At IC, we have authored many blogs on how to measure employee engagement, and how to turn that into an action plan in your internal comms, but many of you may still be wondering why exactly measuring internal comms is so crucial to your internal communications strategy.
The truth is some may not even know what the definition of “engagement” in communications is. It is more than just at-a-glance open-rates, click-rates, and survey response rates. Measuring employee engagement is the key to your internal comms’ ROI, and it ties in with more than just how happy your employees are. Engagement, in internal comms, is defined as the emotional commitment an employee has to their organization. When an emotional bond is built via employee engagement, it empowers the internal communicator to show that they have created a workforce that is more satisfied, productive, and successful—bolstering their value and the value of internal comms in their organization.
Let’s dive into three reasons why measuring employee engagement can show the benefit and ROI of internal comms to your management.
1. Get insight into turnover (and help put a stop to it!)
Creating that emotional connection with employees through your internal comms can help reduce employee turnover. When you’re measuring your internal comms, and translating those measurements into actions, you can begin to gauge turnover. Regular check-ins with surveys and polls are also a way to identify which departments are happy and which are unhappy, and help your organization craft a game plan to give some TLC to departments that may not be feeling the love. Providing management with insight into how engaged employees are can help them get an idea on how likely employees are to leave, create a plan to combat it, and prove the importance of your internal comms.
What’s more, your internal comms can play a key role in a plan to prevent turnover. By having a single source of truth, you can help make employees more productive, and employees who feel productive and efficient are more likely to stay!
2. How productive are your employees, really?
While surveys are a great way to measure employee engagement, they make up only the tip of the iceberg. Robust intranet software provides you with deep insights into measuring intranet utilization. Open rates, click rates, read and confirms , content views, and search histories—these are powerful features built right into your organization’s single source of truth that will give you insight on how empowered employees feel. Can they easily find important IT and HR policies? Are employees submitting forms? By measuring these stats, you can gain insight to how much more productive your employees are thanks to intranet software and your internal comms strategy.
And when you follow IC’s best practices and download our free resources, you can grow the number of intranet adopters—now, not only are you measuring employee engagement, you’re measuring and showing growth in productivity. That will certainly show your value and the importance of your work!
3. Measuring employee engagement = measuring customer experience
The Global Employee Engagement Index analyzed hundreds of employees and organizations and found that more engaged employees were more customer centric and better at solving complex customer issues. Wherever your initial employee engagement numbers are when you begin tracking them, as you see growth, you can also prove to your bosses that their workers will provide customers with better experiences as well. As employees become more customer focused, you can also expect greater success for your organization in sales and revenue, directly tying your internal comms with measurable ROI!
Bonus: use Push messages as your secret weapon to measuring employee engagement
Psssst, want to grow employee engagement quickly and efficiently? Incorporating Push communications into your internal comms plan can help. And with IC’s powerful Push extension, you can track read and click rates , helping your further measure employee engagement! And, since our Push extension is integrated with our intranet software, you can promote content on your intranet in a few clicks to an employee’s preferred channel, boosting engagement with key content.
Start measuring employee engagement today
Measuring employee engagement is the first step to showing real ROI on your internal comms plan to management, and with IC’s software, you can rest assured that you’ll have access to some of the best metrics—that go beyond just surveys! Book a demo today and see our software in action for free!
