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What You Need to Know About Measuring Employee Communications Impact

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 — July 25th, 2022

What You Need to Know About Measuring Employee Communications Impact

When done right, HR management plays a key role in improving employee performance to help achieve top business priorities.

But if these priorities aren’t properly communicated to employees, there’s a good chance that you’re missing out on opportunities to more efficiently achieve these goals.

Fortunately, many of these priorities can be tied to key performance indicators (KPIs) and monitored over time to identify areas for improvement and help support business goals.

If you’re interested in reading our Ultimate Guide to Employee Communications and KPIs for HR Management, you can check it out here. But if you want a quick run-through of the key takeaways we’ve got them for you here.

Aligning HR Challenges with Internal Comms Strategies

It may seem obvious that employee communications should be a key business priority, but studies show that HR managers don’t even consider it in their top five.

However, employee communications can play a key role in overcoming HR challenges if HR and IC teams align their strategies.

The Ultimate Guide to Measuring Internal Communications

In order to understand where internal comms fits into an HR management strategy, it’s important to identify the challenges that you’re facing, and then look at the role that employee communications can play in overcoming those challenges. They include:

1. Engaging a hybrid workforce

2. Attracting talent in a work-from-anywhere world

3. Offering training and professional development opportunities

4. Promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)

5. Supporting employee health and wellness

6. Embracing inevitable change

By strategically aligning HR departments with internal comms, businesses can make employee engagement a key priority by leveraging their shared goals. Working together to understand the needs of employees and developing engaging, relevant content can lead to a more effective employee communications strategy—and add value to the business.

Consider These 4 Things When Developing an HR Comms Strategy

After identifying key HR challenges and aligning them with other business priorities, it’s time to start thinking about the other factors involved in developing an HR comms strategy.

1. Channels Required: Most businesses today have employees dispersed across a variety of locations and working from home, remotely, or both. Because of this, companies need to rely on a variety of comms channels including email, digital signage, mobile devices, company Intranet, and collaboration tools to reach every employee where they’re at.

To identify which comms channels are needed for your business, check out our employee comms planning templates here.

2. People Involved: Getting stakeholders involved outside of HR and IC is a critical part of making internal comms as effective as possible. You not only need to consider who is on the receiving end of different comms, but also who should be delivering the message in order to make sure it’s heard. This could be the CEO, another member of the executive team, a department manager, or someone else entirely.

3. Mediums Used: All employees have different preferences when it comes to the way they learn and absorb information. It's important to offer a variety of content mediums to meet the different learning styles of employees—including visual, aural, verbal, physical, and more. Providing a variety of comms mediums and collecting feedback around what is and isn’t working will help improve the retention of key information.

4. Frequency of Comms: Consistent communication varies by company and industry, so each organization must consider the frequency of communication needed to ensure information is well-received and understood.

Giving your employees the opportunity to choose how frequently they receive comms is a great way to ensure they aren’t overwhelmed with information.

Use KPIs and People Analytics to Improve Continuously

The best way to identify opportunities to improve comms in your organization is to collect data from tools, surveys, interactions, and more, then review those analytics for trends and weaknesses. Some of the KPIs to include are:

  • Employee productivity rate
  • Email click-through rates
  • Training cost per employee
  • Adoption rates for new tools
  • Employee turnover

By focusing on the KPIs that align with your business goals, making small adjustments to your HR comms strategy based on trends in those KPIs, and measuring the impact of those changes over time, you can determine the variables involved in any issues and eventually, correct them.

When developing an HR communications plan, it’s critical to first identify top HR challenges, consider the role that IC can play in solving those, and leverage KPIs to understand the impact of internal comms on HR priorities over time.

By prioritizing employee communications and effectively leveraging the right analytics, HR teams can improve employee engagement, reduce attrition, attract top talent, and add value to the business.

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