Employee engagement is a key indicator of organizational performance, culture, and retention. But how do you know if your intranet is contributing to it or not? In this article, we'll explore some ways to measure the impact of your intranet on employee engagement using data and feedback.
Before you start collecting and analyzing data, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your intranet and how you will measure it. Think about the specific goals and objectives of your intranet, such as improving collaboration, communication, productivity, or innovation. Then, identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you track your progress and success. For example, you might use metrics such as page views, visits, likes, comments, shares, downloads, or ratings to measure the usage and engagement of your intranet content.
Don’t just worry about “comms metrics” - consider the needs of your business partners. Metrics like “visits” are fine: but more importantly - how current and necessary is the content being visited? Internal communications professionals can win points with stakeholders by orienting intranet discussions around the business objectives of those partners. This will create shared KPIs that all parties can track and advance together.
“Vanity metrics” like clicks and reads are important and shouldn’t be snubbed. However, you’ll also want to go a little deeper. For example, what does “more collaboration” or “better communication” look like? Do you have different goals for different departments? Are you going to measure these quantitively or qualitatively or (ideally) a mixture of both?
I've found that conducting regular focus groups and one-on-one interviews with employees has been instrumental in understanding their experiences and perception of the intranet. Analyzing the data on the frequency of content updates and the number of active users has also helped in evaluating the intranet's impact on employee engagement. Moreover, tracking the changes in employee productivity and collaboration levels before and after the intranet implementation has provided concrete evidence of its influence.
For me, before I define my strategy of internal comms, I go directly to the people. Know them - understand what they do, their successes, their challenges, and their needs. If you really want to make a difference, just start with that. And then, focus on what you can do to improve their experience in the company. Regarding metrics, I would go beyond that and say: use the metrics that make sense for you and help you understand if you're getting success or not. Sometimes, less is more.
Once you have your goals and metrics, you need to use the right tools and platforms to collect and visualize your data. Depending on your intranet software, you might have built-in analytics features or integrations with external tools such as Google Analytics, Microsoft Power BI, or Tableau. These tools can help you create dashboards and reports that show you the trends, patterns, and insights of your intranet data. For example, you can see which pages, topics, or formats are most popular, how often and when your employees access your intranet, or how your intranet traffic correlates with other business outcomes.
Analytics data can tell you a lot about the behavior and preferences of your employees, but they can't tell you everything. You also need to ask your employees directly about their opinions, experiences, and suggestions regarding your intranet. You can use various methods to gather feedback and surveys, such as online forms, polls, quizzes, focus groups, interviews, or suggestion boxes. These methods can help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your intranet, the satisfaction and motivation of your employees, and the areas for improvement and innovation.
I would say that it really depends on your people. Creating surveys takes time, and sometimes your colleagues can't take the time to do it, especially when there are different surveys to answer. So, I would say: use what works best for your people and be creative. In my experience, asking people directly is the most effective one, because you can get a good overview of how they feel about your work/initiative and hear their suggestions. But, with time I also learned how to be creative and collect feedback from different tools and using different methods. I really like using collaboration tools (Mural, Miro, ...) to collect real-time feedback about my communication actions.
Another way to measure the impact of your intranet on employee engagement is to compare your results with other organizations or industry standards. You can use benchmarking tools or reports to see how your intranet performs against similar or best-in-class intranets in terms of usage, engagement, design, functionality, or content. You can also compare your intranet data with other internal or external data sources, such as employee engagement surveys, turnover rates, customer satisfaction scores, or revenue growth. These comparisons can help you identify the gaps and opportunities for your intranet to enhance employee engagement.
Finally, you need to test and experiment with different ideas and strategies to optimize your intranet for employee engagement. You can use A/B testing, user testing, or pilot programs to try out different versions or features of your intranet and see which ones generate more engagement and positive feedback. You can also use gamification, personalization, or recognition to make your intranet more fun, relevant, and rewarding for your employees. The key is to keep learning from your data and feedback and make data-driven decisions to improve your intranet and employee engagement.
Some of your internal communication actions can come by initiative and risk. If you know your audience and believe you can make an impact, just do it. Test different tools, new tools, different ways of communicating, new features, and different platforms. After that, understand what is most effective for your colleagues and keep improving communication.
In today's time we all are overloaded with digital content both in our personal and professional lives, by just dumping content on intranet will further hamper the engagement and can create adverse impact on internal communication. Segregating communication under various categories will help employees align and prioritise what is crucial and most important. Intranets today do allow content-wise control of sharing, hence encouraging employees to forward sharable communication to their social media and track and reward employees generating highest no of pageviews thus making them advocates for the organization / brand will further strengthen the impact of your intranet. Hope this helps!