How can your company benefit by having a custom publication for employees?





Imagine a world where you can exchange ideas with employees and peers without saying a word. Imagine creating a new world within your office walls, a world with windows of opportunity and progress with every turn. Welcome to the world of Custom Media and Inhouse Magazines.

Custom Media isn’t the same as conventional media. I’m sure several posts of mine can validate that. Custom Media holds within itself the secret window of limitless opportunities, and in this post, I will help you unlock the world of potentials in your workspace, through the world of inhouse magazines and employees.

You may wonder if custom publishing is really one of the best solutions to keep employees happy, while increasing the utilisation rate and reducing the attrition rate. And you may want to know what exactly a company inhouse magazine is all about, and why it should interest your organisation. The truth is, it really can change the working environment in your office within a short period of time.

Inhouse magazines can help your organisation in many ways. It can be a great marketing medium, a brand builder, or even a campaign tool to promote your company’s ideas. Using inhouse magazines, an organisation can enrich and strengthen bonds between employees, consumers and clients by a large extent. Connections too, can be sustained and strengthened by a great deal.

There are several mediums of Custom Media to connect with employees. But the most preferred and beneficial options are Print Magazines and Online Publications. Most companies already provide company information to employees in the form of newsletters and official reports. So how can a good looking inhouse magazine be any different? But that’s where we hit the nail. That very difference is the key to opening new avenues of Employee Relations. While newsletters and reports provide details in a dry and factual manner, inhouse magazines weave a story around it. And we know stories are always happier and more interesting than fact sheets and reports.

Ask yourself a question, what would interest a typical employee or consumer more? Sheets of reports or a magazine brimming with interesting ideas and colourful visuals weaved together in a neat corporate magazine? To help someone understand more about your company, you need to make an understandable connection between your company and the reader. A company magazine doesn’t really need to focus only on the figures of business, especially if it wants to reach out, connect and build a relationship with the employee. It needs to be employee focussed, catering to the interests of the employee, while talking about the company goals, achievements and ideals at the same time.

It’s like the days when we were little kids at school. We’d always hate the mean and haughty teacher, but adore the understanding one. And with that adoration, came respect and fierce loyalty. All of us need a friend who can help us understand the world around us. At your workplace, you can create a mutual friend who can communicate your ideas and goals to the employees, while at the same time ensuring that you get to hear their issues at work too. This friend is an inhouse magazine, in the print form, or as a web portal.

A good looking, professionally created publication that creates an unforgettable experience for your employees is definitely going to make a greater difference in the lives of employees than a few sheets with figures and colourless pages. When you create a bond with your employees, you can create the same feeling of happiness and bonding that they would have with their own friends outside their workplace. And by putting the message across in a clear and friendly approach, in a manner that connects with them, you can definitely bring about a positive change in your office environment. As long as we can make an understandable connection between your organisation and your employees, you can use it to make them love what they do or completely hate it.

One factor that can build or shatter employee relationships, as we all know, is appreciation. Every employee wants to see their share of the pie. The designation doesn’t matter here, it’s how one is appreciated that matters. At the end of the day, every single one of us want to know that we have made a difference, a difference that is noticed and appreciated by others. And more than that, everyone who’s put in a lot of effort into their work would want to know that they did a good job. There is nothing that can bring more intense happiness and joy than being appreciated.

Everyone loves to get their 15 minutes of fame. Every hard working employee wants to be credited and be a part of the limelight, even the shy ones that don’t really want to stand under the spotlight without a little push onto centre stage! All of us love the glory of appreciation. Have you ever thought about how happy your employees would feel if they could be appreciated through a company magazine, with their pictures in it? Have you considered how special and motivated a particular team would feel if their achievements were featured in a glossy magazine? Imagine the little things that you could do for them with an inhouse magazine that would improve their work experience by a large extent.

Is there enough appreciation and happiness in your office? Striking a balance of friendship and office rules can be difficult, but with a custom publication, not only can you create a happier team that would enjoy their work, but you would also be able to improve the attrition rate and the employee utilisation rate of the company. All you would need is a few months to see a difference in the employee behaviour, and less than a year to see the growth curve of loyalty and work happiness shoot the charts.

With custom publishing and inhouse magazines, you can involve the employees on a personal level, and make them feel like they’re a part of something that’s bigger than themselves, their cubicles or even their team. With a custom magazine, you can make them come together and connect with everyone in the entire organisation. You can make them love what they do every single day. And most of all, with a custom magazine, you can make them feel appreciated all through the year!

One comparison you should always remember is that a company magazine is like driving a car. You can drive around town in an old Maruti 800 or a classy new Audi A8. You’re driving around town, alright, but tell me this, which car would make you swell with pride? Company magazines have the same effect on employees. If your magazine is a good one, your employees would love talking about it, and would be ecstatic if they’re featured in it. But if it’s just another magazine that’s bordering on average or (gasp) mediocre, then your employees can’t help but cringe when they hold the magazine in their hands, and your company is bound to face the inevitable “employee dissatisfaction” moment.

If you want good results in the productivity curve, you should be considering and visualising an excellent in-house magazine or a website with exceptional editorial quality and photography to match the likes of internationally backed media houses. Internal teams with little or no experience in the publishing industry won’t do you a bit of good. And remember, when you have an internal team, you’re going to make a few people who are the unqualified “editorial board” shuffle tasks with their existing job profiles. At some point of time, the multitasking may overburden the editorial team, and then, boom! Magazines, just like company turnovers, are only as good as the present one. If your new magazine issue is a bad one, that’s going to create a lot of negativity and bad gossip in the campus.

On the other hand, a great magazine will show a marked increase in the improvement of employee satisfaction, utilisation rate, work happiness and a lot, lot more. So if you were to ask me if your company should have its own inhouse magazine, I’d definitely recommend it hands down.

Starting a magazine is not an easy option though. I’m certain you’re wondering if this is even worth a thought, or whether it’s an affordable option. You may even wonder if spending on employees issue after issue is a feasible option. But with the returns that you would be able to see in just a matter of months, you’d be wondering why you didn’t start an inhouse magazine years earlier!

Confetti Media has been working on several inhouse magazines over the years, and has even provided several additional benefits for its clients and their employees. And that’s not all, using strategic marketing associations with different partners, Confetti Media has also been able to create monetarily profitable magazines for their clients, wherein the companies don’t have to pay for their inhouse magazines after a certain period of time, and Confetti Media would create a self-sustaining environment to let the magazine generate revenues and profits for the company by itself!

All these pointers barely even scrape the surface when it comes to planning and creating strategies for the production of an in-house magazine. I’ve got a huge bag of tricks that I can share with your company if you’re interested in launching a company magazine. But for starters, all you need to do is get in touch with me! I’m the kinda guy who loves partnering with companies, no matter where you are on the map.

So you want a magazine? Get in touch with me.