Your overall engagement numbers say the internal comms campaign is working. Break those numbers down by audience segment, and a different story emerges: not everyone receives the message the way you intended.

Johnna Muscente, vice president of communications and PR at Corcoran, told Ragan that communicators should start by defining the needed outcome for each employee group.

"Start with what each audience needs to know, feel or do," she said. "If the desired outcome is different, the measurement should be different too. Senior leaders may need to understand the strategy behind a transformation. Managers need to feel equipped to answer questions. Employees need to understand what it means for their day-to-day work."

Different outcomes also mean different delivery methods. Whether someone can act on a message depends on where they encounter it — and not everyone sits in front of the same inbox.

"You can't judge an office employee who lives in email against a frontline employee getting information through a mobile app or workplace signage," Muscente said. "The measurement has to reflect how people actually receive and use the information."

Decide what you'll do with the numbers first

This step happens before a campaign reaches its audience. Muscente defines three things before anything goes out:

1. The business objective of the messaging campaign.
2. The employee behavior you want to influence.
3. What you'll do with the metrics you get back.

The third rule separates a strategic data point from a plain number. Muscente builds the response into the plan ahead of time. For instance, if employees understand the message but still aren't acting, the problem may not be communications at all — it may be an operational barrier.

"Too many communications dashboards exist because somebody expects a dashboard, not because the numbers are actually going to change what anyone does," Muscente said.

Follow the chain as far as you can

Once you know how you plan to act on the results, the next question is how far to track them. Open rates are only the starting point.

"Measure people based on how they actually engage and what you need them to do," Muscente said. "Across all of those groups, I generally think about four things: reach, engagement, understanding and behavior. The farther you can get down that chain, the more meaningful your measurement becomes."

The four questions are:

• Reach: Did the message get to them?
• Engagement: Did they do anything with it or just open it?
• Understanding: Did they take away what you intended?
• Behavior: Did anything change?

These questions should stay the same across the organization. The metrics that answer them should not.

"For office employees, email engagement or intranet activity might make sense," Muscente said. "For frontline employees, you might care more about mobile engagement, operational adoption or whether key messages are actually reaching teams through managers."

When her own numbers showed frontline teams lagging behind corporate employees, Muscente responded in three ways: shorten the content, give managers more frequent talking points, and move information into the channels frontline employees already use.

Measure managers separately

Communicators often treat managers as a distribution channel, but few check whether the distribution actually worked, according to Muscente.

"They're one of the most important communications channels in any organization, but we often measure whether employees opened the announcement without asking whether managers understood it, felt ready to discuss it or even received it early enough to lead effectively," she said. "If managers are finding out about a major change at the exact same time as their teams, you've created a credibility problem before the conversation even starts."

She recommended four questions about managers specifically:

• Did they attend the original message briefing?
• Did they use the materials the comms team shared?
• Do they feel confident answering questions?
• What are they hearing from employees?

These questions don't need formal structure. Ask them at the end of a call with managers, and communicators will likely get what they need.

Count the things that don't show up in a report

Not all useful data comes from a dashboard, Muscente noted.

"I think of quantitative data as the 'what' and qualitative feedback as the 'why,'" she said. "An open rate can tell you engagement dropped, it can't tell you whether the subject line was bad, the timing was wrong, or employees didn't care."

She cited several sources of qualitative feedback that help communicators understand different employee populations: pulse surveys, manager feedback (formal or informal), frequently asked employee questions, and topics that repeatedly surface in town hall meetings.

"Numbers can look very precise while completely missing the employee experience, while qualitative feedback can sometimes overrepresent the loudest voices," Muscente said. "The useful insights usually come from looking for patterns across both."

The dashboard itself is not the point, she added.

"That's the difference between measurement and reporting," Muscente said. "Measurement should help you make a better decision."

Source: Ragan Communications (https://www.ragan.com/measurement-employee-groups/)