Why Measure?

Measuring the effectiveness of communications is not always straightforward, but is a vital element of the communication process.  There are many methods that can be employed.  As a first step you should speak with a communications professional in your company to find out what is available to you.

What Can You Measure?

Which Measurement Method Should You Use?

Once you know what you need to measure, you need to think about what method of measurement you want to use.  Here are some example methods that are regularly used by large corporate companies.

Share Your Findings, Recommendations and Take Action!

If measurement is the last thing that people think about, sharing the results is what people almost always forget! If you’ve taken the time to measure your communications you should share the findings, make recommendations and take action!

• Share your measurement feedback/findings with stakeholders and interested parties
• Celebrate your successes
• Identify need for follow up communications
• Act on the feedback –are there improvements or changes needed?
• Make improvements and change happen!
• Take responsibility for developing and improving best practice
• Look for further opportunities for engaging employees through success stories

As employee communicators we need to ensure that our employees:

• Are kept up to date with key information about the company, team, key projects, training, etc.
• Fully understand the role they play within the team, the company and delivery of strategy and plans
• Are engaged with and are actively supportive of the team and the company actions
• Are working at optimum efficiency and within company guidelines and tolerances

What are the benefits of effective communication?

• Engaged Employees – If people are communicated to regularly and in an effective manner they are much more engaged with the company/team and have a more positive attitude towards their work and their customer.
• Ensures Consistency – If everyone understands what the company/team is trying to achieve and their role within it, you will get a much more consistent approach and less tendency for people to come up with their interpretation of what they think something means.
• Promotes 2 Way Feedback – Regular and effective communications invite people to engage in discussion (communication is a dialogue after all!) and provide 2 way feedback between management and employees, departments and colleagues. This in turn promotes a culture of sharing ideas and knowledge, but also making these happen.
• Ensure Compliance with Regulatory Bodies – Effective communications and training information ensures that our employees are compliant with all regulatory requirements and aware of all the company guidelines/policies and/or where to find them.
• Ensure Common Understanding of Strategy and Goals – Employees understand how their work fits into the bigger picture and what the team/company as a whole is trying to achieve.
• Promotes a Positive Attitude Towards Change – Employees that are communicated to effectively around change respond much more positively to it. Communication can also identify champions within the company/team willing to help embed change.

How should you communicate with your people?

When communicating with employees it is important to remember that they have seven key drivers:

1. Reward – How much I earn / financial bonus
2. Recognition – Non-monetary, recognition by peers and leaders, and direct manager
3. Opportunity – My opportunity for advancement / to experience different areas
4. Process – The way in which I work /my level of autonomy / my workload
5. Personal Pride – How I feel about the job I do / how my job makes me feel about myself
6. Product – What I work on / whether I get a choice / my creative license
7. Working Environment – My desk / building / facilities / location of office

What should your communication take into consideration?

There are a number of key communication elements that we have to get right in order to deliver effective communications which result in the desired action being taken by the audience. These are:

• Audience – Communicating to the right people
• Timing – Communicating at the right time
• Message – Knowing exactly what it is you have to tell people and what you want them to do
• Clear – Communicating your message and call to action (i.e. what you have to tell them and what you want them to do) in a clear and simple manner
• Concise – Delivering your message and call to action succinctly (i.e. cut the waffle)
• Language – Using language and phrases that the audience understands and relates to (i.e. no unnecessary jargon or use of manageze and strategeze)
• Tone – Use a tone that reflects the brand guidelines, message and audience you are communicating to
• Channels – Using the appropriate communication channels, which fit the audience and message needs (e.g. road shows for key company information to all employees or intranet for cafeteria opening times)
• Context - Give a flavour of the bigger picture and how local activity fits with the overall company strategy

Understanding How Communication Leads to Engagement

Engagement is both emotional and rational: people act according to their short or medium-term interests and how they feel. Engagement is personal and voluntary; it can’t be guaranteed and has to be worked for.

People feel commitment to their job or profession, their team, their manager and the company in differing degrees; some people connect more to their job and ‘their customers’, others more to colleagues and so on. The manager influences all of these factors.

How do you know how well you communicated?

