Thursday, October 08, 2026
Thursday, October 08, 2026
Greg Howe:
If employee behavior didn’t change, the campaign didn’t work. Most internal comms teams aren’t set up to know either way.
They measure reach—newsletter opens, video views, town hall attendance. But not what changed because of it.
In 1996, Bill Quirke said this tendency was like measuring how well an engine runs, but not how far the car goes in the right direction. In 2026, Gallagher’s Employee Communications Report confirmed the pattern held: 70% of practitioners track opens and clicks, while 16% measure shifts in awareness, understanding, or sentiment, and just 12% measure business impact.
The report’s authors recommended a focus on outcomes, but stopped short of the how. What follows is a practical starting point, with real examples from the Los Angeles wildfires to senior leaders failing to connect with the factory floor.
They work alone. And they work even better together:
For smaller teams, or teams of one: scope and frequency of use are up to you.
Business leaders know priorities. They don’t always know how communication can support them.
I created The Mini Brief based on Sue Dewhurst and Liam Fitzpatrick’s focus on do-feel-know objectives in their book Successful Employee Communications. It’s the least you need to start a campaign and set yourself up to measure impact.
Your CEO wants to record a sharp video about the company’s new strategy. Before you book the studio, The Mini Brief forces the questions:
Say the goal is for managers to feel prepared to explain the strategy to their teams. A 10-minute polished video won’t get them there. A 90-second phone video from the CEO paired with a conversation guide might. The framework gives you the language to have that conversation.
Ask these questions every time. Be the “do-feel-know” person. Stakeholders start expecting it.
Build it with your project team. When everyone shapes the brief together, they understand what success looks like and how you’ll measure it during the campaign.
The point of evaluation is to act on the results.
That’s the main idea behind Dewhurst and Fitzpatrick’s “standard report format.” The authors say to: “Focus the discussion on actions and improvements.”
The framework has six components across three categories:
I used this framework every two weeks for eight months, guiding senior leaders on a cross-functional project team planning a May 2025 recognition event for 2,500 employees. (See full case study here.)
In January 2025, wildfires hit Los Angeles—our host city. Here’s how the report helped us make decisions the week of January 20:
General Feedback: A December survey showed most employees were prepared for travel. Some needed more info. Then fires hit LA. I BCC-emailed 14 colleagues across roles and geographies. Seven quick responses questioned whether the event would happen.
Decision: Broadcast a message immediately.
Attitudinal Scores: 80% plan to travel. 76% feel prepared. Employees want hotel/flight/dress-code info.
Decision: Focus comms on travel logistics once updates are available, despite incomplete information.
Completed Comms: Wildfire acknowledgment sent; outcomes pending at time of report.
Planned Comms: Continue listening strategy; multiple touchpoints on travel preparedness.
Future Issues: Corporate travel site overload, self-booking complications, hotel room block stability.
Decision: Solve potential operational problems before they become comms crises.
Hot Spot Problems: One office questioned whether holding the event was appropriate given the disaster’s impact.
Decision: Event professionals suggested a community service activity for the May event to support fire victims. We didn’t announce it—we weren’t sure we could pull it off. But knowing the depth of feeling, the event team persevered. We coordinated with a local nonprofit for an 800-person community service activity. It helped the LA community, and 97% of survey comments about the activity were favorable.
Here’s a recreation of that week’s report:
This framework relies on employee insights to inform decisions in real time throughout a campaign.
“My heart breaks when I see pretty charts showing just opens, clicks, and page views,” said Cindy Crescenzo, principal at Chicago-based Crescenzo Communications. She’s advised Mayo Clinic, SAP, Target, Bayer, UPS, and others for more than 20 years.
Crescenzo developed Communication Dashboards for Leaders—what I’m calling “Narrative Dashboards”—to help teams move past output metrics and toward decisions that support business priorities.
Your dashboards should help leaders understand what’s working, what’s not landing, and what to do next.
What you leave off the dashboard matters as much as what you put on it. Choose your focus and data based on where communication can make the biggest impact.
The following example comes with permission from Crescenzo based on work for one of her clients. I’m presenting the framework in text. Her infographic versions—designed for live delivery—are available through the Crescenzo Communications Strategy Studio community.
Strategic priority: Grow market share
Audience 1: Desk-based employees
Audience 2: Employees not at desks
Same strategy, message, and channel. But manufacturing employees don’t sit at computers. The email barely reached them, and the results showed it. Time for a new approach.
Note: Communication alone doesn’t grow market share by 17%. But when communication and business outcomes move together, it suggests the strategy is reaching the people who execute it.
