Once a year, we recommend you do a comprehensive audit of your internal communication program. During this assessment, you survey your company and look to gain insights that are statistically relevant for the different personas you are communicating with throughout your workforce.
If you’ve never participated in a communications audit before, the most common objectives are:
Doing an audit is an important step when creating and updating your communications strategy, which should be done regularly. The audit allows you to remove personal bias from those involved and instead use data to answer core questions.
For example, you might not like email as an internal communication channel but perhaps you find out that the majority of your organization does. The next logical question is why do they like it? It could be because of the generational makeup of the workforce (see our article on channels for multi-generational workforces) or because the other channels that have been made available to your workforce are so poor that only email works.
There are only two ways to find out:
The audit should be grounded in a few key categories:
You want to stay away from asking general questions that lump all topics together because different personas are likely to have different preferences for how and where they want to receive their information. For example, communication preferences for frontline or “deskless” employees will likely be very different from the preferences of those who work at a computer most of the time.
You want to ensure that the questions you are asking are neutral, do not contain any bias, are not leading and get you to a great conclusion.
We believe that modern communication platforms should answer the questions below via their analytics. It is way more effective to have actual data based on usage than anecdotal information via a survey (Sparrow Connected provides you these reports out of the box). We are including the questions here because not every reader would have deployed Sparrow Connected or a similar tool:
Under this category you are looking at some very important attributes of your communication including:
For example, if your organization had two initiatives:
Then you should ask specific questions about awareness and behaviour as related to those two initiatives. For example:
Measurement is one of the hottest topics in internal communication today. At Sparrow Connected, we’ve developed a communication platform that integrate with and automatically measure the impact of your communications across the digital channels you use to reach your workforce, from MS Teams to email to the intranet to mobile and more.
Have questions about how to do an internal comms audit? Or, want to explore how to leverage the results from your latest audit?
See how Sparrow Connected can help. Book a demo today