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Measurement standards have been available to the public relations community for some time. Only recently has the Institute for Public Relations assembled a group to establish a similar set of standard for assessing the effectiveness of employee communications.
On June 30, FIR host Shel Holtz moderated a discussion featuring Sean Williams, who coordinated the group’s efforts, and three other communication measurement thought leaders: Katie Paine, Angela Sinickas, and Ryan Williams. The robust discussion reflects the challenges of trying to set measurement standards for an activity as inconsistently practiced as employee communications. Among the points of contention that emerged in the conversation: the appropriate categories for various metrics and the items that belong in each category, whether outputs (such as intranet posts or emails sent) should be measured, and the distinction between metrics that predict future employee behaviors and those that look at past behaviors.
We have been given permission to share the preliminary document produced by the group; you can download it here in its pre-publication format. The list of proposed standards and their definitions, extracted from the document, appears below:
FIR Interviews are sponsored by Thornley Fallis, the public engagement specialists. If you are looking for tools and up to date techniques to engage with your community, Thornley Fallis can help. Find them at thornleyfallis.com.
About our interview guests:
Katie Delahaye Paine, aka The Measurement Queen, has been a pioneer in the field of measurement for three decades. Her books, Measure What Matters (Wiley, March 2011) and Measuring Public Relationships (KDPaine & Partners, 2007) are considered must-reads for anyone tasked with measuring public relations and social media. Her latest book, written with Beth Kanter, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit:Using Data to Change the World, is the 2013 winner of the Terry McAdam Book Award. Her latest company, Paine Publishing is the first educational publishing firm entirely dedicated to making more Measurement Mavens. Its newsletter, The Measurement Advisor, is the industry’s most comprehensive source of information about best practices in communications measurement. In her consulting practices, she designs measurement dashboards for some of today’s most admired companies.
Angela Sinickas, founder of Sinickas Communications, which has worked with companies, organizations, and governments in 32 countries on six continents. Her clients include 25% of the Forbes Top 100 largest global companies. Before starting her own consulting firm, she held positions from editor to vice president in for-profit and government organizations and worked as a senior consultant and practice leader at Hewitt and Mercer. She is the author of a manual, How to Measure Your Communication Programs (now in its third edition), and chapters in several books. Her 50+ articles in professional journals can be found on her website,www.sinicom.com. Her work has been recognized with 20 international-level Gold Quill Awards from IABC, plus her firm was named IABC Boutique Agency of the Year in 2015. She holds a BS degree in Journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MS in Leadership from Northeastern University.
Ryan Williams specializes in internal communications, research, and leadership development. He has a passion for servant leadership and shares the positive impact it can have on the lives of employees and organizational performance. His experience has involved strategy development, service improvements, communication audits, change management, and employee engagement. He facilitates planning, designs research, constructs effective questions, communicates results, and produces action. Ryan has won five International Association of Business Communicators’ (IABC) Gold Quill Awards and was recognized by the International Public Relations Institute (IPR) with the Golden Ruler Award of Excellence for Measurement in 2004 for his work with the Alberta Medical Association. Ryan earned his Masters of Arts in Leadership from Trinity Western University in 2007, and has a Bachelor of Arts in Recreation Administration with a major in Community Development from The University of Alberta.
Sean Williams is Vice President and Practice Lead, Education and Internal Communications, at True Digital Communications. Before joining True Digital, Sean was owner of Communication AMMO, Inc. Williams has held executive communication posts at National City Bank, KeyCorp and The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. He also provides managerial communication training through Face2Face Communication, which he acquired from Joe Williams Communications in 2015. Earlier in his career, Williams was senior consultant for Williams, where he expanded the strategic planning, research and consulting practices, and led and refined the Face2Face program with companies including First Energy Corp., KeyCorp, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Merck, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Prudential and Lucent, training literally thousands of managers in the innovative and highly rated program.
He also is an adjunct professor of Public Relations at Kent State University, and has created graduate classes in PR Measurement/ROI and social media measurement for Kent and another university.
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Thanks Shel for shedding light on this important (and often under-recognized) aspect of communications research and evaluation. And how affirming to feature key members of the Measurement Commission from the Institute for Public Relations to represent the subject so ably.