These frameworks give you the decision points to act on:
The organization that listens and acts on what it hears has an advantage.
Mike Klein recently wrote that internal comms pros must move beyond engagement metrics and link their work to operational impact. Finding the right data and connecting the right dots isn’t easy, but that’s the job.
The engine and the car. Bill Quirke, Communicating Corporate Change: A Practical Guide to Communication and Corporate Strategy, McGraw-Hill, 1996, p181. Quirke argued that IC teams default to measuring communication activity rather than business direction—a pattern the Gallagher data confirms three decades later. For a wide-ranging conversation with Quirke on the evolution of IC, listen to Katie Macaulay’s interview: “Episode 28 – The Godfather of IC,” The Internal Comms Podcast, 4/29/20.
The measurement gap. Gallagher Employee Communications Report 2026. Based on responses from more than 1,300 communicators and HR professionals across 40 countries, the report finds most teams still focus on basic activity metrics rather than business impact.
Do-feel-know and The Mini Brief. Adapted from Sue Dewhurst and Liam Fitzpatrick’s “Successful Employee Communications: A Practitioner’s Guide to Tools, Models and Best Practice for Internal Communication,” 2nd Ed., Kogan Page, 2022. The do-feel-know framework appears throughout the book as a foundation for campaign planning and measurement. For an introduction to their approach, listen to “Textbook IC: rewriting comms for a new era,” The Internal Comms Podcast, 5/11/22.
“Feel” considerations. Ellen Griley, LinkedIn comment, 2/19/26. Griley, a trauma-informed communications leader, argues that the “feel” objectives IC pros default to—inspired, proud, motivated, excited—assume a nervous system ready to receive and mobilize. The shift she advocates: design for trust, groundedness, quiet curiosity, and steadiness. “These aren’t lesser emotions; they’re the conditions under which people can absorb information, make meaning, and act with intention. Calm arrives when the nervous system gets a signal that it’s safe to settle. Some of this will be in our control as communicators; some up to leadership.” For more on her approach, see Equilibrious Communications.
The campaign brief. For a concise guide to building a more comprehensive internal comms brief, see Janet Hitchen’s article on collaborative briefing: “To brief or not to brief…,” LinkedIn, 11/14/23.
KPIs in name only. Michael Schrage and David Kiron, “Leading with Next-Generation Key Performance Indicators,” MIT Sloan Management Review, 6/26/18 (paywalled). The authors found that most organizations treat KPIs as compliance exercises rather than strategic commitments, a reality IC pros navigate when the business metrics they need to reference don’t yet exist or aren’t well-defined.
Reporting for Action. Dewhurst/Fitzpatrick, Successful Employee Communications, p237. The “standard report format” is their term for a structured conversation framework designed to focus leadership discussions on actions and improvements rather than outputs. I adapted their framework.
Crescenzo on dashboards. Cindy Crescenzo, author interview, 1/28/26. Dashboard framework and client example shared with permission. Crescenzo developed Communication Dashboards for Leaders through her work with Fortune 500 and large enterprise clients over two decades. For more, read “Communication Dashboards for Leaders: What They Actually Want,” Low-Hanging Fruit, 1/20/26. Infographic versions of her dashboards are available through the Strategy Studio community.
The case for operational effectiveness. Mike Klein, “The Big Shift: An Internal Communication Business Case That Actually Works,” Strategic, 11/26/25. Klein argues that the engagement paradigm gave IC weak business cases, and that the profession must reframe around organizational effectiveness and decision coordination.
“Winning” as strategy. The before/during/after framing in this article is about helping companies succeed against their strategic priorities. The language of “winning” in business strategy traces most directly to Roger Martin’s Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works (with A.G. Lafley), Harvard Business Review Press, 2013. For a useful summary, see Sachin Rekhi, “Playing to Win by Roger Martin,” sachinrekhi.com, 1/11/25.
Listening as competitive advantage. Mike Pounsford, Kevin Ruck, and Howard Krais, Leading the Listening Organisation: Creating Organisations that Flourish, Routledge, 2024. Based on research across 500 organizations, the authors argue that organizations flourish when leaders not only listen, but respond visibly to what employees say.
Claude, ChatGPT, and Workshop’s Cici were used to assist with the analysis, rewriting, and proofing of this article. The final content reflects my expertise, perspective, and intended meaning. I take full responsibility for its accuracy and presentation.
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Greg Howe is a US-based executive communication advisor who helps leaders turn strategy into action inside complex, growing organizations.
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