A New Model for Employee Communication, Part 28: Measurement

Measurement has been a critical employee communications topic since I first started working in the field more years ago than I care to admit. Professional associations and conference companies host entire conferences on the topic. Studies have been produced. Consultants specialize in it. And based on research I see every year, a significant number of communicators do not engage in it, either because they don’t have the budget, they don’t have the staff, or they don’t have leadership support for it, or they don’t think they need it (or a combination of all four).

If you have identified components of the New Model for Employee Communication that require the focus of your company’s internal communications, without measurement how will you know you have moved the needle? In fact, without measurement how will you know which elements of the Model actually require your focus?

This is the penultimate installment in a series of posts exploring a new model of employee communication, designed to deliver measurable results that demonstrate the impact on the organization in ways that matter to leaders.

When I started this series, I made an extra effort to be clear that the New Model for Employee Communication is not intended to serve as an internal communication primer or a comprehensive overview of the practice of communicating with employees. (If you are in search of this, my favorite is?Internal Communications: A Manual for Practitioners, part of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ PR in Practice series, written by Liam FitzPatrick and Klavs Valskov, with Pamela Mounter.)

Rather, the model is meant to provide a practical framework for implementing the principles of employee communication. If the model seems overwhelming, remember that it was not created as a prescriptive approach to everything you do as a communicator. Based on what you know about your organization’s goals and challenges, the model will help you identify and act on those dimensions of the business that will benefit from employee communication help.

Similarly, this post is not an encyclopedic review of internal communication measurement. Sadly, there is no book that addresses measurement, though there used to be. Angela Sinickas, the goddess of internal communication measurement, wrote a brilliant manual for Ragan Communications that is now long out of print and badly out of date. You can get her guide,?The Ultimate Guide to Measuring Internal Communications?for free from Poppulo.

This post’s goal is to review how measurement applies to the New Model for Employee Communication.

The Employee Communication Audit

Before crafting an employee communication strategy—which is how you will employ the New Model for Employee Communication—you will first identify where your team can deliver the biggest bang for the bucks your company invests in communication. The best way to do that is through an internal communication audit.

An audit is far more involved than a survey. The concept of an audit had its origins in company finance, defined by Wikipedia as an “independent examination of financial information of any entity, whether profit-oriented or not, irrespective of its size or legal form when such an examination is conducted with a view to express an opinion thereon.” An internal communication audit is no different; just swap out “financial information” for “internal communication practices and effectiveness.”

A critical word in the definition is “independent.” Communicators should?never?conduct an audit themselves; if they do, by definition, it is not an audit. If you simply don’t have the resources for an audit, taking audit steps yourself is better than not doing it at all, but the results will not be as good. The whole idea of auditor independence is that they bring no internal biases to the project and are able to see the forest for the trees, which is a challenge for even the best internal communicator who has been living, working, and breathing their program day in and day out.

When I offered audits as part of my independent communication consulting practice (which I ended nearly four years ago, opting to return to the client-side), I typically followed these steps (note, we used protocols for every interview that ensured we didn’t miss anything):

