Measuring what matters: quantifiable and quantified data and metrics to drive business outcomes

By Katharina Auer, Strategic columnist.

Internal Communications is not about sending messages or acting as an internal mailbox, our role is to help drive behaviors, align the organization to a shared direction and goals, and demonstrate our impact on business KPIs.

Unfortunately, this is not yet everyday practice among internal or other communicators. We still see people reporting the number of newsletters they sent, how many townhalls they had, how many media releases they dispatched – none of which are metrics. They are activities, hopefully to support business goals, but they don’t measure their contribution to goals.

Outcomes vs outputs: an important distinction

Outcomes reflect the impact of communications on people’s knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and how those elements contributed to a business key performance indicators (KPIs) or business outcomes. Which is not just about Communications team activities, but also leader & manager communication effectiveness, and general communication in the organization.

Take for example employee engagement (= commitment = outcome): engagement is a key driver of organizational performance, as well as people’s intent to stay and advocacy/eNPS. Engagement can also have a direct impact on KPIs such as health & safety or sales, for example. How? Using employee survey data, you can establish the co-relation between engagement and performance; you can then establish the correlation between engagement and communications (line manager/team leader; team communications). There is a lot of research on the value of engagement on business performance.

In past research in this area, we established a direct correlation between safety performance and engagement, and then the impact of leader/manager communication effectiveness and communication impact on engagement. The teams with the best safety performance had higher engagement scores and better team communication, led by the leader/manager. The same applied in a sales environment, where I did similar research. So, not only did we establish the impact of effective communication on these KPIs, but we could also take learning from the high-performance teams and share them with the lower performance teams.

We can take this and other data from our employee surveys, and any other data we have on communications, such as people’s views & preferences, and run key driver or co-relation analysis in areas where we want to find out more – for example line of sight from individual work to organizational goals; eNPS (employee net promoter score of the company); intent to stay; perceptions on company priority topics, whether our content is relevant to individuals. AI makes this even easier these days, as you can upload the data and ask your GenAI platform to do this analysis for you. You can also use GenAI for other areas, such as sentiment analysis.

And we can do simple outcomes research with polls/quizzes to test for awareness/understanding/actions – depending on the goals we set right at the beginning of the program or initiative. At major events, you can ask delegates what their three top take-aways were, what three messages they will communicate to their teams. If they don’t play back the desired messages, actions or takeaways, the desired outcomes weren’t achieved, and more work is needed. You can run quizzes to test for desired awareness or understanding and work with feedback. Post survey focus groups can help us understand why people answered the way they did and maybe even do some root cause analysis and so identify follow up actions based on quantitative (the survey data) and qualitative data.

We can also calculate return on investment (ROI) on campaigns and initiatives, using any costs we incurred to produce the campaign/initiative/event and related collateral, and convert our own time, colleagues’ and contributors’ time into monetary value, and then track the total (time and money) against the campaign/program performance. This is not only useful to show the business contribution or impact, but also extremely useful to stop non-value adding work. If the cost outweighs participation or campaign/program results, it should be revisited or stopped. Important to note: when working with ROI, it’s best to start in small steps, by project or by campaign – don’t try to measure ROI on everything in one go.

Output metrics are those on our activities, for example opening rates for a newsletter, downloads of materials, click-throughs on stories, social rankings (engagement) with internal or external posts (reactions, comments). They have their place as part of our metrics, but they don’t show us if we have achieved our goals; output/activities are what we do to deliver on our goals and the activity data can help improve our messaging, tools, channels, collateral, activities. 

Barriers?

We may not have all the data, but most organizations have all the data we need. Work with HR, IT and data & analytics teams to see what relevant data exists, and how IC could use it.

Too overwhelming? Start with ‘bite sized’ chunks, for example pilot programs to test measurement approaches before scaling up. 

Conclusion

There is a lot more we could include here, but I tried to focus on the essentials. The ability to measure what matters is more important than ever. By focusing on outcomes, Internal Communications professionals can clearly show the impact of effective communications and focus on what adds the most value to employees and the organization. At the same time, it allows us to stop anything that does not add value or only creates noise. 

Metrics are not just numbers. They help us track the strength of our culture, clarity of vision and direction, the credibility and effectiveness of our messages. So, measure selectively and wisely, focus on outcomes and communicate with purpose.

Written by: Editor