Measurement.

For many years, measurement has been a source of frustration when it comes to internal communication and organizational alignment.

Embedded analytics and easy online survey questions can be helpful in adding numbers to the internal communication story. But using them without strategic intent and thought makes them a potential trap for internal communication pros.

It’s a trap that can actually limit the power and impact of internal communication measurement activity by emphasizing what’s easier to measure over what’s meaningful to measure.

To avoid this trap, here are some measurement tips that will help your objectives and ambitions drive the process, rather than have it be driven by what’s easier to measure.

• Drive the measurement agenda

Doing that is simple – choose what gets measured, or at least make sure that some of the things that get measured are actionable, and show a direct relationship between your contribution and the organization’s results.

• Don’t benchmark, baseline.

There’s another trap that a lot of organizations fall into – the desire to benchmark performance and attitudes relative to “similar” companies – sector competitors, other large companies based in the same country being popular targets.

A real pitfall of benchmarking is the need to use common questions (or, even a common research vendor) rather than to ask questions that are specific to an organization’s own reality and context.

Baselining is far more important – asking a given question before the organization or its communicators starts take action to address the issue being examined. Good baselining and tracking allows the ability to measure the impact of your involvement over time – and also the impact of specific one-off interventions.

• Use different types of questions and measures

There are a lot of different data sources available to an enterprising communicator.

Aside from embedded analytics, one can use surveys to address different types of questions: open-ended questions (where participants are given limited guidance about answers), open-ended lists (where participants are asked to supply several different answers), closed-ended questions where participants select the “right” answer, and ranked lists which test alignment in direct way. Add in the ability to monitor enterprise search terms on an ongoing basis – a potent source of information that can be tapped into silently but powerfully.

What to not do.

Don’t ask people what they think they know.

Earlier in my career, when I was working on organizational change programs with certain (nameless) large consultancies, I was stunned by the surveys they used.

They would ask questions like “Have you heard about the change?” and my personal favorite: “Do you understand the change?: • Aside from being non-specific about what “change” they were asking about, these questions asked participants to out themselves as ignorant, stupid or both.

Don’t do this.

Better to ask another type of question and see how close people are to the official explanation of what they are being asked about.

Measurement is an activity that has tremendous potential to support internal communicators in delivering more effectively, and help them prove their value more convincingly to senior leadership and management.

But to do that successfully, communication pros need to avoid the “measurement trap” that easily accessed data with limited relevance can set.

By following these four steps, IC pros can raise their game – and have the words and numbers at hand that demonstrate their impact.

If you want to navigate and find opportunities in the worlds of measurement, strategy, content or messaging in internal communication, start with my measurement masterclass.

Or, if you’d like to talk, send me a note at mike.klein@changingtheterms.com.

Insights, Internal Communication Strategy

Internal Communication: What’s the “tipping point” for small and medium-sized businesses?

July 29, 2023August 23, 2023 mikeklein

How big of an organization do you need to be to have a professional approach to internal communication?

It’s a question I hear from time to time when I talk with people in startups and other small-to-medium enterprises.

There’s no easy answer — it’s a proverbial “how long is a piece of string” question. But it’s one well worth exploring, and perhaps earlier than you may think.

A good starting point is 150, the so-called “Dunbar Number” reflecting social scientist Robin Dunbar’s assessment that the normal number of extended associates an individual can personally engage with totals between 100 and 200. Now, social media allows individuals to engage digitally with many more, but as organizational life consists of a mix of physical and digital relationships, I see 150 as a good starting point for exploring the question.

Of course, not all businesses with 150 employees need either professional IC leadership or an internal comms platform. If all employees do roughly similar work out of a single location, word of mouth and perhaps a few formal channels can keep the conversation flowing and help keep work aligned with objectives.

But if you get beyond 150, there are a number of conversations worth asking.

What Is Your Footprint?

The more dispersed an organization is, the more it can benefit from a structured approach to internal communication. In a more virtual organization, internal communication professionals and platforms can combine a virtual infrastructure that aids cohesion, with an organizational narrative that aids alignment and coherence.

Dispersion does not have to be global. Research done by organizational network analysis specialists Innovisor shows that the degree of interaction between employees at two locations in the same city is often minimal — and unlikely to happen spontaneously.

Coherence And Cohesion

In small, global organizations, a planned and professional approach to internal communication can have a centering effect, driving prioritization while facilitating interaction between dispersed peers. In knowledge-intensive organizations, this approach can also support professional collaboration while providing a context that collaboration tools alone can’t provide.

A consumer-grade platform, in turn, is a major hygiene factor for millennial and younger employees who think in terms of their networks and connections, and expect the intimacy of human narratives and the immediacy they experience from the apps and platforms they use outside the workplace.

Employees As Communicators

An approach to internal communication combining professional support and a consumer-grade platform also puts an organization into position to integrate the natural communication roles of employees in a more cohesive way. Employees not only execute their own jobs, they also talk with each other about what is going on in the company, and they represent the organization to their families, friends, customers and industry peers.

