Your human resources newsletters have a pretty big job to tackle. They're responsible for delivering up-to-date company news and industry insights, announcing new hires and keeping employees engaged. All while staying short, sweet and to-the-point. That’s a tall order.Luckily, there are some pretty incredible internal communications tools to help you out.In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about creating engaging human resource newsletters as well as the tools to help you do it. By the end, you’ll have a handful of new ideas and best practices to swear by.Let’s get to it.
What Is a Human Resources Newsletter?
Your human resources newsletter is a place to connect employees with the latest company news and internal updates. At the same time, it’s responsible for keeping employees connected and engaged. It should spotlight opportunities for staff to get involved within the company and build trust with colleagues—social committees, volunteer events, and everything in between.Your newsletter must also convey your company values and internal brand voice. This is done through your choice of words—conversational vs. formal—the images and graphics you use—memes vs. stock photos—as well as the information you include and exclude.
Human Resources Newsletters Best Practices
Internal newsletters from your HR team play a huge role in connecting employees across your company. They are even more prevalent now in our post-pandemic world.If your IT and Marketing teams have felt worlds apart beforehand, the pandemic introduced a whole new layer of physical distance. And it’s the job of your human resources newsletters to bridge this gap. To get your staff truly reading your newsletter, you’ll need to follow these best practices:
1. Ensure that your newsletter is easy to read
To get employees reading and connecting them to key company updates, you need to keep things clear and concise. Ditch the corporate jargon and keep sentences short—20 words or less is a good range.And don’t just make your newsletter a laundry list of new company protocols and policies. Add warmth and humor with personal anecdotes or jokes. All it takes is a quick google search of ‘funny’ or ‘heartwarming news stories of the day’ and you’ll have a selection of content to use as inspiration.
2. Use visuals
While it’s essential to get a lot of your information out in writing, some can be replaced with videos or even images. This includes how-to-guides, or announcements from your CEO. With a responsive HTML email template from BEE Pro, you can easily embed videos, GIFs and branded graphics into your human resources newsletters.If you’re a ContactMonkey customer, you can also leveragedesign service for Outlook. Their internal communications software enables businesses to create, send and track employee newsletters right from Outlook or Gmail. By streamlining employee communications, they empower internal communicators to continuously improve employee engagement.
3. Avoid information overload
You want to deliver the most up-to-date information to your employees without overwhelming them. The best way to find a balance between too many and too few emails is by checking your email analytics.See exactly when your employees are engaging with your HR newsletter the most and learn from the data.For example, if you send communications twice a week and employees mostly open them every Monday, it may be best to send your newsletter weekly. You’ll also learn the exact time when your employees are most likely to open your email and can schedule your send accordingly.
4. Include interactive elements
Reading often becomes boring when it’s too passive. You can make your internal company newsletter more engaging by asking questions and gathering employee feedback.Embed employee pulse surveysright into your human resources newsletters. These quick, simple surveys centre around a single focused question, which employees can answer using emojis, thumbs up/down and even anonymous comments.
The Top 12 Human Resources Newsletter Ideas
Even if you have years of experience in internal communications, it’s normal to feel like you’re fresh out of ideas sometimes.Below, we’ll break down 12 human resources newsletter ideas—the essentials and a few fun extras—as well as the tools to bring them to life.
1. Company updates and new products
This content should make up the core of your human resources newsletters. It could be a product launch, new influencer campaign or a bug fix on one of your customer interfaces. Big or small—it’s important that employees are fully in the loop so they can deliver the latest information to customers.Since this is the focus of your newsletter, you’ll want to keep this information at the top—so that it’s easily accessible for employees. But try to leave a surprise announcement, or exciting piece of news till the end of the newsletter so employees are incentivized to keep scrolling.Pro tip:List some of the update topics in your newsletter headline so employees interested in those insights are more likely to open.
2. Project updates from across your company
These are department-specific insights that will attract readers who are working on a project— such as a new marketing campaign or IT software—or whoever is directly impacted by it. This type of update also gives employees in other departments an in-depth look at what their colleagues are doing and prevents everyone working in silos.To roll out this update you’ll need to first send a request to different departments and have them email you any project updates and details. Remove any terminology that may not be accessible to others at your company and summarize the updates into key points.
3. New hire announcements
While it’s always been a challenge to be the new person in the office, the introduction of remote and hybrid work have made things even trickier. It’s challenging to build meaningful relationships without ever meeting your colleagues in person.New hire announcements play a huge role in connecting new employees with the rest of the team. In your new hire announcement, include the essentials like:
- Name
- Job title
- Personal hobby
- Experience level
But also go beyond the basics and make the intro fun and conversational. With employee pulse surveys, your human resource professionals can embed the two truths and a lie in individual survey boxes and have readers respond with thumbs up for truth and thumbs down for lie.
