At Recess, we send out an internal newsletter every week.
It’s an email that recaps what’s going on and what everyone needs to know about the current state of our business.
- From the leadership team, this helps our communication to all of our teams and each employee within them by sending this newsletter
- For the employees, they’re able to keep up to date on the current events of Recess’s world, even if it doesn’t correlate to their particular team (marketing, customer support, product, etc.)
This newsletter isn’t just useful.
It’s entirely necessary.
You see, the problem is that founders and executives can forget that everyone doesn’t know about your new offer, how many customers you acquired last week, and everything else that happened last week, month, quarter, or even year.
And all of that information is really important.
Organizations that thrive long-term are the ones who make sure everyone is in the loop. There’s a reason you call your employees your team.
If you’re feeling less than ready to win a Superbowl championship with your current team, it might not be them… it may be a lack of communication.
These are the 5 signs your organization needs an internal newsletter.
#1: You have over 20 employees
Once an organization hits the 20-employee mark, it’s going to be nearly impossible to stay up to date with what everyone is working on. It’s also going to start to be really hard for them to know what’s going on with the marketing, sales, customer support, and other teams.
Luckily for founders, executives, and managers, they get weekly meetings to let them know the state-of-affairs. They’ll find out about all the latest happenings and use the information to pivot their teams as needed.
But your employees don’t. They won’t know that you had the highest sales week in months unless someone tells them. They won’t know that upper management met and decided that there are going to be a few upcoming changes. They won’t know that so-and-so is leaving the team.
Running a team of over 20 people means that people are going to start falling out of the loop, and that’s what your internal newsletter was made for. Keeping everyone in the know so you can lead your team in the best direction for long-term growth.
#2: You have a startup culture that involves making constant changes
Speaking of long-term growth—most startup businesses need to make a lot of changes to achieve the growth they’re looking for. They need to be quick on their feet changing their product packages, offers, campaigns, and more as needed. What happens if your customer support team gets a ticket for a product they didn’t even know existed?
That’s exactly as bad as it sounds.
The startup environment means that you might have less than 20 employees, but you’re moving so quickly that whatever number of employees you have all need to know what changes have been made so they can adjust.
A startup mentality is a great thing to have as a new business, but it’s also a dangerous mindset if everyone else isn’t in on it.
Your internal newsletter will make sure that everyone knows what changes and updates are being made so you can make sure that everyone’s following and ready to take action.
#3: You are having trouble synchronizing teams
Like we said, a startup mindset of flexibility when it comes to products and internal business structure is great. It’s the reason that we have so many new companies on the rise. But a lot of them fail because they’re not able to move their entire ship in the same direction at the same time.
While some team members are rowing east, others are still rowing west. Eventually, you head north—and you never intended to go that way. For your team to be able to come together and row in the direction you need them to… they’ll need to know what direction that is.
If your teams aren’t synchronized, it’ll be tough to create sustainable profitability. We’re not saying your teams need to be so in line up that they’re putting Olympic synchronized swimmers to shame, but they definitely need to know what moves are coming up in the choreography.
Having an internal newsletter builds the bridge between teams that don’t necessarily have to communicate on a daily basis. For example, your advertising team probably doesn’t know much about what’s happening in customer support. But, they should, and vice versa.
An internal newsletter will send everyone the choreography for next week’s dance, so they all know what they’re working toward and how the other teams are chipping in.
#4: It’s getting harder and harder to get everyone together for an all hands meeting
But, how do you get the beautiful performance of synchronized swimmers if you can’t get all of your swimmers into the pool at the same time?
Every organization hits a point where scheduling an all hands meeting starts to become impossible. The customer support team is going to have workshops, the ads team is going to have to monitor a newly launched campaign, or the product team is going to need to focus on finishing a product by launch day.
Poof!
Your all hands meeting gets pushed back week after week… after week… after week.
Until it doesn’t exist. And that’s okay.
At some point, it’s going to be extremely hard to get all of your employees into one room (and that’s exciting!). It means you’re growing (woop woop!), but it also means that it’s going to be harder to have communication—particularly at scale.
Which is exactly why we created his internal newsletter. Getting the team together was hard. But having everyone know what was happening was just as essential as before.
With this newsletter, we’re able to have a substitute all hands meeting where we update everyone on what’s going on, what to expect, and ask what our team needs from us.
#5: You can tell your employees don’t love, love, love their jobs
Zappos realized early on that if their employees felt like they were working with a purpose, they were happier with their job. If employees can’t see the sales numbers and happy customer testimonials, how are they going to know that they’re doing anything worthwhile by showing up for your business day after day?
Organizations can quickly forget that while they get to touch, feel, smell, and live through the wins and losses—their employees might feel like they just lived the same day for 60 straight working days.
Team members want just as much purpose as leaders. They want to know that they’re contributing to a cause larger than themselves, and in this case that cause is the organization. An internal newsletter reminds them of that purpose and shows how they helped lead the organization towards its purpose that week, month, quarter, and year.
Giving your employees purpose is handing them the keys to contentment. Don’t take it from us, Zappos will tell you all about it.
Having an internal newsletter for your organization is essential if you want to win the long-term game. This is how you create a team that can happily take on the great days and the challenging days.
And it’s how you become a leader that they can look up to, rely on, and feel proud to work for.
