We’re constantly told to be data-driven. Yet the proliferation of platforms in the comms channel stack create an abundance of available, easy-to-grab metrics. What do they mean and how can we learn the signals to demonstrate value and impact to the business?
Ever feel like you're drowning in data, yet starving for wisdom? You're meticulously tracking email open rates, page views and platform clicks, but when stakeholders ask, "Is that good?" or "what's the real impact?", the answers feel… hollow.
As communication professionals, we instinctively know the inherent value of what we do, and we’re constantly told to be data-driven. But our industry often seems obsessed with "vanity metrics"—the kind of numbers that look refreshing on a dashboard but are ultimately overwhelming and don't demonstrate true value or impact on our most important goals. This obsession means we're often just chasing noise, and that noise is expensive and rarely moves the needle.
It's time to shift our focus.
Here’s how we can drive more effective communication and demonstrate the impact:
- Manage the noise: Understand your audience prioritizing empathy.
- Measure what matters: Move from outputs to meaningful outcomes and detect the signals that drive value.
- Tell a compelling story: Communicate value through the lens of your stakeholders and the business.
1. Taming the information overload: Managing the noise
Employees today are constantly drinking from the information fire hydrant. And with productivity a constant focus, there’s a premium on focus and attention rates.
This unmanaged noise has a tangible cost to the business in terms of interruptions, decisions and lost productivity. Research suggests knowledge workers lose a significant portion of their day to interruptions, and it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back on task1. Another study found that distraction at work was 15x more costly to productivity than health-related absenteeism2.
Volume and lack of relevance are repetitive themes from employee communications audits and employee research projects that we run for clients. Employees want to be informed but struggle to engage. They deploy active filtering strategies for messaging which means they could be missing important messages. With the number one purpose of Internal Communications’ teams being ‘Communicating Strategic Purpose and Alignment,’ this is a concern.
Filtering strategies and active avoidance towards communication are a result of employees taking this challenge into their own hands. It’s not their fault. As humans we need to make some 35,000 decisions daily, so we create heuristics and short cuts to help.
Understanding our audience deeply helps us appreciate that an ‘average open rate of emails’ has little quality on whether the email was understood, had any value or could be acted upon—especially when these and other vanity metrics are unreliably tracked. Being an expert on your audience empowers you to critically evaluate communication requests, ensuring they truly serve a purpose.
2. From outputs to outcomes: Measuring what truly matters
If there's one critical mindset shift that we need, it's moving from outputs (the stuff we do, the emails we send, the townhalls we organize) to outcomes (what we help our audience "Know, Feel, Do," and the impact on the organization).
Our biggest challenge is often translating abstract goals like "building trust" or "increasing engagement" into something concrete and measurable. We're goal-obsessed, but often in a fluffy, ambiguous sense. Poorly defined outcomes will never be truly measurable. Once we make our goals concrete through observed (operationalized) behavior, measurement becomes much easier.
Think about it with this hypothetical question: who makes the best burger, McDonald's or Five Guys? If you just look at units sold (an output), McDonald's wins by a landslide. But does that mean they make the best burger? To define "best" (the outcome), you'd need to consider taste, quality of ingredients, leftovers, likelihood to recommend, perceived value—the things that matter to the consumer (which you uncovered in your research no doubt!).
The same applies to communication goals. We need to clearly define:
- The need: What problem are we solving? Are we just creating more noise and communicating for communications sake?
- The outcome: What do we want employees to Know, Feel and Do because of our communication? And critically, what is the desired outcome for the organization?
- The evidence: What tangible, concrete evidence will we see that indicates we've achieved that outcome? This is where measurement becomes meaningful.
For example, a vague goal like "Build trust in leaders so employees are engaged, aligned and adopt/live new strategic values" needs to be decomposed. What does "trust" look like in behavioral terms? How will we know employees are "aligned"? What specific actions indicate they've "adopted new values"? Leading with curiosity and breaking these concepts down is key.
Agreeing these definitions and articulating outcomes with stakeholders is a critical step. Everyone has a very different view of such terms like “Employee Engagement,” without consensus, how are we measuring progress? With no single point of ownership of these lagging measures, it can be challenging to claim our slice of the pie. But clear definitions of outcomes drive clarity and tangible impact/contribution. They provide the ability to pulse and measure through a variety of checkpoints and ongoing listening techniques.
3. Telling a compelling story: Showing real value to the business
Once we're measuring what matters (evidence of outcomes), we need to tell that story in a way that resonates with our stakeholders. This means speaking their language and connecting our work to tangible business value. For example, leaders will be interested in reputation, trust, risk—our communications directly influence these through employee voice and behavior. Simple stakeholder mapping exercises can reveal KPIs and targets where our communication efforts play a significant role.
To tell our value story effectively:
Build relationships: Nobody in the organization is better placed than comms and HR to see the entire cross-function employee experience. When you build collaborative partnerships, your measurement become part of something much bigger and more influential. Understand what other departments care about and how your communications can help them achieve to their goals.
Create value with data:
- Gather: Understand the end-to-end employee experience by working with others. Use mixed methods (online, offline, in-person) not just digital vanity stats.
- Combine: Link these diverse data sources to see the bigger picture. This is where you can go even deeper using techniques to find real drivers of impact.
- Communicate: Connect your insights back to the business, closing the gap from insight to action.
Moving forward with meaning
The path of least resistance is showing those easy-to-get vanity metrics. But if we embrace curiosity, focus on understanding our audience, and relentlessly execute the basics of defining outcomes and evidence, we can establish a foundation for truly meaningful measurement.
Let's stop chasing noise and start demonstrating the incredible, strategic value that effective communication brings to our organizations.
We’ve got you covered—drop us a line today.
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