Less Chatter, More Matter: The Communications Podcast

#136 Let’s stop using ‘engagement’ as a measure of internal comms success

• Mel Loy • Season 1 • Episode 136

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Engagement surveys are everywhere, and it’s tempting to use those scores as proof that your internal communications are working. In fact, a lot of people, and senior leaders, ask for exactly those scores to prove communication cut through. However, engagement isn’t just about comms because it’s shaped by leadership, culture, salaries, career development, values, and more.

So if engagement isn’t the right measure, what is? In this episode of the Less Chatter, More Matter podcast, we unpack why engagement shouldn’t be your go-to metric. Then, we tell you what should and seven practical measures that actually demonstrate the value of internal communication. 

Th real kind of measures that will give you the data-backed and human-proven evidence you need to show senior management, and other employees, the internal comms impact on the business. If you agree that it’s time to move past vague scores and start measuring what really matters, you’ll want to listen in!

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So you need to measure your internal communications and show value back to the business. That's great. We should always be doing that. And an easy measure to grab a hold of levels of engagement. Most organisations run regular engagement surveys, and so it's an easy way to tap into an existing measure and get some numbers. But there is a big problem with using an engagement score as a communication measure, and that's why we should be looking to other measures instead. So what's that big problem and what are the solutions? That's what today's episode is all about. Hi friend, and welcome to another episode of Less Chatter More Matter, the Communication podcast. It is wonderful to have you tuning in. I'm your host, Mel Loy, and I'm recording this episode on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin, also known as Brisbane. And today I'm going to tackle a big juicy question. How do we measure the effectiveness of internal communication? Now, as I said in the intro, what I often see is teams trying to use engagement scores as a measure of internal comm success, and that is a problem for many reasons. Firstly, and probably most importantly, engagement isn't just the result of communication. There are far too many other contributing factors to be able to accurately say that comms has had an impact on engagement. So for example, what's the leadership and culture like at your organisation? What are the salary? What's the recognition and rewards? And the benefits? What are the physical environments like? What are the hybrid and flexible working options? Are there opportunities for career development? Does the organisation have a compelling mission and values, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Comms is just a really small part of a big engagement equation, so while we do contribute to engagement - Engagement cannot be a measure of our impact. Why do we keep using engagement as a measure then? Well, like I said in the intro, because it's easy, the data is there, it's ready to be collected. It's nicely benchmarked against industry and previous years' results. But dare I say it, this also tends to happen when internal comms sits in HR. HR usually has a business goal centred on engagement. So for internal comms, it becomes a default measure too. The other thing about engagement in general is that the term itself will mean nothing to most people in your business. It's a very broad term. It's not tangible enough for an employee to be able to point to. I mean, how often do you find yourself thinking, gosh, I feel so much more engaged today than yesterday. Or you're setting a personal goal, like, I'm going to be 10% more engaged tomorrow. It's ridiculous; Engagement Is an overall score, but it's also an outcome. It's not an impact score. So when we think about measurement, think about it in three different levels. Level one, base level, this is outputs. This is what you have done and can be measured in terms of numbers. So for example, you drafted 10 intranet articles, sent out 20 CEO emails, et cetera. Readership rate was 40%. 500 people read that intranet article, blah, blah, blah. Now, don't get me wrong, the output data can be very useful. It can tell you what topics people are interested in when they're more, most likely to engage with that channel and that content, et cetera, but they don't tell you the value you've added to the business. So keep those outputs really for yourself in terms of informing when and what you communicate. Level two is the outcomes measures. So this is measuring what you wanted people to know, feel, and do as a result of your communication strategies. So are they taking the action that you ask them to take? How do they feel about the new strategy or the change in leadership, or whatever it is? What do they know about this change or the organisation's strategy, the values, et cetera, et cetera. So this is really about making sure your comms hit the mark of those outcomes that you would've started your comms plan with Level three. This is the top tier. This is impact. This is where we really show value as professional communicators. It's where we make a difference to how the business operates and how successful it is in achieving its goals. Now with impact measures, again, it might be tempting to go back to this goal of engagement, but please avoid the temptation. To me, engagement is a contributor to the overall success of the business, but it's not necessarily a success factor in and of itself. So, for example, you might have a really happy team, but your profits are dropping dramatically. In that case, engagement doesn't mean much at all. So what impact measures should we be looking at? I've got seven measures