Measuring the effectiveness of your communication is just as important as delivering it. Measurement is key to understanding the success of your communications and an opportunity to invite feedback – Too often we just tick the box on a communication after it is delivered.

You can measure communications in many ways using informal and formal channels. A good communicator makes use of the measurement systems available within your organisation, but also uses the most powerful form of measurement – feedback. By inviting feedback you can not only measure the success of the communication, but also enter into valuable two-way dialogue, which will help to hone your future communications and engage the audience with your message and the company.

An internal communication strategy will normally cover a 12, 6 or possibly 3 month period. 3 and 6 month strategies tend to be for specific topics, such as contained projects, while 12 month strategies tend to be for a wider departmental/company messages and large scale change projects/programmes.

Objective/Goals

Every strategy should have a clear objective and/or several key goals that it wishes to achieve over the allotted time span of the strategy. The objective and goals provide the focus and backbone to the communication strategy. The objective and goals should all be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Articulate, Relevant and Time-bound.

Example Objective:

Our objective is to deliver an internal communications framework that provides clear, informative and engaging 2-way communications which are planned and effectively link together
the key messages.

Example Goals:

• Simplify structure of internal communication plans, channels and messages
• Ensure known communication events and tactics are captured and referenced in forward planning
• Promote 2 way feedback with employees and regularly respond to feedback received, whilst tying in feedback with communication messaging where appropriate
• Review and reduce current measurement indicators
• Use agreed measurement indicators to measure success against strategy and further identify areas/channels of success and areas/channels in need of further attention
• Use targeting of communications to relevant employees and embed targeting into the communication channel process

Communications Approach

The communication approach is the framework of how you will deliver your strategy. It provides the focus for where you will need to deliver your tactics to best advantage.

Example Communication Approach:

Our communications approach is focused on the improvement of our internal communication mechanisms – from strategy and planning, the channels we use, to the way in which we engage with and seek feedback from employees and ultimately the way we are measuring success, identifying issues and highlighting best practice. With this in mind there are some key elements that we need to address:

Simplification

We need to look at ways of simplifying the following elements of our communication process so that we have clarity and understanding of how internal communications is to be used and works and where responsibility lies. We will focus on improving the following areas:

• Strategy
• Tactical plan
• Channels
• Process/standards Key messages (from Strategy & Vision)
• Communications consultancy/training for leadership team

Forward Planning

We need to become smarter at ensuring that known communications events and tactics are recorded into a pre-planned events calendar and tactical communications plan to allow more “joined up” communications and avoid communication clashes. We need to educate individuals to consult and update the events calendar and tactical plan on a regular basis. We will focus on improving the following areas:

• Pre-planned events calendar
• Tactical plan
• Process/standards
• Awareness training/communications with required individuals
• Set deadlines for submissions
• Allow for more “joined up” communications and communication campaigns (especially around strategy and key messages)

Engaging Employees

We need to promote greater 2-way feedback with employees to generate consistently positive engagement between management and employees. We need to actively respond to and communicate appropriately on feedback received. We need to encourage more bottom up communication and feedback, moving away from a purely “top down” approach. We need to generate more ‘honest’ reporting and feedback from employees – telling it like it is, rather than what they think management wants. We will focus on improving the following areas:

• 2-way feedback loop
• Targeted communications
• Responding and communicating appropriately to feedback
• Moving away from a purely “top down” communications approach
• Working with HR on combined communications and engagement activities

Targeted Communications

We need to reduce the amount of communications that employees receive and ensure that the communications individuals receive are relevant to them and received in a timely fashion. We will focus on improving the following areas:

• Personalise communications
• Targeted messaging
• Cut back on “broad brush” communication messages
• Ensuring communications have clear “call to action”

Effective & Relevant Measurement

We need to review the existing measurement indicators to ensure that they are providing relevant and useful data. Use key measurement indicators to determine any gaps and identify what is/isn’t working and examples of best practice. We will focus on the following areas:

• Employee survey
• Specific activity surveys
• Where are the gaps
• Determine what is/isn’t working, where and what are the blocks/barriers
• What should we be capitalising on

Methodology

The methodology is the key communications principles and practice that the strategy will use to deliver its communication approach. Whilst it is not necessary to include a methodology in your strategy, it can be useful to ensure that the key communications principles and practice are understood and followed.

