Internal communicators are often stuck in the middle of proving the business value and impact of comms to senior leaders and lacking the time and resource to measure their performance. This is where measuring internal comms performance with the right metrics comes into play. It’s also important to measure how your internal comms campaigns are performing so you can optimise your budget, time and resources!
Metrics to measure for reach
Reach is about measuring how many employees accessed your communications. This will be especially important if you have a distributed workforce across frontline, in-office and remote.
Measuring reach helps you identify which communication channels work for your workforce. Whether it’s the intranet, email, digital signage or corporate screensaver, measuring how each channel is used is the first step in understanding reach.
Employee adoption rate
Employee adoption rate answers the question “How many people are even engaged?” To measure it, calculate the percentage of employees that have an account on a particular channel. The formula is:
Employee adoption rate = (Number of employees/total number of employees) x 100
For example, in an organisation of 500 staff, 300 employees created an account on Workplace from Meta. The employee adoption rate is 60%.
Corporate noise makes it difficult for internal communicators to reach everyone. Measuring employee adoption rates tells you which channels you should be using in your comms outreach efforts, and which channels can be optimised or removed from your channel mix.
Open rate
This metric tells you what percentage of employees are opening your internal communications. Usually, this is used to measure how many times a newsletter, email or intranet page was opened. The formula is:
Open rate = (Number of users who have accessed the message/number of eligible users) x 100
For example, you send an email to the manufacturing department of 1000 staff and you see that 750 of them have opened it. The open rate is 75%.
Foot traffic
Some communication channels like emails and employee apps will have reporting built into them. For communication channels like digital signage screens, you’ll have to be creative. For that, we’ll take a cue from how marketers measure the reach for outdoor advertising campaigns!
To measure the potential reach of your digital signage screen, you need to know how many people will pass it daily – a digital signage
screen placed in the lunchroom is more effective and valuable than one placed in a hallway with barely any foot traffic. If you already know
how much foot traffic areas of your office get, great! If not, we’ll have to go back to basics by counting with physical clickers or
analysing camera footage.
Optimise digital signage placement by accurately measuring foot traffic in the area
Metrics to measure for engagement
Engagement metrics tell you how well your workforce is interacting with your messages. It can help you determine how many people are seeing your content, what they have to say about it, which channels they prefer to receive messages on and more.
Click-through rates
After sending a newsletter blast to employees, check the click-through rate to tell you if they’ve actually read your email and wanted to learn more or take action. The formula is:
Click-through rate = (total number of clicks/total number of opens) x 100
For example, you sent an email inviting everyone to morning tea with a link to RSVP. Your email was opened 150 times and the link was clicked 90 times. The click-through rate is 60%.
The click-through rate can help you spot gaps in your internal comms strategy. If click-through rates are really high on emails but low on your intranet, it would suggest that your workforce is more active and receptive via emails.
Unique page views
Unique page views are one of the most simple and effective KPIs you can track. It will tell you what content employees are looking at and what is most popular. If you have pages or articles with low view counts, check if the content is still relevant. If the page is important and relevant, but has low page views, explore ways to make them more visible, such as sharing it on digital signage screens with a QR code that can take you straight to the page!
QR codes performance
QR codes are growing immensely in popularity. Internal communication teams use QR codes to provide instant access to digital content. They are a great way to link staff through to policies or full articles within the intranet, registering for an event, competition or completing a survey.
You can track most QR codes like you would hyperlinks – unique scans and number of total scans; scans by location; and scans by mobiles devices, operating systems and browsers.
Keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming Vibe feature this year that will allow you to generate QR codes for your slides, and track their performance – without the use of a third-party tool.
Metrics to measure for outcomes
Internal communications play a vital role in employee retention, employee engagement, brand marketing, recruitment, rewards, and more. Measuring outcomes tells you how your communications affect the business overall.
Employee turnover rate
Employee turnover rate is defined as the percentage of employees who leave an organisation during a certain period of time. The formula is:
Annual employee turnover rate = (Number of employees who left/Average number of employees) x 100
The average number of employees is the difference between the number of employees at the beginning of the period and the end of the period
Working together with HR, you’ll be able to find out which types of employees are leaving, why they’re leaving and if there are any trends. This can inform your internal communications strategy. For example, you’ve been told that young staff are leaving because they don’t feel like there are enough upskilling and training opportunities. Upon further investigation, you realise it’s because not many people know of your organisation’s upskilling opportunities. Your future internal comms campaigns can focus on promoting these initiatives across the organisation so that all staff can take advantage of more training.
Event sign ups
Track the total number of registrations for an event to give you an idea of employee engagement. This metric also allows you to retarget more effectively in the future, give you a reliable idea of what types of events work and which topics resonate with your workforce. Plus, it’s one of those metrics you can take to senior leadership team to show them how aligned your workforce is.
Employee advocacy
Happy and engaged employees are more likely to be brand advocates and sing your praises to their friends, families and social network. Encourage your workforce to repost company content on social media, using a dedicated hashtag that you can track.
Tracking employee advocacy can inform how you promote your company culture, advertise internal job vacancies, engage with employees and more. Vibe’s social media slides are a great way to enable staff to share their own content such as photos, videos, and social media posts. This creates a sense of ownership and increases employee engagement.
Employee advocacy could be key in combatting labour shortages
Employee surveys
Surveys like employee satisfaction surveys and pulses are great ways to gauge how well your internal comms strategy is doing. It’s especially important to get an idea of employee sentiment on channels you can’t directly measure, such as corporate screensavers and digital signage. The key is to ask specific questions, such as how often they notice messages on the corporate screensaver or the screen in the lunchroom, testing their recall on specific campaigns, and what kind of content they find most useful.
Focus groups
It’s important to get a mix of quantitative data such as open rates and page views, and qualitative data such as employee sentiment, to get a clear picture of your internal communications channels.
Focus groups with a small, select group of staff generate conversations that dig into issues. This will give you insight into how they feel about your comms, what channels they find most effective, what content works best for them and what changes need to be made to improve engagement.
Combine hard data with employee feedback to improve internal comms
Where to from here?
Now that you’re armed with 11 essential internal communications metrics and KPIs, you can start measuring how your internal comms campaigns are performing. You can do this annually, at regular intervals (e.g. each quarter), before a new campaign and after a campaign.
Use your insights to benchmark how effective your communication channels are. From there, you’ll be able to perfect what’s working well, and conduct experiments that will improve the delivery and engagement of your messages.
