The Measurement Gap – Sharn Kleiss, Employee Experience Lead, Gallagher:

Our partner Sharn Kleiss, Employee Experience Lead, Gallagher joined us to discuss our recent measurement gap report, here’s her take on the key findings:

Measuring internal communications effectiveness is notoriously difficult. There’s confusion about what constitutes meaningful measurement, a lack of tools to measure the right indicators effectively, difficulty in getting qualitative data, the need for clear, measurable objectives, and the struggle to move beyond “vanity metrics” such as reach, likes, and comments.

In this survey, we wanted to get to grips with just how much time and effort is being spent measuring, what the challenges are, and how we might overcome them.

Personally, we know measurement matters. Professionally, we’re being held back.

This might be due to the time-consuming nature of measurement, the difficulty of obtaining comprehensive data, and the lack of resources and capacity to perform measurement tasks. A lack of standardized metrics (31%) and complexities in attributing outcomes solely to communication efforts were identified as key challenges.

The average time to create a measurement report was about 4.5 hours at a time. Funnily enough, respondents who said measurement was ‘not very important’ still took 3-5 hours to do their reports!

While the average respondent was reporting on their internal communications measurement about 9 times per year, respondents that thought measurement was important, were reporting monthly or quarterly. But those that didn’t see it as important, were either doing it weekly or annually/biannually.

Could this mean that in reporting little and often, we don’t see the big picture impact?

Or is that those who measure infrequently do so because they don’t see it as important?

Report too often, and your feedback may be too transient to act upon. Report too infrequently, and you’ll have missed your chance. It seems the sweet spot might just be the monthly or quarterly cadence.

Several respondents expressed a desire to improve their measurement practices. They wanted measurement to be easier, automated, and tied to business goals. They mentioned the need for better tools, resources, and systems to measure effectively. Some mentioned the difficulty in getting leadership to care about measurement or provide sufficient support for it – despite proving effectiveness to senior leaders being ranked of highest importance to the organisation when measuring impact and success (47.4%).

Scroll down to access the full report.

Methodology

Gallagher & Haiilo partnered together to collect in-depth feedback about their experience with measurements. Using a proprietary online survey platform, more than 100 quantitative and qualitative data points were reviewed.