Example Methodology

• Ensure all communications are crafted to meet at least 1 of the 7 internal comms drivers:
  • Reward – How much I earn/financial bonus
  • Recognition – Non-monetary, recognition by peers leaders and direct manager
  • Opportunity – My opportunity for advancement / to experience different areas
  • Process – The way in which I work /my level of autonomy / my workload
  • Personal Pride – How I feel about the job I do / how my job makes me feel
  • Product – What I work on / Whether I get a choice / My creative license
  • Working Environment – My desk / building / facilities
• Ensure we are using simplified and readily accessible communication submission processes and standards
• Maximise message delivery through use of forward planning, ensuring messages are linked, do not contradict each other and avoid overloading of messages
• Instigate a 2-way feedback loop tying together HR engagement activities and interactive communications channels
• Work in partnership with the leadership team on vision and key messages

Communication Channels

There are a wide variety of communication channels that can be employed for internal communications. The channels available will vary from company to company. When selecting the channels for your strategy you should consider which are the most appropriate to meet your strategy objective and goals.

Example Communication Channels

We will employ both passive and interactive communication channels to deliver our communication tactics. NB these channels will also need to be evaluated for effectiveness and monitored should any changes be made.

Passive Channels:

• Intranet news
• TV
• Wiki
• Notice boards
• Posters
• Email
• Print

Interactive Channels:

• Director road shows
• Company conference
• Business unit briefing
• New Starter Lunches
• Monthly Director Communications Day:
• First Line Breakfast Brief
• Site Team Brief
• Director back to the shop floor
• Director Hosted Employee Birthday Lunches
• Director Q&A Drop in
• Hot Topics Panel Q&A Sessions
• Lunch Time Learning/Panel Q&A Sessions
• Blogs
• Company Collaboration Tools
• Discussion Forums
• Instant Messaging
• Ad hoc discussions/face to face meetings

• Do prepare in advance of a presentation (never just wing it, it will show…..badly).
• Don’t just dump all your ideas down onto PowerPoint as a stream of consciousness!
• Do plan your presentation out on paper before you start creating it in PowerPoint – outline your story and the key slides, their objectives and key messages that you want to cover.
• Don’t assume that your audience has the same level of knowledge around the details as you do. This is doubly important when creating cascade presentations and it is key that you provide sufficient detail in speaker notes for the lowest level of knowledge.
• Do use work that other people have already completed, but be wary of using other people’s slides directly without amending them, is the info still up to date and is the slide still effective (e.g. it may have been seen too many times before or could be too technical for the audience).
  
  Make sure that when you use other people’s slide/info that you adapt them to the look & feel and tone of voice of your presentation.
• Don’t just create your presentation based on what you want to say and/or what you think your audience wants to know.
  
  The best presentations are created based on having asked the audience what they want to know about before you create your presentation. It’s a little bit of extra work, but the benefits far outweigh the extra work.
• Do send your presentation round to peers/interested parties for comment/feedback where appropriate before you present. They may be able to pick up on errors/missing info or add additional info/insight to your presentation. The best presentations are rarely created by one individual.
  
  However, be mindful of sending out your presentation to too many people; don’t lose sight of what you are communicating!
• Don’t create your presentation and then assume it will never change if you need to present it again. After every presentation you do, think about the questions that came up.
  
  If this is a presentation that has a long shelf life you might want to address the recurring questions in your presentation to avoid them coming up again.
  
  With every presentation your delivery should become much slicker and easier if you adopt this process.

Consistency of Style & Tone

• Do use a consistent look and feel throughout the presentation. When working on corporate presentations ensure that you adhere to the presentation and branding guidelines.
  
  Is your presentation using the corporate stationery/template, but even more important is it using the correct tone of voice? Large corporations often have Tone of Voice Guidelines, which are either part of the Brand/Presentation Guidelines, or part of a guideline suite.
• Don’t mix up different styles through your presentation (e.g. if you start out using Title case in your headings keep this going throughout).

Visual Accessibility

• Do break up your presentation with relevant images and/or graphics. Not everyone needs them, but many people are more visually stimulated and therefore need to see imagery or graphical representations to understand as well as just the words on the screen.
  
