How do you measure the impact of your internal communications on leadership and feedback? This is a crucial question for any organization that wants to foster a culture of trust, engagement, and performance. In this article, you will learn some practical tips and tools to assess and improve your internal communications strategy and its outcomes.
Internal communications are the messages and channels that connect leaders, managers, and employees within an organization. They serve multiple purposes, such as informing, aligning, motivating, and recognizing staff. Effective internal communications can enhance employee satisfaction, productivity, collaboration, and innovation. They can also reduce turnover, conflict, and errors. On the other hand, poor internal communications can lead to confusion, frustration, disengagement, and resentment.
The global nature of many organizations, combined with the shift to hybrid work, makes internal communications more important - and difficult - than ever. You can’t just get everyone in a room and read their body language anymore. The challenge is to find in-person and digital ways to keep everyone informed, inspired and aligned.
Internal audiences are also becoming an important channel to communicate branding initiatives through personal social channels. Employees are nowadays the most important brand ambassadors for companies.
To measure the impact of your internal communications on leadership and feedback, you need to define your goals, indicators, and methods. Your goals are the specific outcomes you want to achieve, such as increasing trust, transparency, or feedback frequency. Your indicators are the measurable signs that show your progress, such as survey results, engagement metrics, or performance data. Your methods are the tools and techniques you use to collect and analyze the data, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, or analytics.
It's helpful to align what you measure with your organization's business priorities. Senior leaders care about business progress. They'll care even more about internal communication when you demonstrate that you've aligned your communication strategies and measurement to show how your team's work is making a positive impact (or not). When you're choosing what to measure, consider what ACTIONABLE insights you can share. Then in subsequent months, you can demonstrate through your measurement how improving/tweaking your comms tactics made additional direct impact on key priorities and goals. Actionable insights are a big step forward, compared with baseline measurement like open and click-through rates.
Traditionally more emphasis and investment has gone to measuring the impact of external communications. Many of the analytics tools used for external communications are difficult to use inside a company. Goals set should be a mix of input (the activities you will complete) which lead to output (the desired outcomes aligned to your objectives).
Integrity and transparency of results are fundamental when evaluating internal communications tactics. Even when metrics are not the expected, they provide valuable learnings and insights that communicators can and must apply back into the planning and development of new messages, as well as into the overall communication strategy.
Once you have collected and analyzed the data, you need to use it to inform your decisions and actions. The data can help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your internal communications, as well as the opportunities and threats. You can use the data to evaluate the effectiveness of your current channels, messages, and formats, and to adjust them accordingly. You can also use the data to communicate your results and achievements to your stakeholders, and to solicit their feedback and suggestions.
Data and outcomes are the base for bigger budgets and for funding new initiatives. A/B test can be also useful to show leadership the preferred voice and style for internal audiences.
Data and feedback suggest that there are some best practices to improve internal communications and their effect on leadership and feedback. To start, it is important to ensure that internal communications are in line with the organization's vision, mission, and values. Additionally, it is essential to segment the audience and craft messages that are tailored to their needs, preferences, and expectations. To reach and engage the audience, a mix of channels and formats should be used, such as email, intranet, newsletter, video, podcast, or social media. Furthermore, it is important to encourage dialogue and interaction, not just one-way information. Questions should be asked, comments should be invited, and responses should be acknowledged. Additionally, it is important to provide timely, relevant, and consistent information, while avoiding jargon, ambiguity, and overload. Finally, achievements, contributions, and feedback should be recognized and rewarded, and successes and milestones should be celebrated.
It’s important to use more than one channel, but be mindful of the impact diluting your message in many places may have. Every company has different preferred ways to consume information - meet your audience where they are and don’t forget the power and impact empowering managers to cascade messages to their direct teams can have. Most people listen more when their boss is delivering news rather than someone a few layers removed.
To ensure that your internal communications are delivering the desired impact on leadership and feedback, you need to monitor and evaluate them regularly and systematically. You can use the same goals, indicators, and methods that you used to measure them, but with some modifications and adaptations. For example, you can change the frequency, scope, or sample of your surveys, interviews, or focus groups. You can also add new indicators or methods, such as feedback forms, polls, or quizzes. The key is to keep track of your performance, learn from your results, and make improvements as needed.
Utilize AI-powered sentiment analysis tools to automatically analyze employee comments and feedback. These tools can categorize sentiments as positive, negative, or neutral, providing quick insights into overall perception.