Why are internal communication metrics valuable?
Demonstrating the value of internal comms and the success of your strategy feeds into a cycle of success. The more you can prove ROI, the more likely it is that you’ll get further buy-in and investment at a strategic level.
But measuring success has been a persistent challenge for internal communication professionals over the years – it can sometimes be hard to quantify things like culture and engagement. In the early days, it was difficult to track how many employees were reading the company magazine or checking the bulletin board. Even email open rates may not have been a reliable metric.
But now, particularly with many enterprises having undergone rapid digital transformations post-pandemic, we have greater access to data. The challenge is knowing how to turn that data into insights – ones that help leaders understand what employees need in order to be engaged, and how internal comms strategies are adding value.
The internal communication metrics challenge
According to research by Gallagher, two-thirds of internal communicators don’t check their reports or dashboards on a regular basis, and the majority of leaders fail to ask for internal communications metrics at all.
Why is this? Lack of time is one reason internal communicators struggle to focus on data interpretation, but another big barrier is confusion around how to turn intranet analytics into insights. With so much data available to mine, knowing what's important isn't always easy.
But as technology matures, so do analytics capabilities. Today, the new generation of intranets, commonly referred to as employee experience platforms, come equipped with pre-built dashboards and rich visualizations that make processing large volumes of data easier than ever before.
So, what are some of the internal communication KPIs that matter?
Which internal communications metrics best prove value?
1. Platform adoption
We’ll start with an obvious one. For your platform to show business value, your people need to be using it. A high-quality intranet is a significant business investment, so being able to prove that employees are engaging with it in the first place shows your leaders that it's an investment worth maintaining.
Keep track of adoption figures year-on-year and look to prove ongoing adoption. Don't just look at how many employees are looking at the homepage, but how many users are clicking away and where they're going.
You can also dig deeper at things like unique page views, which are one of the most simple and effective internal communication KPIs you can track. They tell you whether employees are looking at your content, and more important what content they’re looking at. Pages or articles with low view counts can be investigated to understand whether the content is accurate or relevant. If they are, you start to dig into how to make them more visible or findable.
2. Time saved
Reporting back on the average time it takes your employees to complete tasks is an important metric to show leadership. Productivity is one of the keys to business success, as productive companies have 30-50% higher operating margins than their less productive counterparts.
If it takes a user less time to find what they are looking for, whether it’s the answer to a question, a document, or the right person to talk to, it can prove to have demonstrable benefits. McKinsey found that knowledge workers still spend 19% of their time searching for and gathering information.
Proving that your employees can complete tasks and find the information they need quickly through the intranet – essentially working smarter, not harder – should be something that leadership is interested in knowing.
Take a look at Shell, who were able to show that the business was saving $41m in increased productivity with their new and improved employee experience platform. Time-to-task testing revealed that employees could complete common tasks 82 seconds faster, equating to over 3.5k hours saved across the enterprise each day.
3. Search accuracy
Search accuracy might not seem like an obvious choice, but the more accurate the search result, the higher the employee productivity is. On the flipside, the longer it takes them to find information, the longer it takes them to finalize the task at hand.
Feeding back a high percentage of search accuracy shows to leadership just how your employee experience platform is having a positive impact on productivity – particularly if your search center also pulls in all external tools and applications that are integrated.
Estee Lauder Companies were able to show that search accuracy increased by 300% following the launch of MyELC. By giving employees a single platform to search for information stored across disparate repositories from ServiceNow to SharePoint, ELC was able to reduce platform switching and ensure easy access to knowledge. Calculated time-savings were 2 hours per week for the average employee, proving the platform's value to the business.
4. Clickthrough rate
Clickthrough rates (CTR) measure the percentage of viewers that ‘click’ through to read more, sign up, or take whatever desired action you have set up within your comms. Particularly effective in analyzing the success of outbound channels, like emails and push notifications, CTR will tell you whether people are interested enough to take action, sign up, or read more.
Your leadership team may be particularly interested in the CTR for comms that are specifically linked to actions they want people to take.
A high CTR tells you you’ve effectively engaged people to your objective. A low CTR tells you people simply aren’t interested enough or may be missing the point. They may reveal a lack clear intent within your copy, an ineffective call to action, or show you that your employees are less interested in certain topics than you predicted.