  When choosing imagery, try to use images that have some connection to the slide objective/key messages.
• Don’t use difficult to read or uncommon fonts that might not be saved on other people’s computers. So for instance the font Comic Sans or the Calligraphy style fonts.
  
  When working with corporate presentations there will invariably be brand guidelines on the fonts that have been approved for presentations.
• Do use a font size of 14 pt or larger – smaller fonts may mean that people will not be able to read it. Rule of thumb – If it can’t be read then it shouldn’t be on your slide!
• Don’t use garish background and font colours, remember it might be easy to see when you are less than 50 cm’s from your screen, but how will it look projected from about 6 metres away?
  
  Also, just because you like the mix of Fuchsia and Lemon doesn’t mean other people will! Stick to neutral colours & tones, blues, blacks, greens & whites if you are not working with a branded template.
• Do be mindful of people with colour blindness; avoid teaming the colours of red and green together!
• Don’t create long bullets with several sentences; try to keep your bullets to single sentences, two maximum.
• Do use bullets instead of paragraphs. People find it very hard to read off of the screen and paragraphs can make people instinctively switch off and disengage with a presentation as they appear to be hard work to read. Again – Keep it simple!
• Don’t use more than 6 bullets per slide (blank slide); if you have headers and footers on corporate stationery/template this may need to be lessened.
• Do put a clear line break between bullets, this helps to make them easier to read and makes them look neater on the screen. Remember that “presentation” i.e. the way it looks is as important as the content when communicating.
• Don’t use more than 12 words per bullet point on your slides and where possible avoid this on your speaker notes – keep it clean and simple!
  
  On speaker notes when you have more than one sentence or message per bullet break it up with clear line breaks, e.g. as per this document.
• Do keep your bullets to a single line where possible, this keeps your slides looking clean and tidy visually.

Slide Layout & Content

• Don’t try to cram too much detail/information into one slide. This is not just the number of words (though that is a big part of it), but also the number of key messages you are trying to cover.
  
  One slide should really have no more than 3 key messages unless it is an early positioning slide where you are outlining a number of messages at a high level that you then go into more detail later in the presentation.
• Do keep your slides to a minimum, maximum 15 slides for a 30 min presentation, NB this does not include Q&A time! This assumes a 2 minutes per slide presenting ratio (which most struggle to maintain).
  
  A trap that a lot of people fall into is to try and combine slides together to make a presentation appear shorter. In truth it just makes it more complicated to present, look untidy and also ruin the pace of a presentation as you can spend far too long on a single slide instead of moving on.
• Don’t put in meaningless slides, e.g. additional slide titles, agendas on a short presentations, etc.
• Do have some fun with your presentations. The presentations that work best and are the most memorable are often the ones where you have a bit of fun and engage with your audience.
  
  This goes for the content and the way in which you present it. Remember people buy people, if you don’t seem to be enthusiastic about your content why should they?
• Don’t use acronyms unless you have previously prefaced them with the actual title/phrase and all acronyms should be written out in speaker notes, especially for cascade presentations. However, as a good communicator you should try to avoid them where possible.
• Do use handouts – especially for complicated diagrams or detailed information. Depending upon the style of your presentation you can choose to give these out before, during or after your presentation.
  
  If it is a cascade presentation then you should indicate in the speaker notes that there are handouts and when these should be delivered to the audience.
• Don’t put word for word exactly what you are going to say on your slide. This immediately makes people switch off and they may cease to see either the slide or hear what you are saying.
  
  This is a common mistake that people make when presenting and is especially true in cascade presentations where the presenter doesn’t know the content and doesn’t have good speaker notes to refer to.
• Don’t overuse sound and animation – 9 times out of 10 the animation that is used is unnecessary and irritating to the audience and in a cascade presentation can cause confusion and embarrassment for the presenter.
  
  Think – do I really need to animate this slide; does the sound effect actually add anything? Animation is most useful when you are building concepts, or wish to introduce information in a trickle effect.
  
  When you do use it please ensure that you make sure that you have detailed animation notes in the speaker notes.

