12 metrics and KPIs for effective internal communication

Ineffective communication costs companies $15,000 per employee per year. That’s because effective internal communications do so much good for your business.

They keep employees engaged and in sync with company values. Your teams find it easier to solve problems, make decisions, and collaborate. All of this boosts customer satisfaction and your bottom line.

It’s clear. Strong internal communication is a business essential. But how do you know if you’re doing a good enough job?

This is where internal communications metrics and KPIs come in. By tracking metrics and KPIs, you get a ton of useful data, that you can then use to judge the success of your internal communication strategy.

To get you started, we’ve created this list of 12 internal communications metrics and KPIs. Use them to understand and assess your internal comms performance. Then, find ways to improve it.

Why track internal communications metrics and KPIs?

We know that internal communications can make or break a business. So you need to approach company comms with strategy.

That’s the first step. The second is working out whether your chosen strategy is making a difference. And for this, you need internal communications metrics and KPIs.

These metrics help you to track your performance over time. They help you put your efforts in the right places and get the best possible results.

By gathering and analyzing comms data you get to:

• Assess the effectiveness of your internal communication strategy, identifying successes and areas for improvement
• Make data-based decisions — which tend to be wiser than those you make with your gut
• Find employee groups that you’re failing to reach and messages that you’re failing to land
• Justify internal communications investment

Getting started with communication metrics

Before we get to our list of communication KPIs and metrics, let’s cover some basics. Here are a few things to consider before you start measuring your internal comms performance.

Choose measurable, relevant metrics

You need a clear plan for gathering and measuring data. So before you commit to tracking a metric, make sure the data is accessible. Metrics should also be relevant to your internal communication goals — and overall company goals, too.  

Use qualitative and quantitative data

To get a full picture of your internal communication performance, you need both concrete numbers and in-depth detail. For this, you need to gather both qualitative and quantitative data.

Set goals and a schedule

Record internal communications metrics before you make any updates to your comms strategy. Set measurable goals. Then schedule your next metric check for 90 days, six months, or a year from now.

Involve your organization

When the whole company gets behind an initiative, it’s easier to see it through. So involve employees, managers, and leaders. Share internal metrics with them. Give updates, take action, and communicate results.

Be open to change

Internal communication trends and technologies evolve. So do your business goals. So be prepared to update your communication metrics and strategies to keep them relevant.

12 internal communication KPIs and metrics to track

So, let’s dive in. Here’s our list of internal communication KPIs and metrics. You may like to measure some or all these metrics to gauge your internal comms progress.

Employee engagement  

Internal communication and employee engagement are closely linked. Strong internal comms support engagement by:  

• Aligning employees behind your business values and goals
• Helping employees build strong workplace relationships
• Making employee voices heard
• Recognizing employees

Where there’s good communication, employees become more engaged with their work and your organization. This prompts a positive cycle because engaged employees are more likely to read and act upon your comms.  

Because there’s such a strong link between engagement and comms, employee engagement rates are a really good indicator of comms success. So to find out how successful your communication strategy is, you can use employee engagement KPIs.

You can gather this data with the help of employee surveys. You can also look at employee retention, absenteeism, and internal promotion rates.

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Message open rates

If you send messages via an internal communication tool, you should be able to track your open rates. This communication metric tells you how many employees read your emails, newsletters, and announcements.

If you find that lots of messages go unopened and unread, there are several ways you can improve things. 

You could vary the time of day you send messages. Or the frequency with which you send messages. You could switch up your subject lines. Or try segmenting your employee mailing list so employees receive personalized communications. 

Some experimentation could reveal an internal comms style that better suits your staff.

Message open rates can also reveal whether one communication channel outperforms another. If this is the case, it makes sense to focus on that communication channel as a way to better reach employees.

Message and feedback response time

When your workers respond quickly to internal messages, you learn three things.

First, it’s easy for employees to access the message and therefore the communication channel.

Second, employees are engaged and want to respond to messages promptly.

And third, the meaning of your messages is getting through. 

So track employee response time for your internal communications and feedback requests. If you find that it’s taking a while for employees to read and respond to messages, you might like to consider:

• Streamlining communication channels so employees don’t waste time switching between them
• Setting clear and fair expectations for message response times
• Encouraging managers and leaders to lead by example
• Seeking feedback from employees to find out what’s preventing a speedy response

Communication tool adoption

Internal communication tools are an investment. So you want to be sure that your chosen communication software is proving a hit with employees.

Adoption rates show you how many workers are using a new communication tool. High adoption rates are great for proving a return on investment (ROI) and the tool’s usability.

Low adoption rates suggest resistance among the workforce to using your chosen tool. If this is the case, you could try one of the following ideas. 

Software training  — so all employees understand how to use your communication tool and what they stand to gain by using it

Software ambassadors — give software training to a group of employee ambassadors who then support their peers in using your intranet or app

If your chosen tool isn’t intuitive to use or doesn’t suit all members of your workforce, you may also have to go back to the drawing board to reconsider the tools you use.

Content consumption metrics

It’s important that employees engage with essential content, like company policies and training documents.

To find out how employees interact with this content, you can use content consumption metrics. We’re talking page views, page engagement, content downloads, and message shares.

