5 Crucial Metrics When You’re Measuring Internal Communication

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Internal communication is about informing, engaging, and inspiring your workforce. But when you’re getting out the message, building trust, and delivering information consistently, how can you prove you’ve achieved success? In this blog, we describe five crucial metrics when you’re measuring internal communication.

Employees expect targeted and relevant content coming from internal communicators. Measuring your efforts will improve your communications and communication strategy and will be beneficial to every employee. This starts with personalized communication, meaning you send relevant messages to specific audience groups at the right time through the right channel. Data on your internal communication can help you determine which content resonates best with your staff, which channel they prefer, and when you can best send your messages.

When you are collecting relevant data on your internal communication efforts, these are five crucial metrics:

Reach of your messages

Reach may be the first thing you think of when you start measuring your internal communication, and it’s a great first thought. Your reach matters first in your internal communication: if your messages reach no one, you can be sure nobody reads them, either. Understanding your messages’ and communication channels’ reach can help you adjust your communication strategy to ensure your reach is optimal.

When it comes to your messages’ reach, keep in mind all of your various employee groups: your office workers, your on-site staff, and your remote workers. Not every message must reach all of them, as you want to keep relevance high, but you must be able to reach all of them with the same message at the same time when it matters.

Integrating an employee communication channel that automatically determines your reach can save a lot of time and help you adjust future communication plans. Our statistics feature automatically tracks all sorts of data, such as reach, readers, and engagement, so you don’t have to.

Acknowledgment rates or read receipts

After measuring your reach, you know how many employees receive your messages. But are they genuinely reading them? Implementing an employee communication platform that allows you to track acknowledgments or read receipts can help an organization identify whether employees have actually opened it, read it, and clicked through on any links or calls-to-action.

Adding an acknowledgment button to your messages enables you to track who has acknowledged that they’ve read a message. This results in a better overview of who genuinely reads your messages. You can combine this feature with our attention boosters for employees who haven’t read a message.

Each attention booster campaign consists of multiple attempts to reach your audience automatically with notifications or pop-ups that are impossible to miss. Automatic retargeting ensures you reach only those employees who still must take a specific action, such as acknowledging they have read your message. Attention boosters will keep reminding employees of a certain message until they have acknowledged reading it. This decreases the chances your message will get lost in other messages and other work and increases the chances your staff actually reads the news.

Communication channel usage

Measuring your channel’s success can give you insights into which channels your employees prefer. This can be easy if you have an employee communication platform that shows an overview of channel usage. Look at the activity rate for each communication channel and determine which channels are widely used and which channels aren’t.

This can help you evaluate if you’re using the right channels to publish your messages. It will also help you determine which channels you can use for important information and for specific audience groups. It may give you insights into whether you should discard any channels or need to tap into other channels to reach your employees optimally.

Interaction or engagement with your messages

Understanding your employees’ interaction or engagement with your messages will help you understand how your employees consume information. It will give insights into various topics: their preferred communication channels, on which days and during which hours they mostly read your messages, which content they prefer, et cetera.

Our statistic feature automatically tracks all sorts of data about employee engagement with your messages: from likes and reactions to Click-Through Rates and acknowledgments. These data are displayed in a report that shows data for a period of your choice.

Testing whether your employees are truly engaging with your internal comms messages will give you a great overview of how engaging your messages are to different segments of your staff at varying times. If you can see how many employees actively interact with your content at a glance, you will be able to understand what resonates with various teams and individuals. Over time, this enables you to adjust your strategy to optimize engagement.

Employee satisfaction with your comms

A very important goal is your user’s satisfaction with your communication channels. Measuring satisfaction levels can be done by simply asking your staff how satisfied they are with your comms channels. Conduct a pulse survey at regular intervals to track your employees’ sentiment.

Assess your employees’ sentiment using an eNPS, an employee Net Promoter Score-like survey, to track your staff’s opinion over time and adjust your communication strategy accordingly. Questions such as ‘Would you recommend this communication channel?’ or ‘How would you rate this communication channel?’ can clearly explain your employees’ satisfaction with your channels.

Are you measuring these five crucial metrics when you’re measuring internal communication, or could you still use some help? Get in touch with our consultants for advice on measuring your internal communication efforts; they are happy to look into your specific situation and help you get the most out of your internal comms. Would you like to see how Netpresenter statistics can contribute to your internal communication strategy? Schedule a free 30-minute demo to see everything Netpresenter has to offer. Or download our free guide to find the right communication tools to reach your employees.