beBit Open Newsletter Survey Results Announced!
Hello everyone! We are the beBit Open Newsletter editorial team.
Almost a year has passed since we started the Open Newsletter in March of 2022.
A total of 46 articles have been published so far. We have been releasing an article almost every week, and in order to find out how employees actually perceive the content, we conducted an internal survey.
The heart pounding results of the survey will be revealed here, as we look back at the past year of the Internal Newsletter!
※For those wondering why we started beBit Open Newsletter, please check out our first article.
Open Newsletter Survey Results Announced!
In December of 2022, we invited our employees to fill out a survey and received 28 responses!
Let’s take a look at the results!
1. How often they read beBit's Open Newsletter
A whopping 60% of respondents said that they read our newsletter every week or almost every week!
We publish articles every Tuesday morning on note, and at the same time, we announce the posting on our company-wide Slack channel #general, so it’s very reassuring to hear that some individuals routinely check out our newsletter. It was well worth updating our articles every week (besides during summer vacation and year end holidays)!
By the way, we post a few recommended reading points along with our article to let you know what to look forward to, so please check it out if you have the chance!
2. Series/Categoris that were interesting, memorable, or helpful in understanding beBit
The number one most interesting/useful/memorable article category was “Inside beBit” by a landslide!
Inside beBit is a series of 10 question 10 answer interviews with beBit members about their work and personal lives. (Past articles can be found here)
Initially, we introduced the executive board members, but we expanded to all of our employees as we received feedback that people wanted to learn more about their other colleagues as well! Starting July 2022, we started randomly selecting employees, and so far we have released 15 individual’s articles.
Here are some excerpts from the survey to show why inside beBit was chosen as the most popular series.
I enjoy reading about the different departments and the work they do, because a lot of times I don’t know what they specifically do!
I recently joined the team in October, and the employee introduction articles are useful when coming up with topics to talk about when I first meet them!
It is helpful to know people’s personalities through the newsletters as there aren’t many opportunities to communicate with them face to face.
It is useful during hiring, as it’s easy to show people what our company is like and what kind of people they will be working with.
When we first launched our newsletter, one of our objectives was to create more opportunities for employees to communicate with each other, as a majority of our work takes place remotely. We were very happy to hear that people are finding the articles useful!
3. Is the beBit Open Newsletter useful for sharing information within the company and promoting communication between employees?
I was the most nervous to see the responses to this question, but was relieved to find that over 90% of the respondents find the articles useful, or at least somewhat useful!
4. Have you ever recommended the Open Newsletter to someone outside of the company?
Five individuals responded yes!
The recommended individuals included family members, prospective students, those who were offered a position, and Twitter Followers.
One of the biggest factors in getting more people to read our Open Newsletters is for our colleagues to share the articles outside of the company. When we first started the Open Newsletter, we had the idea that sharing the article to the general public would lead to more people knowing about each individual and their work, resulting in higher confidence. We will continue to work hard to make our newsletter something that everyone will want to share as well!
5. Requests for future topics
Here are a few requests we received!
beBiter’s Select was great, as I was able to learn about things people were into, making it easier to talk to that individual.
I’d like to learn about any tools or equipment that leaders from each department would recommend. (Cameras and mics for remote work, notebooks or web services used to organize ideas, business books for developing their thoughts, etc.)
I would like to learn more about the work the other employees do. In addition, I’d love to hear about their daily routines (How they spend their mornings and evenings, how they refresh, what they do during their free time, etc.)
I’d like to learn more about our #times and #enjoy type Slack channels. I feel like there are some interesting channels that I don’t know about!
I would like to learn about beBit’s works. Since it is an “open” newsletter, I’d love to be able to send links to my friends to let them know about the work we do. Even for people within the company, it would be nice to learn more about other departments such as consulting, sales, engineering, and general affairs.
I’d love to read articles about UX methodologies.
Thanks to everyone who participated in this survey. We will use this information and strive for future improvements.
Spin-off: Our top 5 most viewed articles
The most read articles over the past year (internally and externally) are as follows!
#1 The Start of beBit’s Open Newsletter!（March 28th, 2022）
#2 The UX Intellifence Association ~Promoting ethical UX design~（June 7th, 2022）
#3 【beBiter’s Select】Content For Those New to Philosophy, Recommended by a Former Philosophy Researcher / Market Development’s Yokoyama-san（July 5th, 2022）
#4 【beBiter’s Select】Content Recommended to Team Members by CCO Yasufumi Fujii（May 17th, 2022）
#5 【Inside beBit】Executive Officer - Shin Takegawa（May 10th, 2022）
Thoughts and Thanks after one year of operation
When we launched the open newsletter, we set a goal of updating one article per week, but since the editorial members were concurrently engaged in their other duties, it was not an easy feat.
Even so, we maintained our motivation thanks to everyone's encouraging words. Kind words such as “The open newsletter is a great project!” and “I just read today’s articles!” helped us get through this past year.
In addition, when we asked employees to be interviewed, they willingly accepted our requests even while they were swamped with their own responsibilities. They would even ask if we needed more photos, volunteering time to take steps to make our articles more interesting. The cooperation that everyone provided definitely reconfirmed how great our colleagues at beBit are.
From here on out, we will take the feedback we received and work towards delivering the best content possible by trying new platforms and potentially limiting some of the information we send out so that only our team members can view it. Because of this, there is a chance that the “beBit Open Newsletter” may not be as “open” as it has been, and the pace in which we send out information may change, resulting in a different kind of newsletter from what we’ve been sending out in the past.
Even so, the editorial team is very excited to continue delivering content to all of our readers.
We hope that you all stick around for year 2 of our beBit OpenNewsletter!