When I first switched careers and went from running a communications consulting firm to starting a communications software company, I knew that there was power in the data that could be made available as a result of analytics and the collection of millions of data points in the cloud.
I always told my team that if, rather than having to rely on anecdotes and hunches based on past individual experiences, we could give our customers, the internal communications professionals, an ability to point to numbers that demonstrate the value of their work, we could greatly enhance their credibility and standing within their respective organizations.
This belief became a reality with the publication of the Staffbase 2020 Internal Communications Retrospective. The report looks at the significant impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on employee communications and engagement. It evaluates employee engagement by geography, content, and industry with some interesting findings, including:
- An 11% increase in employee engagement globally during the peak of the crisis.
- High engagement on pandemic-related information, especially when communicated by senior leadership; but equally high engagement on fun and interactive topics such as contests, gamification, and giveaways.
- All industries analyzed experienced year-over-year increases in engagement (except for the Travel & Leisure industry).
My key takeaway from the report is that cloud computing and SaaS-based solutions present a significant opportunity for the internal communications industry. We can now see and know not only whether a person has opened a piece of content, but how long they spent engaged with it. Furthermore, we can understand what types of content—like video, short articles, long articles, or posts with animated gifs—are more engaged with than others.
We now have access to data that allows us to continuously evaluate the effectiveness and success of our work and, when necessary, change our content creation strategies if what we are doing isn’t working. We no longer have to rely on impressions, anecdotes, and gut feelings when reporting to senior leadership on the importance of our work. The numbers say everything and, with the right commentary around them, don’t lie.