Issuing hundreds or thousands of personalised employee letters, accurately and on time
The problem with doing it by hand
Most organisations reach the same point sooner or later. A pay review, a change to terms, a restructure or a harmonisation project means every employee needs their own letter, and each letter has to carry the right name, role, salary, dates and wording for that person.
Done by hand, that means copying details from a spreadsheet into a Word template, saving a file, attaching it to an email and checking it went to the right person. For ten people that's fine. For several hundred it takes days, and the risk of a wrong figure or a letter sent to the wrong person grows with every one. Those mistakes are the ones employees remember, and some of them are hard to undo.
A real example
Earlier in my career I worked on a project harmonising contracts for several hundred staff at a well-known international cruise business. Different groups had joined on different terms, and each person needed a new contract that reflected their own role, pay and conditions.
Preparing those one at a time would have taken weeks of careful, repetitive work. Instead, each contract was produced from the agreed data and wording, checked, and issued in an organised way, with a clear record of what had gone to whom. That project is where this approach started.
Using the tools you already have
Almost every organisation already has Microsoft Word for the letter, Excel for the employee data and Outlook for sending. Used together properly, those three can produce and issue a personalised letter for every employee without buying or installing anything new, and without employee data leaving your own systems.
This is more than an ordinary mail merge. A basic mail merge fills in names and addresses. A large employee letter run usually needs several versions of a letter, wording that changes with each person's circumstances, an individual PDF for each employee sent to the right address, checks against the source data, and a record of what went out.
We set that up for you. How we build it is our own know-how, so I won't go into it here, but the result is simple to describe: one approved template for each version, one checked data file, and an individual letter for each person that matches both.
Email and PDF, or print
The cost of printing, envelopes, postage and handling has kept rising, and it adds up quickly across hundreds or thousands of letters. Where email is suitable and every recipient has an address they actually use, sending each person their own letter as a PDF can be much cheaper. It's also quicker, and you have a dated record of each email sent.
Email isn't always right. Some employees don't have a work email address or don't use one, some letters need to be posted or handed over, and some situations call for a printed copy. In those cases the same process can produce print-ready letters, so the content is identical whichever way they go out.
How the service works
- Scope: we agree what's being sent, to whom, the versions of the letter needed, the data each one draws on and the date it should go out.
- Build and test: we set the process up and test it on dummy data first, so no real employee information is used until it works.
- Sign-off: you approve a sample of every version of the letter before anything is issued.
- Issue: the letters go out through your own systems on the agreed date.
- Reconciliation: you get a record of who received what, and when, so any gaps can be followed up.
How long it takes
It depends on the job. The number of letters, how many versions there are, how complex the wording is, how clean the data is and the sending limits on your own IT and email all affect the timetable. Some runs can go out in a single day. Larger or more complicated ones are better planned in batches, and we'll tell you which at the scoping stage rather than promise a date your systems can't meet.
This describes our service, not legal advice. The content of each letter, and whether a change needs consultation or consent, is for you and your advisers to decide.
Working out whether it's worth it
If you're weighing up doing it in-house against using a service, our free Every Letter Right cost calculator shows the time and money involved at your volume. The Every Letter Right page explains the service and gives more examples.