Speaker 1: Let me move us on to some more on measurement. We've talked about it in a number of different ways here, and there were a couple of additional questions that I thought would be worthy of looking at. Ninety-three percent of respondents think it's very important or important to measure the impact of internal communications. So this stat warms my heart. Here then are the top three challenges associated with measuring internal communications. On the lack of tools, and Angela, I want to come to you in a moment just to get your big picture reaction to these barriers, a lack of tools, the organization doesn't understand what to measure, and then the third, metrics are either too difficult to get or our colleagues in IT are not cooperating with what we need to generate those metrics. Angela, we'd love to get your thoughts on these barriers. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So lack of tools, sometimes that surveys, they're saying, well, we'll be faced with SurveyMonkey being available and other online things like that. The tools are there. I think the bigger issue comes from most people is they don't know exactly what to measure, and when they do, they tend to measure their activities, like I sent out so many newsletters this month or, I mean, this year, or I conducted so many town hall webcasts. They're counting what they're doing, not the impact of it. I just want to give people another thing to Google up. If you're trying to look for what to measure about internal communication and how to do it, there's a group in the UK called the Chartered Institute for Public Relations, CIPR. If you Google inside the IPR, which is the internal section of it, inside CIPR, measurement matrix, and it's a tool, it's a one-page tool that a group of us came up with that says here's the different aspects of communication we can and should measure, and plus then we have two columns next to that, one that says if you're going to do a survey, this is what a survey question might look like to get at that, and if you can't do a survey, here's other things you can measure at maybe lower cost and quicker time that will still get at that same kind of issue. So if that's your issue, I strongly recommend it's a great matrix to start with.

Speaker 1: Sounds like a fantastic tool. I was going to say, Steve, maybe for you, when it comes to not understanding sort of what to measure, aren't there some very typical outcomes that we seek when we think about internal communications or engagement and or some common dimensions that we're normally looking at? Angela talked about not just outputs but outcome measures as well, so we'd love to get your take on that.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I just think that, and I'm not going to say anything groundbreaking here or earthshattering, that this whole idea about metrics is difficult to get. Metrics are important. It's important to know whether somebody opened up an email. It's important to know whether or not somebody accessed the intranet. It's important to know the numbers and the activity, but I think communications does just a horrible job of linking that back to behaviors, and I think if you don't measure behaviors, and again, I loved what Angela said to start the call, and that is people get so overwhelmed by the idea of measuring overall behavior, and employee engagement, everything's about, oh my God, are we engaged? Are we an engaged workforce? Are we this? Are we that? I think it's really important for communicators to focus on initiatives, communication campaigns, where we're actually changing behavior, to narrow it down, narrow the focus, and measure what matters. I mean, measure the things that you know matters to the business, that you know matters to leadership, and I think if you simplify it and get really good at a couple things there, whether you want to call them KPIs or whatever you want to call them, you know, what are the things? Pick two or three things, and we're going to focus on those things. Are we moving the needle on this, this, and that, or two things even, or one thing? God, if you do one thing, you're ahead of the game probably these days. I just think people get overwhelmed with the idea of measuring, are we changing behaviors in overall? Are we creating an engaged workforce? Are we, you know, are we affecting the culture? I mean, those are all questions that are, you know, how many angels dance on the head of a pin? Those are tough, but if you identify a couple at the beginning of the year, and then, you know, shift it every quarter as needed, and say, okay, well, we're going to move the needle on this, this, and this, and are we doing it? I think you'd be far better off.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's a couple, if your organization already does something like an engagement survey, if you can get a couple of questions added to the survey, that can actually show what the impact of communication is on them. So, for example, we use demographic questions to see how different subgroups respond differently to the question. We can put in a question like, to what extent do you listen to or participate in town hall meetings, or participate in internal social media, or read the publication? Excuse me. The questions are not for the purpose of seeing what the true readership or viewership is, but we use that as a demographic to say, huh, how interesting. The people who more frequently listen in to the executive webcast have greater confidence in leadership. And we say, aha, those who participate more in internal social media tend to be more engaged by our engagement metrics. So, just by adding a couple of questions, we can actually make those correlations. It's not cause and effect, but it's a correlation between certain communication things we do and certain of those outcomes on those surveys.

Speaker 1: I think that's an excellent point, because so many of our organizations, we have some kind of engagement survey, and often there are some communications questions and or there may be a communications dimension on there that we can be thinking about and then add those extra questions, Angela, as you mentioned, to see if we can come up with some, I'll use the word drivers, but some correlations around what can impact engagement. The other thing that we're seeing, if I could add, with some of our clients that are really excelling in this space is they're doing a complementary survey to their engagement survey that looks at the overall communications climate. So they may do an engagement survey one year and do a communications climate survey the next year, because so often some of the engagement surveys don't have everything we need to be able to know what to stop, start, or continue when it comes to internal communications. But if we can do a separate survey that is connected to and linked to with some of the same questions in many cases, so we can come up with some drivers, that can be another way broadly to look at the broad communication system, which I think is just an add to what we've been already talking about today.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And David, I do the reverse as well. When we're doing a communications survey to get at basically your blueprint for what you should be communicating and how, I try to add in a couple of engagement questions onto those surveys right off of their engagement survey, so we can do that same kind of outcomes correlation in the communications survey.

Speaker 1: You bet. And we're connecting our work to work that's already being done inside the organization. And in the spirit of, and we've all talked about this idea of adding value and making connections and bringing insights to the table and looking at things differently and bringing information that no one else has, but that leadership wants that helps drive performance to the table, we can do that. So I want to move us on to- Could I just say one thing?

Speaker 2: Go ahead, Angela. Could I just say one thing? Please. On this issue of how hard it is to get data from IT, I just want to give a little plug to Newsweaver, who's sponsoring this, because they've got great ways of measuring analytics for your email, for your internet, for internal social media, videos, things like that, that you control. You see on your own dashboard. You don't have to wait for IT to give it to you, plus they can also do a campaign where if you've launched a campaign using multiple channels, they'll give you the metrics on who opened up these different communications and from where did they launch their behavior. So thank you so much for sponsoring this, you guys at Newsweaver. I just wanted to give you that plug.