Measuring Your Internal Communications | BTalk

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Rodney Gray

(Episode 423; 15 minutes 46) We all know that you should be keeping your employees informed, but is it really worth the effort of measuring how well it's working? Can't you just follow whatever is the best practice approach for disseminating information and it's up to your staff whether they read it or not?

Perhaps there's a bit more to it than that. Rodney Gray from Employee Communications and Surveys says the notion of just "sending out stuff" is not very effective. Done well internal communications should be driving productivity and increasing sales.

In that case it almost certainly is worth a bit of analysis, but what precisely, and how do you do it? Find out in today's edition of BTalk.

• Transcript

Phil Dobbie: Hello. I'm Phil Dobbie. Welcome to BTalk. Today: internal communications --- it's all that nice touchy-feely stuff and it's probably doing some good if it's keeping your staff happy. But getting down and measuring its effectiveness, well, isn't that just going a bit too far?

You can spend a lot of time communicating with your employees, but we do know that an engaged worker will do more because you tap into that discretionary effort that people will only ever use if they really like their job and they feel part of the company. But how can you tell if your internal communications is actually doing any good? How do you measure it? And more to the point, what is it that we should be measuring? And how can you use it to help you refine your approach when you are talking to your employees? Well, let's ask Rodney Gray. His company, Employees Communications and Surveys, looks at these precise questions. So first of all, Rodney, why measure? I mean we measure everything in a business, don't we? I mean but the effectiveness of internal comms, I mean isn't there a risk of analysis paralysis in all this?
Rodney Gray: Yes. That's a good question, Phil. The feedback I get from our clients often is that employees are over-surveyed. But the reality is unless you're measuring something, you can't always tell if it's working. Your intro mentions the big question of how do you measure? In a sense that almost answers the, you know, what should you measure? And can you measure? The main thing to measure with employee communication is in fact a change in behaviour. And a lot of communicators, particularly of the old school there outside the journalistic school, are into sort of sending out mode. What the Americans call the SOS approach. They Send Out Stuff. Now the acid test of whether that's working or not is does it achieve its objective? So if you are sending out things in a small business, simply talking to your employees, the measure is does it achieve what you set out to achieve? Does the error rate go down? Do the sales of a particular product go up? Many years ago I was very impressed at a conference. There was a guy up from the UK from the Body Shop. And he said what they did with their communication to test how they were going, was they'd have control stores that didn't get the particular communication, say it's some kind of encouragement to sell a particular product. Whereas the experimental stores did. And they did before-and-after measurement and work out whether the communication resulted in sales of the particular product. Now that's an excellent way of doing it. But you know, in 25 years or so of doing this sort work in Australia I've never come across a client doing that sort of thing here.

Dobbie: Right. And that's almost, you know, you measure advertising though. You know, you try a channel and try a different approach in a different channel and see which one works best.

Gray: Well, that's assuming you can measure your channel. I mean the curious thing about advertising, and it applies as well as communication, advertising awards are often given to the ads that people like and look sexy. And I don't know whether you were in Australia many years ago when we had these dreadful advertisements on radio and television. "Where do you get it?" Oh, they were shockers. I think John Singleton was behind it. But they sold truckloads of products. I mean the other way that you can measure in an organisation, it's often difficult to measure whether your communications change sales and so on. Is to ask employees whether the communication, whatever it is or all of them, whether it helped them do their job ... made their lives easier ... helped them serve customers better and so on.

Dobbie: Isn't there a danger in doing that? You can go a bit down the too touchy-feely road. I mean when you're talking about sales or productivity, then that makes a great deal of sense. But you're not going to ask an employee whether they've become more productive. Can't you just ... I mean, there must be other measures that'll tell you that.

