What you don’t measure, you don’t know if it works. You don’t know if you have to adjust or if you have to make changes. So, if you haven’t assessed your internal communication, how do you know if you need to make changes? All this translates into the following: without evaluation there can be no decision.
This formula can be applied to many aspects of life: professional, economic, fashion and, believe it or not, it also applies to communication. How do you know that a message has achieved its objective? How do you know that the words you use convey the right things and that they are understood? And above all: How do you know who you are talking to is listening to you?
Internal mesages
Measuring and evaluating a company’s communication is important. Particularly in these post-pandemic times of liquid companies and remote working. Times when employees can become a brand’s best ambassadors.
Therefore, special attention must be paid to the effectiveness of internal messages, which can complement (or defeat) the best of advertising campaigns. Today we will focus on the fundamentals, which is how to measure a company’s Internal Communication.
“Employees are the best brand ambassadors. They can complement (or ruin) the best of advertising campaigns”.
Which aspects to assess?
- The most important thing is to evaluate the actions that have been carried out according to the established communication plan, in order to know if the objectives have been met and to know the effectiveness of the plan.
- The level and quality of communication/information at different levels should be measured. This can be divided into different areas or themes. For example, the level and quality of communication between workers or the level and quality of communication between departments and management.
- Assessments should not only focus on facts. The perceptions, assessments and opinions of the people who make up the organisation must be taken into account.
Let’s dig a little deeper…
- Workers’ perceptions should be assessed as to whether or not they remember the messages, how they perceived the messages – were they relevant and credible, were they able to understand the message, and what was the general climate around the message sent.
- What happened after the message was delivered should be measured – was there any change in behaviour?
- For very specific objectives, you need to measure the impact of the message in terms of actions, or as we say in digital marketing, conversions: how many signed up for the activity, how many took the action you asked them to take, how many did they do the action you asked them to do, how many did they do the action you asked them to do, how many did they do the action you asked them to do?
How to measure internal communication?
We could say that, as in any research or study, there are two approaches, one qualitative and one quantitative.
It analyses the media and communication channels to try to extract data. Of course, like all statistics, you must take into account the evolution over time, so it may be easier to notice a lack of interest or, on the contrary, an increase in participation and achievement of objectives. For this, you need to determine how often you will measure, weekly, monthly, bi-annually or annually.
““As in all statistics, you must take into account the evolution of time, so it will be easier to notice a lack of interest or, on the contrary, an increase in participation and achievement of objectives”.
Here are some examples:
- Blog: Take advantage of your own content to measure the number of visits, time spent, unique visitors, etc.
- Intranet: if you have an online brand community, analyse visitor statistics, the routes taken and, above all, which topics are the most searched for and the most read.
- Newsletter: Measure subscriptions, open rate, click-through rate, etc. This data will help to understand whether or not the mailings are engaging, and which topics are of most interest.
- Internal chats: Analyse employee or team member participation, understanding of messages, and expected results.
- Event attendance or compliance with instructions: Counts and analyses the percentage of employees who followed an instruction or attended an event.
We cannot leave aside the qualitative side, for many the most significant. Because, while many employees may attend an event, which gives you a positive feedback, they may not agree or feel obliged to.
Informal listening often provides the most honest opinions. But, in addition to this, it is important that the Internal Communication department can observe and notice if there is anything unusual that is a red flag of bad communication, such as departments not collaborating with each other, internal events being rejected or tensions and bad atmosphere in general.
To tackle these situations, you can carry out specific surveys on internal communication or work environment issues, or you can even organise focus groups to get first-hand feedback from employees and, most importantly, to define solutions and areas for improvement together with them.
Start measuring and find out what is really going on inside your company. If you are interested in this topic, we invite you to read our article How to approach a company’s change of image, see you in a future post.
