Internal communications encompasses all the ways that organizations communicate with their employees through the communications team or office. This might include physical bulletin boards, email newsletters or one-off announcements, content on the company’s intranet, or social-media-style messaging using a social enterprise solution. Regardless of how organizations communicate with their internal stakeholders, the goal is the same: to ensure that employees are well-informed and feel seen so they will be more engaged and ultimately more productive.
The Value of Metrics
Ensuring reach and achieving engagement hinges on metrics. After all, how do you know that what you’re doing is working if you’re not measuring what you’re doing? Internal communication metrics are critical to help you understand what you’re doing well and what could use improvement. Fortunately, communication measurement tools can help you understand what you should keep doing and what needs fine-tuning.
They can also give you the ammunition you need to demonstrate the value of your work. After all, your communications department needs support from the leadership team to get the resources you need to do a good job.
But first things first. Measuring for measurement’s sake won’t do you much good. It’s important to understand
- Why you’re measuring it
- What exactly you should be measuring
- How you should be measuring it
A good starting question to help you determine what you should be measuring is: Which internal communication benchmarks are you trying to meet? Are you trying to measure employee retention, engagement, productivity or something else? Understanding the data you want to generate can help you determine what exactly to measure and why.
Unfortunately, most internal communications platforms simply are not built to provide robust data. So, the question of how to measure the data will ultimately require you to evaluate different third-party tools that can extract data from your communication efforts, data such as
- Who is opening your messages across the organization, and where open rates are significantly better or worse
- Which employees and employee groups are accessing/opening documents on the intranet like company news, compliance issues and other announcements
- How employees are communicating on digital workspaces, particularly in response to messaging from your internal communications office
- How workers are reacting to messaging on enterprise social media tools, including what they’re sharing or commenting on
Tools to Measure Communications
Forward-thinking companies today rely on multiple channels for internal communications, including email, the company intranet, social media tools for enterprise and digital workplaces. You’ll want to measure your communications across all communication channels to understand if one channel is better than another in general or for reaching specific audiences or delivering certain kinds of content.
Given that communication trickles down from the top to employees at every level in myriad ways, one early decision you should make is whether you’re OK with using a multitude of different metrics tools. Depending on the specific communication channels your company uses, you might be able to find a single solution that addresses all the communications avenues used by your internal communications office.
That means less of a learning curve for you and other internal communications staff, plus some standardization in the way that data is extracted and metrics are produced. That’s where Tryane comes in.
The Tryane Suite of Solutions
With a suite of tools to measure communications across your organization, Tryane gives you the ability to not only engage in continuous improvement but also demonstrate the value of what you do.
If your workspace is driven by Microsoft products, there’s a good chance that Tryane can provide you with all the metrics solutions you need to gauge the efficacy of your communications efforts and move forward with a data-backed strategy. Tryane offers solutions for
- Office 365. Find out which Office 365 tools are most popular among users so you know how to best communicate with different user groups, detect patterns in user behaviors and create custom dashboards to deliver a metrics-backed communications plan.
- Microsoft Teams. Tryane for Teams allows you to see how information is being used across different work groups, how third-party applications are being used and how collaboration happens across your organization.
- Yammer. See how announcements are performing, detect and onboard inactive users, benchmark performance against similar organizations, compare user behavior across your own company, provide key performance indicators to group managers and identify trending topics.
- SharePoint. SharePoint lets you see exactly who is viewing what content, identify experts on a given topic and encourage them to contribute to ongoing conversations on those topics, and determine compliance with company messaging requiring that specific documents be read.
Tryane uses artificial intelligence to perform sentiment analysis, perfect for gauging reactions to important company messaging. A plain text analysis search engine quickly lets you know about trending topics — in other words, what employees are talking about. It also lets you quickly extract key intelligence on any topic and detect the most challenging or supporting messages around any particular topic. Plus, it gives you the ability to identify experts on specific issues — in other words, potential influencers within your company.
When it comes to internal communications, knowing how well you’re doing what you’re doing matters. Tryane is here to help, by providing a deep-dive analysis of your current communication efforts to help inform future ones. Get in touch today to speak about how Tryane can help you supercharge your internal communications.