To keep track of the effectiveness of your internal communications, it used to be enough to send out an occasional employee survey to gauge the response to your newsletter. But with today’s plethora of communications tools, anyone in charge of internal communications needs a suite of measurement tools to truly understand what is working and not working in their internal communications program.

Below is a discussion of the tools we generally recommend. They’re all widely available, and many may already be in place within your organization.

An Output Measurement Tool

What you need to understand first is whether the “output” that you are distributing is reaching your internal audience. You need a tool that will answer the critical questions:

• Are the memos and emails being read?
• Are they getting to the people and/or departments in a timely manner?
• Are they being passed along or automatically deleted?
• Are they reaching the right people?

There are 3 methods to getting that data:

1. Internal Message Analysis: This works in the same way external media analysis does. You use either human or automated sentiment analysts to scan the email conversations in your intranet and internal blogs for keywords, messages, and sentiment. This technique is particularly useful to compare to external sentiment analysis to determine the extent to which the two overlap. We recommend analyzing  all outgoing communications including emails, newsletters, memos, voicemails, videos, speeches, and presentations to determine what messages are being communicated, who is getting the messages, and what they are doing with them (e.g., deleting them, forwarding them, or saving them for later). 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. BananaTag can do this just as well as some of the customized measurement companies like CyberAlert and Prime Research.
2. Survey on Email Usage: While most organizations are naturally concerned about over-surveying employees, a quick survey (Qualtrics, Benchpoint, or  SurveyMonkey ) on email usage generally pays off. JPMorgan Chase analyzed email usage and discovered that by organizing and managing email communications more efficiently the organization could save several million dollars a year.
3. Intranet Traffic Stats: Another important metric to track is available from your intranet log files via Omniture, Google Analytics, or WebTrends.  To what extent are people clicking on various pages on your intranet? To what extent are they downloading?

An Outtake Measurement Tool

This tool is typically a more in-depth survey that will help you determine what the takeaways are from the messages you’re trying to communicate. In other words:

• Did they understand the message, did they interpret it correctly?
• Did the message change their morale or their work habits?
• Did the communications impact their outlook towards the company?

We recommend quarterly “pulse checks” of employee attitudes to determine how perceptions are changing over time.

An Outcome Measurement Tool

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, 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. They awarded prizes for the most number of right answers. It significantly increased the entire company’s understanding and belief in the key messages.

Another important outcome metric is available by studying your intranet’s log files. Data such as how long employees spend in each area, to what extent are employees hitting various pages, and the extent to which they download the information you provide are all measures of employee behavior.

A Tool to Pull It All Together

Internal communications never functions in a vacuum. Employees are just as likely to get news of company developments from local media or gossip at a soccer game as they are from your emails. Therefore it is critical that you also be monitoring local media to have a complete understanding of what the employee is seeing.

Further, you’ll probably want to compare and contrast internal vs. external communications vehicles to test the degree to different media outlets and different tactics are successful in communicating your messages.

Many organizations standardize on “cost per message communicated” as a way to compare the efficiency and effectiveness of different programs. Another option is to compare the reach and frequency of message communications in the various different vehicles, including email, local media, and internal communiqués.

Increasingly, organizations are using dashboard products like Tableau to weave together data from HR, Finance, Marketing, and Communications to demonstrate the relationships between internal communications, employee behavior, and customer loyalty.

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Thanks to Shutterstock for the pieces of the image above.