1. Communicator interviews—These interviews include the chief communication officer, if there is one, whether they are dedicated exclusively to internal communications or if it is only part of their remit. What are their expectations of internal communications? What are?their?bosses holding them accountable? What do they see as the challenges to achieving those goals? The top internal communicator will share every scrap of information you can think of: budget, staff, structure, constituencies, channels and platforms, goals, and objectives, you name it. The auditor should walk away from this interview with a thorough understanding of the department and its workings. Finally, interviews are conducted with communication team members. These can be handled individually or in groups. The goal is a better understanding of the roles on the team, the challenges they face, and the results they believe they are achieving.
2. Executive interviews—Ideally, the auditor will be able to spend time with the president, CEO, COO, and other C-suite members. It is this leadership team that will be able to best articulate what they want from internal communications, what their primary goals should be, what keeps them awake at night, and what kind of communication they believe works best. We typically began these interviews by asking for an example of a recent internal communication effort that worked well and another that didn’t. These interviews are a crucial element of the audit. I remember one audit in which my client told me that, regardless of what the audit found, there would be no hiring of new communication staff. The president and CEO shared their most important strategic goal for internal communication, but the communication team had no time to pursue it because they were always putting out fires. This revelation led the CEO to authorize a new hire to handle the daily tactical challenges so the communication manager would have the time to focus on strategy.
3. Focus groups, round one—There are two rounds of focus groups in an audit. The first happens before the survey and is designed to surface gaps between what the C-suite and the communication team believe and how employees perceive things. Consider two types of focus groups: functional (for example, representative members of IT and other teams) and cross-functional. For cross-functional groups, we always ensured participants were at roughly the same level: administrative assistants, front-line, managers, and low-level executives (e.g., non-C suite vice presidents). Among the items to review with employees is how well communications have been integrated into operations; that is, do processes align with the messages communications are sending? This is part of the New Model for Employee Communication: the say-do gap that affects organizational integrity (part of the Engagement circle). Focus on all of the Model’s elements that have surfaced in the preliminary interviews: For example, do employees have a voice? How well do managers support messaging? Do employees understand where they fit in the strategic narrative?
4. Channel review—Knowing what the internal communication team is doing, it is time to review all of its outputs: the intranet, emails, publications, digital signage, meeting support, memos, anything the team produces should be evaluated. We always used IABC’s seven-point scale from the annual Gold Quill awards competition to make this assessment as objective as possible.
5. Survey—A survey of all employees if possible, a representative sample if not, should always be a bespoke survey that tests assumptions the auditor has made based on the collection of all the information gathered thus far in the audit process. The survey results, especially when sliced and diced across demographics and geographies, will reveal problems with those assumptions, which leads to the next set of focus groups.
6. Focus groups, round 2—In these groups, covering the collections of employees who are most affected by the problems revealed in the survey, the auditor will look for qualitative information about those outlier survey results. “Based on everything we learned, we assumed?x?but the survey told us?y. Is that correct? Why are the results different than our expectations?”
7. Analysis, report, and recommendations—With all of the data collected, the auditor spends time analyzing the results and preparing a report that covers all findings, highlighting the issues uncovered, and making recommendations to address those challenges.

In almost every case, the recommendations can be tied to one or more elements of the New Model for Employee Communication. Combined with those elements of the Model you already?know?need communication help, you’ll be set to establish a Model-based strategy.

More Than Just Trouble Spots

The Model does more than just provide a framework for categorizing issues arising from an audit. For example, you will always need to communicate company news and help establish context. When a crisis strikes, you will need to engage employees around the crisis. To some extent, you will engage in all of the arcs in the Model’s outer ring (consultation, listening, alignment, channels, and branding). To some extent, you will work to engage employees, influence the culture, improve the employee experience, and help employees deliver a better customer experience. When leadership decides it is time for a change, you will engage in change communication activities.

As I review the elements of the model, I realize that my little two-person employee communication team does?all?of these things, even if it is just a matter of posting an article that addresses, say, one of the company’s core values. The question is, to what degree will you focus your time, energy, and resources on each of these elements? Between clear instructions from above, an innate understanding of what the company needs, and the results of the audit, you will be able to make that determination. I will use my own work as an example:

• Instructions from above—The people I report to (and the people they report to) expect the internal communications department to support the Employee Experience (vital to recruiting and retention, which are top-of-mind among leadership), ensure employees are aligned with the strategic plan, reinforce the importance of acting in accordance with the core values, and encourage cross-functional communication.
• Innate understanding—Just from paying attention, it was easy to identify some gaps in the company’s communication. Just one example: If retention is important, reassuring employees working on projects that there will be another project for them to go to when their current assignment ends is important, yet the company was not letting everyone know when we won new business. Hence, we started an email bulletin titled “Project Win.” One more example: Not everyone was able to attend the monthly operations meeting, so we started issuing a quick recap of the key information shared titled “Operations Meeting Minutes.” We didn’t need research to know this information should be shared.
• Audit—The audit we conducted in 2018 shortly after I started with the company revealed a few glaring gaps, notably in manager communication. Improving manager communication (and, in fact, the culture of managing) is now one of our primary goals, one that occupies a considerable amount of my time.