Gray: Yes. But it's still a good way to. I mean, I routinely do lots and lots of focus groups. I'm about to start doing focus groups in the International Engineering Consultancy. And if they're typical employees, what they'll probably say is that intranet helps them. But, you know, what they really want from intranet are quick ways to find how to reach the person in the organisation they need for whatever. These days people can find their leave forms and particular policies and procedures and so on. But, you know, if a client comes in with a particular query, they need to be able to find who in the organisation, often are many thousands of people does that, so they'll talk about it. And they'll talk about the fact that yes, the newsletter's nice. But, you know, most focus groups you can go for an hour without anyone mentioning a newsletter as being a helpful or useful source of communication that helps them in their daily lives. So that's the sort of thing that I'm talking about. So once you know that, maybe in that example that you'd make sure the search facility of the intranet is first class. You might continue to do a newsletter, but you don't hang your hat on the fact that everyone reads it and hangs off every word of it --- takes it home to their family and so on. So it doesn't have power to change behaviour.

Dobbie: Right. So it'll give you an understanding of which channels in your organisation are working well, and which perhaps are a bit of a waste of time or aren't working quite as well. But you've also got the other side of the equation, haven't you, where people come into it. And obviously that's very important in corporate lines. And you might have some organisations where a manager is a particularly great communicator. And other people in the organisation don't have access to that person. So how do you measure that sort of human influence?

Gray: Human resources people measure this a lot with broad-scale employee opinion surveys. But you're quite right. I mean the manager still is the key person in organisations. You mentioned engagement. I mean people say that the companies or organisations hire people and managers lose them. And this is particularly true. And I should just quickly comment that engagement is, as you've defined it, generally used these days as a term to mean discretionary effort. That's the typical HR term that people from Hewitt Consulting and others use. Unfortunately, many communicators use the word engagement simply to mean we've got their attention, you know. So they're not necessarily committed. They're just listening or they're actively listening. Now this is a pretty weak sort of form of engagement. And of course engagement depends on the whole range of things, particularly the managers. You mentioned HR policies, the flexibility of the organisation, how change is handled. And of course many of those aspects are affected by communication. But what we've seen in the last maybe ten years is communicators being asked to engage employees. And the reality is they've probably only got one out of ten of the tools. Whereas, HR has probably got many of the others. And the managers have got even more. There's remuneration policy, the way that people are handled on the job. And the nature of the work itself. Are you doing something of value to society and feeling good about it? They are all the things that'll help people be engaged.

Dobbie: But it sounds to me like there's a whole load of influences here from ... you just talked about it ... from company policies to individuals to the forms of communication. All of those are going to influence whether an employee is more engaged and therefore more productive or not. How do you pull all of that together in research? You've already mentioned the idea of perhaps having some focus group research. Is that the best way to go? Or should you have ongoing quantitative-type surveys as well? And is there a risk as well? Sorry this is a long question. But is there a risk that you might have too many sort of ad hoc surveys, and you're not really pulling a conclusive picture together?

Gray: Yes. And that's a very perceptive question, Phil. Most of my work is done around engagement and employee communication. And people want to know exactly why the scores in the last opinion survey were so low. I had one recently, a subsidiary of one of our big banks. And engagement in this particular business unit of professional people was only 26 percent of people were engaged. That's a sort of definition of giving discretionary effort.

Dobbie: Right.

Gray: Now if I find that you need to go and talk to people, that's fairly sensitive so you typically do that with interviews. People in organisations typically want to have a fast start to improve communications, so doing it by focus groups is a good way. But you're quite right. That's just piecemeal. If you want to have an overarching sort of picture, you'd use an employee opinion survey or a communication quantitative research. And it's absolutely critical you have two things. One is you have some benchmark information so you can see how you relate to national norms. Sometimes even industry norms, so you can see, you know. I have an example from some years ago where a client had 52 percent of people [saying they] thought they were recognised ... got a thank you for doing a good job ... felt they were prized. Now that particular MD thought that atrocious and went about to improve it. In fact, it was ten percentage points above the nation norm, so his organisation was going well. But because he hadn't benchmarked or the consultant hadn't benchmarked the results, he didn't know the truth. So benchmarking is absolutely critical. And the other critical factor, and you don't always see this, is you need some form of correlational analysis. It's usually factor analysis combined with aggression analysis that shows you what the key drivers of satisfaction or commitment or engagement are. And in Australian surveys this typically is perceptions of the senior executives followed by how well change is handled in communication. The immediate manager normally doesn't correlate with overall satisfaction or commitment that strong. They're usually about .5. But typically senior execs correlate about .7. It's as though employees are saying look, the boss is not the problem. He or she is fine. They tell us what they know, yada-yada-yada. It's the senior executives. We don't see them. We don't hear them. We don't know what they stand for. We don't know where they're taking the organisation. And it applies in public and private sector. It's sort of universal. So benchmarking and correlational analysis are absolutely critical. That way you can get a full picture of what the organisation looks like.

