A communications director reviewing channel reach dashboards covering email, SharePoint intranet and Viva Engage during an internal communication audit

Internal communication audit: a step-by-step guide

By Nicolas Saliba · Published November 2026 · 12 min read

In short

An internal communication audit compares what you send with what employees actually read, understand and act on. This step-by-step guide shows you how to scope the audit, pull Microsoft 365 channel data, benchmark your Viva Engage network and survey employees to rank the gaps.

Key takeaways

An internal communication audit compares what you send with what employees read, understand and act on, across every channel.

In Tryane's Viva Engage Benchmark 2026, average monthly active users run from 78.49% under 2,500 staff to 49.48% above 50,000.

Viva Engage native analytics filters engagement by department, country and job title, but each tool reports only its own channel.

Page visits cannot show understanding: pair channel data with a short survey and interviews on behaviour.

Once a year, leadership asks what internal communication actually delivers, and once a year the answer is a set of view counts that nobody in the room finds convincing. SharePoint's site analytics tell you how many people opened the intranet. Viva Engage shows community activity. Your newsletter tool reports open rates. Each number lives in its own dashboard, and none of them answers the question your CFO is really asking: did the right people read the right message, understand it, and act on it?

An internal communication audit is the structured way to close that gap. It is a planned, repeatable assessment that compares what you send with what employees read, understand and do, and it produces findings you can defend in a budget review. Researchers Owen Hargie and Dennis Tourish argue that organisations need validated techniques to systematically measure and monitor their communications, rather than ad-hoc counts assembled whenever a question arises^[1]. An audit is that technique, applied to your own channels, audiences and leadership questions.

Scope the audit: which channels, which audiences, which period, and which leadership questions it must answer
Pull the channel data Microsoft 365 already records, from SharePoint site usage to Viva Engage analytics
Benchmark your Viva Engage network against organisations of comparable size
Add a short survey and interviews to capture what channel data cannot show
Rank the gaps into an action list and freeze the result as your baseline

Treat the audit as repeatable rather than one-off. The first run establishes where you stand; the next run, twelve months later, shows whether your changes moved reach and understanding. That before-and-after comparison is what turns communication reporting from a collection of screenshots into evidence.

What should an internal communication audit check?

The core check is simple to state: what you sent, against what was read, understood and acted on. Everything else in the audit hangs off four scoping decisions, and it is worth writing them down before you pull a single number, because they determine which data you need and which you can ignore.

Scope decision	The question it settles	Example
Channels	Which channels are in scope	Email newsletters, the SharePoint intranet, Viva Engage, Microsoft Teams
Audiences	Whose reading behaviour counts	All staff, or specific departments, countries and roles
Period	Which timeframe the audit covers	A full quarter, or the last 90 days of activity
Leaders' questions	What the audit must answer for leadership	Did frontline teams see and understand the safety update?

Be disciplined about the last decision. Gallagher's audit guidance warns that collecting data and employee feedback without a clear view of the questions you are trying to answer gets you nowhere^[2]. Write down the two or three questions your leadership will judge the audit by, and let them drive every other choice.

The research case for doing this properly is longstanding. Hargie and Tourish's handbook on communication audits reviews decades of studies showing that effective communication matters for business success, and argues that organisations need validated techniques to measure and monitor it systematically^[1]. In practice, that means deciding in advance what read, understood and acted on will mean for each channel, so your findings hold up when leadership probes them. Our guide to internal communication analytics walks through the four measurement questions, distribution, reach, engagement and outcome, that map onto these scoping decisions.

Which channel data should you pull first?

Start with the data Microsoft 365 already records, because it costs nothing extra to collect and it anchors the audit in evidence. On SharePoint, the Site usage page shows unique viewers, site visits and average time spent per user, plus your most popular pages, news posts and documents, and site owners can export 90 days of usage data as a CSV file^[3].

In Viva Engage, the analytics dashboard breaks engagement down by role: conversation analytics show people reached, people engaged, post open rate and click through rate for individual posts, while network admins get network-wide analytics and can set date ranges across the last week, the last four weeks, 90 days and the previous year. Email newsletters supply open and click rates from your sending tool, and Teams activity rounds out the picture for chat-based communication.

Channel	What the native data shows	Where it stops
SharePoint	Unique viewers, site visits, time spent and popular content per site	A per-site view, with no cross-channel reach
Viva Engage	Reach, engagement, open and click-through rates per post and community	Community and network views, with some dashboards gated by licence
Email newsletters	Open and click rates per send	No link to intranet or Viva Engage behaviour
Microsoft Teams	Activity and adoption metrics built for IT tracking	Not designed for campaign-level communication measurement

Each source is accurate within its own walls, and that is exactly the limitation. Native dashboards are per-channel silos: none of them tells you whether the employee who missed the newsletter saw the news post instead, and none of them says anything about understanding. Our article on Microsoft Teams reporting shows why adoption metrics built for IT fall short for communicators, and measuring internal communications in Microsoft Viva covers the wider gaps in native analytics. The audit still needs a cross-channel view, which is where the comparison in the sixth section comes from.

How does your Viva Engage network compare?

Raw numbers mean little without a reference point. A monthly reach figure on its own cannot tell you whether your Viva Engage network is healthy or lagging. Tryane's Viva Engage Benchmark 2026 gives you the comparison: it analyses the activity of more than 3.5 million Viva Engage users across six company-size bands.

Company size (employees)	Average monthly active users
Fewer than 2,500	78.49%
2,500 to 5,000	73.30%
5,000 to 10,000	66.02%
10,000 to 25,000	75.29%
25,000 to 50,000	56.36%
More than 50,000	49.48%

The pattern is clear: the largest organisations average 49.48% monthly active users, the lowest of the six bands, while those under 2,500 employees average 78.49%. If your organisation is larger, a small-company figure is not your benchmark; compare against the band that matches your headcount, such as the 10,000 to 25,000 band, which averages 75.29%.

