A reorganisation is announced on a Tuesday at 09:00. The intranet news article goes up, a Viva Engage post follows, managers get a briefing pack, and the town hall is recorded for anyone who missed it. By Friday the communications team pulls the numbers and finds something awkward: the head-office population has largely seen it, the field sales organisation mostly has not, and the recording has been watched by roughly one person in eight. Nobody did anything wrong. The plan was sound. It simply assumed something that stopped being true around 2020.
What it assumed was a shared information moment. In a co-located organisation there is a point at which everyone effectively knows, and it is produced by proximity rather than by any channel: the corridor, the canteen screen, the Monday team huddle, the colleague who leans over and says have you seen this. That layer was never measured, because it never needed to be. Distributed work removed it, and most internal communications functions replaced it with more channels rather than with any way of telling whether it had been replaced at all.
Stop measuring engagement, start measuring time to reach
Engagement metrics were built for a world where reach was assumed. Likes, comments and reactions describe what happened after a message landed. In a distributed organisation the interesting failure happens before that: a substantial share of the target population never saw the message in the first place, and no engagement metric will ever surface that, because people who did not see it cannot fail to react to it.
The measure that replaces it is time to reach. Pick a threshold, say 60 per cent of the intended population, and record how long it takes to get there. Then compare that curve between populations. A message that reaches 60 per cent of head office in four hours and 60 per cent of the field organisation in nine days has not been communicated once, it has been communicated twice, badly, with a week of misalignment in between. That gap is where rumour lives.
| Measure | What it answers | What it needs |
|---|---|---|
| Time to 60 per cent reach, by population | How long until this group actually knows | Unique reads over time, joined to a work-arrangement attribute |
| Reach parity ratio | How much worse remote and field populations do than on-site | Reach rate per population with a denominator per population |
| Single-channel dependency | Which groups would miss everything if one channel failed | Cross-channel de-duplicated reach at person level |
| Cascade completion | Whether the message survived the manager layer | Manager population identified in the HR extract, tracked separately |
The four gaps that only appear when you segment by location
Single-channel dependency
Aggregate reach can look healthy while resting on a structure that is one outage away from failing. In most organisations a meaningful share of the remote population is reached by exactly one channel, usually email, and if that message goes to a spam folder or arrives during annual leave there is no second path. On-site colleagues have several redundant paths and never notice. The measure is simple to state and awkward to produce: what proportion of each population was reached by only one channel? Producing it requires de-duplicating the same person across SharePoint, Viva Engage, Teams and email, which is the whole difficulty of cross-channel measurement.
The manager cascade break
Cascade through line managers remains the most-used mechanism for anything sensitive, and it is close to invisible in the data. What you can see is whether managers themselves opened the briefing pack, and how the reach curve of their teams behaves in the days afterwards. A manager population that opened the pack at 40 per cent tells you the cascade did not happen, which is a very different problem from a cascade that happened and did not land. Distributed working makes this worse, because a manager who used to brief a team by walking over now has to schedule it.
The time zone tail
A message published at 17:00 in Paris reaches Asia the following working day and the Americas mid-morning local. Over a single announcement that is a nuisance. Over a year of Tuesday-afternoon publishing it becomes a structural disadvantage for whole regions, and it will not appear in any tenant-wide chart. Publishing time also interacts with expectations about availability, which we look at in the piece on the right to disconnect.
The population that was never remote in the first place
Remote is not the opposite of on-site. Between the two sits a large deskless population, in plants, stores, vehicles and wards, who have no desk, often no individual mailbox, and whose access to the intranet is a shared terminal or a personal phone. Gallup’s workplace research has repeatedly found engagement lowest and communication weakest in exactly these groups[1]. Treating them as a variant of remote knowledge work produces plans that cannot work, and our note on measuring frontline communications deals with them properly.
Why native analytics cannot answer this
Be fair about what Microsoft 365 does well. SharePoint site analytics tells you how a page performed. Viva Engage community insights tells you how a community is doing. Teams reporting tells you about Teams. Viva Connections gives you a reasonable view of intranet adoption on mobile[2]. For a single team running a single channel, that is genuinely sufficient and you should not buy anything.
