Top Tips & Traps – Employee Focus Groups

Top Tips & Traps – Employee Focus Groups

Tim Vaughan
Tim VaughanEditorial Director

Access Guide

By submitting this form you consent to receive marketing content from Poppulo. You can withdraw your consent at any time.

About this Guide

Focus groups are a great way of finding out what your employees really think. Therefore, Internal Communications expert Angela Sinickas presents the tips and traps for conducting employee focus groups in this guide. You will learn:

  • Who to select
  • What questions to ask
  • How to present findings

One of the keys to a successful communication plan is to make sure you have the input of stakeholders before developing a plan in the first place. Try doing it without stakeholder engagement and you can look forward to having a communications disaster on your hands. Quite simply, it’s doomed to fail. But of course it needn’t be like that, and with proper, careful, and informed planning, involving people from across the organization, you are setting a very solid foundation for a successful communication plan.

In Part 2 of The Ultimate Guide to Measuring Internal Communications, measurement expert Angela Sinickas takes readers through the essential measures to ensure effective stakeholder engagement, including pre-planning research and pre-testing of potential communications. Angela is one of the world’s leading authorities on measuring the effectiveness of communications and her knowledge and vast experience is evident in her advice on how to conduct employee focus groups. Her Tips & Traps are invaluable because as we know, if done well, employee focus groups can be hugely positive but if not, it can be a very poor experience with the potential to undo the best of plans.

Related Content

The Internal Communications Measurement Masterclass & Playbook

The Internal Communications Measurement Masterclass & Playbook

Internal communicators measure plenty. Open rates, click-throughs, attendance, views, and reach—most IC teams have dashboards full of the stuff. What they struggle with is proving that any of it made a difference to the business. And business impact is the only measurement their leaders genuinely care about. It's a gap most IC practitioners feel acutely. Gallagher's 2026 Employee Communications Report found that seven in 10 internal communicators still measure only basic activity metrics, and fewer than one in eight measure business impact. Measurement is the weakest capability in their global readiness model, and teams relying only on activity data are the ones struggling most to demonstrate their value. This is a two-part guide built to close that gap. Part One is the Masterclass. It sets out why outcome measurement matters, the frameworks that make it manageable, and the principles separating measurement that proves impact from measurement that just fills a dashboard. Part Two is the Playbook. It's the templates, the worked example, and the sample dashboard—the practical tools you'll need for a successful comms campaign. Read the Masterclass for the thinking. The Playbook is where you'll find the tools to put it into practice. We hope you find them useful. Tim Vaughan Editorial Director, Poppulo

Download Guide
The Internal Communications Measurement Masterclass & Playbook—Part Two: The Playbook

The Internal Communications Measurement Masterclass & Playbook—Part Two: The Playbook

Many IC teams measure and report on what's easy to count: email open rates, video views, all-hands attendances. Outputs that leadership don’t much care about. They want to know whether communications actually changed anything—whether people understood something important and whether behavior looked different afterward. Leaders want proof of impact, they want to see results. Outputs don't give them that. Outcomes do. Part One of this paper, the Measurement Masterclass, clearly showed why. Here, Part Two gives you the tools to measure outcomes: four templates you can fill in for your own campaigns, plus a full worked example showing all four completed together, so you can see how they fit before you use them yourself. What’s inside: The Know/Feel/Do Framework. Defines what a specific audience needs to know, feel, and do as a result of your communication—specific enough to measure. One template per audience segment. The Outcome/Output/Measurement Plan. For each outcome, sets out the communication tactic you'll use and how you'll measure whether it worked. This is the template you'll use most. The SMART Objectives Worksheet. A short exercise for turning a vague goal into a specific, measurable one, with a number and a deadline attached. The Power/Influence Grid. Maps your audience by power and attitude—champions, supporters, blockers, detractors—so you know where to put your effort. A worked example. All four templates completed end-to-end for a company-wide AI policy rollout, so you can see the whole process applied to one campaign from start to finish. A sample measurement dashboard. A one-page example of how to present outcome data to leadership. Written by Andrew Hubbard, Senior Director of Communications at Poppulo, and Joanna Hall of Afire Consulting.

Download Guide
The AI Toolkit for Internal Communications

The AI Toolkit for Internal Communications

Internal communication is under real pressure. IC teams are expected to support leaders, shape culture, and deliver relevant, personalized communication to an increasingly diverse audience—all while operating at greater speed and scale than ever before. AI arrives at the right moment. It doesn’t replace communicators; it elevates them. Applied well, AI sharpens the fundamentals of effective communication: diagnosing issues, shaping the narrative, guiding leaders, and delivering messages that connect people to purpose and progress. At its best, AI accelerates drafting, adapts content for different formats, improves accessibility, and surfaces insights about what’s landing. Without governance, though, it can create noise or risk. The opportunity for IC teams is to bring AI in thoughtfully, with governance and human judgment at the center. This guide shows how to do exactly that. Inside, you’ll find practical guidance on when to use AI, where humans remain essential, how to establish guardrails, how to prompt effectively, and how to scale AI responsibly across channels and teams.

Download Guide

Join The Mailing List to get The Latest Resources