Newsletters
Every single organisation we spoke to has an internal newsletter
or staff magazine. The exact nature of these newsletters varies
by format, style, distribution and use.
From the twelve interviews conducted, ten distribute a printed hard
copy of the newsletter or magazine, either alone or in addition to
an email or intranet version. Only two respondents have a purely
electronic version. One of these organisations uses an email newsletter
which is sent to managers for them to cascade face-to-face to their
teams. The other chooses to distribute their newsletter purely
on email on the grounds that this enables them to be more “versatile
and transparent”.
The style of newsletter varies, as to be expected, from one
organisation to the next; reflecting the corporate style and beliefs.
Some consider a tabloid, human interest style – “a chatty Daily Mail
tone” – to be most engaging. One company stated the importance
of employees feeling that the magazine was ‘their’ publication. But
one organisation also felt that the newsletter was “first and foremost
a mouthpiece for the company, not for staff”.
Newsletter editorial is seen as a crucial job and is generally carried
out by the internal communications team, or at least supervised by
them. Some organisations outsource the editorial, whilst others have
a full-time editor within the internal communications team. One –
very large – organisation has hired a team of journalists to produce
content, while another has one in-house writer full time. One
organisation explicitly sources news stories directly from frontline staff:
“the task of content creation is entrusted to employees”, and similarly
another company newsletter focuses on news from individual stores in
each edition, while in contrast others use corporate events and stories
as news hooks for content