Ever since Sears tied customer retention to employee morale back in 1998, organizations have known that the more loyal and engaged your employees are, the happier your customers will be, and as a result you will see higher profits. In the wake of those findings many organizations realized the importance of internal communications measurement. They implemented annual or bi-annual employee attitude surveys and added the results to their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Sadly, in today’s rapidly shifting landscape, those annual—or worse, biennial—surveys are worthless, and can in no way help improve your results. Our dense and inconstant communications environment requires a minimum of quarterly updates and, ideally, monthly reporting. Otherwise your data will not be current enough to inform your decision making and help you improve results.
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No need to panic; we have a solution. Internal communications measurement in this environment is easier than you think, it just requires a shift in mindset. Time to stop thinking about what you do as a cost center called “employee communications” and to redefine it as “organizational communications.” If your organization is large enough—and your measurement sophisticated enough—you can use internal communications to deliver value. You do this either through saving on some cost, by generating additional revenue, or by achieving some other result that is easy to express in business value. See “From Cost Center to Value Creation: 3 Steps to Transform Internal Communication.”)
A good internal communications measurement program is vital for this realignment, so let’s get started…
Step 1: Rethink your definition of “communicate”
Many companies still think that their employees live in glass bubbles. Traditional employee communications somehow assumed that their workers were magically isolated from all other news sources and therefore could be spoon-fed only the news chosen by their employers.
Social media has changed all that. Today, employees are more likely to get information about developments in your organization from Facebook, blogs, or Twitter than your internal newsletter. With a few key strokes, everyone—your employees, partners, vendors, customers, and investors—all have access to exactly the same information.
So today’s smart companies are responding and restructuring. Increasingly, the “employee communications” function has moved out of the human resources department and into communications. (While this is great for communications, it has turned HR into an arm of legal. HR has now become the “good excuses group,” more interested in protecting the shareholders than the employees. But I digress.)
Today’s smart leaders recognize that a more strategically-focused two-way dialogue with employees—one centered on meeting organization objectives—can affect the bottom line more directly than trying to spoon feed specific news. For example, well-informed employees that are aligned with leadership on company priorities are far more likely to consistently communicate those priorities to customers, thus increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction. They are also more likely to recommend the company to friends and family, which helps lower recruitment costs. And, they are more likely to spend discretionary time on things that positively impact the organization, such as volunteering in the community, or coming up with new solutions. All of which adds to the company’s bottom line.
Step 2: Understand the environment and where employees really get information
To begin the process you need a thorough, honest, and independent evaluation of existing communications, including both official and unofficial sources of news and information. This initial benchmark study will be more or less involved depending on the size and complexity of your organization, on what measurement tools are already being used, and on what data is already available. It starts with collecting and analyzing samples of all the various news bites, rumors, and pieces of electronic and non-electronic documentation that regularly bombard your employees.
Next you need to survey your employees. (Read more about surveys in Special Notes on Tools, below). You want to find out:
- What messages are getting through, and how?
You’ve probably wondered more than once whether or not all those memos and emails are being read. Are they getting to people and/or departments in a timely manner? Are they being passed along or automatically deleted? Are they reaching the right people? (See “The Essential Toolkit for Internal Communications Measurement” for more on this.)
While most organizations are naturally concerned about over-surveying employees, a quick survey on email usage generally pays off. JPMorgan Chase analyzed email usage and discovered that by managing email communications more efficiently the organization could save several million dollars a year. Other important metrics are available from your intranet log files: To what extent are people clicking on various pages on your intranet? To what extent are they downloading?
- What channels, vehicles, or spokespeople do employees trust?
Texts, instant messaging, and social media have replaced water-cooler conversations. Email has replaced the company newsletter, and conference calls have replaced in-person meetings. You need to understand where your employees rank each one in terms of engagement and credibility.
Of course we’d like employees to learn everything from “official” sources, but that just isn’t going to happen. So use your research to find out what sources of information your employees are most likely to pay attention to and, more importantly, trust.
Generally we find peers and immediate supervisors to be cited as the most trustworthy, but this depends very much on the nature of the employee. In fact, different types of employees may very well prefer different media for different types of news. One study we did revealed that engineers in a telecommunications company only trusted information they received electronically, and inherently distrusted information delivered in big corporate meetings.
- What’s important to them?
Some 40 years ago, in a keynote address to the Advertising Club of St. Louis, Ralph Delahaye Paine, (yes, a relative, my father in fact) the editor of Fortune, mused,
“If we can put a man in orbit, why can’t we determine the effectiveness of our communications? The reason is simple and perhaps, therefore, a little old-fashioned: people, human beings with a wide range of choice. Unpredictable, cantankerous, capricious, motivated by innumerable conflicting interests, and conflicting desires.”
In the ensuing years, we have developed increasingly effective methods to measure people’s capriciousness, but the reality remains that humans still hear what they want to hear.
