(Subscription Required) For decades, smart leaders have known that effective internal communications is essential to shareholder value and organizational success. And for almost as long, organizations have been “measuring” internal communications effectiveness by the worst possible means: long, involved annual or bi-annual employee surveys. These provide little actionable information and thus are rarely acted upon. Although they are sometimes used as a ruler with which to slap the knuckles of poorly performing managers. See my rant on that subject here.
Plenty of organizations try to measure the nebulous concept of “employee engagement” (see #2, below) with activity metrics that are way too crude. Employees are key to your success, so why measure the impact of how you communicate with them with something as simplistic as “email opens?”
Here are five tips to improve your internal communications metrics:
1. Replace your annual survey with quarterly surveys.
Recently, high performing organizations such as Southwest Airlines have begun using quarterly pulse surveys to measure employee knowledge and likely behavior. By surveying employees quarterly it becomes much easier to tie communications activity to changes in employee attitude. Things happen fast and surveys are easy to do, so why wait a whole year to identify potential problems?
2. Follow the standards.
The recently released internal communications measurement standards actually do away with the ubiquitous but poorly defined “employee engagement.” Instead, they recommend focusing on behavior and knowledge. Here are their recommendations:
[table “ICStandards” not found /]3. Measure your Say-Do Gap.
An even better approach, and one that has long been tied to higher organizational performance, is to measure the alignment between what organizational leaders say and what they actually do. Think about it. If your leaders are talking incessantly about a set of goals or priorities but are not acting in ways that enable employees to achieve them, what happens to the credibility of the organization? You need look no further than the White House, Wells Fargo, or Uber if you don’t know the answer.
Narrowing your Say-Do Gap enhances organizational effectiveness and, in many cases, results in a dramatic improvement in financial performance. Well-known employee communications guru Jim Shaffer makes some great arguments on why you should be measuring your Say-Do gap.
4. Dump all activity metrics that don’t pass the So What? test.
Look at every metric you’re currently studying and ask, “So what?” So what if your email is opened, your Intranet clicked on, or your newsletter liked? What is the impact on your goals? How do emails and clicks impact your business goals of increasing the talent pool, improving customer satisfaction, or reducing turnover and retention? If you can’t tie any of your current metrics to one or more of the outcomes listed in the standards table above, then get rid of them and measure something more meaningful.
5. Measure external conversations.
In an era in which good talent is increasingly hard to find, it is vital to measure your reputation among your potential talent pool. Studies like those put out by Fortune and www.greatplacetowork.com are good benchmarks of how your organization stacks up against competing employers. Regularly analyzing comments on review sites such as Glassdoor can be good indicator of your reputation as an employer. ∞
