Engage Employees and Reduce Risk
with an Employee Newsletter in 2013
 If you are not distributing an employee work-life-productivity newsletter, then you are overlooking one of the easiest and most effective ways to reduce risk to the organization, help employees manage stress, boost morale, increase productivity, and build a sense of “team thinking” among your employees.
A newsletter from your HR, EAP, or wellness program increases visibility for what you do. It improves program utilization and your relevance. It can be the one mechanism that pulls you into the work culture and makes you an invited guest, not an unwanted pest.
You may never know what nightmare was prevented as a result of a newsletter. It gives troubled and at-risk employees an additional chance to get help. That alone justifies their use if articles delve deep enough into critical issues that can motivate self-diagnosis and self-referral to effective help. Effective newsletters written by licensed mental health professionals focused on the workplace will do this well.
Employees are a captured audience. They benefit from a newsletter that can deliver them stress tips, substance abuse awareness, and ideas for getting to work on time, improving communication, getting along with difficult people, resolving conflicts, coping with change, improving teams, building resilience, achieving personal goals, respecting others at work, and many other topics affecting the bottom line.
There’s a key reason few employers ever produce a newsletter—it is an enormous task. But there are snap-finger solutions available for any company.
If you take the plunge into producing a newsletter, it is critical to distribute a frequent newsletter with less content so it gets read completely. Avoid quarterly newsletters; they have too much content and too little visibility to build top-of-mind awareness for your program, they’re more expensive, and employees deserve more.
Don’t sacrifice frequency because someone upstairs is saying, “leave employees alone” or “they already have too much to read”. They want to read what you’re offering. You are decreasing opportunities risk-exposure intervention with a less frequent newsletter.
Newsletters are not "nice things". They are risk management tools. Sort of like, EAPs. They were never designed to be "employee benefits". They were created as risk management tools by the EAP framers of yesteryear, and the good ones still function this way if properly designed.
The ideal is a two-page, monthly. Find one that is inexpensive, easy to use, editable, customizable, reproducible, web usable, professionally authored, and guided by licensed, mental health pros.
These ingredients make for newsletter success for employees and employers alike. Discover such a newsletter here: fe-hr-eap-safety-training. http://eaptools.com/PDF/fe-brochure-3a.pdf
Daniel Feerst, Publisher
WorkExcel.com
1-800-626-4327
See page one for details
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