Regularly monitoring the efficacy of your internal communication strategy is essential to proactively identifying and addressing any gaps. But which are the most critical internal communication metrics you should be tracking?
We’ve compiled them in this blog. Read on to learn about them and find quick ways to improve performance in those areas.
21 Internal communications metrics you should be tracking
5 Content engagement metrics
Engaging content is the core of effective internal communications. If you are wondering how to improve employee content engagement, start by tracking these essential metrics:
- Opens: The open rate indicates the percentage of employees that open your messages or emails, indicating the reach of your internal communication. Draft compelling or personalized subject lines to improve opens.
- Clicks: Click-through rate (CTR) indicates the percentage of links clicked by recipients in your emails, push notifications, or other communication. It gives a good idea of how engaging and relevant your content is. Boost your CTR performance by highlighting clickable links and optimizing your content for mobile devices.
- Time spent reading: This metric explains how much time your recipients spend consuming your content—whether it’s just a glance, bouncing off midway, or reading it entirely. Improve this by creating audience-specific content and sending it out to segmented groups.
- Downloads: The number of downloads indicates how many recipients value your communication enough to hit the download button. To boost this, ensure the download links are visible and the content is compelling. Additionally, assure your recipients that downloads are virus-free.
- Shares: Shares, whether email forwards or social media shares are a powerful indicator of your engagement and content relevance quotient. Boost this by creating relevant and engaging content. Add attractive visuals. Also, embed social icons to encourage easy sharing.
Want a jump-start on creating a social media strategy for your internal social network that works for your company? Check out this guide
4 Employee sentiment analysis metrics
When you work toward evaluating your communication effectiveness, the importance of assessing employee sentiment in internal communication cannot be highlighted enough. Understanding this is important if you want to connect with employees deeper and enhance engagement, well-being, and job satisfaction. Here’s what you can track:
- Survey & poll responses: This is the easiest way to ascertain and analyze employee sentiments and well-being. Regularly send out satisfaction and pulse surveys (short questions sent regularly) in attractive templates to gather qualitative insights directly from employees.
- Open-ended feedback comments: You can also send emails or messages requesting open-ended feedback to identify pressing concerns you may not anticipate. Maintain anonymity to encourage honest reporting.
- Message sentiment analysis: You can also assess dominant themes and sentiments within the text you send out. For example, some applications enable interpreting employees' social posts if they are unhappy, dissatisfied, or motivated and inspired. Checking this can alert you if sentiments are harmful, and you can take action before it's too late.
- Emoji reactions: Emoji reactions are another quick way to gauge employee sentiments about your communications. Use professional tools to enable your internal communication campaigns to receive emoji reactions and track them.
Want to create a positive employee experience that benefits frontline workers and your organizations? Check out this guide
8 Employee app engagement metrics
You may have implemented an employee communication tool. However, it’s useful only to the extent employees use and engage with it. Track the following essential employee app engagement metrics to assess this aspect:
- Login frequency: If your employees frequently log in to your employee app, it’s a sign that they’re using and engaging with it. To boost logins, encourage using the app for all communication and ensure it’s user-friendly. Also, focus on creating sticky content that is useful and engaging.
- Time spent on the app: This duration indicates how much employees value and are engaged with your internal communication on the app. If you notice low time spent, go deeper to analyze and address the root cause. For example, this may be due to a complex app interface or irrelevant content sent to them.
- Feature usage data: Tracking how employees use various app features explains what they consider valuable. Track aspects like newsfeed views, the 'groups' feature utilization, and the number of file downloads. Make specific changes where you feel feature usage metrics need improvement.
- Push notification open rates: Push notifications are helpful in internal communications as long as employees stop to read them. Track their open rates. Low opens can mean irrelevant messages or too frequent messaging, indicating that you may also need to explore asynchronous alternatives.
- Social intranet read-receipts: Knowing if your employees opened and read messages sent on the company’s internal social networks is always helpful. If you notice they’re not opening messages regularly, enquire about the reasons and address what you need to.
