Five steps to measure the effectiveness of your internal comms

If you have never conducted an internal comms audit or it’s been a while, then it’s probably good time to take a look at whether your efforts are having the impact you hoped.

An audit will provide valuable input to your strategic communication planning and can help identify where you might be missing the mark including any information gaps, messages that aren’t clear, and channels that aren’t delivering. It can also help you establish a benchmark to measure effectiveness and allocate your resources wisely.

Here are the five steps:

1️⃣Determine what you will evaluate
First things first, you need to determine exactly what it is you want to evaluate. Do you have an existing internal communication strategy? If yes you could select the elements that are most critical to its success or the areas where you are making the biggest investments.

Examples of what you could evaluate include:
🔹Channel effectiveness – evaluate their effectiveness and determine employee habits and preferences.
🔹Employee awareness – are they retaining the essential pieces of information and acting as hoped?
🔹Leadership communication – there’s almost always a gap between how effective leaders perceive their own communication skills and what employees feel.

2️⃣Select your audience
Make sure you get a diverse set of views from across the organisation, including employees from all business areas, functions, roles, locations and levels.

Don’t forget to get the necessary permissions to conduct the research if necessary.

3️⃣Determine how you will collect the insights
Here are three methods:
🔹Reviewing existing internal comms practices and processes – to uncover any gaps or themes that could inform your research approach. This could include existing comms strategies and any existing survey results.
🔹Collecting quantitative data – through a survey
🔹Collecting qualitative data – through a series of one-on-one interviews or focus groups to dig a little deeper and uncover more detail.

4️⃣Review your data objectively
Draw your conclusions and combine your findings in a report that includes:
🔹an overview of the research and why it was conducted
🔹a description of the methodology used to execute the research
🔹an executive summary of the findings
🔹analysis of employee opinions and perceptions
🔹recommendations for improvement.

5️⃣Communicate your findings
Whatever you do, don’t forget to communicate what you have learned through your audit. This is important for all your audiences and stakeholders, and especially for those who participated in the research. People support what they help to create so make sure you tell people what you discovered, how you plan to address it and by when.

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