
The function of the company newsletter remains important for today’s workplaces to stay engaged, but the form is ready for an upgrade.
Putting together a company newsletter takes a ton of time and effort to complete and create. It’s too manual and inefficient.
Challenges with company newsletters
The team responsible for internal communications has to devote significant resources to collect stories, highlights, and features to keep the content fresh on a consistent basis.
This leaves the newsletter to likely be sent out on a monthly or quarterly basis — at which point most of the business and priorities have already moved on.
When the newsletter is finally sent out, how many people even take time out of a busy day to read it?
Our inboxes and our messaging apps are full and cluttered. If you have to choose between your department’s latest project status update or reading the company newsletter, you know which one will be prioritized.
And once that email is skipped over, there’s a good chance that it’s forgotten. In this scenario, the company newsletter becomes a loss of efficiency and productivity for the business.
The static nature of email leaves much to be desired when it comes to updates from leadership or other areas in the business. It makes it difficult to engage, share feedback, or start a back and forth conversation.
It also isn’t easily accessible for new employees to access previous newsletters, which leads to a loss of knowledge share for recent hires.
In this scenario, the company newsletter becomes a loss of efficiency and productivity for the business.
An automated way to collect and publish employee stories, highlights, and company news would save time for teams and allow for more frequency when it comes to sharing news across the organization.
The Company Newsletter Alternative
The modern workplace needs a modern internal communications engine. More companies are turning to employee advocacy programs to create a more informed community at the workplace.
With an employee advocacy platform like EveryoneSocial, employees can easily share, create, and publish content both internally and externally to their personal social networks.
All of the content that employees are sharing can then be tapped into to create a better employee experience when it comes to internal company updates.
Instead of all the highlights in a company newsletter coming from the same voice, now employee-generated content provides a more authentic lens for employee stories.
More voices will be heard which leads to a richer depiction of the employee experience and a more unique internal brand.
Instead of a long winded email each month that is easily missed or forgotten about, a collection of social-style posts for a company newsletter more closely resembles the way that people get news today.
We have so many competing forces for our attention every day. A company newsletter will get more traction and visibility in a shorter, easier to digest form.
Simpler, more frequent bursts of news and updates can help coworkers feel more connected and in the loop.
It also makes it more likely to be read and engaged with as social posts allow for likes, comments, tagging other teammates, and discussion threads.
Switching up your company newsletter to a more social format will reinvigorate the way the company shares and organizes its latest information. And include all employees in the process.
How EveryoneSocial Better Distributes Company Information
Who doesn’t want more collaboration across the organization to produce team communications? This is how we can work better together for company news.
EveryoneSocial’s Content Email feature takes the company newsletter one step further in its transformation. It makes the process of collecting employee updates and company news fast, easy, and automated.
Since EveryoneSocial users are posting content in the same centralized location, that immediately cuts out a step for hunting down content. And then it gets even easier.
Creating a recurring Content Email ensures that the latest updates are seen across the organization and highlights what different groups have been sharing automatically.
This automation guarantees that the content that is most relevant and engaging is shared. It also builds awareness for the whole organization around any particular posts the creator wants to feature.
An Auto-Pilot feature can also be chosen that distributes the Content Email when a user is most likely to read it. That helps ensure that the email won’t get lost or buried and increases the chance that it will be enjoyed.
More personalization leads to more engaging, useful, and timely communications. And makes it easy for employees to catch up on anything they might have missed on their timelines.
By embracing employee advocacy and automating content collection and distribution, the company newsletter can become something new and exciting.
Employees get to both contribute more to the conversation and have updates personalized to them, while still leaving room for enterprise-wide conversations. That is the sweet spot that employee advocacy with EveryoneSocial provides.
But wait, there’s more!
With employee advocacy platforms, you get more than a company newsletter alternative.
Besides employees getting digestible newsletters featuring their colleagues and company content, they can access content when it best suits them.
In an advocacy program like EveryoneSocial, employees can have a more personalized timeline of content that interests them.
Meaning they can:
- Follow colleagues to get the content they are creating in their individual timelines
- Subscribe to groups of content that is intriguing to them
- Or create their own feeds from publications that matter most
Additionally, the program enables push notifications of important information that can go to the platform users emails and mobile phones if they have the app.
For example, say your organization has some important news, not only will it be in the newsletter feature, but it can be:
- Pinned to the top of everyone’s feeds for a specific amount of time
- Use push notification messages to alert everyone immediately
- Recommended to share which encourages employees to distribute to their networks
Essentially, EveryoneSocial becomes the newsreader that everyone can access and use when it’s most convenient for them.
This convenience ensures that even if the newsletter or push notifications are missed, content will still be seen, engaged with, created, and shared.