you could consider as part of your internal comms measurement and some ideas for how to measure those. So let's get into it. Measure one. Faster moving, more successful change. This is so important to businesses because the slower the pace of change, the slower the business is to capitalise on opportunities and keep up with everyone else. Now again, comms is not the only factor involved in successful change. There's also training stakeholder engagement, leadership and hr. But it is easier to find a line of sight between your comms about the change and the impact because you can ask questions like, tell me what you know about this change. How do you feel about what's coming? And positive responses to those questions means you are contributing to a smoother change process. That's a good thing. And you can also check awareness of the change simply by looking at data or again, doing a quick poll and observing people's behaviours. If those behaviours and what they're saying are in line with what you wanted them to do and say, then you are on the right track. And during change, comms is also used to help get people to engage with training and learning opportunities. So again, you have a data point there as a result of your comms, how many people signed up to training sessions? And again, that's helping to make change faster and more successful. In Australia, the other thing to consider is the workplace health and safety legislation, which was updated a couple of years ago to include poor change management as a psychosocial risk. And within that, the legislation calls out specifically things like poor or ingenuine, employee con consultation and poor communication during change, among other things. So if your internal comms is effective during change, you're also helping to protect the business from some pretty serious legal risks, and that is a very positive impact. Okay. Another impact that internal comms can have on the business is: Helping employees feel a sense of pride in your organisation, clarity on what you stand for and their role to play in being brand ambassadors. So in short, when employees become advocates for your brand. Now, how do you measure advocacy? Honestly, there's lots of ways, but a few ideas include looking at what your employees are saying about you on LinkedIn or Glassdoor or other, those types of websites. Ask them how they feel about your organisation and its purpose, how it operates, and their confidence in leadership and the strategic direction. You could also look at recruitment data because oftentimes during the recruitment process, people are asked how they heard about the vacant role that they're applying for, if it was recommended to them by a current or even a former employee. Then again, you've helped to build advocates for your brand. Now having this advocacy in place is good for the business for many reasons. Number one, it helps to position you as an employer of choice, which means you tend to attract higher quality candidates and you limit recruitment costs. And number two, it means you are less likely to see high employee turnover. Again, it's a cost saving and a knowledge saving. And number three, when a crisis happens and it will, your employees will be the first to defend your organisation's reputation. And let's be honest, reputation protection is at least half of what we do as comms professionals every day. Okay. Measure number three for the impact of your internal comms is seeing the organisation's values in action. Now, while leaders absolutely contribute to this by role modeling those values and keeping people accountable, internal comms has a big role to play in helping people to be aware of, or what are these values, help them understand what they mean. And embed those values by demonstrating how they show up every day. So think about the stories that you share through your channels. So whether that's group emails, town halls, team meetings, round table discussions, intranet articles, et cetera, et cetera, if you're using those channels to capture people's attention and center it on the organisation's values. Then you're heading in the right direction because for the business, the benefit of people working by your values is immense. It means people behave well, which limits risk to the business. So along with leaders, internal comms, pros are super important at embedding values into the business, which means we can and should be measuring not only awareness of the values. But understanding and people acting on the values, and we can do that through things like observations, anecdotal evidence, focus groups, interviews, et cetera, et cetera. You might even also be able to tap into HR data again. So for example, around annual performance review time, a lot of organisations report on their employees' alignment to values. So it could give you some insights and some numbers to give you an idea around what's working and what's not. Okay. Measure number four is breaking down the silos and getting leadership alignment. Now, I talked a bit about this a few weeks ago in terms of how comms can help bridge the gaps when silos appear in businesses, and I'm gonna have a wonderful guest on this podcast in a few weeks to talk about alignment, so I won't wax lyrical here. But what I will say is that obviously silos are bad for business, especially when it is so obvious that leaders are not aligned behind common goals or even aligned to each other, and it means it takes much longer to get things done. There's often duplication of effort and waste in the business, and very unhappy people, which of course leads to higher costs related to turnover and recruitment Again. Now your comms can help to demonstrate alignment of leaders and share with teams what others in the organisation are doing, helping to break down some of those barriers. To measure this, you could ask questions like how well informed people feel about what's going on in other areas of