Indeed, thanks very much for the interview and discussion, Shel! On behalf of @meewing @StaceyatJJW and @juliesoneil we look forward to our next phase in our research. If any of your listeners’ organizations are willing to explore testing the standards, we’d love to hear from them.
Michelle Foster, a corporate communications manager, asked this question in LinkedIn, which offers limited space for responses, so I’m re-posting it here and will share responses from other participants in the podcast conversation as I get them.
I apologize that I didn’t listen to the audio before asking this question. I totally get these things on the list. They make total sense. What I’m struggling to define is how employee communications and the efforts we put forth actually correlates to these things.
So, for example. How do we correlate the output from internal communications to a trust score. Or an employee retention number?
Let’s say we did five internal activities in June and our turnover was down 0.5%, then each internal communications activity is tied to 0.1% reduction in turnover. I just can’t get there. There are so many other factors impacting it that communications isn’t the sole reason for the outcomes or the impacts, so how do we get to the point where we can tie them together?
I’m really thinking about this in an if x, then y type of answer.
This response is from Angela Sinickas:
Excellent question, Michelle. Some measurement experts will say we can never make that connection between comms and those types of outcomes or ROI, and even that we shouldn’t for fear management will expect a bottom-line impact on every single thing we do. But there ways to establish correlations, and sometimes even cause and effect. And I’ve never seen a management team expect everything done by any function to produce an ROI.
Here’s an example of a correlation. You probably already have a regular engagement survey. You likely are asking questions about the level of confidence employees have in their senior leaders (trust), their intention to stay with the company (retention), their likelihood of recommending the company to others (advocacy). All we need to do is add several innocent-sounding communication questions to the survey about which channels they use or don’t use to differing extents, or how well they understand key topics we work on, like strategy or competitive positioning.
Then we can use those questions as demographic filters for the answers to all the other survey questions based on those with heavy usage/consumption of those channels versus those with light or no usage. You may very well find that trust in leaders is significantly higher among employees who follow executive blogs or tend to view more leadership webcasts. You may find that advocacy is higher among those who say they have high understanding of strategy and competitive advantage—making sure you compare understanding levels for similar job levels. You may find that expected retention is higher among those who rate their supervisors’ communication skills higher.
These are only correlations. It could be that people who trust leaders more are more likely to want to follow their blogs. However, some correlations have only one direction that actually makes sense; for example, it’s logical that good supervisor communication could increase retention. It is not logical that intending to stay with the company will make people rate their supervisors higher on communication.
Another way to establish correlations is through pilot and control groups. While back in the corporate world, we piloted a new approach to safety in half our locations, which were a mirror image of the control groups in terms of size, location and current vehicle accident rates. After one year of the new approach, there was no change in accidents in the control locations and a drop in accidents in the pilot locations so dramatic it reduced our annual vehicle insurance premium by a million dollars, not to mention all the other cost savings when accidents are reduced. We were able to calculate a compelling ROI from this pilot for our communicator’s work. She was asked to add to her staff so she could do more of this type of work.
Another client successfully pitched a proposal to start call center shifts with 15 minutes of information catching-up time by using a pilot. Even though these employees were off the phones for part of their day, their productivity numbers shot up, while there was no change at other call centers. Having a chance to read emails and intranet advisories about things that would affect their calls prevented them from all individually having to seek out managers to get questions answered or have to put customers on hold or call them back.
You can even ask survey questions with a direct cause and effect. For example, with one client we asked employees who chose certain benefit options that were more financially advantageous for the company which communications most influenced their decisions. We asked employees at another client which safety behaviors they paid more attention to in the past year because of the new communications they received. Not only were the numbers strong, but they also matched actual reductions of accidents. The ones people said they paid the most attention to had the greatest reductions; those they paid less attention to saw smaller reductions.
None of these approaches cost a lot of money or take a lot of extra time to measure. In fact, pilots cost less than launching something company wide. So while I do recommend we communicators attempt to make some connections between what we do and the bottom line each year, I think we still need to focus most of our own research on the more direct outcomes of our work, like increasing interest and information levels on key business topics, or increasing the percentages of employees with more positive attitudes about the topics we focus on. And we even need to quantify the activities we’re using to achieve those outcomes. If we see an increase in understanding of a topic one year, but we can’t show that we produced a lot more content on that topic and wrote it at a reading grade level closer to our employees’ education level, we can’t even try to take credit for those outcomes.