CorpComms Magazine

(1) Make employees feel they own the magazine

The trick to a successful and motivating magazine is to nurture employee buy-in. The magazine should feel like it belongs to employees in order for them to trust in it. This needs to be perfected in the tone of voice from the way articles are positioned right down to the design. Any effective communication channel will open up dialogue between management and employees - bridging barriers and encouraging teamwork throughout the company, regardless of position. Your magazine is no different.

(2) Make the magazine the ‘voice of the people'

A good employee magazine should not be littered with photographs and quotes from senior managers. Your audience might not know these people, which means that the magazine lacks credibility and might be seen as a tool for propaganda. It is important to see the magazine as the flagship communication channel for employees, and, as such, it should feature their voice. How powerful is it to read about ‘Bob in operations', who has worked with the same processes for 20 years, talking about how great the new project to improve processes is? Far more powerful than having a feature from the management team telling people how great this new project will be.

(3) Get feedback

Organise editorial panels. You may need broad shoulders for this but the end result will be a better magazine. Use any contact opportunities with employees to gather feedback from them on the latest issue and get story leads for the next. Consider hand-delivering the magazine within your building as a chance to meet the readers.

(4) Make the magazine look professional

While a magazine can't be expected to fix all communication problems, there has been a shift in their approach - for a start, most are now glossy magazines or newspapers, more reflective of their newsstand counterparts. It is no longer good enough to produce a two-colour, four-sided, A4 newsletter if you want to engage employees with the company's values on service, quality and honesty. Paginations are higher, investment in high-quality images and well-written editorial is the order of the day. If you want people to read it you must make it attractive to them in the first place.

(5) Make your front page engaging

Creating covers with pick-up value is just as important, if not more so, on an employee newsletter as a consumer title. A very formal picture of someone at head office looking at a report is not going to cut the mustard, whereas a photograph of, for example, an engineer out and about in their own environment, doing what they do, is far more engaging and lends an air of credibility to the magazine from the outset.

(6) Make content relevant

Stories should be relevant to your business and provide informative updates about what you do - nobody wants to read a magazine that is full of the softer stuff. Severn Trent's monthly staff magazine Talkabout is becoming as strong a communication tool as our other channels, such as the intranet. Talkabout, which is produced by Summersault Communications, focuses on informing our 5,500 employees about what is going on in the business as well as our plans for the future. The magazine covers a broad mix of business news and chat designed to engage and inspire its readers. It also supports intranet news and team briefings, both of which fall under the remit of internal communications.

(7) Make sure the look and feel of the magazine fits your corporate culture

It is no longer good enough to produce a two-colour, four-sided, A4 newsletter if you want to engage employees with the company's values on service, quality and honesty. Most staff magazines are now glossy publications similar to their newsstand counterparts. Paginations are higher, investment in high-quality images and well-written editorial is the order of the day. If you want people to read it you have to make it attractive to them in the first place. The look and feel needs to reflect the company's branding, but it must work in a magazine or newspaper format. We're living in a media-savvy age, where glossy advertisements and quality publications are the norm.

(8) Make it a two-way street

Staff magazine can perform even more of a service if there is two-way communication. Vox pops, competitions and calls to action are not only good ways to measure readership but also give you a valuable insight into the mood of the company. If people are interacting with the magazine, they're interacting with the company and the brand. Consider producing ‘inserts' or ‘pull out' features that you could imagine people putting up on their office wall. But remember these have to be engaging and relevant to all employees.

(9) Get the physical distribution right

It might sound basic but staff need to receive the magazine, so organise regular checks and updates of the distribution routes. So many times when costs need to be cut the magazine is one of the first things to go. In my view this is a mistake. The company magazine is the one channel that you can almost guarantee will reach every employee - assuming you have your distribution right.

(10) Tell it how it is. Don't use jargon

The motivating force behind the headlines is the employees themselves. Their pride in seeing their news and views published is a force not to be reckoned with. Magazines that invite more involvement from employees are the ones that will succeed at engaging and motivating a work force. But keep it simple.

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