I do?not?spend much time—hardly any at all—on the customer experience. It is the nature of the industry that the “customer”—building owners and real estate developers—is rarely touched by any but a very small group of employees, usually relatively senior people. We don’t ignore the customer altogether. Knowing what can sour a customer relationship that is also actionable by employees occasionally leads us to engage with employees about it. But it represents an infinitesimal fraction of our time. (Checking in on the Model every now and then, though, does remind me to give it some thought and consider whether there’s anything about it we should be doing.)

What to measure after the audit

If the audit helped clarify the elements of the model that require your focus, it should also guide you to the communication efforts that need to be measured. After all, one of the primary objectives of any communication measurement process is determining whether you moved the needle.

Of course, you will also want to continue measuring those things that are important to the company’s leadership. Measurement should also be maintained for those things that you were measuring before that warrant it. Whatever it is, it is represented somewhere on the model. Let’s go through the primary elements of the model:

• The outer circle—The outer circle includes those activities in which you should be engaging regardless of the nature of your organization or its current circumstances. Whether you intend to or not, your communications will help define the internal brand. Is it what you want it to be or is there work to be done for employees to perceive the company’s brand the way they should? Are leader and manager actions aligned with the messages you’re sending? Are the channels you are using effective? Measurement can answer these questions—especially if they showed up as areas of concern in your audit.
• News and context—Are employees in the know about what’s going on in the company, the industry, and the marketplace? Do they understand what the news you share has to do with them and their work? How it affects them?
• Crisis and change—It is unlikely your audit focused on crisis or change unless your company has faced one of these challenges recently. It is more likely your audit will show how well prepared you are to address one in the future. I wouldn’t worry too much about these in terms of measurement unless you are preparing for a change initiative or you are facing a crisis. (You should have the means of measuring during a crisis in hand as part of your crisis management plan.)
• Advocacy and commitment—Advocacy is easy to measure, especially if you are using an employee advocacy tool that provides you with analytics. Your audit—and/or your company’s engagement survey—will help you assess the level of commitment your employees have to helping the company achieve its goals and objectives.
• The four circles—Here’s where the measurement rubber meets the road. Your audit will have determined if the Employee Experience is not a good one if employees are not engaged or actively disengaged (and why), whether the culture is nurturing or toxic, and whether employees are detached from the Customer Experience. You will have determined which of these areas most demands your attention; these are the areas where you will need to set up the means to determine whether you are making progress. Your next audit will certainly help you figure that out, but audits don’t happen often. You will need simpler, quicker measurement tools to help keep your communications headed in the right direction.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative Measurement

While qualitative measurement can be just as valuable as qualitative, your leaders will be most swayed by numbers. Hence you should ensure the metrics you share with leaders are at least supported by numbers. They should also be focused on outcomes. No leader anywhere ever endure sleepless nights because of output numbers like the number of emails distributed.

(There are times outputs can be useful to leaders. For example, if you are driving employees to adopt mobile instead of desktops as a strategic imperative, seeing the rise—or lack of a rise—in the use of mobile to access company resources would be useful. But mainly the measurement of output is of use only to communicators. After all, if people aren’t opening your emails, then your message isn’t getting across regardless of how well crafted it is.)

Quantitative metrics can be easy to obtain. Where I work, for example, one of my key efforts falls under the Engagement arc: engaging managers. One of the many approaches we have taken to elevating the quality of management was the introduction of a monthly manager newsletter that lists talking points, items leaders want managers to share with their reports. To assess the effectiveness of this vehicle, we conduct a spot poll every month with 25 randomly selected front-line employees. It’s the simplest of polls. We list the talking points and ask if their managers have talked to them about each issue in the last couple of weeks. While that may not be a statistically valid sample—polling more than that would mean that we are reaching out to the same employees too frequently—it can detect trends. We share the results each month on our metrics dashboard.

Qualitative feedback, though, is often unfairly dismissed. Comments left on articles, unsolicited email feedback from employees, information gleaned from focus groups, and other forms of qualitative information can be invaluable—and can even lead you to conduct some quantitative research to test what you have heard.

Leading vs. Lagging Metrics

Leading indicators are easy to measure. Leadership is probably more interested in lagging indicators.

