The Dreaded Email from HR

Let’s face it: Employees dread getting emails from the HR department.  Many employees have told me that they simply ignore emails from HR or have them set up to go straight to the SPAM folder.  That’s because the emails are usually dry and boring and are about new rules, clarification of existing rules, or in general bad news. I don’t blame employees for not wanting to read them.  The problem is that every once in a while you really do have something important to say and you’ve lost your audience.

I decided that I needed to do something fun, different and unexpected in an attempt to get employees to change their views and hopefully get them to start paying attention.  An idea came to me when I was reading the list that the Social Security Administration publishes containing the most popular baby names for that year.  Many news outlets pick up the story and report about the biggest movers and speculate why certain names become more or less popular than they have previously been.

I decided to do the same thing with the names of babies born to employees at my company.  I ran a report of all the names of babies born to employees that year and ranked them by popularity.  Then I compared them to the national data.  This didn’t take long at all and I put together a cute email blast to the company with the results.

The feedback was overall positive.  Many employees loved the idea and thanked me for doing something fun and unconventional.  A handful of emails were negative (“is this what you do all day?”) but overall I accomplished my goal.  The trick is coming up with interesting topics to send out every once in a while to keep the momentum and to ensure that employees are opening the important emails as well.