Communication is the key to successful business practices. Both internal and external business communication make up two halves of the same whole, and both should be measured carefully and addressed. If you’re struggling to achieve good communication within and without your organization, this guide will help you decide how to set better metrics and what metrics you should be measuring to begin with.
With the COVID-19 pandemic still in effect, the way we communicate has changed, and businesses are feeling its impact. Social distancing requires more of our communication to be digital, which is both easier and more difficult to track in some aspects. It’s easier because tracking tools are usually digital anyway, but it’s more difficult because it’s hard to measure whether your communication is truly effective without measuring the results.
Measure Your Reach
Measuring your company’s reach will determine how many employees are able to use your communication tools, as well as how many potential customers you’re reaching. You need to understand how many employees are regularly using your communication platforms, logging into the system, and opening emails/meeting invites.
First, you start by measuring your employees’ adoption rate. This lets you know how many employees have adopted certain communication platforms. An easy formula for this can be found here: https://www.contactmonkey.com/blog/measure-communications
Now that you know how many employees have actually adopted the communication platform, it’s time to look at how many are actually logging in. The platform doesn’t mean much if your employees aren’t even logging into it! Divide the number of users accessing the platform by the number of enrolled users, and divide by 100. This will give you your log in rate.
Open Rate
Something businesses often overlook is the open rate. This usually refers to opening emails, newsletters, etc. Measuring this will let you know if your employees are actually participating in internal communications, and may help you identify why or why not. Improve your emails, newsletters, drastically improve engagement with this simple metric.
Engagement
Engagement refers to whether or not employees and customers are interacting with your communications and staying engaged. Your engagement rate lets you know two things: whether or not you’re communicating effectively, and whether or not internal and external communications are appealing enough to elicit a response.
Employees that are engaged with their jobs and the communication involved are almost always more productive and focused at work, and if you’re engaging customers, you’re more likely to inspire them to make a purchase.
This is one of your most important metrics, so don’t neglect it. Engagement should always be as high as possible. If you’re not keeping at least 80% of your audience engaged, you’re going to lose interest pretty quickly. Likewise, if you’re not engaging with your workforce, you’re not fostering a happy, healthy work culture.
Using The Right Tools
Setting communication metrics requires specific tools for measuring and improving your overall communication. Maybe you need a new online meeting solution to move away from your unproductive meetings. Or, you might need an analytics tool to effectively measure your communication metrics. Whatever the case may be, having the right tools can make a huge difference in the success of your communication efforts.
COVID-19 showed us that good communication is more important than ever. Companies have been forced to adopt new practices, including remote work. This means you must have the right tools to facilitate such change, or your business simply won’t survive.
Set Standards
It’s up to you to set the standard of communication for your business. You can require a response to emails, mandatory attendance at meetings, and more. Responding to emails should be the least of your standards, as it’s just common courtesy, but you can enact other policies to ensure communication standards.
Follow-Up
It’s important to follow-up on your efforts as well. Don’t just use your analytics tool once to get a picture of your communication metrics. You should be measuring these at least a few times per year, but ideally, at least once per month. Communication is an ongoing process, and one that should always be improved wherever possible. Enlist your employees in the process as well. Ask for feedback on your communication efforts. See what things they like about the current system or recent upgrades, and ask for suggestions.
Since employees will be using the system daily, it should be as friendly to their needs as possible. This might mean changing things around, but improving your communication is worth the effort and cost.
Conclusion
Don’t underestimate the power of good communication within a business. Internal and external communication are equally important, but internal communication can cause a business to excel or crumble from the inside out. Measuring your communication metrics and acting accordingly can increase your productivity and communication with the business for greater success.
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