Make an Employee Newspaper: Ideas & Topics
6/2/2023 10:54 AM By Robin Exner
With our swinging ideas you can make your employee newsletter a holistic success for your company. Whether you want to improve the internal communication of your departments or strengthen the team spirit of your staff - here you will find the right topics and examples. We accompany you on the way to your own employee magazine and show you how to put your ideas on paper.
Overview
- Create an employee newspaper in the online designer
- 5 tips for starting your employee newspaper
- Ideas for an employee newspaper
- Introduction of new staff
- Training & development offer
- Creating surveys around everyday work
- Fairs & Events
- Anniversaries & Company History
- Pro & Con Interviews
- Create & print employee magazine now
Create an employee newspaper in the online designer
From the initial concept to the finished staff newspaper, there is a lot to do. Researching topics, organising editorial meetings, designing surveys, editing photos. Especially in the beginning, it's hard to keep track of everything. So make your life easier and use the practical templates of our online programme.
Here you have free access to ready-made pages and layouts that you can fill with your individual reports and pictures. Logos can also be added quickly. In a short time, you will have a professional staff newspaper that creates the desired "we" feeling and brings your colleagues even closer together.
For the creation of your staff newspaper, you have free access to prefabricated pages and layouts that you can fill with your individual reports and images.
You don't need any in-depth printing or design knowledge to create your newspaper. Just open our beginner-friendly designer tool and start enriching the template with your content ideas.
🗞 Create employee newsletter online
🗞 Template with a variety of ideas & examples
🗞 Print-ready pages to fill in or redesign
🗞 No software download required
🗞 Lots of free space on 4 to 40 pages
🗞 Fast printing from 1 newspaper
Design employee newspaper online
5 tips for starting your employee newspaper
Before you start your staff newspaper project, you should first think about the basic style and direction. Who do you want to reach with your staff magazine? Do you prefer a businesslike, serious or a more relaxed approach? What are your main topics? And how can you involve as many colleagues as possible in the creation of the staff magazine?
All these questions are decisive for the success of the magazine.
All these questions decide whether your staff magazine offers your company real added value or whether it disappears unread in the desk drawer. If you follow the following 5 guiding principles when planning your employee magazine, you will be on the safe side:
➀ Inform & entertain: Figures, statistics and economic forecasts are important. However, they should not dominate your employee newsletter. Instead of tiring your readers with hard business facts, you can also inspire them with gripping content. Therefore, try to tell the exciting stories behind your products and appeal to your employees on an emotional level. A good balance of information and entertainment is the key to a successful employee magazine.
❷ Focus on the employees: The target group of your employee magazine is clearly defined. First and foremost, it is not about impressing outside readers, but about motivating and inspiring your employees. In addition to greetings from the management and articles on image building, it is therefore worthwhile to write a large part of your newspaper from the employees' perspective. Check your topics and critically question whether they are really interesting for the employees.
➂ Create transparency: An open and honest corporate culture is the basic building block for a functioning cooperation. You can exemplify exactly this openness in a staff newspaper. Be open to critical comments. Only in this way can real improvement take place. In order to make your company more transparent for everyone, you have to give your employees a look behind the scenes and describe the work processes as vividly as possible.
❹ Comprehensibility and visuality: Nobody likes texts that are difficult to understand. Instead, try to present your company's products and projects in simple terms. The more complex the topic, the more effort you should put into expressing it in clear language. Avoid convoluted sentences and technical terms that only experts understand. Short sentences, pictorial formulations, active language style - these writing rules are the guideline for your staff newspaper.
➄Topics beyond work: A staff newspaper does not have to be exclusively about professional life. To liven up your newspaper a bit, you can sprinkle in some content that goes beyond the company premises. This includes, for example, leisure tips or restaurant recommendations. Used in the right way, these topics lend a certain lightness to your employee newsletter.
Ideas for an employee newspaper
The guiding principles above will help you find the right approach and tone for your staff newsletter. The details of what makes a successful staff newsletter depend on the range and variety of your topics
It is not important that your colleagues read the staff magazine from the first word to the last. It is more important to present a wide range of topics, with something interesting for everyone, from trainees to managers. Here are many ideas with which you can make your employee newsletter entertaining.
Introduction of new staff
An important part of your staff newsletter is the introduction of new trainees, apprentices and employees. This gives everyone the chance to introduce themselves personally and gain a direct foothold in the company. Whether as a classic CV, a fancy profile or a self-portrait.