5. External awards won
Finally, (although not strictly classed as a metric) winning or even being shortlisted for an external award can provide additional validation that your team and their campaigns are worth their salt.
Being identified by prestigious companies in the market – for example Nielsen Norman Group, Gartner, and Ragan Communications – is a way to show your leaders that your intranet, campaigns, and communications are not only effective, but recognized as award-worthy within the industry.
Unily clients have shown unprecedented success for coming home with the gold, being the first company to have four clients featured in a single Best Intranet Design Annual, amongst other awards. It’s a great way to show to leadership that the time and money spent in designing an engaging, innovative employee experience platform has paid off.
Bespoke internal communication benchmarks
We know that when it comes to internal communication metrics, one size doesn’t necessarily fit all. Businesses have different goals, ideas and cultures, so internal communicators will have their own route to success.
At Unily, our built-in dashboards and dedicated customer success team mean you can decide what your goals are and how you want to track them. We can then help you pull together the precise report you need to wow your leadership team.
Putting it into industry context
Now you’ve got the metrics that matter, it’s time to put them into context. What your leaders really need to understand is how your performance is faring when compared to competitors and other businesses of a similar size. You need to be able to show either where you’re excelling or where you’re failing your employees – and why.
Previously, internal communications benchmarking wasn’t an easy task, so this is why Unily introduced benchmarking into our analytics reports. These allow you to see how your engagement scores compare with companies of a similar size, industry, or geography. This ensures you have the wider context needed to give you and your leaders a better idea of what success looks like.
Engagement Automation: Making campaign tracking a reality
As technology becomes more sophisticated, we’re beginning to see marketing-grade campaign tracking enter the internal comms arena.
Campaign Automation helps internal communicators craft multi-step campaigns and track their success by laying out goals at the outset – much like marketers.
It lets you set objectives at the outset and automatically track them on a campaign-by-campaign basis. The result is a more nuanced overview of how different employees and audiences respond to your comms approach and a clear view of how engagement builds over time.
How does it work?
Let’s say your focus for the quarter is to engage employees with your company’s diversity and inclusion agenda – it’s a broad goal with lots of different variables combining to deliver a cohesive and impactful overarching message. A campaign approach would allow you to:
- Start by creating a 'DE&I hub' site to house resources and information and launch it on your intranet
- Follow up by drafting your organization's equity value statement and sending it via email to your employees and target audiences
- Alongside this you can set up goals that retarget users yet to read the statement, sending a push notifications to remind these users to check out the statement. Follow up again on different channels where people work, like Teams, to make sure your message reaches across your workforce
- Finally, you can finish up the campaign by automatically posting to social channels once a certain number of employees have viewed or interacted with your campaign content, asking for feedback on your DE&I approach, starting valuable conversations, and inviting employees to make their voice heard at the next townhall meeting
Engagement Automation lets you plot all these activities on a timeline and set completion goals against each activity. Once your campaign is underway, you can refer to your campaign dashboard to see how you’re achieving those goals in real-time. At the end of your campaign, you’ll be presented with a clear and concise overview measuring its success.
Why is it useful?
Today internal communicators are under pressure to deliver more personalized, omni-channel experiences, akin to those employees see in their personal lives. But, unlike marketers who have a wealth of sophisticated technology to deliver, track and optimize highly tailored communications to consumers, internal communicators suffer some of the most unloved and ageing technology in the enterprise stack. That’s where Engagement Automation is levelling the playing field.
Engagement Automation ties transactional data to context, bringing a deeper understanding of how KPIs relate to user behavior and how you can use data to influence your desired actions and outcomes.
By setting campaign goals from the outset and tracking these automatically, you can analyze the effectiveness of communications beyond counting views and likes. You gain insight into the characteristics of your most and least engaged audiences, identify the channels and actions driving completion of your goals, and personalize measurement to your intentions to prime campaigns for success.
Ultimately, Engagement Automation is so useful because it is more specific, delivering unparalleled insight into engagement, personalized to your organization’s strategy and aims. Your objectives are tied to your content, so you can go beyond measuring just engagement – you can measure how driving that engagement influences your overall goals.
Prove the value of internal communications
To be able to track and measure this kind of data, internal communicators need access to next-gen technology that supports the reach of comms and campaigns and measures their success. Discover how Unily supports internal communicators to make data-driven decisions by speaking to an expert today.
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