To improve your internal communications, you first need to understand them – what purpose they serve and how well they’re achieving your objectives. This is where insight, measurement and evaluation can prove invaluable.
These three crucial steps lead you towards an in-depth understanding of the effectiveness of your internal communications, allowing you to make informed decisions to improve them. So, let’s break the process down step by step.
What is insight?
Insight is essentially feedback from employees – the people you’re communicating with. By holding focus groups, online surveys and one-to-one interviews, for example, you can gain a deeper understanding of the needs, preferences and challenges of your organization.
This insight enables you to create communications and channel strategies that allow the right messages to receive the right people at the right time – which, in turn, drives up employee engagement. Once your strategies are in place, however, you need to monitor and measure their performance to ensure their effectiveness and impact.
What is measurement?
Within your strategy it’s important to outline your desired results and set performance benchmarks to help you quantify the impact of your internal communications. Make sure you have the right tools in place to track the metrics you need, such as email open rates, intranet page views, social media management or even attendance at internal events like town halls.
These are the metrics that will tell you what’s working and what needs improving – not only indicating the overall effectiveness of your communications, but also identifying behavioral trends and determining where and how you could have more impact. Analyzing your results in this allows you to turn them into achievable actions. It also help you to position internal communications within the wider business – which is where evaluation comes in.
What is evaluation?
Maximizing the impact of your internal communications strategy requires that you align your activity with the wider organizational strategy. The evaluation process therefore allows you to assess how well your activity is supporting overarching business goals.
For example, post-campaign surveys designed to capture this insight could provide evidence of behavioral or attitudinal changes across the employee population as a result of your communications activity. This evaluation helps you to determine the overall success of your internal communications efforts in line with your organization’s direction of travel – and this is the information you need to inform future strategies.
This will be an ongoing process that you cycle through again and again. With each new campaign and each new strategy, you can glean insight then measure and evaluate it to inform a process of continuous improvement. Think of it as establishing your internal communications roadmap.
That said, we understand that this level of insight gathering, measurement and evaluation could be a challenge when you have limited resources and competing priorities. With that in mind, we’ve outlined some top tips to simplify the process further.
Simplifying insight, measurement and evaluation
- Set clear objectives from the outset. Define specific goals and objectives for your internal communication initiatives right from the beginning. These will provide the framework you need to effectively measure and evaluate your activity – more than that, it will clarify your purpose as internal communicators.
- Use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. For your insight to be truly valuable, be sure to combine quantitative data, such as metrics and surveys, with qualitative data gleaned from interviews and focus groups. This gives a more rounded, comprehensive and valuable understanding of employee perceptions and behaviors.
- Regularly review and analyze data. This is not a one-time process. Put in place strategies, metrics and systems that allow you to continuously monitor and analyze your data to identify trends, patterns and areas in need of improvement. Regularly reviewing your communication strategies at this level empowers you with the insight you need to keep adapting and improving.
- Benchmark against industry standards. Comparing your performance to that of other internal communicators in organizations of a similar size and industry can be invaluable. Especially those you see as achieving great results. There’s much to be gained from benchmarking your performance against industry best practice.
- Communicate findings and take action. Use your insights to make better data-driven decisions and implement changes to your internal communications – and share your findings too. Gaining buy-in from senior leadership is essential to demonstrating your influence and impact, especially in terms of supporting organizational goals.
Incorporating insight, measurement and evaluation into your internal communication practices is the most important investment of resources that you can make. It serves to improve employee engagement, support a culture of belonging, help people feel better about work, and can also improve overall organization performance.
Overwhelmed? Let us partner with you in implementing the right processes for continuous improvement. Our team is well versed in the creation of best practice internal communications. Get in touch.