The distributed-work question breaks it in two specific places. First, none of these reports join to each other at person level, so cross-channel reach and single-channel dependency are simply not computable from native tooling. Second, and more fundamentally, Microsoft 365 does not know who is remote. Work arrangement is an HR attribute. It lives in your HR system, sometimes partially in Entra ID, and without it every chart you build is a tenant-wide average that hides exactly the variation you are looking for. Structuring those attributes is the prerequisite, covered in audience segmentation for internal communications.
Teams often try to close the gap with a Power BI build on the Microsoft Graph reporting API. It can be made to work, and some organisations run it well. Know what you are taking on: the reporting API is not consistently reliable and produces days with missing data, customers have observed KPI values in Power BI that do not reconcile with the native SharePoint reports for the same period, and a dependable build needs a robust ingestion process plus scheduled reconciliation against the native figures. Budget for the pipeline rather than the dashboard.
Three changes that move the number
First, set reach targets per population rather than one target for the organisation. A single 70 per cent target is met by over-serving the easy-to-reach and quietly abandoning everyone else. Separate targets make the trade-off visible, which is the point.
Second, name a primary channel per population and stop treating the channel mix as uniform. Field sales may be reachable through Teams on mobile and through nothing else that works. Plant operators may need a shared screen and a supervisor briefing. The intranet may be the primary channel only for people at a desk. Once a primary channel is named, its reach becomes a real accountability rather than one line in a mix.
Third, measure the cascade as a distinct step. Track manager pack opens as a metric in its own right, with its own target, and look at the team reach curve behind it. Most cascade failures are not resistance, they are managers who did not see the pack either. Our piece on measuring hybrid work communications across distributed teams goes further into the operating rhythm, and Gallagher’s State of the Sector research keeps finding measurement to be the capability internal communicators most want to build[3].
This is the layer Tryane occupies. It reads SharePoint, Viva Engage, Teams and newsletter platforms together, de-duplicates the same person across them, joins that to organisational structure through Entra ID or an HR file so that work arrangement, site and country are available as segments, and keeps history across product transitions. SOC 2 Type 2 certified, GDPR compliant by design, EU hosting by default with US data residency on request, single sign-on through Entra ID, deploys in a couple of hours, no agent to install. Reporting is on channels and aggregate segments, not on individuals.
Frequently asked questions
Is reach really more useful than engagement for remote teams?
For anything that has to be known rather than discussed, yes. Engagement is a reasonable measure for a leadership community or a culture campaign. For a policy change, a safety instruction or a reorganisation, the question is whether people know, and engagement metrics cannot distinguish between a person who saw it and shrugged and a person who never saw it at all.
Where does the remote or hybrid attribute come from?
Usually the HR system, as a work-arrangement or contract field, exported alongside function, site and country. Entra ID sometimes carries an office location that is a workable proxy, but it is often stale for people who changed arrangement without changing office. It is worth spending a week getting this field right before building anything on top of it.
How long should a message take to reach a distributed population?
There is no benchmark worth quoting, because it depends on shift patterns and device access. Measure your own baseline over three or four announcements, then set a target relative to it. What matters more than the absolute number is the gap between your best-served and worst-served populations, and whether that gap is closing.
Does more channels mean more reach?
Only up to a point, and adding a channel without measuring de-duplicated reach usually just adds work. Gallup’s research on hybrid working keeps pointing at clarity and consistency rather than volume as what makes distributed teams function[4]. Two channels that genuinely cover different populations beat five that overlap.
Can we do this without replacing our Microsoft 365 reporting?
Yes. Native reporting continues to do what it does, and most teams keep using it for channel-level questions. What gets added is the person-level de-duplication across channels and the join to organisational attributes, which is what makes population comparisons possible in the first place.
Sources
• Gallup, State of the Global Workplace
• Microsoft Learn, Viva Connections overview
• Gallagher, State of the Sector
• Gallup, hybrid work research
Further reading
• Measuring hybrid work communications across distributed teams
• Measuring frontline worker communications
• Measuring cross-channel internal communications
• Internal communication and hybrid work
• Measuring internal communications on Microsoft Teams
Tryane runs a 15-minute working session with Heads of Internal Communication, taking one recent announcement and showing the reach curve for each of your populations on your own tenant. Book a slot with Jérémy.