I’ve often said that effectively measuring the success of internal communications is the summit we cannot seem to climb.
Questions around the value of internal communications and how we measure it come up time and time again.
From my own research with the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) in 2017 to more recent studies from Gallagher’s annual State of the Sector – measurement is still hit and miss and an area of development for many teams around the world.
In this blog I’ll discuss what successful measurement looks like, the barriers to it, and give my top tips on getting it right.
What exactly are we measuring?
I think it’s important to make the distinction between internal communications and employee engagement. Because, what we’re often measuring when it comes to the success of any given internal communications project, or even teams as a whole, is the impact they have on employee engagement.
Has the work of the internal communications function engaged and motivated employees enough to take action and achieve the desired outcome? It’s an important question and therefore an important distinction to make.
I define internal communications like this:
“Internal communication includes everything that gets said and shared inside an organisation. As a function its role is to curate, enable and advise on best practise for organisations to communicate effectively, efficiently and in an engaging way.”
Employee engagement can be defined as follows:
“Ensuring employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success and are able, at the same time, to enhance their own sense of wellbeing.”
When measuring, we need to be able to demonstrate that our work has moved the needle on employee engagement in a truly meaningful way. Meaningful is the important part – there has to be depth to it, an outcome.
An employee engagement score of, say, 86% doesn’t actually mean anything, unless it translates into an organisational impact.
When I was Head of Internal Communication for the UK part of a global organisation, I would often employ agencies to help with creative campaigns designed to reach our office based workforce but, importantly, those on the shop floor too.
I remember one particular agency who chatted about a health and safety campaign designed to reduce accidents in the workplace. They measured their success through the number of people who saw the posters, read their intranet articles and engaged in the campaign.
But if you’re just measuring the campaign materials and the communication activity, you’re missing the point. The business wanted to reduce accidents by 60% – did they achieve that? I have no idea.
Why do we need to measure?
CIPR’s internal communication group, ‘ Inside’ offer a Communication Measurement Matrix which outlines the purpose of measurement as:
– Establishing the value of practice for organisational reputation and success
– Generating insights that inform professional practice
– Supporting insightful business decisions
– Checking progress against plans
– Assessing overall efficacy.
Why is it so hard to get right?
The Gallagher report found that when asked about barriers to measurement and the main challenges faced in measuring impact 58% of respondents cited lack of time or resources, 41% said technology with a lack of metrics hampered measurement, while 38% said technology and lack of tools to collate or analyse the data. This isn’t new though – these are the same barriers that respondents mentioned in 2022 without significant changes.
These factors are undoubtedly having an impact, but I think the deeper cause is that so often we’re not getting the fundamentals right before starting to measure.
We can’t begin to measure unless we have clear objectives that are articulated in a way that is measurable.
We have to think about the impact we want to have, to look at the different ways we can create that impact, and then we can talk about how we will measure it.
Getting the foundations right
Taking things back a stage further, I don’t believe you can begin to effectively measure anything before you get to grips with these five basics:
Strategy – you can only measure effectively if you have developed a strategy.
Dialogue – the dialogue with your leaders or leadership team is important. This will enable you to measure what’s important and meaningful to the business, rather than overfocus on what’s important to the communication function.
Maturity of the function – what you measure is sometimes determined by the maturity of your role within the IC function.
Budget – measurement and ROI don’t have to cost the earth to implement. There are many approaches you can take that save time and money.
One approach doesn’t fit all – you need to do some work and identify the right approach to measurement for your organisation.
What should we be measuring?
There are some areas of life where measuring things is straightforward… taking your blood pressure, getting a shoe fitting, weighing ingredients, or reviewing sales figures. These are all ways of measuring specific things and they offer us very specific results.
In internal communications, however, we often make measurement an impossible task. We want to be “more collaborative”. We want to “align people to strategy”. We want “engaged and motivated teams”.
But how do we evaluate this, when these words are often too broad for us to do anything meaningful with?
My worry is that we are getting stuck using words that are too big for us to quantify and which end up paralysing progress.
So, the most important question when it comes to measurement is to first ask leaders what they are trying to achieve and what value looks like to them. This will help identify what you want to measure.
Check what your stakeholders want people to think, feel or do and always have a conversation about how it aligns with the strategy.
You don’t have to use all the tools and try and measure everything. What you do have to do is ensure the organisation knows exactly what impact they’re looking for and that creating that impact is not just the responsibility of the communications team. It has to work in conjunction with other functions and other activity that is aligned to achieve organisational goals.
If you’re looking at communication alone to create impact and nothing else then it won’t work.
Five top tips to measure the effectiveness of internal communication
To summarise, here are my five tips for more successful measurement:
- Collect data that supports your business case – what you measure will be different depending on the maturity of the team, the function and the organisation as a whole. Everything we need to be able to measure already exists. And qualitative data can be just as valuable as stats.
- Ask what value looks like – don’t be afraid to ask what value looks like to leaders; they often see the challenge of measuring, but lack of measurable objectives leads to noise and confusion.
- Focus on outcomes – rather than outputs. It’s not about measuring channels or intranet page visits. If understanding and behaviour change adds value, that’s what you need to measure. Ask clear, open questions about the issues that really matter to assess whether you’ve achieved your objectives.
- Do it more than once – annual surveys can prove useful, but so much can change in that time. Smaller, frequent surveys are a great way to keep up with trends and act on them. There’s no ideal number – you have to do what’s right for your organisation.
- Use what you discover – data is only valuable in solving business issues if you do something with it. Use what you discover to shape your objectives and agenda to improve the effectiveness of your communications plan. There has to be action linked to measurement. You cannot measure and then not do anything – that is what leads to survey fatigue.
Measurement is still in the top 10 skills for internal communication professionals this year, according to recent research from VMA Group. So if you want to explore this in more detail for you and your teams just drop us an email at info@redefiningcomms.com. We have been running some workshops for global communication teams this year on this very topic so we would be happy to chat about how we can help you too.
