Tools for internal communications measurement used to be pretty limited. You’d either send out an occasional survey to your employees to gauge their response to your newsletter, or pray that someone sent you a response to an email. But in today’s environment those techniques are essentially a waste of time and resources. Anyone in charge of internal communications needs a tailored array of tools to measure what is working and not working.
** Visit this page for a list of our articles on how to measure internal communications. **
Below is a discussion of the tools for internal communications measurement we generally recommend, organized by five vital questions they can answer for you:
- How to know if your content is worth reading
- How to know if your content is going anywhere
- How to know if employees are getting the message
- How to know if your employees trust you
- How to know if you are impacting employee behavior
All the tools discussed are widely available, and many may already be in place within your organization.
How to know if your content is worth reading
Given the volume of internal communications sent out each year, the first thing you need to understand is whether the stuff you are putting out there is even worth reading. Because no matter how much stuff you send out, research shows that only about 59% is actually read.
A good post or email should both contain your key messages and be relevant to your audience. But how do you know if you don’t have a gauge to determine the relative quality of what you are communicating? That’s where the Internal Communications Quality Index (ICQI) comes in. It is a customized index designed to reflect the quality of your content relative to the objectives established by your organization. Each index is unique to a given department and/or organization. The example below was designed for a consumer company, but yours may look very different depending on the industry that you are in.
The purpose of using such an index is that it enables you to rank every post or email that you put out on a +10 to -10 scale, from perfect to “I wouldn’t read it if you paid me.” A typical ICQI might look like this:
What you hope to find, after you have averaged together all the ICQI scores for all your posts and emails, is a mean score of +5 or above. Anything less and you are just cranking out useless content that’s not worth the effort you’re making. So, put together a quick ICQI. Not only will it tell you how good your posts are, it will tell you just what you need to do to improve them. For more on how to develop a Quality Index, a.k.a. “Kick Butt Index,” see “How To Develop a Customized Kick Butt Index of the Quality of Your Media Coverage.”
How to know if your content is going anywhere
O.K., let’s assume that you’ve determined that the majority of your communications is worth reading. The next piece of the puzzle is to track where your memos, emails, etc. are going. Are they getting to people and departments in a timely manner? Are they being passed along or automatically deleted? Are they reaching the right people?
To do this you need to analyze all (or a random sample if your volume is overwhelming) of your communications—including emails, newsletters, memos, voice mails, videos, speeches, and presentations—to determine who is getting the messages, and what they are doing with them. For instance, are they deleting them? Forwarding them? Clicking on your links? Saving them for later?
Typically you would use a tool like MailChimp, BananaTag, or PoliteMail that automatically assembles those metrics. More sophisticated clients actually analyze the email traffic to determine connections and networks that are developing. For large organizations, there are systems like Valdis Kreb’s Inflow to map the forwarding and response patterns of email.
Other important metrics are available from your intranet log files. These can help you measure to what extent are people clicking on various pages, reading blog posts, and spending time on key pages. Track the extent to which they download the information you provide, if that is part of your objectives.
How to know if employees are getting the message
The measures above will help you understand if they are paying attention to your messages. But does anyone remember what you are saying?
And if you think the worst can’t happen, well, have I got a story for you. Once upon a time, about 30 years ago now, I was running my first measurement company, The Delahaye Group. We put out a quarterly newsletter. As you know, I like to write, and I was fairly proud of that little publication. Until we surveyed our “readership” that is. Turns out, nobody—nobody—remembered our newsletter. Zip. Nada. That’s when I hired Bill Paarlberg to be my editor and communications consultant. We’ve worked together ever since.
So, you’ve got to do a survey to find out if they actually remember your content. In this case, what you want is a short pulse survey that tests your employees knowledge or understanding of whatever messages, priorities, or takeaways you are trying to convey. Design it so you find out:
- Do they remember your content?
- Do they interpret your content correctly?
- Did it change their morale or work habits?
- Did it alter their outlook or perceptions of the company?
Today, many intranet and event platforms incorporate surveys as part of their offering. If yours doesn’t, then SurveyMonkey or Google Forms are easy and free alternatives.
Yes, surveys can become tiresome, and too many will dull your employees’ eagerness to respond. To avoid this, one of my clients developed an ongoing quiz based on Trivial Pursuit to test employees’ knowledge and understanding of company messages. They awarded prizes for the most right answers. The program significantly increased the entire company’s understanding and belief in their key messages.
How to know if your employees trust you
In this age of mass skepticism and distrust of media it is also important to know that your employees trust you as a source of information. So we recommend including in your survey some basic questions to measure trust, for instance:
- Does this organization have the ability to do what it says it will do?
- Does this organization treat people like me fairly and justly?
- Does this organization keep its promises?
For more about measuring trust, see these articles:
- Survey Questions to Measure the Effectiveness of Organizational or Internal Communication
- How To Measure Trust in a Skeptical World
- Your Guide to Trust: How to Get It, Keep It, Measure It, and Regain It
How to know if you are impacting employee behavior
Outcomes are the behaviors that you want to effect within your organization. Ideally, your communications efforts are intended to make employees more loyal, more efficient, and more knowledgeable. The metrics to evaluate those are frequently found in HR, including:
- Retention rates, and
- Referrals and or likelihood to recommend to a friend or colleague.
Another good way to measure improved behavior is to analyze what percentage of employees qualify for a reward or performance bonus. As for morale, it is reflected in retention and referrals, and you can measure it with a survey, as mentioned above, using questions from the article “Survey Questions to Measure the Effectiveness of Organizational or Internal Communication.”
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