How do you measure the impact of your internal communications on leadership and feedback?

The global nature of many organizations, combined with the shift to hybrid work, makes internal communications more important - and difficult - than ever. You can’t just get everyone in a room and read their body language anymore. The challenge is to find in-person and digital ways to keep everyone informed, inspired and aligned.

Internal audiences are also becoming an important channel to communicate branding initiatives through personal social channels. Employees are nowadays the most important brand ambassadors for companies.

It's helpful to align what you measure with your organization's business priorities. Senior leaders care about business progress. They'll care even more about internal communication when you demonstrate that you've aligned your communication strategies and measurement to show how your team's work is making a positive impact (or not). When you're choosing what to measure, consider what ACTIONABLE insights you can share. Then in subsequent months, you can demonstrate through your measurement how improving/tweaking your comms tactics made additional direct impact on key priorities and goals. Actionable insights are a big step forward, compared with baseline measurement like open and click-through rates.

Traditionally more emphasis and investment has gone to measuring the impact of external communications. Many of the analytics tools used for external communications are difficult to use inside a company. Goals set should be a mix of input (the activities you will complete) which lead to output (the desired outcomes aligned to your objectives).

Integrity and transparency of results are fundamental when evaluating internal communications tactics. Even when metrics are not the expected, they provide valuable learnings and insights that communicators can and must apply back into the planning and development of new messages, as well as into the overall communication strategy.

Data and outcomes are the base for bigger budgets and for funding new initiatives. A/B test can be also useful to show leadership the preferred voice and style for internal audiences.

It’s important to use more than one channel, but be mindful of the impact diluting your message in many places may have. Every company has different preferred ways to consume information - meet your audience where they are and don’t forget the power and impact empowering managers to cascade messages to their direct teams can have. Most people listen more when their boss is delivering news rather than someone a few layers removed.

Utilize AI-powered sentiment analysis tools to automatically analyze employee comments and feedback. These tools can categorize sentiments as positive, negative, or neutral, providing quick insights into overall perception.