Dobbie: And who should be conducting this? Is it the work of the HR department?

Gray: Yes. That's interesting. In the US, possibly because their organisations are usually much, much bigger than ours, internal communication as a function sits within HR and is driven by it. In Australia, and again a lot of it's got to do with the Send Out Stuff mentality, internal communications are quite often in the marcomms area or corporate affairs or public relations. Now I don't think that's a problem as long as they work closely with HR. I mean one of the curiosities I find is that, given all that I've been saying it's pretty obvious if you want to be a good communicator you need to know a lot about organisational change and people aspects. I teach in a Master's program for communicators, and I asked 19 of them last year how many of them knew about Maslow and Hertzberg, and all these famous researchers on motivational theory. And how do you motivate or engage individuals? Not one of the 19, and now nearly all internal communication managers in big organisations, had ever heard of these people. They've never ever had the chance to study, you know, how humans change their behaviour. And very few of them go on to study at university. And the particular university I teach in has just scrapped that particular course for undergrads. So now we've got undergraduates coming out who will possibly start as internal communication assistants or PR consultants who don't know the first thing about how people behave in organisations and what influences their behaviour. It's very sad and it's very misguided.

Dobbie: So I guess that shows there's an amateur approach being taken in a lot of organisations as to how they communicate with their employees. And I imagine if they're also surveying you're probably getting a lot of amateur surveys as well. Because as we've heard previously on BTalk, it's very easy to do an amateur survey because the tools are available to everyone these days.

Gray: Yes and no. They're not necessarily amateur approaches. Many of the approaches are very, very sophisticated. I mean many organisations have got their CEO blogging with the employees. And whether he or she should or should not is a complicated question. It all depends, so. Using social media, using Twitter with employees. So many of the approaches are a long way from being amateur. But you're quite right. There are a lot of surveys that are very amateurish.

Dobbie: And I'm sure using tools like Survey Monkey and the like ...

Gray: Or in fact, when the executive teams cheat, they change the composition of the index they're using to measure. I mean there's quite a lot of deception that goes on with surveys. I mean people undertake a survey and then decide the results are too bad to tell the employees. So they fudge the results and then some horrifying things happen.

Dobbie: All right. So I mean if we're looking, just going back to the top-line measure then, if there's one thing we really want to measure is that employee engagement, isn't it really? And if we can get that right, then we can start to look at some of the symptoms that are feeding that level of engagement.

Gray: Exactly. That seems to have become the norm around the world, at least in Western organisations. And probably Asian cultures are better off anyway because they've got a more people-oriented, team-oriented approach to working. But certainly in the global Western organisations that I work in, many of them have got it. If not the Hewitt, maybe ISR or Towers Perrin, one of the global engagement surveys that found out what the key drivers are. And they've worked to build on their strengths and overcome their weaknesses. And clearly that will quite often improve, really include communication internally. But internal communication has improved enormously over the 25 or 30 years I've been involved. But there's still a lot of problems in handling change communication. That's still not handled well by most organisations. Some get it right, but very few. And that's one of the main reasons why organisations merging don't usually succeed. I think it's a 71 percent failure rate or thereabouts in the McKinsey surveys as they're clashing cultures, they don't mesh together well. And they don't mesh together well because the change and the change communication haven't been handled well.

Dobbie: Well, Rodney, I've been in the midst of that a couple of times which tells me that I know that that's a far too complex a situation to talk about now. But it's putting us in the right direction anyway in terms of measuring internal communications. Thanks so much for your time today.

Gray: That's a pleasure, Phil. Thank you.