While it is possible to allow people to “get on with it” with zero or amateur guidance, the communication roles of employees are replete with risk, not only in terms of their possible release of sensitive information, but also because of the likelihood of inconsistent or uninspiring messages about the organization reaching potential customers, recruits or investors.

Proliferation Vs Prioritization

In a high-energy small company, one challenge is that everything everyone is working on is “very important”. Without coordination, discipline, and, ideally, strategy, an endless array of initiatives and projects will compete for attention to the detriment of performance. When each has equal access to organizational attention, the problem is compounded. This is a key reason not to invest in internal communication software platforms unless there is clear accountability for governance and access.

The need for discipline and prioritization calls not only for internal communication support, but ideally for an experienced professional capable of interacting with other stakeholders as a peer and with sufficient business acumen to help drive the integration of communication with business activity.

Avoiding A False Economy

Small-company IC roles are often pitched at junior levels for cost reasons. But the weak position of inexperienced staff from which to challenge stakeholders on prioritization issues creates a false economy. If cost is an issue, much of a smaller organization’s IC needs can be filled by an experienced IC consultant or freelancer working part-time, once they’ve become sufficiently familiar with the company, its mission, operations and commercial context.

Communication At The Heart Of The Business

If the value of a business is tied to its reputation, the smoothness of its operations, and the extent to which customers believe its offerings are worthy of a premium, then professionalizing internal communication is a way to move that whole agenda forward. To be sure, putting these essentials in the hands of an intern or leaving it to employee goodwill may initially seem financially attractive. But a more committed approach offers an opportunity to turn IC into a source of real advantage, while managing some fundamental risks.

Insights, Internal Communication Strategy

Making measurement your most effective internal communication tool right now: it’s easier than you think.

July 29, 2023August 23, 2023 mikeklein

It’s time – right now – for internal communication pros to look beyond the embedded analytic tools they may have access to — and step beyond basing their measurement approach on such readings as “click rates” and “open rates.”

Instead, there is a golden opportunity to collect, analyze, and present measures that are actually aligned to business performance — providing data that will mean something to business leaders, potentially even prompting them to act.

Start by assessing the actual gaps

The most important thing to do — if you can get permission — is to ask the two questions which can yield the most complete picture of an organization’s situation in the simplest possible way:

What are the three biggest priorities facing your organization?
What are the three most important things you are working on at the moment in your job?

The power of these questions is not in the number of responses but in the richness of the open responses.

Because participants aren’t being guided toward specific answers, it becomes possible to analyze both what’s said and what’s not said. The ways in which things are said also become crucial findings that can be shared powerfully with senior management.

By counting and categorizing the words that are used, words can thus be transformed into strikingly powerful numbers.

Putting Do-Know-Feel-Say at the heart of your measurement approach

Once you’ve used the “Two Questions” to assess your messaging gap, the effort moves to what needs to be done to close that gap, and how to measure the extent to which communication can demonstrate its impact on closing that gap.

Fortunately, there is an all-purpose approach that anyone could use to drive this analysis — as it can be used for driving the strategy for addressing it.

It’s called Do-Know-Feel-Say.

As a communication leader, you need to focus this measurement narrative on those things which communication can impact: what people do, what they know, how they feel, and what they say — and the extent those things can influence the objective you are supporting.

Then, you use or develop measures that can illustrate the relationship between those objectives and your influence.

Say, for instance, if your objective is to influence something tangible — say the daily use of hand sanitizer in your offices.

Your main focus is on monitoring the use of hand sanitizer, and tracking whether there are any changes in sanitizer use in relation to the communication activity that promotes the use of hand sanitizer.

The story is not one of: “do people use hand sanitizer” but “how has internal communication influenced the increase in hand sanitizer use and why it’s a good investment.”

Baselining beats benchmarking

Making this kind of story work requires baselining rather than benchmarking.

There’s an obsession in the business world about “benchmarking” — trying to compare how we are doing against performance on similar measures by other organizations, usually those we compete against or admire

But benchmarked comparisons are often difficult or even contrived, when you factor in differences as basic as location and compensation and deeper issues like corporate and national culture, workplace strategy and the mechanical and logistical differences between the businesses.

Baselining, which is the process of tracking the impact of changes in activity on the organization itself, suffers no such ambiguities.

Baselining gives you the ability to measure progress over time. It also allows you to pinpoint the relationship between specific communication activities and the actions and opinions being monitored, producing data that will bring the narrative of your impact to life.

Baselining is not to be confused with benchmarking.

Where do embedded analytics fall into all this?

There’s nothing wrong with using embedded analytic tools. The problem emerges when the embedded measures are presented as important without being connected with what the organization is actually trying to achieve.

It’s like measuring the progress of an airplane using the speedometer, but without looking at the fuel gauge, the direction, the altitude and above all, the actual destination.