Leading indicators are those things you can measure before and during your communication. Lagging indicators show the impact your communication had on whatever it is you were trying to affect.

Let’s say you have determined that engaging employees more directly in the customer journey needs to be a key focus of your internal communication strategy. Leading indicators might involve determining whether you’re communicating frequently enough, using the right channels, assessing how many employees are consuming your content, and even looking at whether employees are acting on your messages (for example, if you asked them to attend a lunch and learn with a representative of a key customer, you would assess the percentage of employees who took you up on the invitation).

Lagging indicators, on the other hand, will reveal whether your communications are leading employees to more actively play a role where they can have an effect on the customer journey. Let’s say you communicated heavily to help employees who never see or talk to a customer identify where their work can improve or erode the customer’s relationship with the company. Have they actually made any changes to their behavior in support of the customer? Did they only do it for a while, while your communication was fresh in their mind, or has it become a repeated behavior? Has that behavior become part of the culture (that is, is it just the way we do things around here)? That’s what leadership wants to know. It is much more difficult to quantify.

It is even harder when you are just kicking off your communication strategy since the lagging indicators won’t reveal themselves for a while, possibly even a few years. When I worked with an outside consultant to conduct the first internal communication audit where I work, the consultant asked me, after reviewing the results and highlighting my primary challenges, “Are you ready to work on this for five years?” That was how long it would take, in his judgment, to produce the lagging indicators that would demonstrate the strategy was working.

Wherever you can show lagging indicators, though, you should. You can conduct surveys among employees, for example. You can obtain any customer satisfaction metrics your sales team collects. While you may not be able to show causation, the correlation may be more than adequate. If nothing other than your communication has changed but customer satisfaction numbers are rising, you are justified in taking credit for that improvement. You can even attribute sales growth to your customer-focused internal communication work in the absence of other contributing factors.

Resources

I know there’s a lot of information in this post, yet it barely scratches the surface of how to measure employee communications. I weighed making this post a single sentence: “You must measure the effectiveness of your efforts to improve the parts of the model on which you have placed your emphasis.” Then, I would have shared some resources. Alas, I felt some details were necessary. But I will share some additional resources:

• Measuring internal communications: 7 wasy to show your ROI?by Louise Berry, senior content manager at Ziglu in the UK
• Don’t Measure Internal Communications, from Ethan McCarthy for the Institute for Public Relations (don’t be fooled by the title)
• How to measure internal communication—A podcat episode from Rachel Miller’s All Things IC podcast. Rachel is one of the leading authorities on internal communications.
• 22 Standards to Measure and Shape Internal Communications—By Michele Ewing for PRSA’s?Strategies & Tactics
• Measurement and ROI for Internal Communication—A research report from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations
• FIR Interview: The Challenges of Standardizing Employee Communication Measurement—I’ll conclude with an episode from my podcast, “FIR Interviews,” featuring a 46-minute conversation with Ryan Williams, Sean Williams (no relation), Angela Sinickas, and Katie Paine about the Institute for Public Relations’ efforts to establish a set of standards for assessing the effectiveness of employee communication. As you might suspect, there is disagreement about the viability of the initiative.

The graphics for this series were created by?Brian O’Mara-Croft.

• Part 1:?Introduction
• Part 2:?Overview
• Part 3:?Alignment
• Part 4:?Listening
• Part 5:?Consultation
• Part 6:?Branding
• Part 7:?Channels
• Part 8:?Culture
• Part 9:?Vision/Mission
• Part 10:?Values
• Part 11:?Practices
• Part 12:?People
• Part 13:?Place
• Part 14:?Engagement
• Part 15:?The Strategic Narrative
• Part 16:?Engaging Managers
• Part 17:?Employee Voice
• Part 18:?Organizational Integrity
• Part 19:?The Customer Experience
• Part 20:?The Customer Journey Map
• Part 21:?Touchpoints on the Customer Journey
• Part 22:?Engaging in the Customer Ecosystem
• Part 23:?The Employee Experience
• Part 24:?The Employee Journey
• Part 25:?Daily Interactions
• Part 26:?Work-Life Balance
• Part 27: Job Satisfaction