If you’re getting high rates for all these metrics, your content is easy for employees to access and understand.

Low rates suggest you should assess the clarity and layout of your internal content. It should be easy for employees to read, digest, and act upon the information you’ve provided. That might mean:

• Writing useful, descriptive headlines
• Using simple language
• Breaking longer content down into manageable sections
• Making use of images and videos to make your content more engaging

This internal communication KPI also shows you something else. The pages that are most useful and effective. You may like to use these pages as a best practice template moving forward.

Employee sentiment analysis

Employee sentiment analysis tells you how employees feel about your organization. It’s the general mood or vibe that currently represents your workforce. And it’s based upon the content of the posts they write, the messages they send, and the feedback they give.  

You can manually assess employee sentiment. But by far the easiest way to summarize the thoughts of your staff is with the help of a sentiment analysis tool.

Some tools scan content for keywords. They then compare the number of negative and positive keywords.

Other tools are more advanced and more accurate. Thanks to AI and natural language processing (NLP), they have a better understanding of human language. This means they’re better at summarizing the emotion behind a piece of writing.

Blink communication software has powerful analytics that allow you to analyze employee sentiment. You can also track communication flow, to find both positive and negative company relationships.

Leadership visibility

To ensure engagement with internal communication channels, all members of staff must be seen to use them — including your leaders.

You can measure leadership visibility through a combination of qualitative and quantitative data:

• How often leaders send out messages
• The number of opens, likes, and shares leadership messages receive
• The sentiment of employee responses to leadership messages
• The consistency of messaging in leadership communication

If you’re embracing a two-way communication style within your organization (which we believe every company should), leadership involvement is an important part of the picture.

Profile completion

If you use a modern intranet or an employee app, employees can usually set up profiles. Other employees then search these profiles to find team members and learn more about them.

Employee profiles support stronger workplace relationships, information sharing, and collaboration. So they’re a really important part of your internal comms strategy.

But they’re only useful when employees take the time to complete their profiles. So this is another great internal metric to track.

What percentage of employees have a completed profile? What percentage of each profile is complete? Which fields do employees tend to leave blank?

Find answers to these questions. Then, by either motivating employees or reconfiguring your profile pages, you can improve completion and communication.

Employee advocacy score

Employee advocates are happy to recommend your company as a place to work. They’re also happy to recommend your products or services.

They’re more likely to do this if your company has a culture of good communication and clear messaging. So another of the internal communications metrics to add to your list is an employee advocacy score.

You can calculate your employee advocacy score using a variety of different metrics:

• Surveys asking employees whether they’d recommend your products/services/work culture
• The number of quality employee referrals for roles within the company
• How often employees repost company content on social media or internal newsfeed channels

If lots of employees are promoting organizational messages and values externally, this is a clear sign that your internal communication strategy is working well.

Employee turnover

Engaged employees are less likely to leave their jobs. And we know that good, two-way internal communication is one piece of the employee retention puzzle.

That’s because, with effective internal comms, you can:

• Create a sense of belonging
• Help employees find purpose in their work
• Give employees the information and resources they need to fulfill their roles

So include employee turnover rate as one of your internal communications KPIs. While it doesn’t give the full picture, you can view it alongside other internal metrics to see whether your comms strategy is making a difference. 

Employee satisfaction rates

Poor workplace communication causes stress and harms staff satisfaction. The opposite is also true. Companies with honest feedback, personal openness, and mutual respect enjoy higher levels of employee emotional wellbeing.

This means you’re unlikely to achieve high rates of employee satisfaction without effective internal communication.

To discover how satisfied employees feel, anonymous surveys are a useful tool. It means employees can give honest and useful feedback. It’s also worth keeping your question simple and concise, like this one: 

Overall, how satisfied do you feel with your job at [company name]? 

Send out your staff satisfaction survey on a quarterly, six-monthly, or annual basis to track your progress over time.

Customer satisfaction rates and sales

Employee satisfaction is directly linked to customer satisfaction and a company’s financial performance.

According to Gallup, happy and engaged employees help their company improve customer relationships and achieve organic growth. Highly engaged businesses see a 10% improvement in customer ratings and an 18% improvement in sales.

Surveying customers and tracking business revenue are other useful ways to assess the wider impact of your internal communications strategy.

How the right internal comms tools can help

To make the most impact, you’ll have to dig down into the data.

You can segment your communication metrics for different communication channels, departments, and employee devices. You can even segment them according to the employee life cycle stage.  

When you understand your internal metrics on this level, it’s easier to find root causes and make impactful comms improvements.

But to make data collection and segmentation quick and easy, you need the right internal communication tools. Internal communication software, suited to your organization:

• Makes internal communication more engaging and effective
• Ensures the right people are getting the right comms
• Ensures that everyone has access to company comms — not just those with a company computer or email address
• Provides actionable data that helps you measure the success of your internal communication strategy and make improvements

So, as well as choosing an internal communication software that your employees are excited to use, you need to find a tool with robust analytics features.

Use Blink’s super app for internal communication and you tick all the boxes, particularly if you run a frontline organization.

With Blink, you can send internal communications to every employee smartphone. You can also use analytics functions to track employee engagement, improve your content, and build stronger workplace relationships.

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