As a supplement to the cascade through frontline employees’ direct managers, we’ve found that newsletters, whether printed or digital, are one of the most effective ways to align frontline employees with leadership’s vision for the company, provide sightlines into other facilities, celebrate the frontline’s contributions and engage them in something bigger.
Here are five ways you can use newsletters to do all that:
Frontline employees appreciate seeing people in positions like theirs being recognized and celebrated. That might be with an individual employee spotlight showing how that employee’s work supports the overall vision of the company, how that individual is applying one of the values in their job, or an interview that includes both the employee and their manager.
This is a powerful way to build connection and visibility across locations, and to share solutions to shared problems. We sometimes conduct brief remote video interviews with three or four managers across geography or division and then develop both a video and article from that footage. A QR code in the printed newsletter takes employees to the video.
If your company uses continuous improvement or Lean methods, an article on how employees collectively arrived at a specific solution helps reinforce the success of collaborating to find a better way. A problem-solution article, with photos of the team on site, sometimes with the equipment or work in progress, engages employees with tangible evidence of improvement.
Inspire pride in your industry and motivate frontline workers to be proactive about their career paths by highlighting individuals who’ve been promoted from frontline positions. If you have a CEO or CFO who began their career in the trenches, that’s fantastic, but also feature hourly frontline employees who’ve moved into manager roles or salaried positions.
For frontline communications, we’ve found photos of real employees to be a crucial element of the magic formula for engagement. Ask frontline employees or managers to shoot smartphone photos showing the people featured in each article. We also sometimes ask them to shoot B-roll on site for frontline videos. Authenticity trumps professional photography, in this case.
