Speaker 1: How to measure internal communication? This is the question asked by comms specialists many times over. However, according to research, 60% of IC specialists are still not measuring internal comms. So we've collected some best practices from across the industry to help you track your success in internal comms. When thinking of your internal comms KPIs, start with the big questions. What are the business goals? The communication metrics you're going to track will depend on the goals you want to achieve at your organisation and what you're going to do with the data. So how are you going to track the success of your internal communication? Here are some of the KPIs to keep an eye on. Number 1. Employee reach. Do you manage to successfully reach your employees? All of them? And what's more, do you reach them on time? Identifying whether you manage to reach your entire workforce with the right messages is critical. So to find out whether your internal communication allows you to successfully reach your employees during a change, you may want to track the reads your content has generated. It's also important to drill down into this information and track and analyse reads by department, team and even location. That way you get a better understanding of what content works well, who's reading it and who isn't. For example, if you notice a correlation between the amount of views and the location, let's say that the metrics show you that most employees working in factories don't read your content, you can then investigate to understand the reasons why they don't read your content. Step number 2. Readability of your messages. This next step consists of understanding whether your employees have understood the messages that you've shared with them. The best way to do so is to listen to your employees, to conduct regular surveys and gather their feedback. More specifically, you can combine two different types of surveys. The first type are Pulse Surveys, a survey for all of your employees to evaluate internal communication at all levels of the organisation. Include in your surveys a good mix of open-ended and closed-ended questions and ask your employees to rate your internal communication efforts. The second type are Sample Surveys or Focus Groups. Keep in mind that with this type of initiative, you're going to deliberately survey a small group of employees from different departments. Make sure that your focus group represents the demographics of the organisation so that the results you get from it are accurate. Step number 3. Employee Engagement. If you truly want to measure the success of your internal communication, one of the metrics you simply cannot ignore is employee engagement. Do your employees engage with and react to the messages that you share with them? If so, what kind of reactions do they have? Do they ask questions? Share their thoughts? Do they bookmark the articles that you share? If you notice that your content doesn't generate the expected reactions, you can deep-dive into your analytics to understand the reasons why. One of the most common mistakes businesses do when measuring communication efforts is using multiple tools and dashboards to analyse employee engagement. Data gets scattered between different channels and it becomes tricky to have a clear understanding of the success metrics. The key here is to use one dashboard, where you can gather all your employee engagement metrics and correlate them with the other internal communication metrics you're tracking. Number 4. Impact on the business's bottom line. Your internal communications will have a direct impact on the business's bottom line. To evaluate whether your internal communications is supporting the goals of the business, you'll need to measure this impact. Broadly speaking, you may want to look at three metrics. Employee Performance and Productivity. For this, your HR team can certainly help you get an overview of the development within the past few months. Increase in Revenue. This data is normally communicated internally during the town hall and all-hands meetings, and it can help you understand whether you're on the right track with your comms efforts. Retention Rates. You won't argue that feeling left out and uninformed can drive great employees out of your company. So regularly check the retention rate, see how your company is doing, and consider how your IC team can affect these changes. So to summarize, the main metrics to consider when measuring the success of your internal comms strategy are employee reach, readability of your messages, employee engagement, and impact on the business's bottom line. Halo's multi-channel comms platform will not only help you to measure all of these, but also provide you with insights on how to improve your comms strategy going forward. Check out Halo.com to learn more.