One caution when you pull this figure from your own tenant: the benchmark report uses monthly active users as its own measure and does not define it further, so do not equate it with the Activated users metric you may see elsewhere in Microsoft 365 reporting. Check which definition your number uses before you compare the two.

To compare your network by industry and company size, download the full Viva Engage Benchmark 2026.

What should the survey and interviews ask?

Channel data tells you who saw a message. It cannot tell you whether they understood it or what they did next, and an audit that stops at reach misses the questions leadership cares about. CIPR Inside's measurement advice is to look past page visits and use qualitative data: focus groups and interviews gather information that will never show up in a dashboard^[4].

Keep the survey short. CIPR Inside also recommends smaller, more frequent pulse surveys rather than one annual exercise, because trends tracked against your activity are more useful than a single response report^[4]. Tie every question back to the leaders' questions you scoped earlier: if the audit must establish whether frontline teams saw the safety update, ask about the safety update, not about satisfaction in general.

Understanding: what did employees take away from the last major announcement, in their own words?
Channel reliance: where do you actually look for company news, and where do you expect to find it?
Behaviour: what did you do after reading, and what stayed unclear?
Gaps: which topics do you hear too much about, and which too little?

Use the interviews to explain the patterns the channel data revealed. If reach in one country is half the company average, a handful of interviews with local managers will usually tell you why within an afternoon, whether the cause is language, shift patterns or notification settings. That combination, numbers to locate the gap and conversations to explain it, is what makes audit findings actionable.

How do you compare channels by department and country?

With channel data and survey findings in hand, build the comparison view: reach and response for every channel, broken down by department, country and role. Viva Engage's own analytics set the working pattern, filtering engagement by attributes such as department, country and job title^[5]. The audit's job is to apply that same segmentation across all your channels, not just one.

Resist the Excel silo. Consolidating email, SharePoint and Viva Engage figures into one view takes effort up front, but it is the only way to answer cross-channel questions, such as whether employees who missed the newsletter were reached on the intranet instead. A single consolidated view also makes the next audit a matter of refreshing data rather than rebuilding spreadsheets.

Choose the segments that matter to leadership: department, country and role, at minimum
Pull reach and response per channel into one table, using the same period for every source
Read the over- and under-performers: which departments and countries sit above or below your average, and on which channels
Freeze the result as your baseline, with the period and definitions documented, so the next audit measures movement rather than re-arguing method

The under-performers are where the audit pays for itself. A department that reads the intranet but ignores the newsletter, or a country where Viva Engage reach collapses outside headquarters, points at a specific, fixable communication problem rather than a vague need to improve engagement.

An audit earns its keep when the findings become an ordered action list, not a report that circulates once. Follow the pattern experienced practitioners use: move from findings to recommendations, prioritising each one by how easily it can be implemented and what investment it requires^[2].

Where is reach low? Which departments, countries or roles missed messages they needed?
Where is understanding weak? Which survey and interview answers show employees read but did not act?
Which channels over- or under-perform by department and country, and what does that say about your channel mix?
Which fixes are quick wins, such as posting times and segmentation, and which need a decision, such as consolidating channels?

The gap is common: Gallagher's State of the Sector research found that only 31% of organizations have a written channel framework in place^[2]. An audit gives you the evidence to write or refresh yours, and a baseline to prove the changes worked.

Pulling that evidence together is where we can help. Tryane's Communication Insights is an all-in-one cross-channel analytics platform that connects your email newsletters, SharePoint intranet, Viva Connections and Viva Engage into one central dashboard, so the channel data your audit needs sits in one place instead of five. See what covers for a Microsoft 365 environment like yours.

To see how Communication Insights supplies the channel data for your audit, book a 30-minute call with Jérémy.

Frequently asked questions

What is an internal communication audit?

A structured check of what your organization sends against what employees actually read, understand and act on. You scope it by channels, audiences and a defined period, then compare what was sent with channel analytics and employee feedback to rank the gaps and fix them.

How often should you run an internal communication audit?

Run a full audit when you need a baseline, then repeat the same channel comparison on a regular cycle so you can show movement against it. The value comes from repeating an identical scope: same channels, same audiences, same questions.

Can I run an audit with native Microsoft 365 analytics alone?

Partly. SharePoint site analytics, Viva Engage network analytics and email reports give you per-channel views, and Viva Engage analytics can filter engagement by department, country and job title. But each tool reports only its own channel, so you still need to consolidate the data and add survey evidence on understanding.

How does my Viva Engage network compare with other organizations?

In Tryane's Viva Engage Benchmark 2026, based on more than 3.5 million users, organizations with fewer than 2,500 employees averaged 78.49% monthly active users, while organizations above 50,000 averaged 49.48%. Compare your figure against your own size band before judging performance.

What should the employee survey in an audit ask?

Ask what employees understood and what they did next, not whether they saw a message. CIPR Inside advises looking past page visits to understanding and behaviour: which channels employees rely on, which messages they remember, and what stopped them acting.

Is a communication audit the same as an employee survey?

No. The survey is one input. The audit also pulls channel data from your communication platforms, such as the intranet, enterprise social networks, email newsletters and chat tools, and compares what was sent with what was read, understood and acted on across all of those channels together.

How do I turn audit findings into actions?

Rank the gaps into a short action list: where reach is low, where understanding is weak, and which channels over- or under-perform by department and country. Fix the scope of the baseline so the next measurement cycle shows movement against the same questions.