An official introduction in the staff newspaper reduces fear of contact and makes it easier to join the team. A mix of professional and private facts is particularly popular. These points should never be missing from the introduction of new employees:
📋 First name
📋 last name
📋 Place of residence
📋 Age
📋 Previous professional career
📋 Current occupation
📋 Hobbies
📋 Football fan of...
📋 Favourite film
📋 Favourite book
📋 Favourite dish
📋 3 words that describe me...
📋 I'll take that to a desert island....
Training & development offer
An employee newsletter is the ideal platform to make training and further education palatable to your colleagues. Keep all employees up to date and give them an insight into the range of training courses and seminars that will train them to become competent professionals.
A description of how to specifically sign up for training is particularly helpful at this point. Sometimes employees are uncertain or lack the initiative to actually register for the upcoming training. Therefore, you should explain the registration process in detail and remove all hurdles.
Creating surveys around everyday work
Surveys help you to capture the sentiment in your company or to collect suggestions for improvement from the staff. After the evaluation, you can publish the results of your survey in the staff magazine. From canteen food to the relationship with superiors to the assessment of your own promotion prospects. Surveys are like a barometer that can be used to gauge the company climate.
You can either provide answer options to tick off or leave small writing spaces open for free text. Again, combine serious questions with fun questions. Here are some ideas for your first survey:
❓ These are 3 things I would change in the office space
❓ This is what I like most about my workplace
❓ This positive quality distinguishes the work of our team
❓How well are working hours and family to be combined?
❓Do you work overtime? If yes, how many per week?
❓How do you rate the exchange of information between employees?
❓Do you agree with the strategic direction of the company?
❓What worries you most in your daily work?
❓Who has the cutest office dog?
❓Which department has the most delicious coffee?
❓Do you feel that you can develop freely at work?
❓Which management measures would additionally increase your motivation?
❓Which topics and contents would you like to learn more about in the staff magazine?
Fairs & Events
Visiting a trade fair is always an exciting event. Besides interesting conversations and new contacts, there is a lot to experience here. In order to let all employees participate in the trade fair, you can write a extensive report. The arrival in the early morning, the opening event, the exciting encounters with other companies, the festive evening gala - take your colleagues along on the journey and give them the feeling of experiencing the atmosphere of the fair at first hand.
In addition, you can also write an informative preliminary report on the fair. What are your expectations? What are your company's goals? And how did the design of flyers, posters or product brochures go in the run-up to the fair? A preliminary report is an excellent way to arouse the interest of employees for the upcoming trade fairs and events.
Anniversaries & Company History
Upcoming company anniversaries deserve a special place in your staff magazine. In an anniversary report, you can take a look back at the company history in addition to the schedule and programme of the ceremony. When was the company founded? What were the biggest hurdles in the early days? Which patents and products led the company to success? And what were the ups and downs of the past years?
For this purpose, it is also worthwhile to go to the company archives. Maybe there are some interesting press reports or photos of the company's founding hidden in the files that would be great for your article. Tell the whole story of your company and thereby increase the anticipation of the coming anniversary.
Tell the story of your company.
To enjoy the anniversary to the fullest, you can print the most beautiful photos of the celebration in the next issue of your employee magazine. This way, the anniversary will remain in the minds of your employees for a long time to come.
You can motivate your employees and strengthen the internal communication of your company with your own employee newspaper.
Pro & Con Interviews
One topic, two opinions. Try to look at your company's processes from several angles and thus stimulate exchange between the departments. Be it a new product idea, an internal restructuring or a change of course in public relations. Invite colleagues with different views for an interview and contrast the statements in your employee newsletter.
This will help you to get a better understanding of the issues.
This helps you to look at an aspect of your company from opposite points of view and to discover possible sources of error. You can compare these points in a pro and con interview.
⇄ Advantages - Disadvantages
⇄ Opportunities - Risks
⇄ Sensible investment - high costs
⇄ Time saving - labour
⇄ Productive - counterproductive
⇄ Progressive - backward
⇄ Transparent - opaque
⇄ Understandable - incomprehensible
Your finger-tip feeling is called for in the juxtaposition. Be careful not to embarrass anyone or pit employees against each other. The point is to show a fruitful diversity of opinion in which different perspectives have their say.
Create & print employee magazine now
You have now collected enough ideas for a staff magazine and want to get started with the design? Then take a look at the repertoire of our newspaper templates and choose the design that suits you best.
From an original employee newspaper to classic daily newspapers and modern universal newspapers to creative photo newspapers - choose a template and fill the pages with your individual content. Each template offers you an exemplary sample and layouts in which you can upload your own texts and images in no time.
Design employee newspaper online
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