Rather than being seen as a cost center (or a crisis center), Internal Communications teams are increasingly seen as strategic partners, and this transformation is reshaping the way many organizations approach employee engagement. While most comms teams continue to do more than their fair share of firefighting, they're also expected to take on this crucial strategic role and clearly demonstrate its value.
In this post we're going to break down some easy ways to showcase the value you and your team are delivering every day.
Communicating value
It’s not enough to simply provide value to your organization. How you convey that value makes all the difference. As communicators by trade, translating value might seem easy. But it's easy to get so focused on communicating for the executive team that you forget how to communicate to them about your own work.
In this guide, we’re going to take a page (perhaps a full chapter) from counterparts across the table. We’ll build a clearer understanding of what the C-Suite wants to know about internal communications—and perhaps most importantly—how to package and deliver that information.
Internal Communications (IC) metrics Vs C-Suite metrics
"Aren't my metrics business metrics?"
They're important metrics that connect to business processes, initiatives, and campaigns, but C-suite members can't afford to focus on every metric.
Instead, they’re almost exclusively interested in the downstream results of those initiatives and what led to their ultimate success or failure. Let’s take a look at some examples of IC inputs, outputs, and outcomes.
Inputs and outputs versus outcomes
Crafting a crucial company-wide email is an input; sending it is an output. Both are important, but your CEO cares about the outcome: how that email influenced revenue or the overall health of the organization, and how to make that influence predictable and repeatable.
In most cases, an individual email won’t have that sort of influence on its own, but rather as an important piece of a larger overall impact.
Tracking success
Content engagement metrics are easy and reliable to track with modern communications tools. However, they're best tracked and analyzed at a departmental or team level. In raw form, they're just noise to the C-Suite.
Are content engagement metrics helpful? Absolutely. They’re instrumental in tracking and guiding the success of individual campaigns or larger overarching initiatives. Data nearly always tells a bigger story, but it’s up to the interpreter to piece it together.
Here's the challenge: even though internal comms professionals are often among an organization's best translators and storytellers, connecting the dots between daily metrics and business outcomes isn't always easy.
That's why we're going to spend the next section building a set of tools and frameworks, using real world examples.
Quantify the bottom-line impact of internal communication
Convincing senior leaders that internal communication moves the needle can feel like an uphill climb. Yet high-quality communication is inseparable from business success.
This disconnect is in part due to tooling—which historically hasn’t been dedicated to the needs of internal communications—but also due to shallow metrics. With that in mind, let’s borrow a page from the marketing team’s playbook to get more from the tools we already have.
Identify your conversion events
Your conversion events are the specific employee behaviors that show measurable progress toward a bigger business goal like finishing a safety course, adopting a new tool, or closing a deal. Metrics like opens and clicks mean nothing in a vacuum unless they lead to conversions. Conversions matter because they lead to predictable outcomes. Those outcomes should be aligned with stakeholder goals.
Micro vs. macro conversions
Conversions come in multiple sizes. Large-scale successes nearly always come as a result of multiple smaller successes, so it’s important to include that interplay in your larger data story.
What does a micro or macro IC conversion event look like for your organization, and how do they relate? These events could be anything, as long as it’s quantifiable and leads to a goal-oriented business outcome.
- Micro conversions:
- Completing a required compliance or safety module
- Confirming attendance for an all-hands or training session
- Submitting a helpdesk ticket through the correct workflow
- Macro conversions:
- Adopting a new company-wide process or platform with sustained usage
- Reducing new-hire attrition through successful onboarding
- Improving sales performance through consistent execution of a new playbook
Real-world examples
IABC Fellow Jim Shaffer outlined a strategy for quantifying impact in an excellent article that every internal communicator should probably read. (He put together a series of case studies you can use as inspiration for translating the value of Internal Communications work.) Here’s an example:
“FedEx was an early adopter. Its communication leader and the CEO teamed up with me to improve export sales. We conducted a global communication assessment that revealed that FedEx leaders and the communication team wanted to work more closely in order to improve business results.
We started in FedEx’s Los Angeles operation by reducing communication breakdowns that were impeding export sales. In 90 days, sales increased 23%. The investment generated a 1,447% return. We increased sales and reduced costs in five more FedEx locations.”
There’s no mention of the number of communications sent, received, re-routed, or read. Just the outcome of all those inputs. Were communications sent, received, and read? Did the team track them? Undoubtedly.
Those outsized returns and successes would not have been possible without myriad communications across multiple levels of the organization.
