Employee engagement is a central concern for modern companies. As an internal communications professional, you understand how important it is to know how your employees interact with the content shared via your intranet, newsletters, or enterprise social network. However, many companies still make mistakes when analyzing engagement. Here are the top 5 common mistakes to avoid in order to improve the performance of your internal communications campaigns.
1. Not Clearly Defining What Employee Engagement Means
The most common mistake is failing to define what employee engagement actually means. Too often, it’s confused with job satisfaction or simply participating in internal surveys. However, engagement goes much further: it’s about how involved, committed, and motivated employees feel toward their company’s goals.
Without a shared definition internally, it becomes difficult to set the right KPIs or to draw meaningful insights from the data. That’s why it’s essential to identify concrete metrics like communication open rates, click-through rates on the intranet, time spent on a page, or interactions with posts on Viva Engage.
2. Working with Fragmented Data
One of the biggest pitfalls is analyzing employee engagement in silos—reviewing newsletter stats separately from SharePoint or the company’s enterprise social network. This fragmented view prevents you from understanding the overall impact of your campaigns.
This is where Communication Insights makes all the difference. Our cross-channel analytics platform allows you to connect all your internal communication channels in one place. You get access to all your KPIs—centralized and comparable—so you can finally measure the true impact of your actions across all platforms.
With Communication Insights, you break down silos and benefit from a cross-cutting analysis of performance: for example, you can understand how a newsletter campaign drives traffic to the intranet, or which Viva Engage posts generated actual engagement within a specific department.
3. Not Customizing KPIs Based on the Target Audience
Another common mistake is using the same KPIs for all audiences. But employee engagement can vary significantly depending on country, department, or role. A campaign that performs well in the IT department may have little to no impact in HR.
With Communication Insights, you can import your organizational structure to get custom KPIs per audience. This allows you to see exactly which types of users were reached by your communications. You’ll be able to identify blind spots and optimize your messaging to better resonate with each audience segment.
4. Failing to Contextualize the Data
A single data point has limited value on its own. Is a 20% click-through rate good or bad? It depends on the context: the channel used, the timing of the post, or the campaign’s initial goal. Many organizations make the mistake of jumping to conclusions based on raw numbers, without context.
Communication Insights helps here too. With our Best Time to Post feature, you can identify the optimal times to publish content based on your employees’ actual behavior. This helps you maximize impact by aligning with how and when your audiences consume information.
By cross-analyzing data from all your channels and putting it in context, you can better understand why some campaigns outperform others—and refine your strategy accordingly.
5. Not Automating Analytics and Reporting
Too many internal communications teams still spend hours manually collecting data from different tools and formatting it into PowerPoint presentations. This is time-consuming, inefficient, and often error-prone.
With Communication Insights, that’s a thing of the past. Our tool lets you automatically generate monthly, quarterly, or annual reports based on your selected KPIs. In just a few clicks, you get a clear, professional presentation to share with management, showcasing the value of your actions.
Conclusion: A Strategic Approach to Employee Engagement
Analyzing employee engagement requires a strategic approach based on clarity, personalization, and a holistic view. By avoiding the most common mistakes—unclear definitions, siloed data, one-size-fits-all KPIs, lack of context, and manual reporting—you can dramatically improve the effectiveness of your internal communication efforts.
At Tryane Analytics, we support internal communication professionals with Communication Insights—a solution designed to help you better understand your employees, optimize your content, and improve the performance of your campaigns.
By deeply analyzing your channels—SharePoint, Viva Engage, newsletters—you can improve information flow, better target your messaging, and ultimately strengthen employee engagement across your organization.