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Anton Vdovin : Nov 8, 2021 1:12:00 AM
There are many reasons to conduct internal communication surveys: they are a great way to get valuable feedback and data to inform a range of corporate initiatives and priorities.
Employee engagement, health and wellbeing, training needs and other workplace cultural issues, evaluating communications and marketing campaigns are among the top reasons to survey your employees.
Whatever the reason for the employee communications survey, it’s important that you ask the right questions to maximize effectiveness. The communication survey questions should be designed in such a way that they provide the data needed to contribute to improvements in the workplace.
Internal communications professionals are well placed to assist managers to design communication survey questions for employees. Sometimes they may also engage outside assistance from firms that offer employee communications survey services. Whether you’re using internal services or external ones t conduct your internal communication surveys, it’s important to have the right questions and the right tools for the job.
When you develop an internal communication strategy, it is essential that you factor in a way to measure its effectiveness, and one of the ways to do this is to survey employees to determine if they understood the messages of your campaign.
Unfortunately, around 60% of internal communicators are not measuring their internal communications activities.
According to the Institute of Internal Communication, the benefits of measuring internal communications effectiveness includes:
Learning about these objectives will assist companies in formulating communication effectiveness survey questions. Most times, looking beyond the present and envisaging the end of the process to see what kind of results we want and how we can use them, will clearly define the objectives. It is crucial to consult everybody before jumping into the measurement process.
It is relevant to gain reliable measurement with an objective questionnaire or survey. These are some of the factors to consider in designing the questions to ask in an internal communication survey:
One of the sections of the questionnaire will be about the respondent's profile. Ensure you ask questions that will only be relevant to the study as employees are concerned about their privacy. Too much information may lead to the identification of who they are which defeats the purpose of having an anonymous employee survey. It is recommended that a separate analysis of groups be done if there are at least 10 respondents. The purpose is to assure that the individuals will not be identified.
Melcrum, one of the leading Internal Communication companies has compiled the top ten questions to include in an internal communication questionnaire. These questions were discussed and voted by their members as the questions that elicit the most useful responses from the employee-respondents and help shape the company's internal communication strategy. The top ten questions (out of 25) voted for employee engagement survey questionnaires are the following:
Sending short surveys to the organization – known as pulse surveys – is an easy and effective way to canvas the workplace to get feedback quickly. Many organizations have been using them during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, as a quick way to keep in touch with remote workforces to determine levels of engagement, checking on health and wellbeing, ensuring they have all they need to do their jobs effectively, etc.
These types of surveys enable management to act quickly to respond to employee needs and any emerging issues.
Running employee surveys doesn’t have to be complicated… in fact, it is possible to over-complicate things to the detriment of the survey and the data. These tips will help you to conduct an internal communications survey smoothly to get the best results:
This article was originally published in 2017. We’ve updated it with current information for 2021
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