What they want to hear is based upon what keeps them up at night: their most pressing issues or desires. If your employees are most concerned about the impact of the economy on job security, then your messages about vision, values, and health care benefits will hardly register on them. If a number of pregnancies exist in a particular department, then those benefit messages will be picked up on first—you can bet on it.
- What do they think today?
Existing perceptions play an enormous role in whether or not employees will receive the messages you’re trying to communicate. If you don’t know the health and strength of your relationship with employees, you have no idea whether they’re likely to listen to what you have to say. And then, given the nature of the relationship, you still need to get them to tell you if they understand the vision and values: Do they have an understanding of what the organization is trying to do?
In some companies we find that the space between line workers and management opens to such an extent that internal communicators need to start by educating employees about what business the organization is in. Other companies are at the opposite end of the scale, using open-book management to keep every employee informed of not just the organization’s business goals, but the actual financial details of the operation as well.
Step 3: Agree on clear, measurable goals
Once you’ve got a good understanding of your employee’s needs, wants, and knowledge, it is time to get agreement from top management about what you’re trying to accomplish. To do this you need to understand the vision, objectives, and messages that senior management expects of your communications efforts.
First, if you don’t already know, find out how your leadership perceives your role in building the business. How do they expect good employee communications to contribute to the bottom line? Do they see you as saving money by lowering recruitment costs or increasing efficiency through better alignment with key priorities? However they define your role in building the value of the business, that’s what you want to measure.
Now present key management with the findings from your evaluation in Step 2. Afterwards, interview key management and determine what their expectations are and what they believe your objectives should be. What do they think is important? How do they see you adding to the strategic direction?
Articulate clear goals, write them down, and get your leadership to physically sign off on them.
Typical objectives might be:
- Decrease turnover, increase loyalty
- Lower recruitment costs
- Ensure alignment throughout the organization on priorities
What you will measure will be driven by these goals, so it’s key to get buy-in up front. If you are using Twitter for recruitment, for example, getting more followers is not the goal. Finding better qualified, more engaged employees is the desired result. So you need to have systems in place to track not just the quantity of applications but the quality as well. You probably want to know if using Twitter has resulted in less employee turnover.
Keeping in mind the new “delivering value” mindset mentioned in the introduction, you will want to be sure you can express your results in terms of cost savings. How much does it cost to recruit and train a new employee? If your use of Twitter has resulted in less turnover, then you can express that success in terms of how much money has it saved in new employee costs.
If your goal is greater engagement in the company’s mission, you need to define engagement and describe in detail how an “engaged employee” will behave. Link those engaged behaviors to cost savings or revenue generation.
Step 4: Select a benchmark to which to compare your results
All measurement is a comparative tool, and you have to decide what you want to be compared to. It would be nice to be able to compare your results to robust industry-wide statistics for internal communications measurement, but, other than very broad corporate studies that aggregate data from a few large corporations, industry benchmarks are rare.
Watson Wyatt publishes annual benchmark data that shows that companies that communicate effectively are 4.5 times more likely to report high employee engagement and 20 percent more likely to report lower turnover rates, when compared to firms that communicate less effectively. Copies of the study are available through www.watsonwyatt.com.
Another recommended approach is to find a peer organization. The comparison doesn’t even have to be with someone in your industry. Telecommunications companies have been known to benchmark against Disney and General Electric, because they had similar programs.
From a purely practical perspective, the easiest benchmark is your own results over time, e.g., How does this quarter compare to last quarter? The bottom line is that you need to benchmark your results to something or someone that seems credible to your boss or your board. If your boss just came from Disney, and he/she thinks they had a “great” communications program, then you will be compared to Disney. You need to find out how he/she defined “great” and what specifically made it great, and then measure that.
Step 5: Define the criteria of success
This process involves defining the actual words and numbers to be used as you create your specific, measurable definitions of success. These criteria are numerical, and most often they are percentages or amounts expressed in dollars or numbers of something. Your definition(s) of success might include, for instance:
- My program will increase understanding of the corporate mission and values by xx percent, or
- My program will decrease employee turnover by xx percent.
This is where you decide what truly defines your success, and where you commit to achieving specific goals. Make sure your goals are achievable.
You can find a chart with a sampling of goals, measures, and metrics here.
Step 6: Select measurement tools, collect and analyze data
Once you know what you want to measure, the tools that will provide the data and statistics you use to evaluate and compare programs are:
- Surveys,
- Media content and message analysis, and
- Web analytics.
Go to “The Essential Toolkit for Internal Communications Measurement” for details. At minimum you will need at least two or three different data sets—such as survey results and web analytics, or web analytics and content analysis. They will allow your results to back each other up, and bring data to bear on your question(s) from more than one direction.