Once you’ve done the work and the thinking about which Do-Know-Feel-Say outcomes you are out to achieve, looking at the embedded analytics to assess the impact of specific interventions makes far more sense than using those analytics outside of an outcome-driven context.

If you are using your comms platform or intranet as a main platform for driving messaging to encourage behavior change, click rates, open rates and “time spent on the page” can offer a highly effective early warning system to determine whether additional efforts will be required to get specific desired results.

More interestingly, your embedded analytics can give you insights into the quality of your readership when conbined with actual qualitative data and performance metrics. When the embedded analytics numbers are low but participation in the actual outcome is high or there is high recall of the actual messages, you are actually making a case that your readers are influential and drive behavior through word-of-mouth.

Why can measurement become your most powerful strategic tool?

Your measurement narrative is critical to bringing your leaders into the story being told by your words and numbers — and also for punching up the importance of your numbers to achieving the business’ outcomes.

It’s also a defining way to help your own team and stakeholders focus on activities that can be demonstrated to have direct impact on your measures — and to deprioritize activities, initiatives and spend that don’t.

THE MEASUREMENT MASTERCLASS

To learn how to go beyond the use of embedded analytics and other legacy metrics like employee engagement scores, and measure the impact your internal communication is actually having; my Measurement Masterclass offers two hours of focused training that will give you many more options for collecting the data you need to make your case effectively.

To find out about the next public session, or to register, visit www.changingtheterms.com/masterclass.

For more information on company-specific courses, please message me at Mike.Klein@ChangingTheTerms.com.

Insights, Internal Communication Strategy

Is it time to replace “magic numbers” with a “magic question” when it comes to alignment and engagement?

July 29, 2023August 23, 2023 mikeklein

OVER the last twenty-plus years, organizations have been focused on finding a single “magic number” as the ultimate gauge of organizational health.

The two main candidates have been the “employee engagement (EE) score: or an “employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS).”

But faced with systemic downward trends in both of those measures?—?could it be that we are focusing on the wrong numbers?

There are two key problems with EE and eNPS scores. The first is that both are based on sentiments?—?how employees feel?—?rather than on their actual words, actions, or priorities. Secondly, both are aggregates, combining employee attitudes towards positives and problems rather than separating them out so they can be targeted and addressed.

Time for a Magic Question?

To address those problems, I propose something new: a “magic question”.

And that question is:

“What are the top three priorities facing your organization?”

This question is “magic” for a number of reasons.

The answers tell us whether employees, leaders, and managers give official priorities the same level of importance.

The answers identify hidden or “unofficial” priorities?—?which can either reflect gaps between leaders’ words and actions or highlight chronic or systemic issues that get in the way of aligning employee actions with organizational objectives. These are not things that tend to be asked about in engagement surveys or addressed directly by eNPS scores.

Even with stated or “official” priorities, conscious or subconscious messages may emerge as perceived priorities even if not expressed officially. “Cost cutting” is one that is particularly pervasive. Macroeconomic headwinds (inflation, supply chain, labor market tightness) also may emerge as being more critical than the organization’s stated agenda, and workplace hygiene factors (communication, leadership quality) often surface as urgent for employees even if not on the organization’s official list.

Turning those answers into numerical data can send clear messages to management about disconnects.

When communication leaders and business leaders have differences of opinion, the business leader’s opinion prevails. It’s a game of “rock-scissors-paper” where the power of the business leader trumps the subjective expertise of the communication leader. But bringing numerical data to the table, like saying that the business leaders’ top three priorities don’t even make the employees’ top-ten list, adds some “rock” to the opinion of the communicator that a business leader will be harder pressed to ignore.

The strongest quotes provided can be useful in confronting the assumptions held by leaders about key issues. Quotes like “everything is treated as a crisis here”, “overwhelm?—?too many projects and priorities”, or “attrition in critical service areas and locations” can focus attention in ways that more diplomatically worded interpretations and answers can’t. They illustrate the real word of mouth, which, if left unchecked, can quickly dominate the organization’s agenda.

Even if the answers are collected from a subset of employees, the answers reflect real comments which have likely been shared informally inside and outside the company. And, once quantified, answers to the “magic question” can form the basis for turning internal communication from a cost center to an ROI engine by allowing the financial impact of comms interventions to be tracked, correlated and valued appropriately.

The “magic question”?—?by creating space for open, unaided feedback that can be easily categorized, scored and ranked?—?can provide actionable and targeted insights. In doing so, it provides an opportunity to enable communication leaders to deliver real, measurable and monetizable impact.

“The Magic Question” forms the basis for Mike’s Measurement Masterclass, which is being offered next on 22 August. www.changingtheterms.com/masterclass-measurement.

This article appeared previously in Strategic Magazine and Medium.

Tag: internal communication

How to avoid screwing up internal communication measurement

Making measurement your most effective internal communication tool right now: it’s easier than you think.

Is it time to replace “magic numbers” with a “magic question” when it comes to alignment and engagement?

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