4. Change management communications
When your company is going through change, it can be a time of uncertainty and confusion for employees. To keep your teams aligned and informed, your human resource newsletter is essential for sharing regular updates in the form of change management communications.It’s also important to ask for employee feedback during the change process and gauge concerns before they turn into full-blown problems. By embedding employee pulse surveys into your newsletter, you’ll be able to check in with your employees without overwhelming them with lengthy surveys during an already stressful time.
5. Revenue updates
Your revenue and its ups and downs, should be made transparent to employees. Although this update shouldn’t take up a huge chunk of your newsletter real estate, it does deserve some legroom.A good way to talk about revenue while avoiding information overload, is to leave it for your end-of-the-month human resources newsletter. Use short, simple bullets, to summarize how your company’s revenue is doing in comparison to the last quarter and add some infographics for detail.With a responsive internal newsletter template you can easily embed images, graphs and infographics to make your revenue update accessible for everyone—not just your finance department.
6. Company achievements
Don’t just let your newsletter become a space to break down the numbers and dish out targets. Celebrate your company achievements. Did your company surpass a quarterly sales target? Is a member of your team speaking at a major conference?It’s important to share your company accomplishments with your whole team. Learning about company successes helps build a sense of pride in the company. It also boosts employee morale and engagement by uniting employees in celebrating common goals.Your company achievement feature can include:
- Employee promotions: “Congrats to Anne for stepping into the role of Product Manager!”
- Associate of the month feature: “Check out our top performers for the month of August.”
- New product or feature announcements: “Have you taken advantage of the cool new features of our latest sales software?”
7. Policy changes
Are you implementing a new hybrid workplace? Is your company rolling out a new corporate social responsibility initiative? Inform your staff about company policy changes in your human resources newsletters.Make this information easily accessible and engaging—that means no copy-pasting lengthy policy documents from your legal department. Instead, summarize key points and provide a link to the full policy document or a video discussing it. Replace bulky attachments by embedding smart links right into your employee emails.
8. Event announcements
Sending out event invites and registrations separately from your human resource newsletter only risks that both get lost in your employees’ inbox. Instead, send everything together and drive a bigger audience for each.Have a designated feature called ‘events.’ In it, provide a bullet list of each event that’s coming up along with a registration button. With ContactMonkey’s event management feature, employees can register for events directly from your newsletter. That way, your HR team can easily keep track of registrations—straight from your analytics dashboard.
9. Industry news
Sharing industry news is a great way to give employees inspiration and creative ideas to use in their own work. Or, provide insights on what not to do.In your next human resources newsletters, include a feature called ‘In other news’ or ‘Around the world.’ Use it to spotlight success stories from other industry leaders, innovative ideas, or cautionary tales.
10. Your external blog posts
If your own employees aren’t reading and sharing your company content—why should your customers? Your blog content contains great material to include in your human resource newsletter and get employees reading and sharing.Remember: your employees are your brand ambassadors. Even if they’re already familiar with the content, they may have forgotten to share it on their social media or might be reminded of someone who’s interested in the topic covered. In sum, reposting your blogs to your employee newsletter is a must.
11. Info From Your Leadership Team
Your company leaders set the tone, style, and habits that shape your company culture. So it’s important that employees hear directly from your senior leadership team at least once a month.Your human resource newsletter is a great place for executives to pen a few words to the whole team. Create a feature in your company newsletter called “In their own words” and launch it at the end of each month. Ask your CEO to provide a monthly address on a topic of choice, or provide an overview of the month to come. This is a great way to get employees opening and reading to stay in touch with leadership updates.
12. Client Success Stories
How is your company helping its clients? What challenges are your customers still frequently facing? Not everyone in your company will have a chance to interact with customers on the daily. And yet, everyone’s work ultimately goes into improving the client experience.Use your newsletter to let everyone see where their efforts are going and hear from clients directly. Creating a ‘Client Testimonies’ or ‘Customer Success Stories’ feature is a simple way to boost team morale and show everyone how their work is making an impact.
Key Takeaways
Designing an engaging employee newsletter is no small feat. So trial and error should be expected. That being said, there are many ways to keep improving your newsletter and expanding your readership. The key is to gather continuous employee insights and learn from what worked and what didn’t. With a great email tool like BEE Pro and internal communications platform like ContactMonkey, you can make the job much easier.
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