6 steps to audit your internal communications plan & why you should

Are you due to conduct an internal communications audit? During the last couple of years, the way we work has undergone significant change, bringing new challenges and expectations for employee communication.

If you don’t yet have an internal communications plan, now is the perfect time to create something that’s designed for what your organization and employees need today. And if you already have a plan in place, it might be time to review your current communications and update them to ensure that they're still aligned with your organization, the current environment, and how your employees communicate.

So, let’s take a closer look at some evidence for reviewing and updating your comms — and a step-by-step guide to help you complete your internal communications audit.

Why you should conduct an internal comms audit

Internal communications need to evolve over time in order to remain relevant to your organization, employees, and goals. Reviewing and auditing your processes should be a regular practice that can help maximize the benefits of effective internal communications. 

Here’s why it matters. An effective internal communications plan can help:

• Increase employee satisfaction – Employees that implement an internal comms plan score 147% higher Employee Net Producer Scores (ENPS). 
• Increase employee engagement – There’s a significant gap here, when you consider that just 33% of U.S. employees are engaged at work, while 16% are actively disengaged, according to a recent poll.
• Strengthen relationships – Transparent internal communication can help to foster employee-organization relationships and reduce uncertainty during times of change.
   

Canadian Telecom company, Cogeco, was struggling with their internal communications until they integrated their internal communications plan with LumApps’ employee experience platform. A satisfaction survey found that the average ENPS increased by 38 points following this integration — and 88% of employees expressed satisfaction in how their communications were managed during the pandemic. 

Read more about Cogeco + LumApps.
 

6 Steps to Audit Your Internal Communications

Before you can create or update your internal communications plan, you’ll need to do an internal communication audit. This looks at your current communication systems and processes alongside your employee and organization’s needs and expectations to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.

To complete your audit, work through the following steps:

1. Determine your goals

What are the goals and purpose behind your internal communications? What do you want to achieve? What are you hoping to communicate? What does success look like?

Potential goals could be:

• Improved employee engagement
• Shared knowledge about specific issues
• Alignment on a central message, value, or issue
• Higher employee retention rates

You might have already identified objectives in your internal communication plan. But it’s also worth speaking to representatives from key internal stakeholder groups to find out what they expect from the internal communications. Plus, engage with your internal comms team, HR team, and senior executives — their insights and support will be critical to your audit.

And of course, it’s best if you can identify SMART goals. Get specific about what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve it so that you can measure your progress. 

2. Understand your audience

The key to effective communication is to understand your target audience. To increase your understanding of your employees, you can analyze the demographic data you likely already have on hand. This can produce insights into the breakdown of your audience by age, location, discipline, education, and more.

Another way to increase your understanding is through employee surveys, individual interviews, or focus groups.

Gather feedback on previous internal communications to find out their preferences and how they rate certain aspects of the communication, such as:

• The quality of information
• The amount of communication
• The frequency of communication
• How soon after events they are informed
• Their preferred channels for communication
• Did they know about this piece of information that was previously communicated?
• Do they feel confident in contributing their knowledge?
• Do they feel they can access and share information with other departments?
• Any suggestions they have to improve future internal communications

It’s a good idea to consider repeating this feedback process every 6 months or so. This can help you track whether the changes you make have an impact — or whether employee expectations and preferences are shifting. Fortunately, if you already have an employee experience platform like LumApps, it’s easy to get feedback via surveys.

3. Review your previous communication

Now it’s time to review a sample of your communications. Make note of:

• Quality – Is it well written? In-depth? Relevant? Engaging?
• Format – What format does it come in? What channel is shared on?
• Feedback – What was the response? Did people view or interact with it? 
• Frequency – How often is communication produced and shared?
• Communication style – Top-down vs bottom up? Formal vs informal?
• Purpose – Is it focused on change management, project management, onboarding, or company culture? What does your crisis communication look like? (Read more about the types of internal communication.)

To support your internal communications audit, it can be helpful to review historical data in your communication channels, like the number of internal emails sent, conference call attendees, chat messages sent, and other relevant metrics.

By the way, if you have an employee experience platform (like LumApps), you can tap into a huge volume of behavioral data to understand engagement and communication preferences.
 

Take your Internal Communications to the Next Level

Get this FREE guide on how to audit, align, execute, and evaluate and internal comms plan.

4. Review your systems and processes

As part of your internal communications audit, review your current systems and processes. Start by making note of any communication channels you currently use.  For example:

• Emails (company, department, individual)
• Employee experience platform
• Intranet
• Slack channel
• Teams or Zoom meetings
• Social media
• Phone calls
• Face-to-face meetings
• Physical notice boards or brochures

Consider governance, rules, roles, and responsibilities, as well as the sign off and approval processes that impact your internal communications.

5. Identify gaps

Now that you’ve reviewed your strategy, audience, communication, and systems…it’s time to look at everything critically. 

Questions to help identify gaps:

• Where is our communication falling short of where it needs to be in quality, quantity, or channel? How is it failing to meet expectations? 
• How could we better tailor or target our communications to deliver a more personalized employee experience?
• How can we break down barriers to integrate internal communication between departments, regions, and even continents for better alignment across the organization?
• How can we be more inclusive of all our employees, considering disabilities, cultural differences, different roles, different locations, and individual preferences?
• How can we support improved digital wellbeing and reduce employee overwhelm?
• What new, emerging technologies could we explore? 
• What resources are we missing — tools, training, editing, graphics?
• How could we improve our measurement to track whether we’re meeting our objectives?
• How can we simplify or automate to make this easier or more efficient?
   

Measurement matters! 

A survey revealed that 1 in 3 businesses were not measuring their internal communications, while 78% of those surveyed were dissatisfied with their organization's ability to measure internal communication. 

If this is a gap for your organization, consider quantifying and analyzing metrics like visibility, reach, level of interest, employee engagement, employee satisfaction, time spent finding information, time spent on communication tools, and behavioral changes.

6. Share Your Report

After completing your internal communications audit, you should be able to produce a report that highlights your objectives, findings, gaps, and action items. 

This report will help you get buy-in from anyone on the team that needs to approve your recommended changes.  And of course, you might like to share your report more broadly within your organization so that employees know what to expect and how to get involved.
 

Learn More: Download Our Free Guide

Want to learn more about creating a modern internal communications plan? Download our free guide, How To Audit, Align, Execute and Evaluate an IC Plan.

Inside, we look at how to audit your current IC plan, building team alignment, how to execute and evaluate your plan, and more.

Take your Internal Communications to the Next Level

Get this FREE guide on how to audit, align, execute, and evaluate and internal comms plan.

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