Implementing Metrics in a Business

Please prepare a response to the below post -- please identify two quantifiable business metrics that could be used to measure the ROI associated with the key considerations in your peer's post. How do those metrics measure what is intended? How might they inform decision making or next steps? Support your reasoning with examples, if possible.

question: What are some key considerations that could drive organizations to put metrics in place to measure the effectiveness of internal communication initiatives?

Metric within a business is very important as they can help keep necessary people informed of how well a company is performing. Metrics are put in place to track performance and ensure the company is moving towards their goals. when setting up metrics for a company, the goals of the metrics need to be decided before they are able to determine what kind of metrics to measure.

example: if the company wants to track employee's engagement with internal communications, they can track email open rates, email click through rates, email forward rates, and intranet logins. When determining which metrics to set, companies need to focus on their primary communication channels. whether that be emails, intranet, phone calls, meetings etc. Once they have determined their primary communication channels, they need to find ways to measure their reach. Reach includes not only who's the target audience, but also how much of that audience is being reached and how often. Next, like I briefly mentioned above, they need to determine what kind of metrics are important to them, such as employee engagement, productivity, turnover rate, etc.

How might the metrics be similar or different with an external communication initiative?

When it comes to external communication, the goals will differ slightly. Companies will still want to measure engagement for external communications. Being able to see the metrics for external communications will allow them to see what communication are working and the best time to send communications are. Another example of how internal and external communications metrics could be similar is measuring the satisfaction with the company. The company could send out anonymous surveys to both employees and customers (obviously different surveys, through) to see how satisfied people are with the company. However, tracking productivity and turnover rate is not something that relates to external communications.

Why is the particular business environment organizations operate in an important consideration when implementing metrics?

The type of business is a very important consideration because different types of businesses will want to measure different metrics and will have different goals. For example, a distributor of valves and a website design company will want to track very different metrics. For a distributor, customer satisfaction with the availability of products will be important, which means internal communication of ordering and keeping proper stock of the products is necessary. On the other hand, a website design company will want to track customer satisfaction with the quality of websites being built and the ability to meet deadlines.