A true strategy includes measurement to know whether or not your internal communications are effective. Why should you measure? For starters, it helps you know whether or not team members are engaged with the communications you develop and deploy.
For another reason, it helps you prove your value and provides justification for your Internal Communications budget.
Lastly, it helps you identify where you should be spending that budget and your time in order to maximize your role.
The answers to what’s working and what isn’t are found in your employees, but what’s the best way to consult them? Which tactics should you use?
Some popular tactics include focus groups, employee surveys, and direct observation. Let’s take a closer look at how you might use each.
Made up of individuals throughout your organisation, focus groups (sometimes called “listening sessions”) can be a fruitful way to solicit and collect opinions and ideas. Your employees are full of ideas; many of them just haven’t had the opportunity to voice them.
Getting a group of employees together in the same room, where they are welcome to let their feedback and creativity flow, may produce the exact insights you need to breathe new life into your internal comms. In fact, 80% of IC team members believe that focus groups are very effective or quite effective.
Use these tips to make sure your focus group achieves the desired objective:
Unlike focus groups, employee surveys should be anonymous, which can sometimes render more honest feedback. On the other hand, employee surveys don’t have the highest response rates (they hover between 30% and 40%).
Still, they are a worthwhile tool, providing data around what employees are doing with your communication and even why, depending on the questions you ask.
To increase the effectiveness of your surveys, try the following:
This involves following designated employees around for a short period of time to observe how they interact with employee communications, and to learn which devices and channels they prefer.
Clearly, this method has drawbacks, including the fact that some employees may alter their behavior if they have someone shadowing them. However, observing the work habits and environments of front line employees can teach you a lot about how to improve your communications.
If you want to try direct observation, use these tips:
You can’t measure what you don’t track, so it’s important to distill the learnings from your information-gathering tactics of choice into actual, trackable metrics. These metrics usually come in a couple of forms: What are people telling you, and what are they actually doing?
The data that results from your focus groups and surveys is the first form: What they are telling you. You may find some incongruity between that and what they are actually doing. For example, an employee may say they read the weekly corporate newsletter, but your email metrics may indicate they only open it about once a month. It’s important to track both.
Here are some examples of behavioral data that can be quantified:
At this stage, you may find that you have gaps in your abilities to quantify and track where content is concerned. If this is the case, you’re not alone: Nearly 60% of IC employees reported not having the right internal technology for their purposes.
Employee communications apps are one potential solution, because they allow you to both create content and track what employees are doing with that content. You can then match those data with employee data from HR to start to develop a holistic picture of employee engagement and experience with your communications.
To know if you are improving, you need to identify a starting point. Take a look at where you rank right now, using the intel you’ve received from the above tactics and channels currently in place.
What is your turnover rate? How many sick days are employees taking, on average? What is the rate of employee sharing of content, or commenting on content? How many times does video get viewed, and how does that compare to written content?
Record your baseline for each metric, so you can measure the effectiveness of the changes you make.
Now that you know what employees say they want, and now that you’ve determined your benchmarks, it’s time to make your plan.
Once you’ve implemented changes, keep a constant eye on the metrics to see if those changes influenced improvement: Did your turnover decrease? Did employee shares of content increase? If you didn’t achieve the desired result, what will you try next to turn things around?
Your plan for internal communications success should be living and breathing, relying constantly on the data to determine the path forward.
Remember: Your role plays an integral part in both understanding and supporting the employee experience. None of these steps are intended to be a quick fix, and getting to the heart of whether your communications are doing their job may take months, but the effort and time it takes will be worth it.
An employee communications app makes it easy to track and measure the effectiveness of internal communications. If you’ve struggled to find the right tools that tell the story of internal communications at your organisation, let’s talk.
Still doing research? Check out our eGuide below for guidance and tips.