Measuring results in Internal Communication is often overlooked in a company’s human resources and internal communications departments. Possibly because people can always find “more pressing” issues, the importance of a planning tool is vastly underestimated.

Results should show a snapshot of the current state of internal communication in the organization. Using this snapshot we can create a diagnosis for the state of internal communication to understand what problems we need to improve.

But what does measuring internal communication actually look like? The idea is to stop speculating and start collecting concrete information about how employees are experiencing internal communication on a daily basis.

There are various techniques to capture this information: measuring channels (intranet, corporate social network, email), campaigns and actions, design and implementation of surveys, deep dive interviews, focus groups, survey analysis and other indicators designed to collect the opinions of the different employees working in the company.

Many times measuring is relatively simple; for example, online channels can give us automatic statistics about the number of emails received, number of comments on the enterprise social network, frequency of visits, etc. It’s important to identify what information we need given the goals and objectives for internal communication in our company and to focus on the keys areas that can really be used to make future plans.

Regardless of its importance, the majority of companies in Latin America do not carry out any formal measurements related to Internal Communications.

According to a survey done by Agencia BW, less than 40% of internal communication managers in large companies in the region reported using formal indicators or measurements for their internal media.

And only 7% of them confirmed the use of comprehensive auditing reports for Internal Communication. The main tools used for this purpose are informal conversations with company personnel and information provided by employee satisfaction surveys.

Of those that do measure communication results, 27% of those surveyed stated that they did not use specific indicators, but the remaining 73% mentioned many alternatives that are widely available to any manager, such as the number of clicks in the company’s Intranet, number of logins to the Enterprise Social Network or participation rate in internal events or contests.

The challenge is to include the ongoing measuring of results in the formal internal communication plans of the company in order to be able to better measure the success and effectiveness of those actions with appropriate indicators. This should be decided based on the specific objectives of the company. For example, if the goal is to host an event to improve the relationship between mangers and employees, what is important for us to measure? Attendance rate? Or the real results post the event and if relationships actually experienced an improvement? In this case, a good option is to create follow-up surveys or interviews after the event to determine if there was a real change in the dynamics of office relationships.

Without a doubt, focusing on measuring results in internal communication can contribute to the early detection of problems and in evaluating the results of your internal communication program.