Timing & Delivery

• Do create detailed speaker notes using bullet format rather than paragraph to make them easier to absorb for people presenting your presentation.
  
  You should provide the following on each of your slides:
  
  *Slide Objective - What is it that you are trying to achieve/get across
  *Key Messages – What are the key messages that you need to ensure you get across within this slide (This may be the same as the slide objective)
  Supporting Messages/Information – Additional information/messages that may be useful when explaining the slide/discussing themes and details of where to find supporting documentation/handouts
  Animation Notes – Explanation of any animation used and how it builds
  Activity – Details of any activities that are to take place at this point in the presentation.

  Your first slide should also contain the following information in the speaker notes:

  *Presenter Notes – A bit of info about presentation, what/who it was created for, whether it is for cascade, who the author is and when it was created.
  *Presentation Purpose – What is the overriding aim of the whole presentation
  Presentation Key Messages (May be the same as your presentation purpose)
  How to use the Presentation – Necessary if you intend for this presentation to be used by other people and therefore should as a rule always be put in just in case

• Don’t over script your presentation – especially if it is likely to be used by other people. Keep it simple, use bullets in your speaker notes and break it down using the framework above.
  
  Remember, not everyone talks the way you do and their logic might lead them to relay information in a different order to you.
  
  By using bullets you allow a presenter the opportunity to pick out key information easier and therefore present it more naturally.
• Do allow your audience to react naturally (e.g. in a presentation if a question is asked answer it then and there where possible, if you make people wait until the end a question can be lost or people are wanting to leave and therefore reluctant to ask questions that may delay their escape).
• Don’t create a presentation which doesn’t allow time for questions or queries, remember communication is two way, you won’t have had a good presentation if no one chipped in nothing at all!
• Do rehearse your presentation before it is presented, even if you are not the one who will be presenting it.
  
  You need to rehearse it to fully understand the timing and to understand if the flow is working as you planned.
  
  Try to get an independent person (a long suffering loved one) to listen to you and give you some feedback on how the presentation went.

(*minimum requirement)

With a strong community of followers a blog and website thrives and allows you to make it work as an effective mode of communication for your personal and business needs and to allow it to pay for itself through sponsorship and advertising and/or selling your products and services to a wide audience.

So, with this in mind I’ve been busy getting Wealie’s World onto some of the key blog directories: blogcatalog, blogged, blogger, and MyBlogLog.  I’ve also been further linking the website with my key social media channels: Facebook through the NetworkedBlogs App, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and many more.

In the human body, it is the interconnection of the veins and nervous system that let the key organs do their job and interact, the same principle can be applied to your key communication channels, with the linking and promotion being the veins and nervous system.  In order for all our different on-line and social media channels to work effectively and in conjunction we need to effectively promote and link them together.  By linking all our channels together we create a virtual communications network that can tap into all the diverse communities available to us and take advantage of a truly wide demographic.

There are also pitfalls to not connecting together our virtual comms network, with so many potential avenues of communication available to us, we need to ensure that we effectively manage and control the information and messages we are disseminating from the different channels.  Without the bigger picture we cannot ensure that we do not communicate at cross purposes with ourselves, or worse contradict ourselves.  For example there’s always the chance that we will forget to update certain channels and the information contained on it will be out of date.

It’s very easy to sign up with lots of different social media accounts (I’ve done so today with the blogging resources), but if you don’t update and manage them all, they can work against you, just like the website that is out of date by 3 – 6 months can.  By linking accounts and channels together we can minimise the number of times you have to enter information into systems to update your channels, e.g. By linking your YouTube account to update both Twitter and Facebook when you complete certain actions like when you favourite a video, or upload new content automatically means you are just putting in the information once to  YouTube, but a status update will appear on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter.

And last, but by no means least, we must not forget our traditional forms of communication, we still meet face to face with individuals, word of mouth is as important as ever and paper communications are still a reality in our daily lives.  Make sure that all your business literature has the key social media sites and your website address clearly displayed upon them, e.g. the business card and headed paper.  Ensure that your email signature has direct links as well.  When you’re speaking with colleagues, business partners and customers, take a moment to remind them of the different ways they can keep in touch with you on and off line.

Happy communicating!

Wealie