the business, how aligned they feel leaders are behind the organisation, strategy, et cetera, et cetera. And that'll give you some good numbers to act as a baseline. Okay. Measure number five, trust in leadership and messaging. Trust is a big one, and again, it comes from more than just comms. It comes from leaders role modeling the right behaviours, and closing that, say do gap where they say one thing, but then go and do another. It also comes from keeping promises, being honest, being transparent, being authentic, all those things. And comms does have a role to play in that we are often in a position where we are coaching leaders in their communication and helping them to build their internal brand. We're often also coaching leaders to be more transparent in their comms, to share the full story, to close off the feedback loops, to show people that they're really listening. When people trust leaders and they trust the messages they receive, they are more likely to do what you want them to do. And again. That has big benefits for business. It makes change smoother. It helps to align people behind goals, and it helps you weather the storms when they inevitably appear. Now you can measure trust by asking people how to rate how timely, transparent, and thoughtful they think leadership communication is. Those are my three T's of trust that I always look at when I'm doing an internal comms audit. You can also just simply ask people to rate how much trust they have in their own leader as well as the C-Suite. You might find an interesting difference in those two measures if the worldwide research is anything to go by. So that's measure number five, trust. Measure number six. Well, people have the information they need to do their jobs. Think about it. If you don't know where to go to get the information you need, you're probably going to get frustrated and you're probably going to take a lot longer to do your job or do it correctly the first time around. You are also going to risk not following the correct processes and annoying somebody, or at the other extreme, not being compliant with regulation. And this is why it's so important that as internal comms pros, we help to create a knowledge management framework in the business that's easy and accessible for people. It means being very thoughtful with channel management, what channels we use and how, and that we're always getting feedback from our audiences to make sure that's hitting the mark and adapting where we need to. It also means we have a role to play in educating others on how knowledge management is done in our organisations. Let them know where they can find information, but also how they can contribute to sharing information. So the measure here is asking people how easy it is to find what they need to do their jobs, what they struggle to find, and what would make life easier. Alright, last one is people actively contribute to internal discussions. A healthy culture is one where we see a lot of two-way or multi-way conversation. It's not that directive top-down, dictatorial approach. It's more about how we tap into employees' knowledge and firsthand experience and use that to lift everyone up. It's also about creating a culture where people feel safe to share feedback and ideas and where they. Feel valued and heard. And when we have that, again, there are benefits to the business. You will typically find greater productivity, greater efficiencies, because people share information and lower employee turnover. So how do we measure it? Look at the percentage of your people who contribute to discussions, whether it's online, in person, or both. Look at how much feedback you get through formal channels and the rate of that feedback too. Is it a consistent stream or does it only happen in bursts? Look at how often people of their own accord get together to share ideas and information. Ask people how comfortable do you feel to contribute feedback and ideas? Do you know how to do that? Those sorts of questions are going to unearth where some of the barriers might be as well. Okay, so it is time for your episode recap. So today I shared why we should stop using engagement as a comms outcome, and seven things you could measure instead. Number one. Faster moving and more successful change because when people know what's going on and they feel good about it and they're doing what you've asked them to do, then you've ticked the boxes to get a leg up in your business. Number two, employees are advocates for your brand. They show up on social media, singing your praises and recommending others to your organisation. Number three, you see values in action and you share those stories. Number four. Trust in leadership and the messages they send, there is no say do gap people demonstrate that. They do trust in that messaging and they're very appreciative for that as well. Number six, people have the information they need to do their jobs. They know where to go to get what they need, but they also know how they can contribute their knowledge as well. And number seven, people actively participate in internal discussions. They are happy to share feedback and ideas, and they know how to do that. And it happens regularly, not just when you do a call out, like in something like an engagement survey. All right, team. Well, I hope that gave you some ideas for your own measurement, for your own strategies. And of course, if you've got any questions, ideas, or something to add. Please let me know. As always, you can keep following me on LinkedIn and Instagram for lots of updates, and you can sign up to our fortnightly email where I share the latest news from the comms world, as well as some top tips and tools that we find around the web and all the upcoming events that are coming up in our area of the world. So please make sure you go ahead to the website and make sure you check that out. In the meantime, keep doing amazing things and bye for now.