But that’s not the bottom line.
FedEx’s executive-driven goal was to improve export sales, the timeline was 90 days, and each ‘conversion’ of a broken communication line mended influenced the trajectory of that high-level goal. Success was measured by a percentage increase in sales and reduced costs, netting the organization a 1,447% return on investment (ROI).
Present any C-Suite member with the prospect of reliably achieving 1,000+% ROI in 90 days, and you'll have their full attention.
Quantify the risks of poor internal communication.
If there’s no risk in maintaining poor internal communications, why invest the resources toward improvements? After all, there are numerous other areas of the organization that would benefit from greater investment.
Under that context, it's easy for comms strategy to feel like a 'nice to have,' even if you can outline the benefits. Just as with translating the value of great internal communication, the risks of getting it wrong aren’t always obvious to people outside your department.
You don’t have to look far to find an example of poor communication doing more damage than even a lack of communication would have.
For example:
- Project delays and stalled initiatives
- Low employee morale and trust
- Missed performance goals
- Lost revenue opportunities
Building a data story around poor comms isn't always easy to do; however, it’s essential to know where you need to improve.
At Curative, the team faced exactly this challenge as they scaled rapidly. As Joan Phan recalled, "Our channels weren't well integrated. Information was scattered across separate mediums. Wherever you received a particular communication, it would just continue to live there." The team recognized they needed to transition internal communications to become the starting point for information, rather than just another endpoint, especially since their previous intranet was what Phan called "a dead zone" with no engagement or analytics to measure value.
Cindy Crescenzo of Crescenzo Communications shared a helpful strategy for conveying the risks of poor communication:
In my surveys, if I see a set of behavior statements that have a high number of disagreement, I first show the low numbers of agreement, then show a graph that shows the high numbers of disagreement so that leaders can see we have a risk to communications.
Build empathy with your colleagues
Empathy is your most important tool at your disposal when it comes to working with your colleagues across the table. Understanding the intersection between their goals and yours will make translating the impact of comms easier and more natural.
Give them genuine stakes in metrics you can move, and watch how much more engaged and invested they become in your work.
For example, a colleague in the HR department almost certainly tracks employee retention or employee lifetime value as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Explore the intersection where internal comms efforts could influence that KPI, like onboarding, or recognition.
In addition to tracking onboarding resource usage and recognition instances, consider something like employees successfully onboarded, and qualify that metric with qualitative and quantitative data from those new employees. If you can show how onboarding comms led to a decrease in new employee turnover or an accelerated ramping speed, you’ll have a lot of new friends in the HR department.
The same goes for colleagues in any field. Learn about their challenges, and find the intersection. Sales might not be the first place you’d imagine internal comms could make an impact, but FedEx’s example is proof positive that it can not only have an impact, but a transformational one.
Connect your metrics to business outcomes
The more directly your metrics influence other key downstream measures in the organization, the more significant the initiatives that move those metrics become in their eyes. The importance of internal communications is undeniable, but it takes empathy, data, and storytelling to translate it.
FAQs
Q: What are internal communications metrics?
Internal communications metrics are the measures you use to track how employees receive, engage with, and respond to your communications. They often include tactical indicators (like page views) and behavioral indicators (like completing a task or adopting a process) that show whether communication is driving action.
Q: Why should my team track internal communications metrics?
- To understand what information employees actually use and what they ignore
- To improve clarity, timing, and channel strategy over time
- To connect communication efforts to business priorities like retention, productivity, and change adoption
- To identify risks early, such as confusion, low trust, or missed compliance steps
Q: What sort of internal communications metrics tie directly to business results?
- Training or policy completion rates
- Onboarding milestones completed and new-hire retention
- Adoption rates for new tools, processes, or programs
- Employee sentiment, trust, and engagement survey outcomes
- Operational outcomes influenced by behavior change (for example, safety incidents or customer response times)
Q: How can I tell if employees read and act on an internal email?
- Start with basic engagement signals like successful deliveries and views.
- Link to a clear next step (a form, resource, or sign-off) so action is measurable
- Track completion of that next step as the primary indicator of success
- Compare results by audience segment (role, location, or department) to identify gaps
- Follow up with a short pulse question or survey to confirm understanding and remove blockers
Q: What is a “conversion event” in internal communications?
A conversion event in internal communications is a measurable employee behavior that shows progress toward a larger business goal. Examples include completing a compliance course, acknowledging a policy update, signing up for a benefits program, adopting a new workflow, or taking a specific action that supports a change initiative.
