Employee Newsletter: Instructional or Motivational?
Planning an employee newsletter? If you do, think in terms of two primary functions: Instruction, and motivation. Here’s why…
Every employee newsletter (or, newsletter of any kind) should have a specific identifiable purpose. An employee newsletter will cost you time and money, and what’s more, if you give up after a couple of issues, it will hurt your reputation (and, yes, most employee newsletters do fold after just a few issues).
If you take an instructional approach, you want to offer useful information. In addition, of course, you will need to define useful information when considering strategy for your employee newsletter.
One type of useful information is that which helps increase productivity - get more work done with the same amount of resources. It could be anything that helps employees get their jobs done more quickly, or has some other positive effect. Some employee newsletters try to remove barriers to high performance, and that’s a good idea, too.
If you take a motivational approach, your goal will be to provide information that influences the way employees think. You may want your employee newsletter to increase retention, stimulate teamwork, or do something that increases engagement.
Writers and publishers of employee newsletters often use emotion in their employee newsletters when want a motivational effect. Keep in mind, of course, that motivation is strictly internal, which means you can facilitate it, but you can’t directly motivate someone else.
As the person in charge of an employee newsletter, you also have the option of combining instructional and motivational articles. One article might deal with instructional, while another provides motivation. And, sometimes you can put the two into one article in an employee newsletter.
Summing up, when you’re planning your employee newsletter, you’ll find it helpful to ask whether you want to take an instructional approach, a motivational approach, or some combination of the two. Neither approach is necessarily better than the other, and your choices should be guided by the goals and audience for your employee newsletter.
