Measuring Employee Communications and Engagement: Why and How

Measuring internal communications is critical to the success of any organisation, but it's not always clear how to do so effectively. In this article, we explore the importance of measuring employee communication and engagement, and how it relates to organisational performance. We'll also provide a step-by-step guide for conducting a channel assessment, matching channels with objectives, measuring channel effectiveness and improving channel usage. Finally, we'll discuss some of the challenges of accessing data. By following these steps, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your internal communications and drive better organisational outcomes.

Why employee communications and engagement matter

A recently published paper in the International Journal of Accounting, Finance and Business, based on a substantial literature review, described the importance of employee communications and engagement:

“Modern scholars recognise employee communication and engagement as two pillars of organizational effectiveness. Employee communication effectiveness is a crucial indicator of an organization’s performance for its role in improving the organization’s bottom-line outcomes, such as increased productivity, stability and profitability. Similarly, employee engagement is essential to organizational success, where engaged people who are hard-working, ethical, and accountable provide the ‘backbone’ of a positive work environment.”

Take a moment to notice how strongly the areas of organisational performance, employee communications and employee engagement are tied together.

Given the strong inter-relationship with organisational performance, we need to be serious about measuring employee communication and employee engagement. Just like the people in your supply function measure the stock levels in the warehouse, because it impacts financial performance, corporate communicators need to measure if people understand what is being communicated, and if they are engaged.

“This isn’t that what we do in our annual engagement surveys?” you might say. Yes, those surveys often include questions that can help answer this, but the problem is those surveys are typically done only once every year. Imagine how a person in the finance department would react if you said; “You can only look at the bank statement once a year”. It’s impossible to make day-to-day decisions, or do quarterly planning, if the data is only refreshed annually.

Data on how the internal communications function achieves its outcomes must be much more frequent. While pulse surveys might look to address this issue to some extent, it comes at the risk of non-representative respondent samples.

How to start measuring

We will start with the bold assumption that you know who your audience is, what channels you have available, what you need to communicate and the type of engagement you are looking for.

Step 1 – Do a channel assessment

The first step is to do an assessment of your channels. Most organisations have a multitude of channels available but have little insight about if, or how, they are currently used. List all the ones you have available. Find out how much they are used and what they are used for. Think critically about what their unique characteristics are. Some might appear to overlap in terms of characteristics, but are used by different audiences. This can only be determined with usage analytics, i.e. you need data.

Step 2 – Match the channel with objective

Do you want people to read something? Do you want them to do something? Do you want to discuss something with them? These are important questions to ask as they will point you to the best channel to use. For example, company-wide email announcements might be used a lot, but don’t allow for a two-way conversation. Investing time and money in a roadshow might deliver great engagement with local teams, but the impact doesn’t last long, so may not deliver great ROI on its own. Since channels have different characteristics, use them for what they are good at. This also means that you will not be successful if you simply copy/paste the same content across all channels.

Step 3 – Measure channel effectiveness

For every channel, a set of baseline metrics must be established which are tied to the special goals of that channel. For example, a goal might be for senior leaders to engage staff in a conversation about a new organisational initiative, and the chosen channel is the internal social platform such as Viva Engage or Workplace from Meta. We can now measure how much the leadership team is using the internal social platform and if they are both posting and replying i.e. actively engaging with staff, not just broadcasting . There are ways to assess the quality of content using automated tools. We can measure sentiment using AI tools. We can assess text for spelling, broken links, poor grammar, without having to manually review everything.

Step 4 – Improve channel usage

Channel effectiveness measurement is a critical enabler of improvement. For example, you discover your intranet news articles are only read by 15% of the targeted audience. As you dive into the more detailed metrics you discover the readability of the content is very poor. As you explore your intranet content more closely you also discover that many pages have not been updated for more than a year. You now understand why the intranet scored so low in your initial assessment, but even more importantly, you know what you need to fix.

By ensuring each of your channels is being used effectively, you can be assured your investment in your digital communication infrastructure is now justified and employee experience is being maximised.

Getting access to data

"In God we trust, all others bring data" is a quote attributed to the American statistician and consultant W. Edwards Deming. But getting it can prove to be challenging. Sometimes it does exist, but can only be accessed by the IT department. Sometimes it isn’t included in the communication platforms’ standard functionality.

The challenge for internal communications staff is that they have not been trained as data analysts. There is no shortage of data available. The problem is that it’s either not useful data or buried, requiring a specialist analyst to find it. Therefore, you may need to seek out third party solutions such as SWOOP Analytics. The benefits of these third parties are that they specialise in analysing digital channels, and in the case of SWOOP Analytics provide benchmarking capabilities so you can compare both internally and externally.

Unless you are able to access the right data, you will forever find yourself trying to justify that the internal communications function has a critical role to play. Even when you are able to show the evidence, as per the article in the introduction, you are unable to demonstrate the impact you have on the ground without the data to provide your proof.