We live in an age when data analytics is at an all-time high, from health data on your watch, screen time on your phone, to countless business and marketing analytics apps that provide you with endless amount of information. Among all the options for measuring data, especially in terms of internal communication, the most available data is not necessarily the most accurate. And without accuracy in your measurement, it is hard to take action to improve your internal and external communication efforts.
Internal Communication Leads to External Commitment
More and more CEOs are starting to recognize the importance of internal communication. Good internal communication not only saves your organization time and money keeping your team engaged and happy with their workplace, but also turns your employees into active advocates for your organization. Engaged employees are your best brand ambassadors to reach your customers, and their testimonials can attract the best future talent to your organization. Therefore, internal communication makes external commitment easier and more effective.
How to Measure Internal Communication Accurately
In terms of measuring internal communication, the most commonly used data can be misleading. For example, email open rate is frequently used as a metric to how many people read the email, but how many times have you opened an email but never read it? Similarly, webpage views can be misleading, since the viewer could click on a page but never read the content. To get more accurate readings on your internal communication efforts, more serious metrics need to be considered.
Take Advantage of Your Primary Channels
To many organizations, in-person meetings are a primary channel for internal communication. Meetings can be an effective way to communicate with your employees and measure their engagement, due to the direct interactions, the spoken words, and nonverbal face-to-face communication. You can get a direct measurement of how engaged your employees are by their attendance rate at meetings and their level of interest during these meetings.
Another primary channel that organizations like to use is emails. Make your emails concise and to-the-point. Incorporating multimedia content such as pictures and videos to better engage your employees. Embedding these clickable elements also enables you to more accurately track and measure engagement through click through rates.
Segment Your Audience for More Targeted Results
Similar to what marketers do, you can set your target audience for better engagement and more accurate measurement in your internal communications efforts by segmenting your audience. To get things started, here are two helpful areas you can segment your audience by:
- Location: does your organization have multiple locations? Targeting each location with messaging that’s more relevant to the employees can help get your messages read.
- Department: craft your emails and other communication methods by your employees’ departments. Catering more to their interest can help improve your internal communications engagement rate.
Other Methods of Measurement to Consider
In addition to more traditional methods of measuring internal communication such as meetings and emails, there are many other ways for measurement your organization should consider taking advantage of:
- Annual surveys for employee feedback on their level of interest and engagement.
- Monitor your Glassdoor company profile and see what your current, former, or prospective employees have to say about your company.
- Track benefit participation rates, such as health insurance plans, 401(k), fitness programs, tuition reimbursement programs, and other programs.
- Pay attention to the amounts of post likes, shares, and comments on your company social media pages by your employees. This could be a good indicator of how happy your employees are at their workplace.
Conclusion
In all, today’s technology and data-driven world allow you to measure your organization’s internal communication more and more accurately through creative ways. Take advantage of these methods and be mindful of the accuracy of your measurements, you can improve your organization’s internal communication, improve employee engagement and productivity, and retention rate.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“Jody Ordioni is the author of “The Talent Brand.” In her role as Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Brandemix, she leads the firm in creating brand-aligned talent communications that connect employees to cultures, companies, and business goals. She engages with HR professionals and corporate teams on how to build and promote talent brands, and implement best-practice talent acquisition and engagement strategies across all media and platforms. She has been named a "recruitment thought leader to follow" and her mission is to integrate marketing, human resources, internal communications, and social media to foster a seamless brand experience through the employee lifecycle.”