- Page visits and logins: These metrics help you assess how frequently employees visit pages they’re directed to. You can focus on strengthening pages with few visits and maintaining engagement levels on the frequently visited pages.
- Adoption rates for new apps: If you’ve recently implemented new employee apps, track how well they’re adopted. A poor adoption rate can mean a lack of know-how to use, having too many apps to handle, or a lack of direction from the management to use it.
- Mobile usage rates: Tracking mobile usage indicates how many employees prefer to consume content on the go. If it’s high, ensure your mobile app interface is clean and content is crisp and mobile-friendly.
For example, Workforce Analytics within Speakap allow you to see what content is most popular, how many updates are shared monthly, what are the adoption rates across departments and location, as well as login frequencies and much more.
Additional metrics to consider
- Meeting attendance (physical or virtual): This strongly indicates employee performance and availability. If employees regularly miss meetings, find out the causes and take steps to address difficulties. Suppose you find out too many meetings are causing this and disturbing work-life balance, you may consider implementing asynchronous communication for non-urgent communication. Similarly, you can share meeting video recordings for frontline workers on the go to catch up.
- Training process completion rates: Regular learning and development are key to ensuring competitiveness. Simply creating a base isn’t enough; you must track whether employees consume and resonate with that content. Poor engagement may indicate difficulty accessing it, lack of awareness, or outdated, unhelpful content. For example, Employee Journeys Analytics within Speakap allows you to see which steps are most engaging, identify any bottlenecks, and optimize employee training processes for maximum impact.
- Internal communication platform search queries: Many internal comms apps allow employees to search for information, functions, and messages. Track such search queries to get a gist of what employees genuinely want answers to.
- Help desk tickets related to internal communication issues: This metric will help you identify any gaps in your internal communications. With knowledge of support areas sought by employees, you can fix them proactively for seamless communication.
How traditional internal comms methods hinder measurement
Traditionally, internal communicators have relied on feedback forms, surveys, or manual data collection to track employee engagement and sentiments. However, these legacy methods are time-consuming and also prone to human errors. Moreover, between collection, analysis, and response, there’s usually a significant lag. This often delays resolution and can cause sufficient damage in the process.
Given the availability of digital tools and the prevalence of distributed workforces today, relying on technology for this measurement, tracking, and response is far more efficient. However, you must note that not all tech tools are equal in this respect.
The power of an employee comms app with engagement metric analytics dashboard
When it comes to employee internal communication apps, look for ones that support data-driven analysis compared to costly trial and error. According to a report, nearly 90% of organizations with frontline workers agree that success depends on data-driven decisions. The best way to integrate this into your comms is by using tools that automate tracking and analyzing critical internal communication metrics in real-time.
Make sure you choose the app that collects and interprets data and presents easily digestible insights in a sleek dashboard. Ideally, use a tool that tracks real-time data and compares it against historical trends. If you find anything alarming, ensure the tool allows you to go deeper into the root cause. These features are vital to gathering a well-rounded view and communicating the situation with your stakeholders. With that, you can speed up response time with the right plan of action to improve internal communication effectiveness.
Streamline internal communication with measurable results
Monitoring internal communication metrics is necessary to gather an overall and granular picture of your internal communication strategy's effectiveness, what employees want, and how you can boost their well-being and productivity. The best way to track is using secure, up-to-date technology that automates internal communication data collection and simplifies interpretation with a centralized dashboard.
For more insights on measuring the impact of your internal communication strategy and how to make data-driven decisions for the future, check out this White Paper - Measuring Internal Communication Effectiveness
Want to experience the power of data-driven communication? Leverage Speakap to achieve cohesive team communication through the innovative employee communication app. It’s designed to empower and inform everyone with targeted internal communication and efficiently supports tracking engagement. Our users have experienced a staggering 80% adoption rate within the first 2 weeks of implementation, thanks to a user-friendly interface optimized for mobile devices.