As a discipline, internal communication and its landscape is changing rapidly, yet as communicators we’re still lagging behind our marketing counterparts in measuring impact rather than output – or not even measuring at all.

The figures are in all likelihood much the same at your company.

There are multiple reasons for this.

Sometimes communicators lack measurement skills and tools, internal campaigns and initiatives are often complex, so assessing the impact can be challenging and more often than not resources are limited.

Measurement is not just about managing internal communication better.

It’s about generating valuable insights that can help shape solutions for the organisation, while demonstrating your own value as a communicator or department to the broader business.

A good place to start is to identify what real-time analytics and metrics you already have in place, so that you know where or what to update.

Often it’s also a case of developing new skills, understanding how to use what you already have, and may not have even known you have – think about it, as Office 360 gets integrated into more and more organisations, do you know and understand the powerful measurement tools you have at your disposal?

Once you know what measurement tools you have at your disposal, it’s important to consider how you incorporate measurement into your planning.

Knowing why are you sending your communications, what success looks like, what behaviours you want to change, and aligning these goals to the overall business strategy, should precede planning what you are going to communicate.

Once you have identified your goals look at your internal communication metrics from different angles – and look beyond typical indicators.

For example opens and clicks do not provide the insight you need, but drilling down on the types of clicks, such as content preferences, provide more valuable understanding. You can also consider using data to distil metrics by different target audiences, this could help you understand what communication resonates better in, for example, your Call Centre vs back-office support.

As you start measuring, you can also start creating unique benchmarks tied to your goals, enabling you to review trends over weeks, months, quarters and the financial year. This will start giving you an accurate view of your internal communication activity.

As we become more agile in our approach to internal communication, we need to also think of measurement in a more agile way – measuring so that we can adapt as we communicate, rather than only measuring at the end of a campaign.

With this in mind, pulse surveys should be your new BFF and social measurement where you gauge what employees are talking about and the overall mood of the organisation should be top of mind in your measurement strategy mix.

Instead of the traditional typically long, generic, annual questionnaire, measurement will be more frequent, focused, qualitative, interactive and in real-time. This will enable us to gather information that is more meaningful.

In measuring in real-time we’ll be able to get a sense of subtle shifts in the internal climate on an ongoing basis rather than just once a year. This allows us to be more agile and more proactive in our engagement and communication approach.

Going forward employees will be empowered to conduct polls themselves.

Measurement will become more social and communicators and HR partners will start crowd-sourcing the right questions to ask, resulting in surveys that are co-created by the very people we’re surveying.

Internal social networks will allow us to measure the mood, sentiment and emotions of the organisation based on conversations taking place on our social platforms.

As we progress in the digital workplace (which is already a strong focus at many companies), we’ll be able to use mobile technology to collect data from our employees. This will open up feedback channels to non-office based employees that have often been limited in their ability to participate in employee research.

Finally, the most important change in measurement will be the focus on measuring in a way that drives results, where employees’ responses lead to change, rather than leaving employees feeling that they are not being listened to. This will result in a move away from traditional engagement targets to targets based on action.

Adding CQ to your measurement approachLet’s chat about adding Creative Intelligence to your measurement strategy, so that together we make a meaningful impact while deriving efficiencies from your communication efforts. Email kim@icandicq.co.za

[Sources: Melcrum, Newsweaver, Silverman Research]

The traditional employee survey is dying a slow death.

Think about it; is an annual employee survey still as relevant as it was in the past?

Is it giving you a sense of what staff are thinking, feeling and saying right now, this very minute?

The measurement landscape is changing, here’s what you can expect: