The dirty part of the work

Yesterday (technically that was the day before yesterday because we were not informed about it in time) the next issue of our internal employee newsletter arrived from the Netherlands. If you read my About me page or came from David Ferrabee’s blog you may be confused a little now. Yes, I live and work in Hungary. So why we are producing our newsletter abroad?

To understand that I have to explain it all. But I strive to provide you the gist of it. So I suggest you to jump back a little. Have you done it? Alright, so they manage the designing and the printing process we only have to provide some material (text and photos). The original plan was that we use an online content management system to upload our stuff but from whatever reason later they asked for only some Word files and images. Dealing with the newsletter in that way have advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:

• the designing part does not waste our time
• we do not have to disseminate to separated company newsletter (our country specific pages are in the middle of the European-wide pages)
• the Corporate Communications receive more information about our plant than before because I translate the country specific pages to English also for the Japanese staff
• it easier to keep the deadline than before (Should I say that for my superiors the internal magazine was not a priority until we dealt with the whole process?)

Disadvantages:

• we had to reduce the number of pages of our newsletter (12 -> 4)
• it’s not depends on us – so some delay could happen if one country specific issue has not made in time

But back to our topic. I started to disseminate the copies. We have four designated area for the purpose within the plant. Obviously the rest rooms. I distributed most of them (1600 copies) within an hour. This is the dirty part of our work. I mean literally dirty. (The rest 400 copies will be provide to the associates later and I keep some copies also.) If somebody remember I have already written about that our employee number is higher than 2000. Although, if you plan to launch an employee newsletter than you have to count on that most of the employees will only take a look at it or read the interested part (for him/her) on the spot. A rest of the employees will take it with them to home.

Do not get me wrong now. The crisis is not a good thing. I don’t think that. But I have to admit that now the employees have more time to read – even within the plant and not only in the office. So it is good to see that  more people are reading what you (partly) have created now than before.