Feature
Self-awareness is an important skill in the workplace — with awareness of your strengths and weaknesses, you can maintain effectiveness or drive improvements.
Internal communications teams may also find this skill worthwhile. Taking stock of current practices and initiatives, and how impactful they are, not only opens the door for future growth, but helps justify continued investment in your department.
The good news is there’s no shortage of metrics or tools internal comms can turn to. However, it might take a more thoughtful approach to stay on track and avoid getting lost in the numbers.
What Makes 'Great' Internal Communications?
To measure communications performance effectively, let's first take a broader look at what great internal comms means. Unsurprisingly, experts say there’s no one driving goal, and what matters to one company may be less relevant to another.
“Improving overall communication throughout the organization is one goal, but I also feel that getting the right information to people, in the right way, and at the right time is just as important,” said Suzie Robinson, an intranet expert and digital workplace consultant at ClearBox Consulting Ltd.
Melanie Bochmann, senior director of corporate communications at Staffbase, said that internal comms can look to both employees and the broader business as important stakeholders.
Internal comms can power a more engaged, trusting workforce, which reduces turnover and boosts culture. On the other hand, internal comms also support clear communication of goals.
“[Internal comms] play a vital role in helping employees understand the company’s objectives and how their roles contribute to achieving these goals,” Bochmann said. “This alignment is crucial for driving collective efforts toward the company's mission and vision.”
As a result, your definition of “great” may depend on who you’re trying to prove it to, according to Alistair Berry, an internal communications manager who works for a UK-based innovation firm.
“It's very different if you're trying to sort of frame your own successes for your own team and learn from them. There’s different measurement techniques to try to prove your worth to your department leads or even your C-suite colleagues.”
Related Article: How I Decided to Build an Internal Communications Service From the Ground Up
Room for Improvement with Reporting in Internal Comms Tools
As new technologies help internal comms become more data-driven, departments can easily find quantitative proof of their reach and engagement — via intranet visits, page views, email open rates, likes, shares, comments and more, Bochmann said.
However, Robinson pointed out that the wealth of data can actually make measurement more complex.
“This has definitely been improving, but my experience in intranet tools is that this has been a weaker area for years,” Robinson said. "There is often a large number of charts and tables in these tools, but they don't really say or mean anything.”
However, both she and Bochmann agreed this is an area where AI has a lot of potential to act as a consultant and aid data analysis and decision-making.
Berry said that he’s seen many platforms now rolling out AI features, but that there’s still skepticism within departments: “I think you can bring in the tools really, really quickly. But the buy-in and the trust for those kinds of tools, I think, is a much slower process.”
Related Article: Internal Comms' Number One Channel? EmailNot All About The Numbers
While numbers can be powerful, all three experts pointed to tools like employee engagement surveys as a method to collect qualitative feedback. Bochmann even suggests using sentiment analysis on intranet/social media comments to understand the tone and get a deeper understanding of how messages are being received.
Berry once again highlighted the importance of equipping your department leaders with information they can confidently take to senior leadership.
“You can give them all sorts of open and click rates that you want, but that's probably not going to be that useful to them when they're trying to advocate for your team,” he said.
It’s about proving you’re moving the needle on something useful, Berry continued.
“Internal comms inherently don't provide financial rewards that are really easy to draw out, but if you can show that you've reduced turnover, increased efficiency or increased how happy people are in their job that tends to be a lot more useful for some senior leaders,” he said.
Robinson also suggested finding stories that can provide proof messages are reaching people effectively.
Conference
Oct
20
Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
“In a past role, I helped the Health and Safety team re-energize their reference materials,” she said. “There was an incident in a location in London (who were known for 'doing their own thing') and they found and followed those instructions, then thanked the team for clear, findable instructions.”
Related Article: Are Your Messages Hitting the Mark? Time for an Internal Comms Audit
Spot the Warning Signs
Once you’ve found the right blend of quantitative and qualitative metrics to track and evaluate your team’s performance, you also need to figure out what warrants concern.
Berry said that some drops in engagement appear quickly and are easy to spot — for example, a sudden drop off in click rates that can’t be tied to outside factors suggests “your content isn’t cutting through in the way you’d want it to.”
Bochmann said that in addition to monitoring “clear indicators” like declining reach, attendance and engagement, internal comms leaders should also pay attention to more broad employee metrics like attrition, engagement and alignment with goals, all of which can be hurt by poor communications.
Finally, Berry said, if your internal comms are lagging, employees might just tell you as much.
“Quite often people will tell you up front: this isn't relevant for me. For one reason or another, this content doesn't speak to me,” Berry said “As internal communicators, you don't hit the mark with every single piece. It's a learning process. And I think that kind of direct feedback is often the most valuable kind that you can get.”