Scheduling research
When scheduling your research, work backward from when the results will do the most good. If you do your planning in July but get your research results in January, the results are six months too late and you’re dealing with very old news. Because you don’t want a “message du jour,” but do want to engender consistency and continuity, we recommend quarterly pulse surveys or twice-a-year in-depth surveys.
In internal communications, the very act of surveying raises expectations that things will improve or at least change. Getting back to employees is especially important, not just with results but with specific changes that you will make or recommend because of the research. Set up a regular schedule for reporting and planning. “Last week” is generally when most companies need the results of their research.
Special notes on tools
Surveys
You will want to conduct a survey that will help you determine what the takeaways are from the messages you are trying to communicate. In other words, did they understand the message, did they interpret it correctly? Did it change their morale, their work habits, and their level of understanding? To what extent did your communications affect their outlook toward the company?
Surveys should not be viewed as big burdensome things that you undertake every few years. They should be short, and posted on your intranet. We recommend quarterly “pulse checks” of employee attitudes to determine how perceptions are changing over time.
For surveys to be statistically valid, every employee needs an equal opportunity to participate. In many companies, that precludes email surveys, since not every employee has equal access to computers. In many cases, even phones aren’t always within reach. No surprise, then, that so many companies still rely on paper surveys. Although they may be slow and appear antiquated, employees seem remarkably willing to fill them out. A good response rate for employee paper surveys is around 40 percent. Phone surveys are typically a bit more expensive but deliver results much faster.
The key, of course, is to ask the right questions. See “Survey Questions to Measure the Effectiveness of Organizational or Internal Communication.”
Designing a survey is a deceptively difficult job, and if you get it wrong, you probably won’t find out until there’s a pile of worthless paper staring you in the face. So, make sure that you have a professional researcher craft the survey questionnaire. We often see homegrown survey research fail because the right questions either were not asked or were asked in a way that failed to yield actionable information.
Too many employee attitude surveys measure tactics rather than relationships. The right way to measure employee attitude is to use the Grunig Relationship Instrument questions, not just test satisfaction.
Look around any organization Christmas party and you’ll quickly realize that employees are hardly a single audience. You’ll see long-time employees and newbies, men and women, geeks and marketers, telecommuters and cubicle dwellers, branch office and main office. So don’t measure them as if they’re one group; include demographics by which you can segment the data.
Focus groups
Focus groups can help you probe employees to discover the real issues that concern them and to discover the specifics you want to measure with other tools. If the major messages aren’t getting through, what is? What are the subtle variations between what the head honchos say and what the employees hear?
Social media
Analyzing internal social media can also provide some insight into employee attitudes. If you use a tool like Yammer, monitoring and analyzing the conversations will provide some insight into employees perspectives. However, unless a very broad cross section of employees is communicating on Yammer, it should not be seen as a representative sample of employee opinion.
Measure the outcomes you want to encourage
Outcomes are the behaviors that you want to affect within your organization. Ideally, your communications efforts are intended to make employees more loyal, more efficient, more productive, and more knowledgeable. So the outcome metrics might be employee retention, performance ratings, turnover, or efficiency ratings.
One company developed an ongoing Trivial Pursuit quiz to test employees’ knowledge and understanding of the messages. Prizes were awarded for the most right answers. The program significantly increased the entire company’s understanding and belief in the key messages.
An important outcome metric is available by studying your intranet’s log files. Data such as how long employees spend in each area, what pages they visit, and the extent to which they download the information you provide are all potentially valuable measures of employee behavior.
If you don’t have one, start an employee award program that rewards specific behavior that indicates that they are engaged with the organization and its goals. From that you can determine the percentage of employees that is eligible for an award and presumably more engaged than the rest.
Data analysis
After you’ve collected the data it needs to be counted, evaluated, and categorized according to type, effectiveness, messages communicated, and so forth. Examine what messages are being delivered in what formats. You can use something as simple as an Excel spreadsheet, or a more sophisticated database package like WinCross, SAS, or SPSS to dig a little deeper.
Make sure you analyze your data by segment. At the very least you will want to compare data by: gender, age group, length of time with the company, title/level, exempt vs. non-exempt, and geographic location.
The point of internal communications measurement is not just to generate a folder full of charts and graphs. You need to analyze the data, segmenting it across different employee groups to glean insight, draw conclusions, and make recommendations. The idea is to use your hard-won knowledge to improve the effectiveness of what you are doing. Therefore you want to have results in hand when actions can be taken, decisions made, and steps taken toward improvement.
The one rule of employee communications is that once you have conducted a survey or asked a question of an employee, they will expect change to happen. So whatever you do don’t keep the data to yourself. Post it on an internal blog or Intranet site for everyone to see.
While your “experts” can do the formal analysis, don’t be afraid to solicit input, comments, and interpretations from all of your employees. You may want to conduct additional focus groups to explain or interpret data that seems perplexing. As soon as possible, communicate any changes that will be occurring as a result of your research. That way you ensure participation in future research. ∞
